3 ms·
That all sounds plausible, but I am skeptical that today is significantly different from other historical periods or nations that had/have similar tribalism. L
by xapata 6y ago
That all sounds plausible, but I am skeptical that today is significantly different from other historical periods or nations that had/have similar tribalism. Look back far enough and you'll find rich stories of senators murdering each other. Sure, ancient Roman history, but relevant today. Many societies of the past have had our same divisions.
Rather than making conjectures about why today is different, it might be more helpful to investigate why some time periods weren't rife with tribalism.
- hpoe 6y agoYou don't need to go that far back in the mid 1800's one Senator beat another Senator almost to death on the Senate floor.
- xapata 6y agoAnecdotes (US History) are useful for building hypotheses, but I like statistical evidence for testing those theories. Unfortunately, our best source of democracy data (Rome, at least 52 Greek city-states, Greek leagues, etc.) may be 2k years old. Obviously, we don't know much about the media of the day, so it'll be hard to test some of the modern social media theories. Maybe we could compare the behavior of different municipalities.
- oblio 6y agoThe tribalism part is easy: prosperity. Just like a fed snake is calm, so an extremely prosperous society is peaceful. A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/File:Motor_Vehicle_Prod_share_RITA_T1-23.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil... In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down. So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.