I pulled on the thick, slightly greasy upright of a Himalayan balsam plant and felt the satisfying tug as the dry clay released its red, bulbous and faintly unearthly root cluster. I snapped the stem in half and threw it onto the tarp.
“It’s posho versus povvo really, isn’t it?”
I’d missed the start of that. I moved the phone to the other ear and asked my forestry-involved friend to repeat himself.
“I mean, it’s just tribalism at the end of the day. The land agent with the clipboard and shiny boots thinks he knows more about the job than me, but I’ve got the bleddy chainsaw.”
Well, quite.
Tribalism – that sense that everyone outside the circle of light cast by the campfire is somehow different, somehow other – is about as innate a human trait as we have. We can no more educate it out of ourselves than we can talk ourselves out of shivering in the cold.
The details were peculiar to forestry, but the argument wasn’t. It could have been a tenant farmer and an estate manager, a gamekeeper and an ecologist, or any two people obliged to share a landscape while holding different ideas about who understands it best. It could equally have been two foresters arguing over chainsaws: ask whether Stihl or Husqvarna is better, and otherwise reasonable men will recite grievances inherited from their grandfathers.
It’s always someone else’s tribe
We tend to discuss tribalism as an affliction suffered by other people: football supporters, political activists, whichever side of the latest public row has proved most tiresome. Our own affiliations, by contrast, are simply sensible judgements arrived at independently. Theirs are tribal; ours are common sense, and the distinction is useful mainly for being false.
Here be dragons
Rural Britain is made up of dozens of overlapping tribes, each with its own vocabulary and procedures for identifying outsiders: farmers, foresters, keepers, stalkers, anglers, horse people, ecologists, land agents. An outsider might gather them all under the heading “country people,” rather as a medieval mapmaker labelled an unexplored region “here be dragons.” Those living within it can tell the difference at fifty yards.
Every tribe has its tells. Some are obvious (a workwear logo, a car-boot sticker); some only surface in conversation, such as giving the height of a horse in feet rather than hands, which will not be mistaken for the language of an equestrian. Nobody writes the rules down. You absorb them, or you don’t, and the trouble starts when fluency and comfort get mistaken for competence.
RAC versus a Shed in Mid-Wales
The polished boots in my friend’s story mattered because they signalled a different kind of authority, not a lesser one. Competent chainsaw work takes years to earn: certificates in felling, cross-cutting, windblow and a dozen other niche skills, assessed stage by stage by a practitioner in a shed in mid-Wales who has felled more trees than he can count. The land agent’s authority was built differently, over three years at Cirencester studying land law and rural economy. Both men had genuinely earned what they knew, but vocational and academic qualification are marked on entirely different scales, so neither man’s ticket counts as currency in the other’s economy. Each was fluent in a language the other hadn’t studied, and mistook the gap in fluency for a gap in worth. “Posho versus povvo” was crude, but it was doing quite a lot of work.
Class remains one of Britain’s more dependable methods of tribal sorting, though it grows unreliable the moment you examine it closely. A penniless aristocrat remains posh; a wealthy contractor may not be admitted to the category at all. A pair of red trousers can outweigh a bank statement.
The Maths of Belonging
This is where the simple division between us and them starts to misbehave. I’ve never been especially sure which side of it I sit on myself. I had a brief taste of private education before getting slung out for a persistent habit of scaling rooftops, and having spaffed away that opportunity, I spent the rest of my schooling in the state system, where I was reliably marked out as the posh kid. Turn up anywhere else, though, and I was the state-school outlier who couldn’t quite follow the shorthand of a “proper” education. You end up watching both rooms rather than belonging fully to either.
A hunting man and a hunt saboteur may regard one another as opposing camps, yet both may be parents, dog owners, allotment obsessives. Which loyalty comes to the front depends entirely on where you’re standing and what’s happening at the time.
The anthropologist Robin Dunbar built a career on a related idea: that humans can maintain something like 150 stable, meaningful relationships, and no more. The figure gets argued over, but the underlying point holds up well enough, and can be seen in everything from the average size of a neolithic farming group to the soldiers who make up a company in the British Army. We sort the world into groups we can actually keep track of, and we know, more or less instinctively, who belongs, who’s loosely attached, and who’s arrived from over the hill with an accent, ideas and beliefs we don’t recognise.
It isn’t only about headcount, though. The journalist Sebastian Junger spent a book arguing that a tribe is less about shared opinion than mutual obligation: the point isn’t that people agree with you, it’s that you matter to them and they to you, and everybody notices if you fail to pull your weight. That’s presumably why close groups form around hard graft or overcoming a shared problem: a crew clearing storm-felled trees, a farming community racing the weather for the harvest. Sometimes a tribe is simply whoever you happen to share suffering with.
The Elephant and the Rider
None of which explains why the loyalty arrives before the reasoning does. For that you want the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who pictures the mind as an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant is intuition: enormous, fast, largely running the show. The rider is conscious reasoning, holding the reins and telling himself a flattering story about who’s actually in charge. We feel loyalty or suspicion first and work out why afterwards, which may be why appeals to “stop all this infighting” so often land badly. They tend to come from someone who has already decided which bigger tribe everyone ought to fold into.
Round the Campfire
Tribalism can certainly turn ugly. It turns disagreement into treachery and lets the worst member of another group stand in for all of them. Strip out place and tone, as the internet reliably does, and people who’d have managed a perfectly civil conversation over a farm gate become sworn enemies underneath a Facebook post about rewilding. Reduce the interaction to nothing more than short, unfeeling words and you strip out every signal that might otherwise have led to allyship instead of a fight.
And yet the instinct itself isn’t something we’re going to reason our way out of, nor would we necessarily be better off if we could. Firelight only reaches so far: inside it, faces you know, footsteps you’d recognise in the dark; beyond it, shapes you can’t quite make out, which the mind fills in as threat until proven otherwise. That same machinery produces loyalty and the quiet certainty that somebody will turn up when you need them. Maybe the problem was never the campfire. It’s what happens when you stare too long into your own and stop being able to see anything beyond it.
My forestry friend was probably right about the land agent. The land agent was probably equally sure he was dealing with a bloody-minded contractor who wouldn’t take advice. Both of them may have been right, which is one of the more irritating features of human affairs generally.
I pulled another balsam plant from the clay and threw it on the heap. If I took a photo and posted it on social media I could find four competing groups to tell me why I was doing it incorrectly, and why the other three groups are also wrong.
And they’re probably all correct.
