Junger is an excellent journalist, and that ironically is the biggest weakness in Tribe, his new, slender book that includes only 138 pages of text. All the salient and important points he makes can already be found in [his earlier] magazine piece. Still, where you read what Junger has written is less important than that you read it. The substance of the article and the book is significant well beyond soldiers returning from war ... Tribe is an important wake-up call. Let’s hope we don’t sleep through the alarm.
Mr. Junger has raised one of the most provocative ideas of this campaign season — and accidentally written one of its most intriguing political books. All without mentioning a single candidate, or even the president, by name ... There’s a numbingly familiar quality to much of the social science research he cites. It is not exactly news that nations with large income disparities are less happy than those without them, or that group cooperation increases levels of oxytocin, the bonding hormone ... But Mr. Junger’s most powerful — and surprising — argument is the one he makes about the military’s epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Tribe” is as thought-provoking as it is slender. Blending anthropology, psychology and history with social criticism, it’s a model of synthesis and brevity; but I often felt that it would have benefited from some expansion. Junger seems to try to do too much with too little. I found myself underlining many passages, each one striking me as a gem of careful observation and thorough research. At the same time, I’m not sure that these jewels hang together as tightly as they should.
Junger argues persuasively that postcombat psychological problems must be understood as a problem of reintegrating to society on such terms, at least as much as they are due to the trauma of war ... The brief introduction to Tribe is a micro-masterpiece in which Junger sketches the discontent of bourgeois life ... A more serious limitation of the book, in my view, derives from Junger’s reliance on evolutionary psychology for his explanatory framework. The just-so stories that various professors have offered, after imagining what survival on the Pleistocene savannas might have required, cannot compete with the kind of material gathered by a journalist who is alive to the human drama unfolding before his eyes in a firefight.
Junger is particularly insightful when he is discussing combat soldiers and the difficulties they experience when returning from war zones. He makes the provocative, but plausible, observation that one of the reasons American combat veterans suffer such high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is because they find it difficult to separate out the harm of war from its pleasures ... But in many other ways, this is a deeply unsatisfactory book. The chief problem is that Junger is nostalgic for a world that never existed – at least not for most people .. the idea that 'poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities' simply does not ring true ... I don’t understand Junger’s glamorisation of violence, disaster and catastrophe.
Tribe is refreshingly free of neuroscience—some might consider this a shortcoming, but in truth far too many reporters trying to write about PTSD get lost in the maze of academic neuroscience ... Tribe is a sorely needed account on the problems of homecoming after war. But it is also filled with mistakes and misinformation ... PTSD is a complex condition with vexing moral and psychological aspects, but in Mr. Junger’s view it’s mostly about men being depressed because they can’t play war anymore. This odd, juvenile rendering of military life is a problem with much of Mr. Junger’s recent work. He presumes to speak for veterans, but he has never been inside the prison. This makes him, as an Iraq veteran friend of mine put it, “a war tourist.” Mr. Junger is never able to bridge this divide between himself and his subjects, and he ends up leaving his reader stranded.
Junger writes soberly, at times with angry despair, about a fractured society ill equipped to restore the hearts and minds, the essential humanity, of those we’ve sent abroad ... Sebastian Junger’s aim, on the other hand, is to militate, not against the military but against our fractured society. Good luck with that. Yet even though his case is brief — it contains elaborations loosely stitched onto a 2015 Vanity Fair article — it is persuasive. That doesn’t mean it’s possible ... Tribe is a sketch of a book. Its most important points are artillery rounds, coming in so rapidly there’s little time to do more than take cover.
Tribe [is] a book offering a surprising thesis about the ways humans have traded communal belonging for excessive safety ... It’s an awful lot of ground to cover in such a short book, and it’s inevitable that Tribe would either feel inchoate and sketched or else aggravatingly dense. Because Junger is an adventurous storyteller (rather than, say, an academic theoretician), he opts for the former. It’s not necessarily a good thing. The book’s lightness makes it accessible, an easy entry point to weighty subject matter. But its concision can make Tribe feel breezy even as it discusses life and death — if not outright incomprehensible ... Unfortunately, Junger’s quick look at violence, trauma, and modern anomie also omits important information from other books, and as a result ends up on shaky ground, failing to consider counterpoints or bring its own arguments to a close.
For the most part, Junger’s arguments are sound and convincing. My only quibble concerns his idealization of tribalism ... In spite of this caveat, Tribe is an important, thought-provoking book that encourages us to see veterans and American society in a new light.
Mr. Junger’s critique of modernity is refreshingly free of ideology, and the complaints cited are those any thoughtful person might point out as aspects of civilization we could do without. But Tribe is also free of any practical guidance on instituting these changes. Assuming we are persuaded of the auspiciousness of swapping the worst attributes of modern life for the most obvious advantages of tribal cultures, there is no suggestion on how such fundamental social relations could be implemented.
