Book Review: “Urban Tribes” by Ethan Watters

I’ve been waiting a while to get this review out. I finally finished the book this weekend and will highlight the main points below:

The premise of the book is that while twenty and thirty somethings are delaying marriage and forsaking family at alarming rates, all is not lost. They survive by forming tight-knit circles of friends (tighter than any family I have encountered) which them becomes and replaces their family. The friends understand them better, provide more support, and are not as judgmental as the family.

He makes a comment that supports a comment I made a while back here that challenged a popular author’s comments of the amount of classism that exists in America. Watters writes, “ Raised during a time of remarkable wealth, our potential has always felt unlimited. We could be anything we wanted, our parents had told us from birth, and we believed them almost too well…Not long ago, the course of one’s life would, in all likelihood, be an expression of one’s class and group membership. How exciting that we had the freedom to shape our lives to be an expression of personal character.” (9)

Much of his study revolved around the functioning of the tribes, how did they live and what did they do? I couldn’t help but think throughout how the Church, in reality, needed to function as a tribe. Look at the following traits:

- Every tribe member has their role. While one member may become sort of a de facto leader, it is not a hierarchical sort of membership at all, this leader’s role is simply more of an organizer and is no more important to the tribe than any other member – see senior pastor
- Many tribes told stories of pooling money together to send another member on a vacation, send them home to visit family over the holidays, staying over at a house to watch them in time of need, visit in the hospital, attend funeral as show of support, etc. Aren’t we called to take care of the body of Christ as such?
- A man named Nikolas was a member of his tribe in San Francisco and was sort of an expert at blown glass creations. He had received a large contract to create some glass figures for a large hotel in the city, though the technology he was counting on had not been created, it was up to him to create it. Obviously throughout that year Nikolas endured a lot of stress and failure was right around the corner. However, Watters writes, “If he had lost his gamble-lost his enormous investment and failed at his shot in the big leagues-he could have come back into his group of friends every bit as valued as he had been before. How often do we value members of the local body simply on their job or what they offer to us rather than their inherent value as a creation of God?
- He talks about the Critical Mass movements that happened across San Francisco and other large cities around the world where large masses of bicyclists would gather and ride the city to protest something, bring the city to a halt in some cases. It was also frustrating to the city bureaucrats who wanted to appease the protestor’s demands or set out a route for them to follow. There was no leader and it spread through word of mouth or mass emails inviting all to attend. This reminds me of the post-modern church, no leaders, kind of a hodge-podge of ideas, outsiders trying to organize it, yet we won’t let it happen. Our goal is to stay true to the calling of Christ and love Him and His people as best we can.
- Toward the end he begins to write more on connectedness and love, and his travels take him to the American Association of Single People where he meets a man named Coleman who was it’s President. Through the course of his interview with Coleman he notices a grossly overweight man named Cliff stuffing envelops with a few others at the table. He got involved because he was lonely and saw an ad in the paper for the organization, called, found out they could use some help, so he joined in. He also helped with a smokers rights group and he didn’t smoke. But the big thing Watters noticed was that though Cliff would “never be the poster boy for the AASP, Coleman, Michael, and Kat were kind to him, and so as least for today Cliff might feel the stereotype of his single life lift a little.” The people at AASP made Coleman feel welcome, feel special, isn’t that the role of the church? Do you think Cliff ever dreamed of going to the church to feel special? Why not?
- Finally, Washington Post columnist Jeanne Marie Laskas wrote about her experience in the tribe, noting that she “saw that the possibility for humiliation existed in every aspect of her life except for one: her tribe of friends she called ‘the Babes.’ Within that context, she felt no expectation that she had to be continuously smart or attractive or ‘on.’ In fact, when she was around her friends, she felt she didn’t have to do anything at all… ‘No one is going to going to judge me if I just sit here daydreaming.’ That is what the Babes are all about. The freedom to just be.” May the church accept God’s people and love them in this way.

I have to add one more funny note from this book. Watters goes on this tangent about evolutional psychology and how it explains the differences between men and women when it comes to commitment and marriage. One thing I found interesting is how the two sexes differ in this views on sex and multiple partners. He notes that on average, women prefer eight-tenths of a sexual partner per month, one over a year, two in three years and five in a lifetime. Men prefer two partners a month, five in a year, ten over three years, and twenty in a lifetime.

When it comes to how long you have to know someone before having sex, the studies show that women had to know someone six months before having sex. For men it was a week.

Finally, the “amount of time before sex for women bottomed out at a week, meaning no woman reported wanting to have sex with an attractive man after knowing him for less than one week. The men’s curve, on the other hand, never bottomed out. There were many men who reported than they would be willing to consent to sex at the one-hour mark.” Even more funny is that Watters then theorizes that the one-hour mark was too long, why not go down to a second or increments thereof. In fact, he thinks that some men might agree to sex before having met an attractive woman, or even “some men would have consented to sex with an attractive woman, unilaterally and for all future time, somewhere back in high school.” CRAZY!