Deniz T. Kılınçoğlu, author of The National Mind, on how understanding our ‘National Minds’ can help pave the way towards a less tribalistic future

On October 5^th, 2024, the renowned physician Dr. Gabor Maté received a question about the October 7 attack in Israel following his lecture on compassionate care for trauma survivors. A member of the audience asked him how someone could have compassion for “the animals” that committed such a massacre. Dr. Maté’s response emphasized the importance of recognizing that history did not begin on October 7^th, 2023. He drew a comparison between the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli state and that of indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. He added that just as many Israelis are unaware of the human rights abuses committed by their state in the past, the majority of Canadians and Americans are also still oblivious to the traumatic experiences of the indigenous communities in their countries. Facing his interlocutor’s objection to his response and especially the discrepancy of knowledge and ‘facts’ between both sides, he concluded, “You and I do not live in the same world.”¹ Regardless of the facts involved, this sentence encapsulates the overall impact of nationalism.

Although the internet and social media have decentralized knowledge production, allowing for more diversity of available opinions, my research demonstrates how mainstream national thinking and feeling patterns continue to influence our perceptions and emotions. The ‘us vs. them’ mindset is deeply embedded in our educational systems, mass media, and social interactions, creating a self-contained national knowledge system. When a particular knowledge system becomes ‘common sense’ in society, it leaves little room for alternative perspectives.² This does not mean individuals have no agency over their minds and actions. However, it is cognitively efficient, emotionally satisfying, and socially convenient to think, feel, and act according to these intimately familiar and communally acceptable patterns.

We feel at home in the national knowledge sphere because our a priori information about social reality comes mainly from our early socialization and education within its confines, both in family and school. It is also a vast echo chamber. It assures us constantly that ‘We’ are right. It affirms our beliefs and feelings about ourselves and the rest of the world. In this sense, clashes between nations are not merely due to conflicts of interests but encounters between different pictures of reality. We fight with our ‘facts’ against their ‘beliefs.’ The problem is that the opposing side is equally certain of the same thing. And it is not merely a matter of rhetoric but of our confidence in and emotional reliance on our own ‘common’ sense.

Some scholars believe that the evolutionary dynamics of in-group favoritism ingrained tribalism in the human mind.³ Xenophobia may indeed have biological underpinnings. We share such feelings with other social animals, like sheep and cows.⁴ Yet, this is not a reason to surrender to tribalism. Our past does not consist only of the triumph of selfish and belligerent patterns of thought and action. Humans are capable of being altruistic as well as selfish, inclusive as well as tribalistic, and empathetic as well as callous. We have built cultural environments that favor the former rather than the latter. Our cultures and moral standards are flexible and bound to change over time.⁵ We observe today that some worldviews based on equality and harmony, such as feminism and veganism, are becoming increasingly mainstream. Such ideas were deemed ‘irrational’ and ‘unrealistic’ only a few decades ago.

Our starting point should be questioning our ‘common’ sense, the knowledge and beliefs we take for granted in our culture, and the things that seem ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ to us. Our common sense once told us that the Earth was flat and stars were hanging in the sky. Yet, we, at least most of us, came to accept that our planet was roughly spherical and revolved in a vacuum around a star. Similarly, now we believe that the world does and should consist of national territories with physical borders. Many of us are even ready to die for it to remain as such. However, we can develop a new common sense to recognize the destructive absurdity of this fiction.

The existence of some evolutionary basis for tribalism does not entail that we should nurture it through education. Cooperation, more than individual competition, has enabled the survival of our species. Our natural inclination to build a We-self has motivated us to create collective minds and bodies against natural and social adversities. For the first time in our history, we can perhaps be more inclusive by adding all humans, and even the entire ecosystem, to our definition of We. Our previous ideological discussions have not convinced most of us of this idea. Yet, our current global environmental, political, and economic crises seem to win over increasingly more people to the notions of cooperation and mutual aid. However unusual this may sound now, the catastrophes that we are going through can and should be a wake-up call for us to develop a new vision to overcome our tribalistic minds.

This article draws on arguments outlined in the Conclusion to ‘The National Mind’.


Deniz T. Kılınçoğlu is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany. Dr. Kılınçoğlu is an interdisciplinary historian of ideas and narratives. His current research investigates national(ist) narratives and sentiments in contemporary Turkish school books to shed light on how nationalism frames the cognitive and emotive formation of individual and collective minds. His published books include Economics and Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire (2015) and The National Mind: Emotion, Cognition, and Nationalism (2024).
 

References

¹ https://youtu.be/D-5cuqyRM9w?si=dksTBWW-UglSW7iG

² Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” The Antioch Review 33, no. 1 (1975): 17.

³ Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

⁴ Ashley Ward, The Social Lives of Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2022).

⁵ Allen Buchanan, Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).