Tribe

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016).

Junger’s argument, drawn from his war reporting and from the historical record of colonial-era Americans who defected to Native communities and refused to return: modern affluent society gives people safety and material comfort while stripping out the close, interdependent group life humans are adapted to — and that returning veterans often miss the tribe more than they miss the war.

Why it was saved. The note was titled “JK Rowling” and fed The Death of Discourse. The link is belonging as the thing at stake in public argument: if the cost of dissent is expulsion from a group, disagreement stops being intellectual and becomes existential. Junger supplies the account of why that cost is felt so acutely.

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