Smartphones and the New Tribalism 

I come from a large family; I am the ninth of ten. Our parents were of the Silent Generation, born during World War II. Of the nine living siblings, six are of Generation X, and three of us are millennials. In many ways, my family is a microcosm of the divide between those two generations—we millennials have lower expectations for income and status, we are more frugal, we have more diverse palates. Gen Xers might say that the first is a vice, that we are insufficiently ambitious, and that the food we eat is weird. But nobody really cares anymore. We millennials are entering middle age, and Gen X is joining the AARP. 

One area where there is a sharp generational divide concerns our relationship with new technology. The millennial siblings feel much more obligated to limit our children’s use of screens and even keep them away from smartphones entirely. The Gen Xers in my family, by contrast, are more likely to see technological trends as a matter of fate—skepticism is for the Luddites and the Amish. Their experience of new technologies growing up was almost always marked by improvements in their quality of life, and even as something that brought people together. Our experience as millennials, having come of age with social media, was more mixed, and we have seen more clearly how new technologies can also lead to division. 

Jonathan Haidt famously makes the case for reining in smartphones. In The Anxious Generation, he argues that unfettered access to phones gives rise to four fundamental harms that help explain the mental health issues of youth in recent years: 1) social deprivation; 2) sleep deprivation; 3) attention fragmentation; and 4) addiction. For these reasons, it makes more sense to think of smartphones according to the paradigm of chemical technologies than of ordinary electronics. Like beer, wine, liquor, cocaine, opiates, and tobacco, if it is addictive, we should probably find a way to use it, or not use it, depending on what is truly beneficial to us. Smartphones may be worthwhile for many people, but we should at least be aware that they are harmful when unmoderated, and, as with cigarettes, we should probably keep them away from our kids until they are adults. 

But there is another reason we should limit kids’ access to smartphones: their effect on our political culture. It is looking increasingly like smartphones and social media are leading our culture to a new kind of tribalism.  

Back in the 1960s and ’70s there was an eccentric Canadian intellectual named Marshall McLuhan, who wrote about technology and its effect on us. He was even interviewed by Playboy magazine and appeared in the movie Annie Hall. People don’t talk about him as much today. His ideas were condensed, polished, popularized, and applied to social criticism by Neil Postman, especially in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. McLuhan himself was mostly indifferent to technological trends—people like Postman saw in those same trends reason for concern. 

If you are like me, your response to reading McLuhan is like this: “false; false; false; false; false; false; false; WOW, that is one of the most insightful things I have ever heard!; false; false.” He was more gifted in intellectual creativity than discipline. But he would have insights you had never heard, and about things you had never thought to consider. One thing he said that I am convinced is true is that literacy fundamentally changed society. There is almost zero chance that the growth of mass literacy in the West, after the invention of the printing press and the educational shifts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, had nothing to do with the other radical changes that followed, from the development of modern constitutionalism to the industrial revolutions.  

Reading changes the brain. And one thing McLuhan said about it is that it tended to make us transcend our own tribe and take on a more individualist perspective. This was also what Postman tried to emphasize. Indeed, long reading, engaging deeply with the thoughts of others, especially those from very different times and places, tends to open our minds to diverse perspectives, drawing us from tribal thinking to a more cosmopolitan vision. Since the widespread use of smartphones, however, the data shows what we (probably) already knew: that far fewer people are reading today. This should concern us. 

 

In fact, it was McLuhan’s prediction that the trajectory of mass media was that of a return, from the individualist mentality of the “literate man” underlying modernity, to new kinds of tribalism. With television and radio, this tended toward a tribalism of a “global village.” But what McLuhan did not live to see was the internet, which has led to a different kind of “retribalization,” one that is far more concerning than the one we had with radio and TV. Who can look at the last fifteen years—as the bonds of a common culture dissolve and people increasingly struggle to see their fellow citizens as compatriots with whom they share reciprocal norms—and not wonder if that is what we are seeing? 

With social media, for instance, deep engagement in the many worlds of others is often replaced by memes and clips, slogans and knockdowns, and a strong tendency toward exclusive engagement with a highly particularized tribe. Ideas once dismissed as radical gradually come to seem normal as our little tribes embrace them. Little cults form and, as we see in the younger generations, there exist soldiers of online tribes walking among us with almost no allegiance to our real-life communities. The internet has allowed misfits to find each other, which is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it.

But is a return to tribalism and away from universalism so bad? Isn’t the life of a tribe more selfless and communal? If we enjoy the benefits of a modern constitutional democracy, we should be concerned. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich discusses what he calls the unique psychology of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) individuals, explaining this psychology’s development from the Catholic Church’s bans on cousin marriage and polygyny, to the spread of mass literacy after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  

While WEIRD Westerners tend to think in terms of universal moral principles that transcend their kin (trusting strangers and even opposing nepotism and cronyism), tribalists tend to view moral obligation as more exclusively pertaining to their in-group, thus making them more willing to lie, cheat, or defraud outsiders—the kind of behavior one sees with mob families. The increasing popularity of Carl Schmitt’s “friend–enemy” distinction in political sloganeering reflects the proliferation of this kind of thinking. The problem is that it is very difficult to share a common political community in a large constitutional democracy if we are not willing to agree to common, reciprocal rules with people outside our tribe. When we view politics as a game of rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies, these norms break down, and then we are faced with political violence, or worse.  

That this requires a universalist ethic that is present in only some cultures is a big reason why outsourcing democracy to places like Afghanistan has not worked out. Modern prosperity and peace were not, and are not, inevitable. They are a product of Christianity, developed over a long time, a process that includes education and specific social norms, sometimes new social norms, like those that limit the use of harmful new technologies. The various forms of alcohol were disruptive; caffeine was disruptive; tobacco was disruptive; opiates and cocaine were disruptive; books, too, were disruptive, and so were newspapers and pamphlets—print media that, in contrast to books, had a “retribalizing” effect.  

What we are seeing with smartphones and social media is a new challenge, one we should not ignore, as if the trends of the last fifteen years do not warrant a response. What place smartphones have in our future is uncertain, but whatever it is, all generations should be alert to the problem. We should start by keeping smartphones out of schools and away from our kids, and, from there, we adults will also have to figure out how to moderate their use, just as we did with alcohol and tobacco. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.