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Notes -
I just don’t think this applies to a lot of historic conflict since the advent of civilization. When you’re an man in some European country some time in the last thousand years and one year the King and his council decide that you’re at war with this random other European country because of competition over control for the Caribbean or something happening in the Spanish Netherlands (you’ve never met anyone from there) and then thirty years later the next king decides that actually you’re now allies with the people you fought against and your son needs to go off and fight the people you were allies with, this isn’t some deeply visceral intertribal conflict against blood enemies. This is politics. Until the modern period most people didn’t even have what we’d call a modern, nationalist conception of the state or loyalty to it.
For 200 years, immigrant groups have plundered America, destroying everything the Anglo Saxon founding fathers have created. That much is obviously and entirely true. But it also left the descendants of the Irish who destroyed the peaceful, English eastern seaboard, the New England of gentlemen’s clubs and old Boston, long forgotten, the ‘swarthy’ Scandinavians (according to Ben Franklin who settled the Midwest, the Italians and Poles and whoever else poorly placed to frame their own civilizational conflict against later groups of migrants.
If you were a soldier fighting for your King against another kingdom, the whole “ancestral-tribal cognition” related to ingroup and outgroup was activated against that nation; it was activated and deactivated according to political interests of the Kingdom. Songs and propaganda and stories would be disseminated for this purpose. Particular acts of bravery in slaying the enemy might bring you praise or greater status, or sometimes some reward. In the medieval era the common soldier often had no blood ties to the noble families who decide on war, but they still had all of this collective / tribal / dominance cognition going on. The noble families were united by shared ancestral heritage, unless they had just lost a war, in which case they would be united by heritage within a few generations.
In the modern era you see much more explicitly “deep visceral intertribal” cognition: https://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/napoleonic-pleasures/le-chant-du-depart-2/
And the famous Marseilles anthem
These were the favorite songs of Napoleon’s troops, the avowedly White supremacist Napoleon who has such quotes as
Now the Minnesotan can theoretically use any of the tribal cognition package he has; it is hypothetically possible that he can draw whatever criteria for ingroup that he wants, by any criteria. But culture prevents from doing this, and so he has no interest in solving the crime.
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