Human nature is an elusive beast. Some social scientists travel the world in search of it, hoping to find it in a comparison of widely disparate cultures. Others stay home and try to capture it in laboratory experiments.
Harvey Whitehouse does both. An anthropologist by training (and now chair in social anthropology at Oxford University), he began his career studying religious movements on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. This led him to ponder the nature of religious belief more generally. Dissatisfied with the answers supplied by ethnography, Whitehouse began to school himself in experimental psychology, eventually becoming one of the founders of a new field of study, the cognitive science of religion. Since then, he has continued to branch out, forging collaborations with everyone from historians to archaeologists to statisticians in pursuit of a “transdisciplinary science of the social” which would be capable of answering the biggest of big questions: what causes war, why we don’t seem to be able to escape religion, how civilization started and where it might be headed.
Whitehouse’s new book Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (Harvard University Press) attempts to corral these diverse pursuits into a single narrative. It is structured around three “evolved biases” that Whitehouse believes have contributed most to forging the “peculiar world we now inhabit.” These are conformism, the human tendency to copy one another and thereby create rituals, which Whitehouse sees as the source of most cultural innovation and social growth; religiosity, or what he argues is our natural propensity to belief in the supernatural; and finally, tribalism, our instinct to identify most strongly with an immediate group, a propensity Whitehouse sees as the cause of (and perhaps solution to) most human conflict.
Whitehouse follows these three inherited tendencies around the planet and across the full span of the human past. He also projects himself into the future and suggests ways in which the new “scientific study of human nature” he and his collaborators have pioneered can tackle global crises, such as economic inequality and global warming.
These are ambitious tasks, and Inheritance is an ambitious book. It is simultaneously a report from the cutting-edge of evolutionary and cultural psychology, a quasi-memoir of a life in the social sciences, and a stab at a history of everything for general audiences, à la Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel or Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Perhaps inevitably, some of these undertakings are more successful than others.
The sections relating to Whitehouse’s anthropological fieldwork are easily the best. His descriptions of working in Papua New Guinea are uniformly fascinating. He first came to the island of New Britain in the mid-1980s to study the Kivung, a religious movement that combined elements of Christian ritual with local forms of ancestor worship. Beginning as a messianic “cult” under prophetic leadership, over time the Kivung communities developed into powerful vehicles of political agency. The Kivung met frequently to debate the proper course of economic development on their island, established a network of schools and pooled their resources to purchase and protect swaths of threatened rainforest. They also worked to elect their leaders to Papua New Guinea’s parliament.
“Inheritance” is simultaneously a report from the cutting-edge of psychology, a quasi-memoir of a life in the social sciences, and a stab at a history of everything.
In Whitehouse’s telling, the Kivung emerge as an inspiring example of local democracy in action and religious impulses harnessed toward the greater good. His other snippets from the field don’t have the same ethnographic richness as his time on New Britain, but they still provide tantalizing glimpses into the deep psychological forces shaping our behavior. He is especially good on tribalism, showing the ways it acts for both good and ill in the lives of football fans in Brazil, Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, former prisoners in Britain, and members of a revolutionary militia fighting to free their hometown during the start of the Libyan civil war in 2011.
Like most anthropologists, Whitehouse is at his best with his feet on the ground. When Inheritance trades the local view for the wide sweep of history, it becomes notably less compelling. For a book ostensibly about the “evolutionary origins of the modern world,” the first few million years of human evolution don’t feature much. Whitehouse’s three biases are assumed to be both universal and ancient, without much inquiry into how, or why, they might have developed. Whitehouse does make a foray into prehistory, with stops at the crucial Anatolian archaeological sites of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, which contain some of the earliest material evidence for organized religion. Throughout Inheritance, Whitehouse is preoccupied with the potential for ritual to shape human life, and these Neolithic sites supply him with some of the first evidence of this process in action. His accounts of both are intriguing, if somewhat shaped to suit a thesis. However, here he is at least on solid ground, for the broader Inheritance’s view gets, the less persuasive the book becomes.
Among his many interdisciplinary pursuits, Whitehouse has dipped his toe into the burgeoning field of “quantified history,” whose most visible proponent might be Peter Turchin. The two have collaborated on a study of the development of moralizing religions in the so-called Axial Age of the first millennium B.C. By building a database of measures of social complexity around the world across time, they claim to have shown that empires begin to promote “Axial” principles of universal reciprocity and fairness once they cross a population threshold of one million people.
As is often the case with studies drawn from invisible datasets, the evidence for this claim is hard to evaluate. The few bits of history Whitehouse does present are not encouraging; for instance, he reduces imperial China’s very ambivalent relationship to Buddhism, which saw moments of sponsorship alternate with periods of intense persecution, into a simple story of success. Moreover, Whitehouse’s thesis — that expanding empires adopted moralizing religions to bind diverse populations more closely together — seems to get the arrow of causation exactly wrong. It would be truer to say that the violence of imperial rule provoked inequalities that inspired a number of prophetic critiques, which in turn evolved into religions. Jeremiah, Siddhartha, and Lao Tzu all yelled “No!” from the mountaintops centuries or millennia before anyone took them seriously inside the palace gates.
In any case, the “quantitative history” in Inheritance is only an appetizer to the main course, made up of the results of various anthropologically informed psychological experiments Whitehouse and his colleagues have performed over the years. These are almost all interesting, and often suggestive of deep currents running through the human psyche. However, to this reader at least, their results felt rarely as dispositive as Whitehouse would have us believe.
Take one recent experiment designed to find out whether human beings possess an innate respect for gods and spirits. To test the hypothesis that we naturally expect “supernatural beings to be socially dominant,” Whitehouse and his collaborators showed a series of animated videos to preverbal infants. In each video, two agents competed for possession of a green cube. One of the agents, the “natural” one, moved in an “intuitive” way, by sticking to the ground and crawling or walking. The other, “supernatural,” agent moved in a “counterintuitive” way, by flying or teleporting. Once the two converged on the cube, the two would fight and one would emerge victorious. The psychologists measured the length of time the babies stared at each outcome. They found that they stared longer when the “natural” agent won, which apparently indicates a greater level of surprise. According to Whitehouse, this means that the infants expected the supernatural agent to win and thus exert its social dominance over the natural one.
This sounds like a very clever experiment. I question whether it forms a sufficient basis, however, from which to infer, as Whitehouse does, that there is a natural human tendency to defer to ghosts, angels, or gods. This discrepancy — between ingenious but rather limited-seeming experiments and grandiose conclusions about the nature of the human mind — is a recurring issue throughout Inheritance.
Again and again, Whitehouse presents very creative studies, conducted in the most diverse conditions, and uses them to support overarching conclusions about the universal character our species. The mileage readers get out of them will depend on their willingness to accept this kind of inference.
Another problem: the conclusions Whitehouse advances about innate human biases often aren’t all that surprising or revelatory. Following an experiment in which college students were made to perform various versions of a vaguely New Age-y environmental ritual, he suggests that we find ritualistic experiences more meaningful when they are, (a) shared with others, and (b) emotionally intense. Using questionnaires filled out by fans of losing soccer franchises, he argues that shared suffering can bind people together. Drawing on interviews conducted with Libyan revolutionaries, he posits that fighting and dying in combat can be a strong source of what he terms “identity fusion,” or the “visceral feeling of oneness” with a group. These findings are hardly revolutionary; they will be familiar to anyone who has gone to a rock show, rooted for a sports team, or watched a war film.
The discrepancy between ingenious experiments and grandiose conclusions about the nature of the human mind is a recurring issue for Whitehouse.
This lack of surprise is something of a recurring problem throughout Inheritance. Histories-of-everything of the Diamond and Harari type tend to work best when they present compelling evidence in support of counterintuitive claims. Inheritance does the opposite, supplying somewhat suspect evidence for highly intuitive — even obvious — claims. I say “suspect” because another major problem with the book comes down to the current status of psychology as a field. We are almost 10 years into the replication crisis, in which the recurring inability of researchers to reproduce major findings in psychology sent shock waves through the entire discipline. Ever since, it has been hard to take any major discovery in experimental psychology at face value; questions of experimental design, statistical significance, and scientific integrity always linger in the back of one’s mind. Disappointingly, there is no acknowledgment of this crisis in the pages of Inheritance. I don’t mean to cast aspersions at any of the specific experiments presented in its pages, but it would be nice if Whitehouse made more of an effort to reassure his readers that the results he cites are ironclad, and not a result of statistical noise.
Indeed, in many ways Inheritance reads as if it were written over a decade ago. It feels like the product of a time, culminating in the first Obama administration, when popularizations of psychological research and behavioral economics ruled over the pop-science bookshelf and reached huge audiences via TED talks. This was the era of Freakonomics, of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Angela Duckworth’s Grit, of Amy Cuddy’s power poses and the popularization of the Stanford marshmallow test as a measure of future workplace success. It was a rare moment of optimism when it seemed that we might improve our own lives and the efficacy of government through a series of scientifically vetted behavioral tweaks, an approach exemplified by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge. (Sunstein went on to serve as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012.)
Whitehouse’s own policy recommendations for how to harness our inherent biases in service of the greater good come straight out of the Nudge playbook. These include a hypothetical smartphone app called Moralife that would tell consumers which products in the grocery store are ethically sound to purchase; a Grammy or World Cup for achievement in climate activism; and a news service, managed by the U.N., that would report only genuinely “newsworthy news.” In time, Whitehouse hopes that such a service would replace our current news media and in the process encourage a generation of citizens to become “more pro-social and critically alert contributors to [their] political systems.” This will presumably help to achieve Whitehouse’s most ambitious goal, which is to channel our innate tendency toward tribalism and harness it in the name of humankind itself, fostering the creation of the “teratribe,” a new composite entity in which the billions of people alive on earth today will “finally unify to address issues affecting us all.”
Whitehouse admits that his students sometimes roll their eyes at these ideas. He counters that, however “pie in the sky” they might seem, it is sometimes necessary to speak the impossible into existence. Perhaps; but I tend to side with his students, whose skepticism points to a cultural sea change that has taken place over the past decade. It doesn’t seem like we’re about to overcome our evolutionary baggage any time soon. The days of changing the world with life hacks, apps, and nudges are over. The teratribe feels farther away than ever before. The future now seems most likely to be determined at the ballot box, if not the battlefield.
