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Summary
On episode 467 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Allen Buchanan, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Freedom Center at the University of Arizona and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, author of Institutionalizing the Just War, The Heart of Human Rights, and 12 other books.
Dr. Buchanan discusses his book, Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism, and traces tribalism back to an evolved moral psychology shaped roughly 400,000 years ago, when treating outside groups with hostility was often the safest survival strategy.
The conversation covers how that ancient instinct now plays out inside our own society, how social media platforms profit from keeping it activated, and what it costs individuals in stress, relationships, and the ability to make objective health decisions.
Links
- https://mitpress.mit.edu
Key Takeaways
- Tribalism has deep evolutionary roots. Our moral psychology likely formed around 400,000 years ago among scattered, resource-scarce hunter-gatherer groups, where encountering an unfamiliar group often made preemptive hostility the safer bet. That instinct hasn’t gone away, it’s just been redirected inside modern societies.
- Real tribalism goes beyond simply having a group identity. It means dividing the world into “us” and “them,” crediting your own side with every virtue and the other with every vice, and framing ordinary disagreements as existential “supreme emergencies” that justify breaking normal moral rules.
- Tribalistic discourse isn’t reasoning, it’s “sorting and signaling.” People clump beliefs into all-or-nothing bundles and broadcast loyalty to their group, while writing off the other side as either too misinformed to reason with or too insincere to be worth listening to.
- Tribalism threatens two hard-won milestones of moral progress: the “first great expansion” (recognizing all humans share equal basic status and rights) and the still-incomplete “second great expansion” (extending real moral concern to animals). Tribalism works against both by denying the other side is even reasonable.
- Environment shapes which version of our moral mind shows up. A harsh or falsely-threatening environment pushes people toward tribalism, while a more secure one allows a more inclusive response. Humans are unusual in that we constantly reconstruct our own environments, which means we have some power to deliberately build conditions that favor inclusion.
- Social media platforms have a financial incentive to stoke tribalism. Buchanan argues Facebook’s engagement model assumes an interest in keeping users divided, because tribal conflict drives more frequent use of the platform.
- Certainty is a hallmark of tribalism, and it’s a form of arrogance. Tribal thinking assumes your side already has every answer and has nothing to learn from the other side, which shuts down the compromise that democracy actually depends on.
- Practical antidotes exist at the individual level. Limiting time on hyper-partisan media and social platforms, deliberately treating people you disagree with as reasonable equals, and consciously training yourself not to respond to every provocation can all reduce tribalism’s grip on your health and relationships.
- Dr. Buchanan’s three strategies to get and stay well: avoid getting immersed in tribalistic culture by cutting down social media time and avoiding certain outlets; treat people you disagree with as equals capable of being reasoned with; and turn off media, especially political content, as a form of self-restraint that protects both health and relationships.
“Certainty is really a kind of arrogance. That is, that our side knows exactly what’s right and we have nothing to learn from the other side.”
Dr. Allen Buchanan
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