Every now and again, I come across profound wisdom in the novels I read just for pleasure. Here is one such example, from Michael Robotham, Watching You: Joe O’Loughlin Book 7:
Zoe had never been very interested in football. Daniel once took her to a big game at the new Wembley stadium. Zoe tried to follow the action, but mostly she stared at the people in the stands who treated every near-miss as if it were a life-and-death occurrence. They cried, swore, abused the referee and chanted insults at opposing fans.
‘Why is it so important?’ Zoe asked.
‘Supporters belong to a tribe, ‘ Daniel explained.
‘A tribe?’
‘People want to belong. They want to be part of something bigger.’
We need to belong to something bigger. That’s quite profound and it rings true of so many aspects of our lives. Not everyone is a ‘joiner’, but many people are. During their life times, they may be part of a sporting club, a local gym, a political or social activist group, a church, or any number of interest groups from train enthusiasts to cake decoration classes. Others prefer not to be quite so closely connected, and even if they never quite ‘join’ they nonetheless identify with one group or another, whether a nation state, local community or their profession.
For some time there has been an interesting literature about faith or religious commitments, using the terms believing, belonging, behaving. I first came across these terms (at least the first two) in Grace Davie’s study Religion in Britain since 1945, where she introduces the descriptor believing without belonging. As she put it, the Church of England was the church from which most Britons liked to stay away—professing some kind of belief but not within to belong in any close association with a church.
But I have come to think that these three terms need to be understood in a different sequence. (or perhaps even in varying sequences.) Do we first believe, then belong, and then come to behave in line with our beliefs or the group whose ideas and values we share? That seems to me a very Platonic or head-down idea and I am not at all convinced it is true to life.
It is at least as likely, I think, that people find that they are already involved with a group and share the practices, life-style, and implicit values of that group. We are born into a family, a local community, perhaps a racial group, ethnic identity, and we learn to behave as those around us behave. The child at the football watches how others behave. A younger sibling adopts the actions of her elders. We follow the example of those who have walked before us. We behave according to the people and place where we belong. With time we may consciously acknowledge beliefs, positive ideas and values that may be part of our community and its identity. We belong, we behave and perhaps then we believe.
The quotation, though, speaks of needing to belong to something bigger. This is interesting too as it suggest something about hidden or unacknowledged levels of identity and belonging. Large sporting events have far more in common with mass rock concerts or festivals than they have with a local team playing on the village ground. The latter is perhaps more properly called sport, but the mass events evoke extraordinary outpourings of emotion, as the young Zoe observed in the story above.
Such events hook into far more than our interests in sport. The use of the word ‘tribal’ is interesting, as it relates to a form of society we might think is far removed from the modern way of life, with our private housing and ‘nuclear’ families. Yet contemporary political movements are very clearly drawing upon these ‘tribal’ instincts, the need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, and in many instances while drawing attention to such needs also suggesting that we and our group have somehow been excluded or ignored, treated as if we don’t belong, by that other group or tribe, those we consider to be controlling things, making all the play.
We do need to belong and we need to work out to whom we belong, where we belong and what it means to belong. The tragedy of so much of what is happening right now is that we have no common stories, a shared narrative, that might constructively guide us through changing circumstances, so that we are assured that we do indeed belong. Without that story, the ‘tribal’ elements are so easily exploited and manipulated, and it is no longer sport, it is war of one form or another.
We need to work out how to belong, to behave, and what we can truly value and believe.