Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging(28)

Neither political party has broadly and unequivocally denounced these men for their betrayal of the American people, and yet they are quick to heap scorn on Sergeant Bergdahl. In a country that applies its standard of loyalty in such an arbitrary way, it would seem difficult for others to develop any kind of tribal ethos. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community—be that your neighborhood, your workplace, or your entire country. Obviously, you don’t need to be a Navy SEAL in order to do that.

In late 2015, while finishing this book, I saw a family notice in the New York Times for a man named Martin H. Bauman, who died peacefully at age eighty-five. The notice explained that Mr. Bauman had joined the army in the 1950s, contracted polio while in the service, graduated college under the GI Bill, and eventually started a successful job placement firm in New York City. The firm found people for top executive positions around the country, but that didn’t protect it from economic downturns, and in the 1990s, Bauman’s company experienced its first money-losing year in three decades.

According to the Times notice, Mr. Bauman called his employees into a meeting and asked them to accept a 10 percent reduction in salary so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. They all agreed. Then he quietly decided to give up his personal salary until his company was back on safe ground. The only reason his staff found out was because the company bookkeeper told them.

Bauman obviously felt that true leadership—the kind that lives depend on—may require powerful people to put themselves last, and that he was one of those people. I contacted the office manager, Deanna Scharf, and asked her what Mr. Bauman had thought about the behavior of Wall Street executives during the financial collapse of 2008. “Oh, he was very angry,” she said. “He was a lifelong Republican, he was a poor kid from the Bronx who made some money, but he was furious with what happened. He didn’t understand the greed. He didn’t understand if you have a hundred million dollars, why do you need another million?”

Bauman voluntarily served his country, served his employees, and served other handicapped people by establishing a scholarship fund in his name. He clearly understood that belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs. (“It was better when it was really bad,” someone spray-painted on a wall about the loss of social solidarity in Bosnia after the war ended.) That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human and undoubtedly helped deliver us to this extraordinary moment in our history.

It may also be the only thing that allows us to survive it.





POSTSCRIPT




WHILE I WAS RESEARCHING THIS BOOK, I READ AN illuminating work by the anthropologist Christopher Boehm called Moral Origins. On page 219, he cites another anthropologist, Eleanor Leacock, who had spent a lot of time with the Cree Indians of northern Canada. Leacock relates a story about how she went on a hunting trip with a Cree named Thomas. Deep in the bush they encountered two men, strangers, who had run out of food and were extremely hungry. Thomas gave them all his flour and lard, despite the fact that he would have to cut his own trip short as a result. Leacock probed Thomas as to why he did this, and he finally lost patience with her.

“Suppose, now, not to give them flour, lard,” he explained. “Just dead inside.”

There, finally, was my answer for why the homeless guy outside Gillette gave me his lunch thirty years ago: just dead inside. It was the one thing that, poor as he was, he absolutely refused to be.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


First and foremost I would like to thank my good friends and family who shared their thoughts and conversations about this topic and read various drafts of this book. Those people include Rob Leaver, Melik Keylan, Austin Dacey, Daniela Petrova, Alan Huffman, Josh Waitzkin, Brendan O’Byrne, and my mother, Ellen. In addition, psychologist Hector Garcia offered me incredibly valuable advice about some of the scientific aspects of this book. And Barbara Hammond provided a continual source of encouragement, wisdom, and advice that saved me from many blunders and dead ends.

I am also indebted to my agent, Stuart Krichevsky; my editor, Sean Desmond; and my publicists, Cathy Saypol and Brian McLendon. I would also like to thank Deb Futter and Jamie Raab at Grand Central, as well as Paul Samuelson, who handled the day-to-day details of the publicity effort. Mari Okuda also did another amazing job as senior production editor on the manuscript, and I am very grateful to her for her great skill with the English language. The book appeared in early form in Vanity Fair magazine, and I am grateful to Graydon Carter and Doug Stumpf for trusting my instincts on this topic. I would have been completely lost without the heroic efforts of my researcher, Rachael Hip-Flores, who managed to track down every bizarre and arcane request that I threw at her.

My father passed away in 2012. Many of the ideas in this book were formed during a lifetime of conversations with him about the complicated blessings of “civilization.” The opposing point of view was brought into focus by my friend and surrogate uncle, Ellis Settle, who pointed out that white captives of the American Indians often did not want to be repatriated to colonial society. That idea stayed in my mind for thirty years, until it reappeared as a possible explanation for why so many soldiers that I knew missed the war they’d fought in. The two impulses seemed roughly analogous, and I decided to pursue that idea as far as I could. This book is the result.