Sebastian Junger speaks of the tribe as though exile from it were only ever accidental — a modern misfortune, a civilizational error. I want to ask him something he has not considered: What about those of us the tribe expelled on purpose?
In his argument about why modern society makes us depressed, Junger identifies the loss of communal obligation as the wound at the center of contemporary loneliness. The Iroquois man in 1750, he tells us, could answer immediately what his duty was and to whom he owed it. The modern American cannot. From this inability Junger constructs a diagnosis: we are sick because we have lost the structure of mutual need. It is not unintelligent.
But it is an observation made from inside the river by a man who has never known the drought. He does not ask — because he has never had to ask — whether the tribe that answered back answered back to everyone, or only to those it had already decided to recognize as fully present, fully human, fully eligible for the return of their devotion.
I knew men in Harlem who could have answered Junger's question without hesitation. Their duty was to their mother's building, the children on the stoop, the block that held them when nothing else would. They did not lack tribal feeling. They were drenched in it — the Baptist church with its Wednesday night testimonies, the barbershop arguments that carried the weight of legislation, the grandmother who knew every child's name for three floors in each direction. These men had what Junger mourns.
And then the country sent them to wars it could not justify and denied them the GI Bill when they returned with their nervous systems permanently rearranged. So the question is not whether they could feel duty — they felt it so deeply it organized their entire lives. The question is what happens to duty when it is never reciprocated. When you offer yourself to a structure that does not offer you safety, does not offer you legibility, does not even offer you the dignity of an honest refusal — only silence, only the slow bureaucratic violence of being unseen. Junger diagnoses the individual's spiritual vacancy without ever diagnosing the nation's contractual betrayal.
He treats belonging as a universal hunger without treating exclusion as a deliberate policy.
I fled the tribe. Baptist church, Harlem streets, the whole suffocating embrace — I ran to a foreign city with a typewriter and a bottle and the terrible freedom of no one expecting me home for supper. Junger cannot imagine this because for him solitude is only deprivation, never sanctuary. But sometimes exile is the first honest breath you have ever taken.
And yet — he is not entirely wrong. The loneliness is killing people. I have watched it from this window in Paris for decades now. But I have learned to distrust any diagnosis of modern emptiness that does not first ask: empty for whom? The man who has always belonged does not notice belonging the way a fish does not notice water.
He notices only when the river drops. And so his prescription is always: return to the river. Rebuild the tribe. But some of us were never in that river. Some of us were the drought itself — the thing the river defined itself against in order to feel like a river at all.
You cannot prescribe homecoming to people who were never granted a home. You can only begin with the honest question of why the home was withheld — and that question, once asked honestly, does not lead back to tribe. It leads to justice. And justice is a colder, slower, lonelier thing than belonging.
The question was never whether we could feel duty. We have always felt it — felt it so completely it nearly killed us. The question is whether the country will ever feel it back. And I am still, after all these years, waiting for the answer that would make the asking stop.
