Triumph of the Tribe

God revealed Himself in a cultural context, one He designed and implemented Himself as the ideal for humanity. The context is part of the revelation.
God’s revealed Laws presume a tribal nation social structure. The promises are conditioned on this assumption, though it’s not absolute. You can approach the Laws and blessings begin to manifest, but the really good stuff is reserved for those who truly commit themselves. Further, it’s wired into the Creation itself. No other system will really work for very long. His Laws further presume a government which arises from this same social structure, using the cultural and intellectual climate as your guide.
It won’t matter what flaws you see in this model for human life. For all its flaws, nothing better is possible. God is not impressed with your Aristotelian logical evaluations. Aristotle rejected revelation, so you aren’t even on the same planet unless you understand and use the intellectual frame of reference in which revelation was given.
Not fair, you say? Argue with God; I’m just reporting what He says. Nothing in my hands or in my words is a threat to your plans and dreams to the contrary. It’s simply my responsibility to remind you of what He actually says so you can’t deceive yourself that He somehow must bless your brilliant ideas. The only reason I rehash this so often is because people stumble upon my blog and presume I’m somehow obliged to answer their personal objections for the thousandth time.
So we have ample precedent in Scripture that a unified tribal nation is the most just society possible. It’s not just good; it’s effective. It’s just. We also have ample precedent one tribe cannot rule another for too long. If there is a tribe with some implacable hatred for your tribe, you either need to put some distance or other major barrier between your tribes, absorb them completely and dissipate their identity, or destroy them. If they are less than implacable, the options are much greater. You can even share the same space, so long as there is mutual respect and a maintenance of separate identities. Obviously, it requires sharing substantial cultural elements. The more foreign, the less possible it is.
Cosmopolitan neutrality is possible only in select urban environs, not in the living space itself. Precious few humans can maintain their personal integrity by living in such a city, so precious few should try it. Again, this is the immutable facts of human nature. Enter the cosmo-place, do your business, then go home. Aside from the wholly different question of spiritual matters above human ken, there is a distinct human need to grow, then maintain, an identity which is related to a tribal society. There is an awful lot of room for fairly radical differences across human cultures even while we assume for the sake of discussion they all embrace the assumptions behind God’s Laws.
It’s not hard to understand, then, why some modern nations are so very stable regardless of their peculiar economic and political policies, and others are such wretched places regardless of their politics. Yes, there are problems everywhere, because all humanity is fallen. Yet within that assumption we see some places are downright attractive right now with their internal stability, and other places should be avoided at all costs.
Finland is nice; England is hideous. Whatever else you might say about the Finns, they are united in a vast range of common assumptions. They are closer to a tribal nation — one nation. The variations are mild and narrow. England has never been so.
England has always been one tribe ruling the rest. Not just rivalry between common stocks of people, but utterly alien nations always conquering and lording it over whomever was doing it before. You can pretend it was all one people, but it never has been. Inherent in the cultural roots of every people who have lived there is some awful assumption of absolutism in politics. This is the very foundation of warrior societies in the West. They are absolutist in demands, truculent in expression of them, and delighted to rub your faces in it with their feet pressing down against the backs of your heads. They aren’t content to win; they must glory in the misery and sorrow they bring to others. This shows in all the political assumptions you see in the UK and America. There has never been any real unity, nor can there be.
Sure, look at the vast ferment of intelligence, the energy to build and conquer. And then look at how it was born to die by its own hand. We could go further and talk about the fatalism of Germanic tribal cultural assumptions, but it’s no longer the point. What we have today is easily explained by the internal disunity of any given nation. Dominance by alien peoples is the result of denying the necessity and justness of tribal existence. The greatest empires of history lasted for so long only because they recognized this basic human fact, and fell when they forgot it. A basic assumption of God’s Laws includes the realization no tribe is best or better, but one of many. No tribe deserves to rule the others.
This brings us back to that implacable hatred. Holding someone under your feet is not a solution to conflict. God Himself won’t tolerate that for long (we do have to keep in mind His sense of time is totally different, though). He’ll keep blessing the downtrodden tribe so they rise up and make trouble for their overlords. The pain of hatred is the womb of warfare innovation, but peace is not possible on what people can dream up as some brilliant solution. Peace is not possible merely through civil rights so called, but by national rights and a tribal identity.
American politics in particular is inherently nasty. It presumes the fantasy of a single nation, which it has never been, and cannot be. It has always been an empire, and the big lie has been you can absorb all sorts of folks as they are, and ignore the tribal nature. Indeed, it has been to destroy the tribal identity, and replace with a fragmented loyalty to any number of new fake tribes, by associations which, at best, are a feeble replacement for a genuine tribe. The hatred is inculcated even as it is verbally denied. The most implacable hatreds grow and we are a nation of conflict forced to channel our warfare in ways the imperial government will tolerate. It’s layer upon layer of lies. The hope is this big lie permits a unified imperial policy which invades down the very core of what color underwear a man wears, and how often he washes it, and with what. If your every breath can be regulated, vast sums of profit can be made by whomever gets the contract on supplying your breath.
America has shook her fist in God’s face from the very beginning, and richly deserves to be destroyed. Human tribes will be here, by very human necessity, long after America is forgotten. The tribe which triumphs is not the one which holds the guns and collects the tribute; that will change inevitably and often. Nor is the tribe with builds the biggest and best and brightest, because whomever takes control of what was built won’t care who built it, and are unlikely to reverence its true source.
No, the tribe which will triumph is the tribe which remains a tribe. The nation within any empire which manages to remain a nation will outlive every empire which rules them. It is the nation which endures because what they have is more precious than all the other things humanity pursues, and the people of that nation never forget the single immutable fact of their existence is their tribal identity.