Thedes and Hordes

Distinguishing between two sharply different types of tribal affiliation (a mercifully brief sketch)

Some warriors of the Mongol golden horde with two banners (from Wikimedia commons)

I.

Ten years ago, when people would actually read blogs, there was a flurry of activity surrounding something called “neoreaction” or “NRx,” a now-defunct loosely organized online collective that was mostly united in their admiration for the blogger Curtis Yarvin. It was an interesting time. One of its major characteristics was a tendency toward neologisms and buzz words/phrases. NRx bloggers would call these things “exosemantic gang signals” (that phrase itself was one), and the purpose was to give people a sense of belonging just by saying them. On rare occasions you’d find one that does actually indicate a useful novel concept, but usually the purpose was fostering group identity. Silicon Valley is also filled with this stuff. You don’t “understand” things, you “grok” them. Two things are never “unrelated,” they’re “orthogonal,” even when the relation between the two things is more like a 77 degree angle. Because NRx had a lot of people who worked in computers, they evidently learned well from this culture.

One of those bloggers, a guy called “nydwracu” was really into the word “thede,” the Middle English descendant of the Old English “þēod,” meaning a nation or (less commonly) a language. There was apparently no ambitious philosophical motive behind its lexical resuscitation, either. Thede, as far as I could tell, just simply meant “tribe” or “group” in this new context, and it was discussed the same way computer programmer bloggers and Silicon Valley rationalist types would often talk about group dynamics in general, with lots of references to evolutionary psychology, discussion on “signaling,” the Dunbar number, and so on. He also liked to say “elthede,” from the Old English “elþēod,” meaning “foreign nation,” and in this new context, predictably, elthede simply meant “outgroup.” The point of all this, of course, was simply to have a fun new word for him and his fellow NRx pals to say. Language is about exclusion just as much as it’s about inclusion. This is all fine.

II.

As time goes on, though, the word “thede” remains stuck in my mind. I think it’s because “thede” points to a mode of social orientation that was once taken for granted. Group dynamics haven’t followed a set of steadfast and unchanging rules over time, and the concept of the group itself has not remained stable. The manner in which an individual gains a sense of belonging has also changed significantly. Thede is an archaic word, and it presumes natural ties from person to person rather than abstract ones. A thede is a nation, and a nation traditionally requires some sort of blood bond to be legitimate (nation is cognate with “prenatal,” “natalism,” and even the word “cognate,” all pertaining etymologically to birth). Thus, it seems to me highly inappropriate for a thede simply to mean any kind of group or tribe at all — political, cultural, analog, digital, or otherwise. If we’re bothering to resurrect the word at all, it seems to me that thede should be a strictly telluric concept, one that indicates two corporeal, tangible specifics: namely, blood and territory.

Let me elaborate on those two things a bit. Blood relation indicates a shared sense of distant ancestry, and even the possibility of just a couple ur-ancestors. Blood relation means that everyone is part of the same history, and the history stems backward from a specific point of origin. The importance of blood may seem trivial or self-explanatory, but there are surprising implications that follow from it. For instance, it eliminates the need to create an abstract, deontological system of morality. Instead, a tribe can instead create its laws and customs by appealing to the sayings and proverbs of great ancestors, all of whom are revered and respected since they all played an existentially important role for each member.

Territorial proximity, for its part, means everyone has a basic sensibility informed by the angles and aspects of the region (or various regions, in the case of nomadic tribes), including the available flora and fauna. The environmental conditions of a region further impact one’s symbolic vocabulary — the reason C.G. Jung and similar figures were never quite successful in putting together an elaborate encyclopedia of universal symbols is that animals, plants, and even basic shapes can mean different things in different areas, all depending upon the context in which they appear. But shared symbolic meanings absolutely can emerge among specific thedes, and when the conditions of several are reasonably compatible with one another, some generalizations about them can be made.

Thedes also, due to their territorial proximity, experience temporal cycles in the same way. Seasons are the same, morning and night is the same, and so recurring events and rituals are all on the table — daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Regardless of whether a thede believes the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around, there is no question of a profoundly important connection between the two, and the cyclicality of time, which everyone experiences as a unit, is but one consequence. With a primitive thede, something like a World Tree also becomes possible. It’s easy to postulate a center of the universe precisely because it’s the center of your group’s collective, shared phenomenological universe. And what universe, after all, is more important than that one?

In earlier times, with less complex structures of communication, a thede had an easier time remaining intact because a shared semiotic experience was easier to maintain. But a thede is always threatened by the possibility of dissolution — whether by the elements or by the might and fury of other thedes — and so it must further fasten its bonds through symbolic abstraction. Symbolic abstraction is native to the human experience, and in fact all of language, the primary thing that separates us from animals, is symbolic. Symbolism occurs when you take a phenomenon of some sort, like a sound or an image, and assign it a meaning that does not follow in an ontologically motivated fashion from what’s being immediately sensed. The philosopher C.S. Peirce identified the symbol as the richest kind of sign and associated it with the experiential category of “thirdness,” in which a living subject can perceive a given object, reflect upon its relation to both him and its surrounding objects, considering its possible meanings that extend beyond immediate sensation. Thirdness is essentially a step away from animal logic into the world of humans and gods.

Now, in order to postulate the gods, a tribe must be involved in at least some degree of symbolic thinking. But it’s no coincidence that as a thede finds itself in more and more existential danger, the gods it relies on will typically become increasingly abstract. The god of the ocean, for a primitive thede, in some sense is the ocean. But as Mircea Eliade has noted in The Sacred and the Profane, it’s also typical for tribes to have an abstract, maximally-powerful sky god who is rarely invoked unless it’s essential to do so. This god is not synonymous with the sky per se, but rather with what the sky represents — greatness, supremacy, and power. And so, there thus is a sliding scale from the concrete to the abstract when it comes to the gods. A belief in a relatively abstract deity can strengthen a thede’s in-group bonds, as the specific understanding of it, right down to its name, must force a thede to differentiate itself from others, preventing dissolution. The ancient Israelites, who took this principle to astonishing lengths, are the foremost example here. But thedes can also strengthen their bonds through other forms of symbolic abstraction. They can, for instance, engage in various forms of collective mnemotechnics — think of initiatory tattoos or piercings, wedding tokens, and important landmarks. All of these carry a symbolic function, and the symbolic quality of each thing proceeds naturally from the blood and territory shared by each thede. The invention of literacy, handled properly, can arm a thede with an even greater potential for mnemotechnics than ever before.

In sum, a thede will look up to the sky when it must acknowledge how firmly it is held beneath the sway of the earth.

III.

When tribes are formed through the internet, things must be different. On the internet, there are no thedes. A tribal e-community, or digital tribe, is better thought of as what I’d call a horde, originally from the Proto-Turkic *ordu, meaning a temporary encampment of an army or ruler. In modern usage, horde is typically marked by both its predatory as well as its wandering nature. In our sense of the word, it’s essentially a tribe characterized by rootlessness, lacking a distinct physical terrain and a distinct blood or known genetic kinship (by the way, if you want to suggest a better name than horde for a rootless, aspatial tribe, go ahead and do so in the comments below — I’m open to suggestions). Whereas a thede is telluric, a horde is ethereal. It’s abstract. It’s out there in the atmosphere, marked by disembodied communication traveling at the speed of light.

Hordes are characterized mostly by their voluntarism. Because they lack blood and territory, they must be birthed in abstraction, i.e. discourse. In the book of Genesis, God says, “Let there be light,” and the universe is created. Hordes themselves have the same fiat quality. In pagan cosmogonic myths, by contrast, the universe is created when a deity of light slays a chthonic deity and its corpse creates the earth. That’s a good myth for a thede, since thedes are always intuitively aware of the tension between the solar and the telluric and in a sense themselves resemble the slain corpse of the earth. Hordes in this sense are very much the opposite of thedes. Since thedes must look to the light, hordes must look down to the earth. Although most would never admit it, they must in a sense worship the chthonic, since the light is all they know.

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan postulated that the invention of electronic media would bring man back to a communicative environment that he described as “acoustic space,” which he saw as a recurrence of the conditions that tribal man found himself in prior to the invention of literacy. Essentially, the world of literate man (particularly after the printing press came along) was just about entirely dominated by the eye. That is, the visual sense. McLuhan thus felt that the reintroduction of sonic communication thanks to electronic media would “re-tribalize” man, and that reprioritizing the sense of hearing would bring him back to an earlier, pre-literate time — a time in which people absorbed information communally, as a group, while the private, individualized act of reading books did not yet exist as an option. There is no question that technological developments over the last 150 years have reintroduced some of the tribal characteristics found in the oral world, but I believe that McLuhan nevertheless was mistaken in focusing so narrowly on the senses.

There are two non-intellective senses, one potentially (but rarely) intellective sense, and two intellective ones. You can’t communicate with language via smell and taste. You can communicate that way through touch, thanks to Braille… but Braille can only get you so far. And then you’ve got hearing and sight, two clearly intellective senses. Members of an online horde, lacking spatial proximity, cannot communicate to each other through smell, taste, or touch. They can and do, however, communicate through sight and sound, the senses through which language travels. We thus can’t really say that the digital technology brings man back to a pre-literate state if three of his most grounding, telluric, non-symbolic means of communication are lost. Digital man is retribalized, absolutely, but not in the same way that pre-literate man was.

Being themselves formed through intellection, hordes must find a way to ground themselves, forging bonds to one another through other means, preventing themselves from dissolving off in the ether. They do this by establishing a common semiotic framework that doesn’t rely merely on language or symbolic modes of communication. Instead, they have to recruit from the earth to fasten that bond. They must use their senses of sight and hearing to seek out non-linguistic forms of communication when they make evaluations of each other as well as other things they encounter. Old, archaic enlightenment sciences like physiognomy and “voice physiognomy” once again take on a new significance (this is true for all hordes, in fact, though few will actually come out and say it). Concerns for one’s relationship to the physical world become paramount. If members of a horde can’t be united by a tacitly shared relationship to the world that surrounds them at all times, they must find substitutes. The tools they use take on a newfound importance. The particular kind of labor they perform becomes far more important than their actual social class status, which is comparatively abstract. The clothing they wear matters. Diet and food choice matters a lot. Usage of drugs absolutely matters. At this point, I’m veering into territory that I covered in my essay on collective mnemotechnics and digital tribalism, so I won’t go too much further. But the point is that the physical world that surrounds each individual member of an online horde must be approached in the same way in order to create equivalent semiotic experiences for each distant person.

IV.

The electronic era has compromised the basic existence of the thede as I described it earlier. In modern towns and cities, social relations tend to be more voluntaristic than defined by spatial proximity. Other writers such as Russell Lynes and Pierre Bourdieu have discussed this same phenomenon. One’s taste in the arts and food, since about the 1940s at latest, has grown into a valuable social sorting mechanism, and political ideology has increasingly worked largely the same way. Small towns in rural areas still very much function as thedes, and probably the best remaining example of a pure thede in America would be the Amish. But even men from the lowest social classes in most towns and certainly any major metropolis will find their identities mostly through lifestyle preferences and abstract concepts introduced to them through the mass media. Because they aren’t raised in a world of thedes, their primary mode of social orientation often lies somewhere between thede and horde — grounded in a particular geographical location, but ultimately aspatial and often without blood ties.

Under such conditions, racial minorities manage to stay more thede-like than the racial majority, since their blood ties are often immediately visible, and they will self-segregate into the same areas. However, even within racial minorities, individuals can select themselves out of a thede and take on a horde-like tribal orientation. Some, interestingly enough, even use their own race as the main commonality through which the bond is formed, even while remaining mostly aloof from the physical community to which they swear primary allegiance. A black thede in the inner-city and a Black horde on the internet, for instance, will look, behave, and even think very differently from one another. The same is true of any racial or ethnic group that has both representative thedes and hordes. Western white people are slightly different, though, since any white thede will never arise on the basis of whiteness per se (although a place like Orania would be an interesting point of comparison here). But there absolutely can be a White horde, as with online White Nationalism, and this is quite a complex matter, since it will not necessarily view every white person as White. Race, according to the intrinsic logic at play here, takes on a voluntaristic quality. To be truly White, one must opt in, and opting in typically means agreeing with the horde about everything.

This short little blog post must only amount to a preliminary sketch comparing the two modes of tribal affiliation, as I haven’t quite thought through all of the fine points yet. But the basic idea is that there can’t be any straightforward equivalence between a tribal sensibility formed out of necessity in order to endure the ravages of nature (y’know, red in tooth and claw) on the one hand, and a tribal sensibility formed primarily through disembodied discourse on the other hand. In fact, it is still unclear to me as to whether these two modes of tribal orientation could ever actually meet at a central point, with the mentalities of thede and horde perfectly united as one. Perhaps time will tell.