It’s more like “Tribalism defines me.”
The “proud Irishman” had Emerald Isle-appropriate ditties played at his wake instead of arranging for a klezmer band. The actual Irishman had to produce what turns out to have been faulty documentation in order to assure skeptical in-laws that he was really kosher. I’m neither a biologist, a psychologist nor an anthropologist, but as we look about us today, and cast a glance backward toward the various human histories, it’s not difficult to credit that our species has hard-wired in it at least a predisposition to tribalism.
As to biology, well, my late mother was lavishly what is today called bipolar—personally I prefer the older, more evocative term “manic-depressive”—and among her offspring there are two or three of us who appear, fortunately less dramatically, to have inherited the tendency in some degree. Easy glum, easy glow.
cordially,