In the near entirety of recorded history, humans, animated by the will to survive, inclined toward family, tribe, and clan. To establish a state, or something like it, was to ask subjects to transcend narrow loyalties for greater ones. The city-states of ancient Greece to the proto-state of prophet Muhammad and the first Muslims grappled with this tension.
As Plato records in The Republic, Socrates took such concerns to their logical extreme, advocating communal ownership of property, including women and children. In sharing women and children, says Socrates, the guardians “will not tear the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine' and ‘not mine'.” If man naturally inclines toward family, then the solution was, in effect, to make the state into a kind of larger, all-encompassing family.
This was one solution. Another was for nations to have states: states would be one big tribe, bound together by language or ethnicity, or usually both. But this required sorting: the French would have France, the Spanish Spain, and (perhaps eventually) the Indians India. Ideally, these states would be governed democratically. But, short of outright ethnic cleansing, the sorting could never be complete.
To the extent that societies have transcended tribalism, they have done so not by accepting history but by defying it. Liberalismâ??—â??referring here to the philosophical tradition emerging out of the Enlightenment rather than the political classificationâ??—â??seems so dominant today that to think of plausible alternatives requires an overactive imagination. In the eyes of its increasingly spirited critics, liberalism is also insidious, at once everywhere and nowhere, and therefore especially difficult to dismantle. To fight your enemy is first to name it.
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