Syria & Ukraine - Thoughts on Tribalism

Tribalism is in our nature.  Our default emotional inclination is to distrust that with which we are unfamiliar.   When humanity was living in isolated small groups, with no technology, subject to the whims of the environment, that inclination was necessary for survival.  When your tribe is barely surviving a stranger is a threat on many levels.  They may deprive your tribe of the resources you need to survive, or just outright kill you.  So whatever tribe recognizes the threat first and eliminates the strangers survives.

As humanity evolved that instinct evolved into forms of institutionalized discrimination against those who are different from us.  

Beginning a couple hundred years ago our ability to manipulate our environment began to make, for more and more people, the notion of scrimping for survival a thing of the past.  Here in 2013 we have the technology to feed everyone, to house everyone, to cloth everyone.

But our thinking lags behind our technology.  Even in the United States, where Tribalism was not well entrenched to begin with, and has been continually weakened by the influx of immigrants seeking to put that all behind them, we are only now finally getting to the point where Government, in word and deed, does not discriminate against people based on broad categorizations of personal characteristics.  Although our founding principal was that we are all created equal and entitled to equal treatment under the law, we had to fight a Civil War in which millions of citizens died and then amend the Constitution to clarify that the principal actually applied to all persons.  WW I and WW II both exploded out of tribalism, the sincere belief by some that other ethnic or religious groups were subhuman in some way.

To this day, 150 years after the Civil War, we in the US are still trying to clarify that "all" means "all".  Most of the world is moving, slowly, the same direction as the United States, particularly in Democratic states.  The exception is the Middle East.  The crossroads of the world has such a long history of conflict between competing groups that many folks there evidently have not yet even begun to realize we all do better through respect and cooperation.

Syria is the bleeding wound in Middle East that is exacerbating regional tribalism.  In some sense, like our Civil War, it may be a necessary and painful process that we cannot insulate the people of the region from.  But in our Civil War, we were largely left to sort it our ourselves.  In Syria that is not the case.  Russia and Iran, two purported democracies where powerful groups "who know best" have a monopoly on the democratic process, have been supporting the Syrian Government, whose power is based in Tribalism and patronage, for decades and continue to protect and support the regime.  Various other regional power brokers support one or another group of dissidents hoping to influence the outcome.

Now Russia is moving in the same direction in Ukraine.

So the stark choice for the US is whether we try to counter the influence of external power brokers to level the playing field so the people of Syria make the choice they will live with, and learn from, in the future, at the risk of sparking wider conflict?  Or do we stand by and let the folks with a tribal agenda prevent the people of Syria and Ukraine from living and learning from their mistakes.