Posts
 |
| CC Jean Stimmell |
I had an epiphany watching Kamala Harris’s first campaign rally in Atlanta: It came to me that tribalism can be a good thing, a position I would have previously considered unthinkable. In fact, I will go further and admit that I now feel tribalism has some major advantages over rational, intellectual discourse – along with potential dreadful liabilities.
I confess I got so carried away listening to the rally that I found myself chanting along with the crowd. I felt as if one with Harris and her rapt audience. What was happening to me, the reserved, bookish person I usually am?
Obviously, becoming one with the audience is not a solitary, individual response but flows out of community. It was in the air around me: it was emotional and transformational. Indeed, it was “tribal.”
I’m not the only one to feel this surge: my friends and acquaintances tell me they are feeling it, too. (Of course, the MAGA folks have long felt it. But that is a story for another time.) Michelle Goldberg, NYT columnist, calls the Harris excitement “infectious.”
She quotes a Harris rallygoer, who is a pediatrician: “Things can happen and turn around in just a moment that can change everything. And I feel like that’s what’s happened. And this is not only a political movement. This is a social movement. This is an inflection point. And this is, to me, a spiritual movement.”1
Goldberg thinks this excitement at the Atlanta rally could be “really durable:” “The reason is that people underestimate how much of getting involved in politics has to do with becoming part of a real-life social movement, making those connections, joining those groups, being in community.”
I agree. This type of public campaigning in the town square is an excellent example of an oral tradition, harkening back to the first humans who gathered together in dangerous circumstances for support and protection.
This ancient oral tradition is fundamentally different from what came later: the written word.
Oral societies are social by nature. They are most often associated with indigenous people, who are considered primitive by today’s standards. Cultures that live by the written word are a modern development, valuing the individual over society. They are thought to be more sophisticated and reliable in our modern world.
Whether we follow an oral or a written tradition has huge consequences: it determines how we view reality.
Walter Ong, an American Jesuit priest, English professor, and cultural historian, is a fascinating character and an acknowledged expert on this subject. His major interest was how changing from orality to literacy influenced culture and human consciousness.2
While he agreed that so-called illiterate Indigenous people did not think in abstractions, he demonstrated that they enjoyed a major, complementary strength: they were intimately connected to the physical world around them. In other words, they were mindful, living in the present, totally in tune with the rhythms of Mother Nature.
This illuminates a fundamental difference in the group dynamics between oral and print cultures.
As Ong notes, “when a speaker addresses an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again.”3
The difference is stark: an oral culture brings people together, while a print-oriented culture like ours pulls people apart.4 That’s why political rallies can be such high-octane unifiers.
But they come with a warning…
Rallies are a potent way to build community but come with the ever-present danger of ceding control to a charismatic dictator like Hitler who would command absolute power at the expense of our individual freedom and inviolable human rights.
xxx
Photo Credit: I took this photo at Hampton Beach on Christmas Day 2014.
Footnotes:
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/opinion/kamala-harris-president-support.html?showTranscript=1
1 comment:
Interesting article! I know nothing about Walter Ong, You have peaked my interest to understand more about this subject. As a Jesuit it will be interesting how he justifies millions of years of Evolution with his creationist theology.
Post a Comment