The Tribe and the Horizon
On patriotism, cathedrals, and the eternal now
I have spent these past few days warning about cathedrals.
The cathedral, as I have used the term, is the framework that protects itself from the data that might revise it. The institution that has made its own prior sacred. The tradition that can no longer question itself because to question it would be to dissolve it. I have argued that the compass — the tool that navigates without pretending to be the map — is the more honest posture for anyone who has looked carefully at what happens to anomalies inside closed systems.
But I have not been arguing against cathedrals themselves. I have been arguing against capture by them. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters enormously — because we need cathedrals. We have always needed them. The question is how to build them and inhabit them without losing the compass.
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Before I go further, I want to name something. If you have read The Cathedral and the Compass and are now reading this, you may feel a whiplash. That piece warned against cathedrals. This one defends them. The apparent contradiction is not a mistake. It is a dialectic.
A dialectic is not a contradiction to be resolved by choosing the correct side. It is a tension between two truths that depend on each other — each incomplete without the other, each clarified by the other’s pressure. The thesis: cathedrals protect their priors from the data that might revise them, and this is the epistemological error that produces every closed system, every authoritarian movement, every tradition that mistakes its container for its contents. The antithesis: cathedrals are the structures through which meaning is housed, transmitted, and made livable — and to dissolve them in the name of liberation is to dissolve the people who inhabit them. The synthesis is not a compromise between these positions. It is a posture that holds both simultaneously: build the cathedral, and never stop asking what it cannot afford to discover.
This is what I mean by the eternal now. Not the resolution of the tension but the honest inhabitation of it. With that named, let me make the argument.
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The standard liberal instinct, when confronted with the violence that tribal identity can produce, is to dissolve the tribe. No flags at the Olympics. No anthems. Random allocation of athletes across nations. The individual liberated from the collective, freed from the loyalties that produce conflict, returned to some prior universal self that exists beneath all the tribal accretions.
This instinct is wrong. Not wrong in its diagnosis of the danger — tribal identity has produced catastrophic violence and continues to — but wrong in its proposed remedy. You cannot dissolve the tribe without dissolving the person. The self that is supposed to exist prior to all tribal membership, clean and universal and free — that self is a Cartesian fiction. You are thrown into a tribe before you can question it. The language you think in, the stories that shaped your moral imagination, the ancestors whose sacrifices made your life possible, the land whose specific light and weather formed your earliest perceptions of what the world is — these are not attachments you chose and can therefore unchoose. They are constitutive. They are you.
Whitman understood this. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” This is not a confession of incoherence. It is a statement about the structure of a self that is honestly inhabited. The Irish-American who loves Ireland and loves America is not confused about their loyalties. They are large enough to hold both. The Black American who loves the republic and rages at what the republic has done to their people is not contradicting themselves. They are being honest about the full weight of what they carry.
The multitudes are not a problem to be resolved. They are the condition of anyone who has not flattened themselves into a single story. Someone else’s story.
