TRIBE-TRANSCENDING DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY

It seems my mind and David Brooks’s are running along similar tracks this morning, although I think I’m a little more interested in reconciling ‘tribal’ wisdom with multiracial, multiethnic democracy.
Someone, somewhere has written this line: “Western Civilization was born in the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem.” I can see the truth in that; the tension is between the empirical observation of Athens and Jerusalem’s loyalty to divine revelation. I think about another pair of opposites currently at loggerheads and wonder if one thing we need is a state of creative tension between them. These opposites are: on ‘our’ side, a universal law under which all life has equal justice and all humans have equal dignity and, on the other, ever more naked tribalism: everything for Me and Mine and crumbs, if even that, for all others.
You, Gentle Reader, might think the choice obvious. But, for many of us who are actually or, in our own minds, all for universal rule of law and democratic principles, we also still have what might be called tribal barnacles on us. That is to say, we all have our own partialities which tend to lean towards the ways and people who look like those with whom we grew up. There is nothing evil in having such biases.
The evil begins when, deliberately or unthinkingly, we treat ‘our tribe’ like royals: members of our tribe can do no wrong. My own inclination is to go the other way: were I on the bench and a case came before me in which a ‘fellow’ (fill in the blank) allegedly violated a law which I considered to be one of the treasures our…