First responders, caretakers, and maintenance personnel relieve most citizens from ever having to rescue their neighbor from distress. The modern-day Good Samaritan need not go through the trouble of caring for the beaten man on the road—calling the local authorities will suffice. This reality was identified ten years ago by Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, a secular work investigating the nature of tribal living and human happiness.
In Tribe, Junger states, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Junger’s analysis in this respect is incisive for our modern society. Still, his book suffers from an oversimplified vision. In the end, Tribe articulates just a fraction of what the Christian tradition has articulated for centuries.
Junger’s Tribes
Junger notes that quite a few early American settlers left their own society to join American Indian tribes in the wild. By contrast, almost no American Indians left their society to join the settlers’. A letter from Benjamin Franklin describes the situation:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no [persuading] him ever to return.
This asymmetrical cultural relationship serves as Junger’s point of departure; he asks just why did Americans leave Chicago and New York to join native tribes? Why did “the sons and daughters of Europe” go off to live with, dress like, and marry American Indians?
Tribes tend to form in the immediate wake of disasters, even up to the modern day.
Junger’s answer to the question escapes neat summary: He notes at once the alluring pleasures, leisure, and “freedoms” of the American Indian tribes (Franklin’s letter, in fact, goes on to suggest that a tendency to be lazy is the reason why men join the native tribes), but he also notes that the tribes were small, relatively poor, and “intensely communal.” These last two characteristics are connected for Junger; he writes: “The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities.”
Junger argues that this close communal living plays an important role in preserving mental health. He notes that there is “remarkably little evidence” for suicides caused by depression from early tribal societies and that some tribes did not experience suicide at all. Today there are 25 suicides for every 100,000 people in the United States. Junger sees this disparity as evidence for the preferability of tribal living, despite any material hardships that may follow.
Importantly, Junger observes that tribal living is not merely an ancient phenomenon. Tribes tend to form in the immediate wake of disasters, even up to the modern day. The English and German citizens subjected to aerial bombing during World War II serve as examples. These men and women endured unprecedented noncombatant bombing designed to break town morale. At first blush, one would expect these bomb-ravaged communities to be fraught with moral and psychological devastation, perhaps leading to anarchy. Just the opposite occurred. Junger wrote of Blitz-stricken London,
Conduct was so good in the [bomb] shelters that volunteers never even had to summon the police to maintain order. If anything, the crowd policed themselves according to unwritten rules that made life bearable for complete strangers jammed shoulder to shoulder on floors that were at times awash in urine.
Junger’s Tribe is on to something—it is a bestseller after all—but his account fails to tell the full story. Junger’s relative silence about the fact that gangs, cartels, and terrorist groups also engage in tribal living serves my point. Junger fails to mention that tribes can lead to abuse, deindividuation, and normalization of vice. Tribal living does in fact offer some goods to the human person, but these goods are only truly realized for the Christian, who correctly views the place of society in the order of reality.
Christian Community
The Christian tradition has long recognized that human flourishing has everything to do with community, the virtues, and the inextricable connection between these two realities. The Catechism states the heart of this connection succinctly:
The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of his nature. Through the exchange with others, mutual service and dialogue with his brethren, man develops his potential; he thus responds to his vocation (CCC 1879, emphasis added).
The Church, moreover, articulates the fullness of this truth when it proclaims that this natural calling to communal living is fulfilled and wonderfully exceeded by the supernatural calling to charity in society—the love of God and all people for God’s sake (see CCC 1822).
The Christian has indeed long heard “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39), “bear with one another” (Col 3:13), and “anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (2 Thes 3:10). Thus he can find much of Junger’s work familiar. Still, the Christian calling goes much deeper than that of any natural society. Christians are called to “become sharers in the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4) and enjoy communion with the Holy Trinity and the saints for eternity in heaven. Consequently, living and serving in this earthly community becomes both a preparation for and a foretaste of the ultimate communion in the next life.
With this ultimate communion in mind, we can appreciate the profound words of St. John: “Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall” (1 John 2:10). Likewise, those of St. Paul: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).
In sum, the Christian sees the place of communal living in a grand vision of the cosmos. The Christian goes to his ultimate communion by traveling along in an earthly community, imitating Christ by laying down his life for both friend and enemy. Whatever good Junger has recognized in Tribe, the Christian has it all the more: Solidarity, sacrifice, and fraternal love are baked into the Christian life.
The Christian tradition has long recognized that human flourishing has everything to do with community, the virtues, and the inextricable connection between these two realities.
Now, Christians can learn from Junger’s critique. The opportunities to exercise social virtue in modern society have been decreasing in proportion to our technological progress. This much is lamentable. But the Church is in a prime position to offer remedies. I close by recounting a modest parish effort that worked well to this effect.
Man Up Monday
While in college, my parish priest announced a new initiative: Every Monday at 6:00 a.m., he would host “Man Up Monday.” This gathering would include black coffee, an exhortation from the priest, and time for fellowship. After his announcement, he asked me if I was coming. “I’ll be there,” I said. The next morning when my alarm clock showed 5:40 a.m., excuses to return to sleep emerged in my mind. But I knew I had given my word and that fellow Christian men were counting on me. I got ready and walked in the pitch dark to meet some twenty other tired men in the parish hall. We drank black coffee and listened to our pastor exhort us to live good lives.
Man Up Monday continued for the rest of the semester, and good fruit was borne from it. This priest had constructed a tribe—albeit in a somewhat artificial manner—but a tribe nevertheless. This tribe, like all good tribes, gave its members an incentive to practice social virtues like dependability, fortitude, and amicability (it was 6:00 a.m.). But as a Christian tribe, it offered much more—the opportunity to love the Most Holy Trinity and neighbor through charity. If our priest had not started this group, I would have missed out on this opportunity to grow.
I am sure this initiative can be repeated successfully elsewhere. In fact, our priest had gotten the idea from another campus ministry. At that campus—the story goes—more men showed up the earlier the leaders scheduled the meeting. This correlation would not surprise Junger, and it should not surprise Christians.