In-group fidelity as a necessity for social trust

My friend,

What follows is a reflection intended for you. I publish it in this blog as a better alternative to sending you a Drive. Plus, I might need to retrieve it. The topic in question is not precisely niche nowadays.

It was your impression that in America there is less social cohesion than in Europe, that is, that in America there is a weaker union among the inhabitants of a given place in favour of their particular ideological and religious groups. If I was mistaken, I beg you correct me.

Social cohesion is not a luxury, but a necessity, among the individuals that share a given territory. Social cohesion is not simply living amongst eachother, to coexist. Trading, having a beer and sharing the same streets are part of the economic and social categories. Social cohesion, I argue, is the domain of politics. And, as the always polemic but always lauded Carl Schmitt always defended, that is the difference between friend and enemy. A professor I had described an anecdote of a Jewish settler who opened a bar in the West Bank. All the Arabs went there for a drink, even conversed with the Jew, but that doesn't mean that, if war were to arise, they wouldn't cut his throat, not out of hate, but out of in-group cohesion and furthering perceived Palestinian interests. The anecdote may be false, but the point still stands: Social cohesion has nothing to do with personal sympathy.

Social cohesion is about fidelity to a group. The individual furthers the group's interests, not in hope of a short-term repayment, but for a variety of reasons, mainly a feeling of belonging to a group. Across the West we've seen many sons and daughters of Palestinians, and even other Arabs or muslims in general with little relation to that land, protest in support of Palestine. What do they gain by supporting a land they may have never visited and were not born in? Nothing, they simply are loyal to the identity their parents passed them on. This behaviour is difficult to comprehend to Westerners, seeing that our youth has no qualms to abandon its native countries. I cannot tell the reason, although it might just be irrationality (non-pejoratively).

Social scientists have observed how social capital increases with social trust. Social trust is the consequence of social cohesion/fidelity to an in-group. Of course, if many groups coexist in a given territory, social trust will decrease, as the inhabitants do not share such a strong and irrational link that can even compete with self-interest. We can have a civil town hall meeting in a city that is half Catholic and half Protestant, but don't expect it to reach many consesuses, for different groups will have different interests. In fact, both groups had nothing in common, so conflict arised, burning eachother's churches. Now they do cooperate - in opposition to Secularists. In a similar way, many protestors in favor of Palestine in the West were born here: ethnic Palestinians, ethnic Arabs from countries that do not support Palestine, or non-Arab Muslims, all of them individuals who live in our territory, united to protest for a country they have never seen. They have a high social cohesion in their Muslim identity, even when these different ethnic and national groups have hated eachother at times. Identites have always an aspect of opposition. But my emphasis here is in the spatial aspect, which cannot be brushed upon: we must be able to trust those who are around us. And the most effective way to do it is for all the residents of a given territory (I know not the extension of it) to be in an in-group.

In Who is Catalan? Dolors Clotet defends as a model for integration that of those Spanish immigrants of the XXth century that adopted our language as their own, against commentators who try to pass on as Catalan every individual inhabiting this territory, whether they are interested in being Catalan or not.

In The integration to a people Oriol de Marcos lays an example of true integration through the story of Noemi, a gentile that became Jewish. She was not merely a citizen that abided by the law or practiced the customs and spoke the language of a people, but who interiorly became part of them, going as far as saying "The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried" (Ru 1:17). That entails, necessarily, to cease being a part of the in-group she was born in. Adopting the language and customs is just an external, imperfect sign of an internal decision to integrate into the community.

Hope you find this reflections interesting and reasonable,

- Admin.