No balm in Gilead

If something seems to you to be consistently counterproductive, it’s probably because you’re misunderstanding it. Truly counterproductive stuff gets weeded out.

I used to be puzzled by the practice of land acknowledgments, the ritual performed by progressive types before academic conferences, city council meetings and other such gatherings. Almost never are representatives of the tribes acknowledged present. The acknowledgers confess to having stolen the land, yet no effort is made to restore it to the previous owners.

Initially I thought this was an empty, innocuous gesture. But after the election of Donald Trump, I realized it wasn’t innocuous at all. Such performances as this were what Trump’s supporters were reacting against, in sufficient numbers to elect him twice.

I supposed that the acknowledgers would learn their lesson and dial back the ritual. In some places they’ve had to, under duress of laws and edicts forbidding it. But elsewhere it goes on much as before. Won’t the progressives ever learn?, I thought. Don’t they get it?

Only gradually did I realize I was the one who didn’t get it. The land acknowledgments weren’t about Donald Trump. They weren’t even about the tribes being acknowledged. They were about the acknowledgers, and about their desire to signal to like thinkers that they were part of a tribe of their own.

In the early days of our species, tribal membership came naturally. People were born into tribes. Some people still are. But many modern tribes are elective. These include religious denominations, fraternal organizations, followers of sports teams, and political parties and persuasions.

Members of tribes need to be able to identify fellow members. They might recognize one another from Sunday services, by special handshakes and by team colors. Styles of speech and rituals of performance work too.

Speech and rituals lend themselves to the modern media environment. The same people who make land acknowledgments often append their preferred pronouns to emails and other communications. This can be helpful where given names permit pronominal confusion, but at least as often it’s a signal of a certain style of gender politics.

Other tribes have their own speech habits and rituals. Some are trivial. Republicans now refuse to refer to the Democratic Party by that name. To them, it’s the Democrat Party. Someone once offered a rationale for dropping the suffix, but the real reason was that it annoyed Democrats. And so it stuck.

Another Republican ritual touches a weightier matter. As far as I can tell, most Republicans understand that Donald Trump didn’t win the 2020 election. But very many of them feel obliged to indulge Trump’s charade on the subject. As with the lefties on land acknowledgment, the rightists’ denialism produces no follow-up. The alleged crimes of the past are left in place. The purpose of the exercise is not justice. It’s tribal solidarity.

Tribal tests have a long history. In the Old Testament, the Gileadites were fighting the Ephraimites and winning. Some of the latter, to escape across the Jordan River, tried to pass themselves off as Gileadites. But their speech gave them away. “And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites,” according to the Book of Judges. “And it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over, that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, nay, then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth. And he said Sibboleth, for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” The language of the Ephraimites lacked the sh sound. “Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan. And there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”

Tribalism isn’t usually so lethal today. Yet we still divide ourselves into friends and foes. The shibboleths change, but they’re not disappearing.