Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50,” to be published in May.
The single most important intellectual trend of our time is the popular rediscovery of human tribalism.
We thought we had it licked. For roughly 200,000 years, humans ran around in small, clannish groups, hunting and mating together while variously raiding or befriending other groups. But in the past couple of centuries, we wised up and replaced tribal social organization with depersonalized, rules-based institutions: markets to organize our economies, elections to organize our politics and science to organize our search for knowledge. To satisfy our hankering for group affinity, we transferred our tribal loyalties from clan and caste to abstractions like the Constitution and the free-enterprise system. The results were spectacular, a step change in human potential. We had figured it out. Or so we thought.
