I’m currently two-thirds of the way through Mike Maxwell’s book Tribal Future of the West. While I know very little about Maxwell, it’s enough to say that he is clearly a critic of liberalism (i.e., of the liberal political order) as well as a proponent of tribalism. In what follows, I’ll briefly summarize his main theses. Then I’ll turn to a couple of reflections or impressions I’m sitting with.

Maxwell has four theses. The first is a strong tribal view. He thinks that tribes, in the literal sense, are meaningful units of social-political sovereignty. The second is elite theory, which states that genuine social change happens through the actions of elite actors (though those actions may galvanize the many as well). Hence, this view, upholding the idea that history moves through different elites exercising power, runs in contrast with a “grassroots movement” idea that change comes “from below.”

The penultimate thesis is that political history convulses–we could say–in accordance with two countervailing tendencies: the first is a propulsion toward unity and this gives rise, for instance, to modern nation-states after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; the second is toward devolution, and this leads to the re-formation of sovereignty at more local levels. History just is this unifying and then entropic, unifying and then entropic process taking place over and over again. The last thesis is that the West is now entering a period in which the conditions are right for the devolution from unity to plurality–from nation-states to all sorts of tribes.

Left out of my summary is Maxwell’s tone, which I can only describe as sober. I’d like–and now I’m turning toward my impressions–to say a thing or two about this tone. I feel as if Maxwell has an unacknowledged “death drive”: his sober, academic writing (e.g., as many as 100 endnotes per each chapter) is hiding the fact that he wants to see the liberal order come down. Something in him is very much yearning for destruction. I think William James, he of “The Moral Equivalent of War,” can empathize.

For if there’s anything that can be said against the liberal political order that is far less sophisticated than the sort of critique leveled by Patrick Deneen (for instance, in Why Liberalism Failed), it is surely that liberalism is stupendously, numbingly boring. For a man especially, it is all too obvious that there’s nothing to hunt (I mean for food, not for sport), no noble wars to fight, no honor to defend (no one has ever challenged me to a duel), and not even a fight club to join. Material comfort is not just entropic to the point of ooze; it’s also horrendously dull. You don’t really get a chance to blow stuff up or to fight to the death (unless you wish to be imprisoned or unless you join a private mercenary company). Instead, you take far too much time to find the perfect air purifier, many precious minutes to conclude that Slack message with a full stop or a flourish.

If I’m right, then Maxwell is really missing the point: as much as one might bemoan the liberal world order (on the accounting for the liberal order’s defects, he and I are generally agreed), its collapse would be terrible and, for many, terrifying. It wouldn’t be pretty–nor would famine, forced migration, corruption, pestilence, or the negotiation of allegiances. One needn’t be enamored with a bloated welfare state in order to imagine a future in which West Virginians or Louisianans are without it.

Of course, I also don’t want to see a “rolling back” of the Axial Age, and the devolution of states could spell disaster for the religious ideal of universal love. For tribes, clearly, are only tribes insofar as they form a hard distinction between in-group and out-group treatment. Toward one’s allies, one is to be a friend; toward everyone, a strategic partner at best, an enemy at worst.

I’d like to say that we really need to grow up. The desire to blow up a world order is damnably dark. Sure, it may happen, but such is not to be wished for, provided, that is, that one really cares about others. Go within. See the ugliness. Give up the gleam of cool-headed analysis or overly sober forecasting when what’s called for is an appreciation of the very possibility of calamity. The old virtue of temperance–that is, of measure–is mete.

In other words, it’s time to stop playing with G.I. Joes.