RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to build on the progress we started.”

Meanwhile, across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.

The same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).

Two days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”

So, who’s right?

They’re both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their graves.

The Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”

Hobbesian theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama, thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries. The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.

But in Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny — after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Your humble servant recently came across a report showing that Israel scores highly in surveys of human happiness. The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel 11th in the world out of 158 countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Life Satisfaction Index rates Israel fifth out of 36 countries — ahead of many other advanced democracies.

At first blush, these data may seem unexpected, since Israel lives under the constant threat of terrorist violence. By definition, such violence does not discriminate between military and civilian targets, and strikes its victims at random. Yet it is partially because of this danger (not in spite of it) that citizens of the Jewish state exhibit remarkable degrees of personal fulfillment. The stresses of war and terror often breed social unity. Little wonder that 83 percent of Israel’s Jewish citizens consider their nationality “significant” to their identity.

Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.” Since its inception, Israel has faced aggressive neighbors bent on its destruction — a near-constant reminder of its precarious status in the order of nations. Israelis have responded to existential danger by banding together as if they belonged to a vast kibbutz settlement. They have, in other words, taken quite literally the ancient Israelite claim to be people of the tribe.

The phenomenon of tribal solidarity isn’t confined to Jews. It is the subject of Sebastian Junger’s enthralling new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Junger offers a richly researched work of history, psychology, and anthropology to explore the deep appeal of the tribal culture throughout history. The result is a tour de force that should be read by anyone interested in the human condition.

Junger previously served as a war correspondent for Vanity Fair, embedding for long stretches at remote American outposts in Afghanistan’s frightful Korengal valley. This experience may help explain his interest in the intimate bonds that define tribal societies as well as the despair that can come from being wrenched out of a situation that makes those bonds necessary.

Tribe aptly opens with Benjamin Franklin’s observation, decades before the American Revolution, that more than a few English settlers were “escaping into the woods” to join Indian society. Doctor Franklin noticed that emigration seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal, but rarely the other way around. White captives of the American Indians, for instance, often did not wish to be repatriated to colonial society. At this distance, it is simply astonishing that so many frontiersmen would have cast off the relative comforts of civilization in favor an “empire wilderness” rife with Stone Age tribes that, as Junger notes, “had barely changed in 15,000 years.”

The small but significant flow of white men — they were mostly men — into the tree-line sat uncomfortably with those who stayed behind. Without indulging the modern temptation to romanticize what was a blood-soaked way of life, Junger hazards an explanation for the appeal of tribal culture. Western society was a diverse and dynamic but deeply alienating place. (Plus ça change…) This stood in stark contrast to native life, which was essentially classless and egalitarian. The “intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe” provided a high degree of autonomy — as long as it didn’t threaten the defense of the tribe, which was punishable by death — as well as a sense of belonging.