Before COVID-19 hit the scene, an “ism” had arisen to diagnose our suspicious mood: tribalism.

Most of us have been living increasingly disaggregated lives—our sense of wholeness and belonging becoming fragile as we peer out at a landscape that can appear chaotic at best, hostile at worst. We instinctively begin to ask ourselves: Where are the people we can call our own? By what criteria do we identify these people, and how then should our allegiance play out?

COVID-19 has at once scrambled these realities and threatened to intensify them. As this global pandemic re-frames the world as we know it, we invited viewers to join a live webinar discussion to explore these questions.

When social distancing subsides, will we emerge with fundamentally altered relationships to government, our neighbours, and those from whom we previously felt inexorably alienated?

Comment’s Editor-in-Chief Anne Snyder engaged the vagaries of this hour with two fine contributors to Comment’s winter issue on “The Tribes that Bind,” namely, Seth Kaplan and Samuel Kimbriel. Brian Dijkema, Senior Editor of Comment, moderated the conversation.