What is your neighbour’s name?

I’ve lived where I have for over three years. I’ve spoken to my one neighbour a handful of times; I know he works as a welder, and I could describe him to you physically. I know he has family in South America. I know which car in the parking lot is his, and that he works an early shift that means that sometimes I can hear the shower running at 4AM through the walls.

But I don’t know his name. I think he told me it early on in our correspondence, but he has a somewhat thick accent and I was too embarrassed to ask him to repeat himself. Besides, what does it matter? I don’t need to know his name to have perfectly adequate smalltalk about the weather or my new dog or the shrub that hangs over our shared fence.

Except, maybe it does matter. Maybe it’s crucially important that I know his name. That I know all my neighbours’ names. One of the driving messages in Tribe is that modern society is terrible for the people that live in it. So much so that we are falling apart mentally and scrambling to re-establish a sense of community wherever we can find it because these concepts are rooted so deeply in our psyche that living without them is torture.

If I average out the amount of time I have spent in physical proximity to every person I knew, and ranked them from most to least, my neighbour would probably break the top 20. He might also be the one person on the list without a name.

Junger makes the comparison of modern society to a tribe in Africa called the !Kung. He describes their lifestyle as rather hard compared to ours, where members would die more frequently from accidents and diseases that we in modern society have been insulated from. But he also mentions how the tribe lives communally. They share resources, they share their work, they share their lives with a modest (50 was the number I believe he gave) handful of people, some of whom are relatives, all of whom are around you nearly 24/7.

You think they know their neighbours’ names?

This analogy warrants exploration because modern society has not yet “sunk in” to us on a biological level (Junger argues that it takes ~25 000 years for changes in lifestyle to show up in the gene pool, and we started the whole agrarian lifestyle thing about 10 000 years ago). Put another way in a quote I heard: “we are modern software running on millennia old hardware”. We weren’t built for modern society on a fundamental level.

What are we missing? I’d like to think the benefits of modern society are self-apparent (plenty of food, modern medicine, social welfare programs, safety at a level unimaginable to people even 200 hundred years ago). Why is it then that our collective mental health seems to be in free-fall? Junger raises an interesting possible explanation:

How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?

When did you become an adult? Do you even consider yourself “an adult”? I think, retrospectively, a lot of people would say things like “when I got married”, or “when I had my first kid”, or “in my twenties”. Maybe these answers are all true. But I wonder how many people went in to these proactively with the thought “Today, I will become an adult”.

I’m brought back to the stories we hear about how Sparta treated its children. I think it’s in the movie 300 where the future king Leonidas was thrown in to the wilderness with barely the clothes on his back and had to kill a wolf and skin it to survive. When he came back to Sparta, do you think there was any doubt in his mind as to whether or not he was a man?

I’m not suggesting we send our kids in to the woods to start fighting wolves again. But I do think the lack of a demarcation point is trying on the human mind. It’s hard on society too, because we lack a common language to describe how one becomes an adult, and we lose part of our identity as the “group who has all, to a man, done X hard thing”. Shared hardship is another point that Junger argues is sorely lacking in modern society, to the detriment of all.

I think the hardest thing I’ve ever done is get my Bachelor’s degree. It required sustained effort over four years, and lots of kinds of sacrifice to achieve my goal. But, I don’t think getting my degree made me an adult. In my youth, I thought it was like a checklist: if I do all the things an Adult does, I will, by definition, be an Adult. At time of writing, I have done or am doing many things I thought would make me an Adult - but I don’t feel like one.

A content creator I admire sometimes references an adulthood initiation rite that he underwent years ago. It stands out partially because the rite and his outward mannerisms are at odds: his name is Chris, and he’s a white guy in his thirties that is in to gaming. But then he mentions a Mayan initiation rite performed partially by a Shaman out of South America and it stands out due to the intense juxtaposition.

I’ve been thinking about it because it’s a marker that he can confidently point to and say “that was when I became a man”. It’s something he went in to with his eyes open, with the express intent of transforming himself.

I think this is something that we are missing from modern society, which I attribute partly to the more globalised nature of the world. Cultures and religions used to be chock-full of (admittedly often arbitrary) markers that one could point to as the changing of an epoch in one’s life. Baptism. Marriage. Time in the army (often mandatory for men of a certain age). Having kids. Your kids having kids. And I think they were more significant because unlike say, high-school, not everyone survived every epoch transition.

Our no-one-left-behind policy, while great for accessibility and the group as a whole, strips meaning from the event for the individual. It’s the blue-ribbon “participation trophy” problem that is so often lampooned. “If everyone’s super, no one is”.

Aside from my bachelor’s degree, there is one other experience I have gone through that I would fit roughly in to this category of “transformational”. I didn’t think of it as such when I signed up, but looking back, the trip definitely changed me, and for the better I think.

It was called “!explore”, and it was a youth program that I was introduced to through my church. You had to be referred, and the program selected ~10 applicants from Canada and the US to travel to Indiana and live at a seminary for three weeks. The intent was for the program to be a “junior ministry” training camp of a sort, where churches could send the more heavily involved teens to see if ministry would be a path they would be interested in pursuing.

So, at 18, I went to the States and joined a tribe. We ate communally, lived in shared accommodations (separated by gender), volunteered for the benefit of the community in soup kitchens and bike repair shops and even one Habitat for Humanity project where I helped pour the foundation. We were led by a shaman and a group of elders (okay they were ministers and the “elders” were in their thirties but I’m trying to draw an analogy here) through sessions where we explored the nuts and bolts of ministry, and our own faith foundations. At the end of the three weeks we retreated to a camp in the woods and spent the last couple days reflecting both as individuals and as a group. Most of us cried at some point. I sure did.

I’ve thought about this trip infrequently over the last decade or so since it happened, and every time I do it sounds more surreal and magical. It was three weeks. We were your typical aloof teenagers. How did this program break through so much cultural programming to affect us so strongly?

I wish I could say we all kept in touch and there was a fairytale ending in there where two of us went on to get married, but that isn’t the case. Most of us lost touch the moment we all left. I have most of them on Facebook still, but we don’t keep up. I think modern society moved back in to our brains and destroyed the tribe we had started to build.

Even if it was short-lived, I think the return to tribal life had an effect on me. I thought for a long time that the reason this trip was transformational was because it was the catalyst for my falling out with the institution of the church. After reading Tribe, I wonder if the act of community living was the more profound impact. It gave me an alternate experience to the current average mode of being in society, something to contrast daily living with. I think I miss it. I think many of us miss it, deep in our genes.

A significant part of the book also concerns itself with war, and why veterans seem to be having a harder and harder time re-integrating with society over the generations. A couple of Junger’s anecdotes are about soldiers missing the war when they return home. He highlights that they miss the cooperation of military service, and the lack of competition within your unit. He argues that PTSD stems from re-integration with society, not from the trauma of war itself.

He contrasts soldiers from modern societies with those from societies like the !Kung. If we think about the experience of re-integration, it would be much easier in a tribe than in a city. You know everyone, and everyone knows that you have sacrificed heavily for their personal safety. They know the ones who didn’t come back. Maybe you have generations of familial friendship between your family and the family of a fellow soldier who died in your arms. They would be understanding. They would grieve with you.

Compare that to the experience of “coming home” to a city in the West. Your immediate family and friends are empathetic to a certain extent, but the enemy was never “at the gates” (at least not in the last ~50 years). If you successfully land a job, I doubt there would be as much latitude given to you as there would be to your tribal counterpart. Maybe there are even people on staff who are against “The War”. And the people in your community, where you live? They don’t even know your name.

How can we expect people to not start losing their sanity when confronted with the horrific banality and detachment? Friends complain about traffic and gossip about celebrities. A year ago you weren’t certain you would survive the night. There is no shared experience. From the book:

If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does

I recognize this is now the second time I’ve advocated for violence as a necessary part of life. I’ll state unequivocally I do not believe that’s the case. However, there is something we seem to have lost in modern society that war provides. In my heart, I’m a pacifist, and I believe that any conflict that devolves to violence is one where both sides have lost.

I wonder if there is some core element of the nature of war that we can extract that would help us return to our more tribal nature while simultaneously not having to base that element on killing. The best analog I can think of is the Olympics: groups of peoples get together to compete for supremacy with other groups. We rally behind our soldiers. We require our soldiers to sacrifice their time and energy for the benefit of the group (and, to an extent, to the soldier themself). The group also supports this individual, both before and after the “war”.

I don’t think the Olympics is the answer, but I do think it provides an interesting model for a non-lethal warfare analog. Maybe it can be scaled down to a city versus city or community versus community level, too. I’m starting to pull a bit from The Righteous Mind now, too, but another aspect that helps bind a group together is the identification of an enemy, or other. Some non-lethal way for groups to engage in spirited competition against an “other” would, from what I can tell, probably be a net benefit to the people.

Of course, we would have to abolish the participation trophy. I haven’t looked in to it, but my hunch is that coming in last place is better for an individual in the long-term than getting a participation trophy.

I also don’t think this is a radical idea, because I’ve basically described varsity sports, or even Scouts-style youth groups. My suggestion would be to make the competition more intense, and to require all people to go through at least one of these groups and engage in this soldier-like existence before a certain age. In a world of helicopter parenting, I think this is a hard sell. But it might also be necessary.

I don’t think globalisation is inherently bad, and I am certainly happy for the benefits of modern society. Given my physical ability, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have survived as a soldier of the !Kung. But, as Junger argues, I think we’ve also lost something. We’ve bought physical security at the price of our tribal identity. Who am I? What do I stand for? What are my values? In modern society, I think these answers are harder to come by, if the questions are even asked. To give the Junger the final word:

What would you risk dying for - and for whom - is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves