Inheritance by Harvey Whitehouse review – the power of unity

After the Arab spring uprisings spread to Libya in 2011 and Muammar Gaddafi ordered his troops to fire on protesters, many ordinary Libyans took up arms and joined anti-government militias. I had been living in Libya since 2008 and watched with shock as friends and acquaintances – party animals barely out of their teens, middle-aged accountants – became fighters overnight. The kindly receptionist at work became a powerful military commander. Ever since then I’ve puzzled over the change in them, and how freedom fighters are created.

It turns out that the social anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse and his colleague Brian McQuinn travelled to Libya in 2011 to try to answer these questions. Whitehouse’s studies of everything from painful initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea to Catholics and Protestants responding to sectarian abuse in Northern Ireland have illustrated that sharing emotive and difficult experiences can lead to powerful group bonding, creating a sense of “fusion”, a visceral feeling of oneness with your group. The principle applies to fellow tribesmen, Chelsea fans or new mothers. His interviews with Libyan fighters showed that Gaddafi’s violence had helped those on the frontline see themselves as more closely aligned with their brothers-in-arms than with their relatives. Shared hardship can create such a powerful sense of kinship that it harnesses the same deep-seated instinct to sacrifice yourself for your descendants. To understand the logic of hatred and violence, in other words, you also need to understand love.

Such research is typical of Whitehouse, a chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford who likes to roam across the world and across disciplines to better understand how our biological intuitions and our cultural traditions interact. His work often brings together ethnographic field work with psychology and big data. Whitehouse helped found a new branch of research known as the cognitive science of religion, which examines the intuitions and biases that underpin common religious beliefs. It is thought, for instance, that the hypersensitivity that once alerted our forebears to a nearby predator, stalking them in the bush, explains why we tend to attribute mysterious noises and happenings to an unseen agent, and lies behind widespread beliefs in things such as witches and demons.

In this ambitious and dense book, Whitehouse brings together almost four decades of research to argue that the course of human history has been shaped by three natural biases: conformism (our predisposition to emulate our peers), religiosity (our propensity to develop certain moral commitments and beliefs about the world), and tribalism. All three have at times been harnessed to achieve remarkable feats of cooperation, he writes, enabling the creation of bigger societies and more complex political systems. But they have also fuelled conflict and violence, and bolstered cruel and unequal political systems. He argues that if we are to respond effectively to the threat of global heating, we need to find ways to harness these natural biases to our benefit. Can we become a “teratribe” in which people experience the same fusion that the Libyan militiamen described, only extended to include all humankind?

Whitehouse rightly argues that when it comes to the climate crisis, our greatest and most neglected obstacles are psychological. Capitalism has become so routinised that we accept it unquestioningly, the media and mass advertising taking the place of religion, instead of catering to our psychological needs they serve corporate interests. He writes of the value of citizens’ assemblies, of using schools, religious institutions and civic leaders to spread pro-environmental behaviour, of harnessing social science to better predict and de-escalate conflict. But there’s sometimes a disappointing contrast between the depth of his analysis of the problems and the flimsiness of his policy solutions: how big a difference would glitzy awards for environmental heroes make?

We need to “update the news by at least a few thousand years”, he says, accusing the media of focusing on titillating gossip and divisive narratives when it should be helping citizens become more pro-social and better able to understand potential solutions to the large-scale problems facing the world. But people aren’t moved by statistics, nor are they easily absorbed by deeply researched thinktank reports. If Whitehouse spent time observing newsrooms he would learn that, despite journalism’s failings, many reporters are his natural allies and are kept awake by the same important issue that has motivated this thought-provoking book: we have known for a long time that our current way of living is unsustainable, so what will make us properly act on this knowledge?

• Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World by Harvey Whitehouse is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.