Tribes

My friend David Boxenhorn wrote a wonderful essay on tribes, Maladjusted to our Habitat. He says we need tribes to protect us from our toxic environment. I like David's tribe very much. My friends that are observant Jews seem very happy, and have an exceptionally high "goodness coefficient". But I am not an observant Jew, so I often feel like an outsider looking in. If you are not born into it, how do you recognize your tribe? I did not think I had tribe membership.
But then I was epiphanied by what razib said in this post. I love this part the best, so I am stealing it and keeping it forever.

I am not a utopian, I don't believe that all the world can be university educated and have a greater love of ideas than of cousin, evolutionary psychology tells me that won't be so. My aim is to make the world safe for my people, who are not defined by blood or belief, but a quirky disposition to dance with ideas and explore the bounds of our brains as if that was the end of life itself. I have suggested that my people should not deceive themselves into thinking that all are as they are, that ancient and deep bonds of belief, family and ethnic blood will be worn away by the application of ideas or the distribution of texts or even the compulsion of the gun. But neither should we accept our fate meekly and be bound again by dogmas, rites and rituals, in the straight-jacket of custom and tradition.

Razib's people are my tribe. They do not choose me, but inherit me as I was made. I had met other tribemembers before, at work or school, and we were instantly in empathy, but I didn't understand why. Until razib put it into words. I was born into razib's tribe before I knew such a thing existed. Perhaps one is always born into a tribe, and the puzzle is to find it.