Tribalism and the Absurd

        In the fall of 1963, my first wife and drove one afternoon to Chewacla State Park, a rocky hill overlooking a creek on the edge of Auburn, and took the winding road up to the big pavilion on top. It was a favorite stop, with a grassy field, a big parking lot, and a climb down to the dam at the head of the lake. At the WPA-built log pavilion, usually empty, was a small crowd of brown people, all ages, the women in old-world dresses, and somehow Jeannie and I drifted over to look at the goat they were roasting on a spit. A little boy sat turning it, and there was loud talk in an unknown language. A young man, a sort of cultural liaison, instructed us to bring beer, so we did, crossing highway 29 to a little store (back then, the park--four miles from downtown--was in the woods; now it's smothered in subdivisions). We passed a six-pack of Old Milwaukee to the old man in the middle of the pavilion, a ritual gift, and were like family.

We were barely legal to buy beer, and our friend from the beginning was twenty-something called Johnny (his "American" name) who initially told us they were Lebanese. It was a lie to dodge the stigma of Gypsy. Gypsies were taking turns dancing to on a flat rock beside the rotating goat, whirling and stepping to strummed guitar. Jeanie and I took our turns, and, by the end of the afternoon, we were invited to visit Johnny's home, a Jim Walters with a fortune-telling sign beside the Montgomery highway. He lived there with his older brother Jimmy and a mother and sister who told fortunes and mostly avoided the big front room. There were older males too who ignored us. I can't say how many times I visited, but I could drop in at random and was always welcome, their pet American. This continued past Christmas, and once Johnny took me (not Jeanie) to a party in Montgomery--a beery gathering in a little frame house packed with men speaking Romani. I listened hard but understood nothing. Johnny had taught me a little Romani (like that I was a gadjo). It didn't help, but I enjoyed imagining that my tan complexion and attentive gaze let me pass for a taciturn cousin. Being welcome in a foreign culture excited me. It was world travel in an old Chevrolet. Billy Green, two generations removed from teetotal Scotch-English farmers plowing Alabama river bottoms, took a beer and was transported. It was magic.

There's a word for this, xenophilia. It's the opposite of the better-known xenophobia, which is a sinful condition (from my biased perspective) that caves in to collective pride and fear. I have always been a xenophile. In high school, my best friend was British, my hopeless crush half-Chinese (both of whom, by the way, slept in my house yesterday. No kidding). I glom hard on foreign. As for my first wife, she was an army brat from Michigan, and my wife now (approaching our 52nd anniversary) is half Cajun. My own kind bores me. Been there, done that. 

           But maybe my ultimate xenophilic triumph came that spring when Johnny's uncle, a patriarch in the far-flung Marks clan, spent a month in Auburn. The story was that his wife had recently died, and the mourning ritual was to visit far-away relatives and stay drunk for a month. He was always planted in the middle of the living room wanting somebody to share a beer with, so I came back a number of times and sat with him, both of us nicely toasted. Except for the last visit, I can't recall much that he said, but that day he put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I'd like to go back to Philadelphia with him. It wasn't just a light comment. He was serious, he insisted. It was an overage adoption proposal, a chance to leave my gadjo life behind and go off with the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh. In more respectful terms, an opportunity to become a Rom.

It was impossible, of course. I was married, about to graduate with a B.A. in English, applying to graduate school. I visualize myself sleeping wherever in some old house, breakfast with strange people expecting me to adapt. "Our ways are not your ways." But it was a stirring fantasy, especially the chance to learn Romani, a language taught in no school or textbook, an ancient secret tongue. It was an opportunity to become utterly not-me. It wasn't just a road-not-taken fork, but an impossibly sudden left veer down a mist-shrouded lane that I still look back at now in my rearview mirror, half a century down the road. Johnny is an old man now. His uncle dead. There's more to the story--how the Marks smashed their sign and vanished but three years later Johnny was in the next car on the ferry from Baton Rouge to Port Allen--but through forking paths and synchronicities, here I am, an arthritic grandfather and retired professor in Virginia wondering who I would have become if I'd dared to abandon my tribe in 1963.  

Of course, there's a reeking paradox here. I was attracted to the Romany because they were strangers in the land with fierce separate ethos maintained since they migrated from Punjab a thousand years ago. Compared to them, the Irish Travelers and Amish are upstarts, the Jews assimilated. I was attracted because, as a white Baptist with educated parents, I was heir apparent to middling mainstream status, on the high road to the level of boring Alabama success that my father enjoyed and I never achieved but don't really miss (he headed a statewide agency). I felt drably ordinary and needed a breath of strange air. Bur, of course, to Johnny Marks, there was nothing strange about his life. It was all he knew. I was attracted as a xenophile to--and invited to join--perhaps the most xenophobic ethnicity in the nation. Johnny, the faux Lebanese, complained early on about how his people were distrusted, watched in stores, and, if I'd joined, I imagine that my southern accent might have served gainful projects on the margins of legality. I don't know how I came to be so trusted. Any other gadjo at the Marks house was a mark, but they never took my money. My Chewacla six-pack was repaid in spades.

The paradox was that I wore my group identity loosely and longed to shed it (and half-did by marrying a Yankee and converting Catholic), while the Romany were absolute in their tribal identity--except maybe for Johnny looking out the window at mine. Of course, there are tribes all over, such as clusters of cousins in once-thriving coal-mining towns like Blocton, Alabama, with peeling abandoned storefronts. I'm drawn to that kind of huddled solidarity even though I fled it, drawn to reunions of my own family, and also of others--the more unlike me, the better. Call it solidarity voyeurism, belonging porn. Life is desolate without something greater to belong to. 

The world is absurd, Albert Camus argued, because it fails to supply any unquestionable point of meaning--which has long seemed obvious to me. Firm meaning rests on some personal commitment, albeit often an uncritical one conditioned by life around us. A faith-based life takes one plate from a cafeteria of faiths--faiths that may all nurture but will not all fit on a single dinner tray. Ego exists by choosing to belong to things outside itself--or by accepting being chosen. Maybe the latter is typical. The connections to family, nation, race, party, gender, and so forth that we take as givens are arguably more like lazy choices. We sense a swarm around us and move with it as if it were an absolute, a fixed point, even as it falls into the eternal void.

Thomas Nagel, in his classic 1971 article, "The Absurd," defines absurdity as "a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality," such as a man's pants falling down as he is being knighted. Absurdity is an uncomfortable state that we try to avoid by modifying either the pretension or the reality. But human life itself, Nagel argues, is inevitably absurd because we can't avoid pursuing our lives seriously--behaving as if our being fired, shamed, or killed were significant events--even as we see a larger reality in which nothing that can happen to us is significant. We can look at ourselves "with that detached amazement that comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand." Our "highly specific and idiosyncratic position," viewed in a frame of eternity, is "at once sobering and comical" (p. 720). Because we're human, our passions are absurd in a way that a mouse's are not, even as it covets crumbs in the dark, because it cannot imagine eternity. In its own terms, it is immortal and heroic until the cat eats it. But we are cursed with knowledge of our inevitable deaths and our insignificance in the great world. 

Of course, Professor Nagel is an adult writing in a heated office in the belly of a stable society and may exaggerate the extent to which detached reflection--and thus absurdity--is a human universal. A child's life need not be absurd. In "Existential Angst in the Void, ("https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/07/existential-angst-in-eternal.html) I recalled awakening to my own insignificance in the vastness of time and space--which was arguably the end of my childhood and the onset of absurdity. But does everyone grow out of childhood? Maybe not. Also, as Nagel allows, even after existential angst emerges, it may be pushed to the margins of consciousness--obscured by entertainment, love, and duty--and I doubt there is any sense of absurdity in a woman struggling to carry her child to high ground after her town was swept away by a flood. Such back-against-the-wall pure significance happens and may have been the norm in our evolutionary past when social institutions were much less protective.

But stepping back to see life from a wider perspective is clearly one of the plagues of civilization--that realization of the ultimate insignificance of everything we keep doing as instinctive beasts and cogs in society. It's a rat race, but unlike rats, we know it. A common response to this is to escape absurdity by submerging ourselves in a great cause, one too large to be stepped back from, such as, Nagel suggests, "service to society, the state, the revolution, the progress of history, the advancement of science, or religion and the glory of God" (p. 720). Today, I might add race, party, and the environment. Like Rick in Casablanca we find nobility in a larger good: "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," he says as he gives up the love of his life. The context is the fight against Hitler--recognized then, as now, as the nearest thing to a real-world moral absolute.

Rick has seen the disproportion between his "highly specific and idiosyncratic positions" and a wider view. He has avoided the absurdity of aiding Hitler just to shack up with Ilsa. Not a bad thing, but Nagel dismisses this and ploys like it--however socially useful--as false solutions to the philosophical problem of absurdity. Given the powers of human imagination, he says, there is no cause too great to be stepped back from, not even the glory of God if you work at it. The same absolute perspective that undermines individual life as absurd--widened ad infinitum--also undermines nations, knowledge systems, and religions, so the insubstantial pageant fades and leaves (as Shakespeare wrote) not a rack behind. Nagel's solution is to get over it and enjoy the existential irony, because the only alternatives are to deny life or to live like brutes.

But I suspect that Nagel's argument--if philosophically rigorous--underestimates human ability to quit backing up. Once we are comfortable that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, many of us are like the old woman said to have argued with William James about cosmology. Asked what the turtle rested on, she said, "It's turtles all the way down." Whatever we commit to as the foundation of our lives we generally imagine as its own foundation. It supports itself, which is, of course, a circular argument and does not solve the problem. The most common remedy for the discomfort of existential absurdity (besides ignoring it) is God, a being by definition before, above, and beyond every other thing. There's no backing off far enough from a Turtle-of-Turtles to see it as absurd in Nagel's terms, so we may escape absurdity by faith. 

But we are still left with self-uncertainty at the social level, the mismatch between what Albert Low in The Iron Cow of Zen calls self-as-center and self-as-periphery. Self-as-center is my inescapable sense that I am the center of the known universe--the definer what is good and bad, near and far. After all, the sky domes exactly over me. When I move, the horizon moves, and, when I close my eyes, everything goes dark. In tension with this is self-as-periphery, the world of duality, of alien selves that extend to the horizon around me and refuse to do what I want. The mismatch between these two selves is inevitable discontent and striving ("Can't get no satisfaction"), what the Buddhists call duhkha. Obviously, unless I'm going to cry and open my mouth for food like a baby born into the center of an infant world, I want to construct a self-as-center in meaningful relationship with self-as-periphery, in service of which I may commit to a third center--say, nation, family, knowledge, or God--that I imagine as sufficient to anchor a stable triangular relationship. Low, like Nagel, dismisses this as a futile. Like Nagel, he calls for "yea-saying" acceptance of existential irony, although perhaps at a more meditative level: "It is by seeing that all props and reassurances, havens of rest, and harbors from storms are illusory and unnecessary that we awaken to the security of the One Mind" (p. 12).

But, again, the solutions to subjectivity that Nagel and Low (philosopher and zen master) insist on may be beyond most people's pay grade. Most of us are too busy shoring up props and reassurances of ourselves, patching seawalls around our havens and harbors, however illusory. In fact, any suspicion that our constructions are illusory may inspire even more desperate devotion to them, as Michael A. Hogg argues in a recent Scientific American article. "Globalization, immigration, technological revolution, unlimited access to information, sociopolitical volatility, the automation of work and a warming climate" have deprived many people of a clear sense of  identity in terms of social groups and categories and all that this implies about how they can expect other people to treat them (p. 85). "I want my country back," is a symptom. The pain of self-uncertainty--absurdity, dhukha, or whatever--is dulled by joining groups that define tribal memberships with authoritarian pronouncements and demonize whoever questions them--illusory third-self absolutes from hell. (We saw an example of this in the January 6 invasion of the Capitol.) Such groups are facilitated by the echo chamber effect of the Internet, which elaborates, hedges, and maintains a variety of insular worlds that reassure the self-uncertain of their importance. Hogg paints a picture of seawalls, havens, and harbors run amok--virtual groups turned inward and insulating each other from testable truth.

Maybe Johnny Marks didn't need an echo chamber to combat self-uncertainty--not in Hogg's sense anyway, born and raised as he was in a culture and language hardened by a thousand years of marginalization. Of course, he was an odd Rom, reaching out as he did in friendship to an Alabama gadjo, but my recollection is that he enjoyed explaining gypsy customs to me, always in positive terms, as if he were a sort of missionary anticipating his uncle's offer of conversion. Whether tribal identity shielded him from Nagel's sense of absurdity is another question. I'll guess that it didn't and was even less prophylactic for his bereaved uncle.

Works Cited

Hogg, Michael A. "Radical Change." Scientific American, September 2019, pp. 84-87.

Low, Albert. The Iron Cow of Zen. Charles E. Tuttle, 1991.

Nagel, Thomas. "The Absurd." The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68, no. 20, 21 October 1971, pp. 716-727.