The Unbelievable Power of Tribal Bias.

I played organized sports my entire life, starting at age five, and after years of modest success in multiple sports, eventually became something of a local standout in basketball in High School. More importantly, I was one of the lucky ones whose parents attended virtually every game in every sport I suited up for, and not only cheered me on, but encouraged me and told me I played great even when I didn’t.

An interesting reality emerged during those High School years: the fact that my father, normally an extremely mild-mannered man, perennial church leader, and probably faultily nonconfrontational, often became a furious, revolutionary madman during my games.

The source of his unchained Vietnam-veteran fury? Referees. Particularly the unbelievable blindness of referees when they blew an obvious call that hurt my team.

A key word here is “obvious”, because somewhere along the way, even I noticed that very often the call he was overly incensed by seemed utterly fair from a gracious perspective. Sometimes I could simply understand a referee’s imperfect judgement; other times it was obvious that the call was probably correct, the people in the stands just couldn’t see the details from so far away. Meanwhile, losing his mind as he was in my favor, my father was generally unfazed when the exact same calls were made or missed on the other end of the floor or in my team’s benefit. In those cases, he assumed the officials got it right, and even if they didn’t, no yelling and screaming was required. Meanwhile the incensed fans on the other side of the gym were certainly overreacting.

The upshot is that my father, a very discerning man, in these circumstances at least, was prone to being gripped by an incredible amount of what we can now confidently and academically call tribal bias. His devotion and emotional connection to my teams caused such a loss of objectivity that, not only was his judgment unfairly skewed, he actually sometimes observed a different event than most everyone else in the room, even the other people, like myself, on the actual playing floor, also wanting the best for my team.

My father isn’t alone, of course, and at least the recent history of professional sports evidences this fact. Whether or not “Dez caught it”, or “Brady fumbled”, or “Jordan pushed off” often depends upon which team one is rooting for. It’s normal for humans to see circumstances differently depending upon predetermined allegiances, and judge matters favorably for one’s own side, or vice versa.

But of course, some circumstances are of much greater import than pass interference or travelling.

From Athletics to Activism

The greater application of this phenomenon, especially in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota, should be painfully obvious. It was obvious three weeks ago after the killing of Renee Good. It should have actually been obvious long before that. Millions of Americans’ tribal bias is so overpowering they cannot see the reality right in front of them.

Many of us in America are clearly not watching the same movie. Our differing perspectives and “worldviews” are causing us to judge the exact same national events in radically different ways- so much so that when one person sees a law-abiding citizen protesting peacefully before being thrown to the ground, beaten by poorly-trained obsequients, and ultimately executed in cold blood, another sees a “domestic terrorist” “attacking” a “peace officer” and “threatening democracy and trying to destroy the American way of life”, and therefore worthy of whatever violent response that ensued.

This challenge is not new. The reality of “tribal bias”, the related phenomena of “confirmation bias” and “wishful thinking”, and the notion that sometimes “Believing is Seeing”, are well documented. Long before Anias Nin observed that “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”, Democritus (500 years before Jesus) noted “…what we meet with perceptually is nothing reliable, for it shifts its character according to the body’s dispositions, influences, and confrontations.”

It’s also, these days, not news. At this point, most of us are familiar with the refrain that many Americans seem to be living in alternate realities.

What’s newsworthy, however, in my estimation, is the apparent extent to which tribal bias is capable of skewing human judgment. On a personal note, I am both appalled and dumfounded about how stubborn even poorly-discerning people can be, especially involving events so existentially important.

Virtually all of us, even those who’ve never had a philosophy class and have no idea what “epistemology” is, are fully aware that we’re prone to seeing things differently, and that our perspectives often make us biased, and also that objective judgment can sometimes be really hard, as in a penalty against our favorite sports team. At the same time, most people recognize there must be a dividing line for what counts as understandable bias and what lapses into stubborn delusion, which, as far as I can see as someone devoted to objective thinking, the stubborn attempt to justify Alex Pretti’s murder definitely does.

It’s normal, for example, to desperately want a critical fourth-down play to be ruled a “catch”. But when you’ve seen multiple videos from different angles that show the ball clearly touching the ground, even the most loyal and emotionally biased fan is required to capitulate.

Yet, it seems, for many (definitely not all, but too many) Far-Right conservatives, there’s no amount of overwhelming evidence- definitely in Alex Pretti’s case, but not merely that- that can pry them from the perspective that in every situation where there’s “conservative/liberal” conflict, the former are axiomatically God’s good guys and the latter are in the wrong for simply existing. There’s a bias there that seems entirely unassailable, no matter how much evidence- visual, logical, mathematical, or otherwise- is laid out.

Why?

Decades and Definitions

Another key element of my upbringing, besides my Jordan-like basketball skills, is the fact that I was raised in the eighties Baptist, Premillenial, Evangelical world. Thankfully, my particular church was not nearly as Fundamentalist as some, but it was impossible not to receive by osmosis the dominant Evangelical view of the age, that to be a good God-follower was, by definition, to be politically conservative, and that to be a liberal or Democrat was to genuinely hold a first class ticket to the hot place.

It may sound insane to many, but this is the sincere foundational view of reality that I and tens of millions of Americans were raised in (and tens of millions still live in today). And it was subtly (if never overtly) reenforced countless times in church, even before Rush Limbaugh and Fox News turned non-Christian conservative propaganda for it into a grotesque art form.

I bring this up to point out two things as we all continue struggling to understand how and why so many people, even many genuinely good and rational people, will apparently never be able to “trust their own eyes”, no matter how much we beg.

First is the crucial fact that for millions of Americans, devotion to conservative causes- or more importantly, repulsion for liberal causes (no matter what they are)- is more than political devotion, it’s quite seriously religious. For many Christians, to agree with “liberals” on anything at all, even when they claim that “the sky is blue” or “2+2=4” sincerely feels like betraying God, or worse, siding with Satan. To agree with liberals on anything, quite literally in this world, is to invite the anger of God upon one’s self, which conservatives caught in this trap simply cannot do.

But the second is to point out the importance of definitions and categories in this struggle. I often want to ask Far-Right conservatives “What would it look like for America to go too far to the Right?”

But of course, the only possible answer for many is “It can’t.”

Since being “conservative” is conceptually equal to being both “good” and “Christian”, claiming there’s such a thing as “too far right” is like saying someone can be “too good” or “too Christian” or even “They love God too much”. Such things can’t be done.

That’s why if you were to ask most conservatives: “Would you rather elect a corrupt conservative Christian or a good gay atheist to office?” many will likely be utterly confused. They have no proper categories for such a question. Most will acknowledge that there can be corrupt Christians, and some will grant that there are “respectable” gays and atheists and liberals, so far as it goes. But most, in this apparently roughly one-third of our nation’s population who still support MAGA, if pressed, will tell you that the Christian Conservatism of the first candidate- no matter how dishonorable, or corrupt, or lying, or self-serving- still overrides any conceivable “goodness” in the second group. A corrupt, thrice-married, adulterous, financially fraudulent, perpetually lying, Conservative child-molester is still better than a Liberal family man who goes to church regularly but supports DEI and espouses higher taxes on the rich.

This is why, contrary to all objective analysis, many conservatives cannot look at the murder of Alex Pretti and see it for what it clearly is. Criticizing the actions of Conservative federal agents trying their best to make America good and godly feels a lot like criticizing Luke Skywalker for violating the rights of Storm Troopers, or indicting Frodo for the unfair killing of Orcs. The bad guys don’t even deserve rights, and any mistakes made by members of the good team are just that, mistakes.

So the real, daunting challenge before us, not just in this moment but the coming decades, is helping more Americans clean up these ignorantly simplistic categories. Not only, of course, do many conservatives need to rethink Pretti and other “liberal” protestors’ status as inherent demons, and realize that “liberals”, queer, Muslims, and even “socialists” have the exact same rights as straight white Christian Republicans in this country, but also that there are huge and vital distinctions that absolutely have to be made- not merely between “domestic terrorists” and “people saying things I don’t agree with”, but between other categories like “violent illegal immigrants”, “violent legal immigrants”, “legal working immigrants with misdemeanors”, “non-criminal legal refugees and VISA holders”, and several other categories of brown—skinned people with accents but no criminal records.

Sadly, not only do many MAGA conservatives conflate all these, they throw the Alex Prettis and Renee Goods and Joe Bidens and Nancy Pelosis of the world into the same giant box of “evil American enemies” they once threw Adolph Hitler and Herman Goering into, and this is both intellectually lazy and more than appalling. They’ve allowed themselves to be convinced by decades of unconscionable Right-Wing propaganda that none of these are “real” Americans with the same rights as everyone else.

This has to change. It’s stupid, un-American, and it absolutely has to change.

Final note” the most intelligent person in any room is almost always the one who can make the most legitimate distinctions in their assessments of reality. And ultra Right-wing advocates are never going to come close to being able to parse reality correctly until they can learn to make at least a few more gracious distinctions than they currently do.