J. B. Thompson

Rabbits live in tribes. So do humans. The need, nay, the desperation, to remain in the tribe can and usually does override reason in human and rabbit brains. Evolution made it so. One plus one et al. can survive better than one.

It is said that beneath the rational mind’s narratives, fantasies and illusions, the strongest impulse of life is simply to be. DNA, for example, reclining helically in the 10,000 trillion cells that make up one human animal, does nothing beyond replicating itself in order to survive. DNA does not serve the human individual, the human individual serves the DNA. If the DNA serves anything, it is maintaining the human species in order to have a comfortable apartment in a host.

And at a more macro level, so it is with the tribe. The tribe does not serve the individual, the individual serves the tribe, especially so when the individual thinks otherwise. Even sex and its sometimes Great Romance does not serve the individual, however lyrical the language gilding the lily.

The AR loves the DIK and the DIK loves the AR and they love no others, at least in their days of wine and roses. Their DNA couldn’t care less. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet not to enshrine in a temple of love the power of the individual, but to display the exception, perhaps awaken us to the dilemma. We know what happened to those two.

Romeo and Juliet came from separate tribes who did not want their tribes contaminated by the hated other, and the tribes had their revenge. Romeo and Juliet generously provided it for them.

In Franklin Foer’s intriguing Atlantic essay on Jared Kushner as enabler son and son-in-law in a small tribe in New York and the White House, Foer refers to Edward C. Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society to explore the dynamics of tribe.

As Forer explains, sociologist Banfield wanted to understand why some societies do not advance — if advancement is material and cultural wealth and sophistication and physical health and growth in numbers — and he spent time in a small impoverished Italian village in the 1950s to learn why.

The village had been impoverished for generations and showed no sign of changing. Banfield discovered its problem was a paradox: the larger tribe of the village was damaged, undermined, by the smaller tribes of families. Families, extended families, so fiercely protective of each other and fighting hard against the other families. They sabotaged any hope for improvement at the village level, which ironically kept them all poor and perpetually unhappy. Remember the Hatfield McCoy feud in Kentucky.

Recently, a hoard of motorcyclists descended en masse on Sturgis, South Dakota, for an annual gathering that brings up to 500,000 of them to a town of 7,000 citizens. The 7,000, by a margin of 60 percent, didn’t want them to come in this year of the virus. The mayor and council said they could. Business is business. They came.

In an interview, one of the riders, maskless like the others, like the others soon to crush into bars and event venues, proclaimed his faith: to ride free and accept risk. He imagined himself the free rider, an individual alone with the wind. The virus was a hoax, he stated; but at the same time, recognizing his script as perhaps wrong, he corrected himself: if he got sick he got sick. No matter. What counts is his freedom. His, not anyone he might later come in contact with.

He saw himself as ruggedly separate from other docile, herded Americans who did not ride motorcycles, from his government, from anyone. He was free.

The flaw in this reasoning, if reasoning it can be called, is that the rider comes to Sturgis because he cannot be without the other 500,000, who also believe themselves free individuals. With his tattoos, his hair, his rings, his jeans, his boots, his bike, his tattooed heavily breasted girlfriend and his belly he looks exactly like the other free riders who imagine themselves alone in the wind. He cannot be without them, even for just one year, even during a pandemic.

In other words, he is his tribe. What he thinks and says and does are what the rest of the tribe think and say and do.

One monkey is no monkey. One rabbit is no rabbit. One human is no human. Rare is the recluse who can pull himself or herself away from the tribe — and even then the recluse is usually defined by his absence.

What does this mean for the larger society, which can generate benefits for individuals smaller societies cannot easily do — food, healthcare, unemployment insurance, education, roads, clean air and water, electricity?

As with the Italian village, if the mind cannot expand to embrace the greater abstraction of the larger community, if it can only grasp the immediate tribe, including in the guise of the rugged individual — the larger community will fail, as indeed it has been failing.

Where once a common vision bound it together — omitting of course non-whites and other religionists, the disabled, the very poor, speakers of other languages, the mad and bad — the inspirational faith has been lost, and self-proclaimed individualists stand alone — or think they do. In reality they stand with their tribe, their smaller tribe, whether the family or the bikers riding to Sturgis or QAnon or the Aryan Nation or the Rotary Club.

Loss of faith creates a vacuum. Into a vacuum rides the small tribe. The strong man strides into a vacuum too. Into the vacuum valley of death rode the 600.

But contrary to the notion that the larger community is a greater abstraction and therefore requires a greater leap of faith to activate it, the reality is that all life shares the same DNA. We are all one: amoebas, rabbits, monkeys, the riders to Sturgis. It is not harder but easier to embrace the all, it is harder to stay apart.

As the song in the musical South Pacific puts it: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

Time to undo that learning.

Does the Authorial Rabbit sympathize with the Sturgis free rider? Yes, of course. The AR would love to take to the fields and cavort in close quarters with others of the AR’s kind — ears and tails a-waver, teeth bared in ecstatic smiles. It is a yearning most powerful, a pull most strong. And the time of confinement is long. But not all contact during this time need be lost. Another voice inside us beside the tribal can be heard too and guide to a measured approach as we wait for a vaccine.