On Groupishness and New Political Arrangements

Why do we get so mad when our sports team loses after a controversial call by the referees? Why are we unwilling to listen to an argument about a conflict without taking issue with the framing of that argument if it doesn’t adequately portray our perceived side’s concerns? Why do we argue with partisans over policy issues we’d otherwise be willing to consider? And why did I feel the need to send a correction to the Washington Post after they labeled my hometown of 15,000 people tiny? The answer to all these questions is groups. 

What is it with groups that makes humans behave so irrationally?

Humans are social animals and we naturally form groups for companionship, entertainment, procreation, and survival. We’re not even very unique in that respect. Across the animal kingdom we see similar behavior from all sorts of creatures. Fish swim in schools, birds have their flocks, ungulates are usually in herds, wolves roam in packs, lions have their prides, and so on and so forth. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do in the face of a hostile or unknown world. Friends make everything better, and friends’ friends are just people you haven’t gotten to know better right?

Groups dominate human history and our human present. From small hunter gatherer tribes to gigantic multinational empires, the history of our species is often the history of the groups we’ve concocted. Groups do more than just provide the individual members a sense of safety of togetherness, they provide meaning, can arrange worldviews, and shape behavior and practices. What else is culture other than the shared understanding and practices of a group of people in proximity?

So how can something so fundamental also be supposedly the root of all social ills? Because the divisions that are created by groups and their members give permission for unjust, cruel, and unfair treatment to those who are either not part of the group, or worse, part of a competing group.

Groups, what’s a group and what isn’t?

Groups are any number of people who together share some element of behavior, history, ancestry, belief, profession, habit, hobby, place or birth, bodily feature, interest, ownership, or other element of themselves which distinguishes them from people who don’t have that element. Groups can also be amorphous concoctions, think of school cliques or friend groups which developed more from proximity than any one shared recognizable factor. 

Groups can be big. Nations, races, cultures; hell, you could even argue that the entirety of humankind is a group. But they can also be small. A local knitting club, a group of friends who meet every year around thanksgiving, a few co-workers who want to see a change in company policy. They can be strong, such as the childhood friends who still find time for each other, or weak, like a clustering of people who are all double jointed.

The saliency of any one group is often the result of the member’s feelings of being left out of other groups or feeling neglected by broader society. In those circumstances, group membership is something to be proud of, something which provides meaning for members and shields them from the harsh glow of outsider critique or mistreatment. But that’s not the only reason for group saliency. 

People find meaning and a sense of togetherness purely from the concept of being grouped together. In the 60’s and 70’s, the Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel ran a number of experiments about how individuals would respond to arbitrary group inclusion. In one test, he had a class of school boys guess how many dots were on a piece of paper. He then sorted the boys based on whether they had overestimated or underestimated the number of dots. Or at least, that’s what he told the boys. In reality, he simply sorted them into two completely random groups. Next Tajfel used a classic distribution of resources game in which the boys had a certain amount of money gifted to them and they were told they could share with the other boys in any proportion they wanted. What Tajfel found was that the boys shared more with the group they had arbitrarily been placed in (overestimators or underestimators) and shared less with the group they weren’t sorted into. 

The finding surprised even Tajfel. As a Polish Jew who had survived being captured by Nazi’s by not revealing his Jewishness, he had been hoping to understand why individuals behave differently when grouped together. But had designed this test as a basic control. He thought the boys would behave no differently based on their sorting. He was wrong. 

Tajfel and his student John Turner developed social identity theory which they used to explain how people found self-esteem, identity, and purpose out of being members of groups. Being a member of a group allows people to sympathize with the troubles or missteps of their fellow group members. It also helps explain why people often don’t extend those same sympathies to those outside that group. 

Groups doing great things, groups doing bad things. 

Individuals are the root element of humankind. We are the atom in the species wide framework. But we rarely act purely on individual volition. The choices we make, the desires we hold, and the relationships we form are tightly linked with what groups we think we are in, what groups we want to be a part of, and what groups we don’t think kindly of. 

Few in reality are the lone wolves who venture out into the wilderness to live the life of self sufficiency.

For most of us, the groups we are a part of, partake in, or align ourselves towards give us reason in an anarchic world. We find solace in knowing that others in our group are doing well and we feel pain when they are not. 

One of Tajfel and Turner’s most encouraging findings was that grouped individuals are not necessarily negative towards outgroup members in all circumstances, most of the time it’s just casual indifference. You could imagine that a member of a hunting club may look at the local D&D club with a bit of confusion or misunderstanding, but the hunter probably doesn’t wish ill upon the roleplayers. 

But when that indifference turns to conflict, groups can be the fuel that sparks the fire and keeps it burning bright long after cooler heads see time for de-escalation. Examples of this are everywhere but perhaps best illustrated in this moment by the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. I label the conflict as being between those two groups because I think it’s important to frame the conflict that way because it highlights the groupishness of the players and it allows for the larger groups with which both units fall into to also play a role. 

Israelis and Palestinians, a case study in grouphish conflict

The conflict falls between two distinct groups of people: Palestinians on one side and Israelis on the other. Palestinians are largely arabic in terms of ethnic background and language, and Muslim. Israelis have a greater range of ethnic diversity with some from arabic and middle eastern roots while many others have european ancestry. By and large however Israelis are also Jewish, either religiously or culturally. Describing these groups by their bisecting larger group identities is helpful because the conflict has played out not just on the ground in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza but across the global community with those shared group identities often shaping outsider’s perspectives. 

At the core of the conflict are two groups who both hold claims on a single stretch of land. For the Israelis, the state of Israel is the modern embodiment of the traditional homeland of the Jewish people. The lands that centuries ago were made of the Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah. For the Palestinians, the land represents their home, a place they’d also been rooted to for centuries. The modern Israel was created in the wake of the horror inflicted upon European Jews during the holocaust and out of the decades long Zionist movement which called for Jews to return to the historic homeland. What immediately followed was a war between the newly created Israel and its Arab neighbor states. Israel succeeded in defending and expanding their new borders while also expelling thousands of Palestinians from their homes. 

It’s of use to point out that many would argue the Palestinians weren’t a “people” at that time, rather they were the majority Arab and Muslim residents of an area administered by the British Empire. While there may be some validity to that, I think it purposely avoids the essence of groups, which is that they are social constructions which are easily formed by either internal or external stimuli. Russians used to claim that there was no such thing as a Ukraininan, and even if that may have been true at some point, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown that there very much are Ukrainians. Likewise, even if the people expelled following the 1948 Arab - Israeli war didn’t at the time consider themselves Palestinians, it doesn’t mean they didn’t come to view themselves as such. 

What has transpired since is a series of wars and agreements in which surrounding Arab states came to play less of a role in the conflict and Palestinians themselves put forward various political organizations to represent themselves, usually unsuccessfully. 

The well documented atrocities of Oct. 7th were perpetrated by Hamas, the militant political leader of the Gaza strip. Hamas has controlled the territory since they won election in 2006 and have never offered another election since. Signs indicate that most Gazans were dissatisfied with their governance under Hamas prior to the attack. But since Israel started their retaliation by bombing and invading northern Gaza, support for Hamas among Palestinians in the West Bank has increased. Many outside observers rightly look at Palestinian support for Hamas and question the thought process. Afterall, it was the Hamas led assault that has led to the invasion and destruction of northern Gaza by Israel. Isn't it against your own interests in safety and security to support the organization which has baited on your own insecurity? The answer is most certainly yes, but to ask the question in such a manner ignores the pressures of groupishness. 

Nobody likes to see your own team fail. We especially hate seeing criticism of those we consider on our side. In war, we call this phenomenon “rallying around the flag.” It shouldn’t be that surprising to see Palestinian support for Hamas increase during an armed conflict even if as outsiders to the conflict we can clearly see that as being against their interests. Rallying around the flag is just the elevation of a shared group identity in the time of conflict, our group is under attack so we must support whomever is fighting for us. It is easier to forgive the bad behavior of those in our group who claim to be fighting for our cause, this is doubly true for groups which feel under threat or persecution. In turn, this support for Hamas gives reason for Israelis to condemn the entirety of the Palestinian people for the slaughter on Oct. 7th which further allows Israelis to shield themselves from criticism that their own bombardment of Gaza, which has killed over 15,000 people, is in any way unjust or inhumane. 

Groupish behaviors allow for justification of actions we would never accept if they were perpetrated against our group. 

Groupish Solidarity

Maybe the most interesting feature of modern groupishness is the way in which solidarity amongst unaligned groups have become politically salient. Following the Oct. 7 attack, there was an outpouring of support for Palestinians and even for Hamas amongst western university students and activists. These activists tended to bring their support from other, disparate causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the LGTBQ+ movement. 

Why is this interesting?

Because it signals a new transnational movement based around disadvantage. There have long been activists who have denounced injustice in far-away lands but to have specific organizations taking cross-cutting positions is a development. It’s almost like the creation of the disaffected international, picking up the mantle of a non-national collection of peoples much as the failed communist international movement of the last century. 

Could this be a realignment? Nations are not set in stone, they do not need to be our most salient grouping. They are, afterall, creations of the mind - given greater strength by their supposing as the basic unit of state. The nation state has shown to be durable and useful for the western world (not always for other parts of the world). But that durability doesn’t mean inevitability and the continued importance of “nationhood” is not guaranteed. 

I don’t think we’ll see the development of any sort of government by the disaffected anytime soon. I also don’t think that is the political goal of any of the progressive activist groups who have banded together to form a solidarity for each other’s causes. But there is a radical political idea which many of these groups espouse, particularly in relation to Palestine. 

Decolonization was once thought of as simply the literal process of removing colonial powers from controlled peoples. Such as India gaining independence from the British Empire or Libya throwing off the yoke of French control. But the concept has evolved in academia to also question the validity of established states where the indigenous populations have been pushed aside by outside settlers. This version of decolonization particularly targets places like the United States where 98% of the population can trace their roots to other states and continents than North America. 

Supporters of Israel have suggested that calls to decolonize Israel are tantamount to asking for the destruction of the state of Israel. It’s unclear what the academic version of decolonization would look like in practice in Israel or the US, but it is seemingly a version of political arrangement that is looking beyond the nation as the primary unit of state. 

Identity politics and Groups

When politicians complain about identity politics they are usually just complaining that a particular group doesn’t generally support them or their party. It’s often a shallow complaint that fails to accept that their own political coalition is also made up of different group identities and affinities. But there is a version of the complaint of identity politics which holds up to greater scrutiny. 

When group identity is expected to become the overriding and driving factor in any individual member’s decision making, regardless of their personal beliefs or other group identities, then group identity politics becomes a means of taking away autonomy. This is particularly troubling for liberal democracies where individuals are expected to make decisions about what would be best from a hierarchy of themselves radiating outward. 

But it may be that many of these groups who argue that their members should center their applicable group identity before all others and make their political, economic, and social decisions because of that membership, are also agitating for a new political reality. This political reality would center groups and at the center of political decision making instead of at the unit of the individual. How groups would be balanced among other groups, and how membership would be decided upon, let alone how political decisions would be sorted out are tricky subjects which I won’t delve into here. This vision of a different political system is one in which a conflict like that between Israelis and Palestinians could potentially find a solution. Although I should add, I’m extremely skeptical of that supposition. 

A hypothetical single state solution for the Palestinians and Israelis could be aligned along those group identities with each group getting a set amount of representation and political protection from each other. However, both groups would be required to give up on the hopes of a sovereign nation state which is currently a nonstarter for either the side that already has one, Israelis, or the side that aspires to one, the Palestinians. 

A future of Groupishness

The history of the human species is a history of groupishness. All of our political institutions have had to wrestle with the basic human impulse to arrange ourselves into like groups. The earliest hunter gatherer societies aligned among small bands and familial clans. Tribes existed to group various clans who otherwise shared other characteristics like ritual or language. The earliest states developed out of the adoption of agriculture and the increase in material power. Along with that increase in material power came the mixing of different language and culture groups. Empires sprang out of the alignment to power, not necessarily due to any particular group identity. However, these empires often drew a level of interest from outgroups such that they yearned to be considered part of the ingroup. The constant struggle in the Roman empire between who was considered “Roman” and who wasn’t is part of the reason historians disagree exactly about when the empire fell. For centuries after the political power of the Roman empire retreated eastward, various states claimed the mantle of Rome. To be associated with that historic grouping brought prestige and legitimacy. 

The modern nation state in many respects grows out of the movements to remove monarchic authority in Europe. You can remove the monarch but you cannot remove the sovereign, someone or something must be at the root of the state or a state knows not who to cater towards. The creation of the nation would provide an alternative to monarchic rule. It’s not the divine right of kings to rule these states cobbled together through centuries of war, resource extraction, marriage, and other forms of power - its now the right of the people. But who are the people exactly? Those who live in the existing state, speak the prevailing language, and have at least similar cultural rituals and practices. It’s only after the creation of the nation state that we see states take concerted efforts to formulate and consolidate that nation into something concrete. When the French Revolution violently shed the yoke of monarchic rule, less the 50% of the population of the state spoke French. The modern nation state goes to great lengths to consolidate and craft its own sovereignty. Establishing dictionaries and building schools to teach students who they are (or will be) and what they speak. There is nothing organic about this process, there’s also not necessarily anything wrong with it either.

So maybe the next evolution in political orientation will be away from the nation state and towards something which accounts for the groups that have either been left out of the nation state game or have been disadvantaged by it. I’m not sure what that would look like, and I doubt that is something we would see develop quickly. The ingrained “reality” of the nation is unlikely to change without some form of intense external pressure on the entire nation state system. It’s certainly possible, people across the west - the traditional home of the nation state - are broadly dissatisfied with the state of their democratic politics. However I’d doubt most people would jump to downgrade the saliency of their own nation for some other group identity any time soon. 

A nation is, after all, a group - and groups are far easier to build than they are to dismantle.