Football, Tribes & Sustainability
So In-ger-land kick off their World Cup campaign tonight. As a Northern Irishman who has lived in England for almost 30 years, I’m not terribly excited. I’m not churlish, I’d like them to do well, but, hey, they’re just not my tribe.
Tribalism was the topic of discussion at our terribly middle-class dinner party on Saturday night. I read Amy Chua’s Political Tribes on our recent holiday and it hit its target – Liberals like me and my guests who can’t get their head around why Brexit happened, or how Trump got elected, or how ISIS manages to recruit people to do terrible things – and the answer, according to Chua, is tribal identity.
Sport is the ultimate in tribalism – while I can watch Portugal vs Spain as a fascinated objective neutral, if Northern Ireland are playing, I go off at the deep end – shouting, cheering, crying. Likewise when Ulster or Ireland play rugby. In fact I could fill pages here on the bizarre contortions of Irish tribalism and rugby – how even the most trenchant Northern Irish Unionist will support the (united) Ireland team over any of the mainland UK teams. There is no logic to supporting a particular team, just tribal identity.
Tribalism explains quite a lot in the Sustainability debate. UK climate change deniers tend to belong to a right-wing nationalist tribe defined by Euroscepticism, traditional values and “that’s political correctness-gone mad!” tendencies. There is a much smaller (very) left-wing tribe of deniers – the kind of people who think Margaret Thatcher dreamt up climate change to destroy the coal industry. The green activist tribe is far too often exclusionary, raising barriers to entry (often through competitive self-sacrifice), rather than making Sustainability open to all (which it must be by definition to succeed).
My Sustainability tribe is the Mangoes – green on the outside and (liberal) orange in the middle. But I’m always very interested in how other tribes interpret Sustainability whether it’s the watermelons (red on the inside) using Sustainability to argue against capitalism, or when right-wingers make the economic case for Sustainability. To me, the latter is actually the most important, just as some US Republican mayors are enacting climate friendly policies under the radar to avoid the opprobrium of their tribe, removing barriers to progress is critical to Sustainability.
So let’s not support Sustainability like we would a football team. We need tribes to work towards that common goal, even if they all insist on taking different paths.