When Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer shot and killed beloved Zimbabwean lion Cecil with a bow and arrow in July 2015, the world responded with grief, outrage and revulsion. Signs appeared on the door of his practice: “We are Cecil”; “#Catlives matter” and “Rot in hell”. Palmer’s business, for the time being, was toast; his reputation was destroyed globally.
The loss was personal, too, for a small group of scientists at Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who had been tracking Cecil for seven years through his GPS-satellite collar. But for this team, a more positive scenario was unfolding. In the hours and days after Cecil’s death became public, thousands of people called the unit offering whatever help they could to save other big cats from a similar fate.
For Oxford anthropologist Professor Harvey Whitehouse, the phenomenon his colleagues were experiencing triggered a bigger idea that fed into his years of research in the field of social cohesion – the collective rituals that bind us, particularly those of group identification and identity fusion. He launched a longitudinal study surveying a group of the callers, and discovered that over time, they began to regard Cecil’s death as a life-changing episode – a transformative moment in their views on wildlife conservation. It was, he says, a remarkable example of humans fusing their identity with a lion.
“This deep shift in identity was rooted in feelings of shared experience with Cecil himself and, as a result, their feelings of fusion with him and with other wild lions in Africa,” Whitehouse writes in his new book, Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World.
“This was the first study to demonstrate that identity fusion could occur across the species barrier.”
In a public lecture while visiting New Zealand in April, Whitehouse spoke about Cecil’s death, saying it showed just how far “extended fusion” could take the world. The visit was organised by Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures at the University of Auckland. “If humans are able to fuse with a lion, then they clearly have the potential to fuse with other humans, however different they might seem,” he said.
For Whitehouse, it raised an even more important idea: could humanity at large begin to see itself as a single tribe? And could politicians harness that capacity for fusion, for example by appealing to the emotions – shared suffering – to change minds?
He believes our ability to do so lies at the heart of solving a range of the world’s problems, from crime to climate change, by overcoming differences between disparate groups. All too often, he argues, climate change is seen as a problem best explained to the public by scientists rather than in more emotional terms. “Scientific expertise is crucial to diagnosing the problem, [but] getting us to act will depend on social cohesion rather than rational argument.”
In his new book, Whitehouse says much of the violence today – from terrorism to wars and gangland murders – is the result of three ancient forces: in-group love, outgroup hatred and norms condoning the use or threat of physical force.
The dark side of fusion is that when the group to which an individual belongs comes under attack, they can be willing to fight and die if necessary to bring down the hated oppressor.
Criminal violence among football fans, for example, is what he describes as the result of misplaced tribalism.
“Although fans who join violent hooligan groups like these are often portrayed in the media as deviant outsiders, our investigations suggest that the violence associated with extreme fan groups has much more to do with love of the group.”
Identify fusion – which he describes as a feeling of “visceral oneness” with the group – is particularly obvious, not only in the military, but also among criminal gangs.
Both groups put their members through painful initiation ordeals to heighten their bonding and it’s why they also wear the same uniforms or insignia.
“It’s no accident that such groups often engage in synchronous marching, drilling, parading and dancing. Moving in synchrony may trick the brain into thinking that other people’s bodies are really extensions of one’s own body, further enhancing feelings of fusion between the personal self and the group. We know that fusion with the group in turn makes you more willing to sacrifice yourself when called upon to do so.”
Now, he and other Oxford researchers are investigating whether that fusion can be harnessed for good, by promoting new groups for prisoners to bond with. They’re tracking reoffending rates of prisoners in an initiative called the Twinning Project, which twins professional football clubs with prisons. It was launched in 2018 by former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein.
In the programme, football coaches work with inmates to help them achieve qualifications to improve their job prospects when they’re freed. Prisoners in the scheme are half as likely to commit disciplinary offences in custody compared with others. So far, more than 1200 inmates have graduated from the programme, and more than 1700 are currently participating.
Whitehouse says the hope is that the coaching will translate into reduced rates of reoffending after release – something the research plans to track over time.
Harnessing gang fusion
On his New Zealand visit, he discussed with Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell and Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston the possibility of New Zealand rugby or league clubs establishing a Twinning Project with prisons here.
There are two ways to look at New Zealand’s gang problem, he says. “One is to say, this fusion they have in the gangs is a bad thing and we want to reduce it, so we want mechanisms to reduce fusion because it’s driving a lot of extreme actions and intergroup conflict, for example. Or you could do the opposite, which is to harness the fusion in more positive, peaceful ways.
“For a lot of prisoners, this is the first time they’ve actually had to sit still and bloody listen. A lot of them have attention deficit disorders and it’s very hard for them to sit and listen in a respectful and attentive way or engage in a good learning environment.
“From what I’ve seen when I’ve gone into the prisons, seeing this stuff in action is quite extraordinary. The coaches are charismatic; they’re extremely good at what they do.”
He says criminal justice systems appeared to be minimising the range of law-abiding groups ex-prisoners could join – which increased their likelihood of joining criminal groups.
“To just punish for the sake of it is a destructive strategy. It’s hard to imagine a more effective way of increasing rates of crime and repeat offending.”
In Inheritance, he writes, “The Twinning Project likes to quote a phrase from American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson: ‘Don’t look down on someone unless you are helping them up.’ This could be a guiding principle for all the tribes of the world. But it will be a hard message to spread. As it stands, the media helps fuel intertribal conflict by reporting on the salacious details of unusually grisly crimes and stoking the public desire for harsher punishments. Politicians, meanwhile, promise to get tough on crime in part because lurid media reporting feeds the collective appetite for ever-higher rates of incarceration.”
Mitchell told the Listener that he would “continue to engage” with Whitehouse about the Twinning Project, which he understood had had positive outcomes in the UK.
“Rehabilitation and reintegration programmes for offenders are critical components to reducing crime in this country. I am hugely supportive of these programmes, which provide the wraparound social support needed to help people get their lives back on track, while keeping our communities safer.”
Democracy & free speech
Shortly after Whitehouse and Koi Tū director Sir Peter Gluckman began working together about five years ago, Gluckman was approached by the United Nations Development Programme to investigate how social cohesion could be used globally.
Gluckman says all liberal democracies are struggling to maintain traditional models of democracy as an effective way of creating a healthy society “because democracy requires two things. It requires not only that people have different viewpoints, but that they’re accepted and respected.”
Whitehouse says when it comes to society’s most divisive issues, cracking down on extremist views and limiting freedom of speech are the last things politicians should do. “Our research suggests that curtailing freedom of speech is unlikely to provide a solution to violent extremism. In fact, it could have the opposite effect, actually fuelling perceptions of out-group threat among those who are strongly fused.”
A paper last year co-authored by Gluckman and others, including sociologist Paul Spoonley, late psychologist Richie Poulton and Koi Tū's Māori adviser Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, described New Zealand as being at a tipping point in social cohesion.
“Parliamentary protests, the rising level of rhetorical attacks in what should be policy debates, confused messaging on such issues as the role of local government, growing evidence of infrastructure failure, concerns about the delivery of education, health and other social services and a comparatively high rate of incarceration all point to questions of trust and cohesion,” it said.
The paper recommended a series of steps to address the “emerging risks”, including strengthening the Official Information Act, scrapping the “cynical” release of politically difficult papers at timings designed to bury them, resolving the confusion between central and local government and seeking less adversarial cross-party approaches to address social and economic disparities.
Gluckman says the default position in New Zealand is now to distrust the institutions of government.
“Only half the population say they trust government. Other institutions are put at risk when trust in government at any level is compromised. These include faith in the police and the justice system – both often targets in polarised debates – and the media.”
Whitehouse told the Listener he’s noticed the change in New Zealand, even as an occasional visitor. “I always saw New Zealand as a laid-back, relaxed, caring, compassionate kind of society with a strong sense of its identity as one of the very developed countries at the very end of the world, but with a strong positive sense of where it sat in the global setting. It was a place where I’d often notice people on the streets picking up rubbish they hadn’t thrown and putting it in a bin. I didn’t see that much where I grew up in London, so that impressed me.”
He attended a dinner in Wellington during his visit in which a mother described how teachers at her children’s school were having to deal with issues of gang violence on a daily basis.
“What’s been happening over recent years is a feeling of a society more fractured and with a crime problem that seems to have got a lot bigger than it was when I started coming here.”
Leave it to the people
Whitehouse and Gluckman believe one way to achieve consensus across the political spectrum is “citizens’ assemblies” – people selected by lottery to deliberate on public issues. In a historic referendum in 2018, Ireland voted to repeal its abortion ban after a recommendation made by just 99 people in a citizens’ assembly.
“I believe that this is the form of democracy least vulnerable to the corrosive effects of bias and political cynicism,” says Whitehouse. “People put their smartphones and their social media accounts at the door and have to confront and listen to each other and debate the issues. And they have to listen to the experts.”
Here, for instance, they could be used to set out a 25-year plan for the country. Koi Tū is establishing the Koi Tū Forum to promote such approaches and plans to launch it next month.
A citizens’ assembly could make a list of core principles that matter to all, Whitehouse says. “I don’t think that’s impossible. The next bit is to say: what would be the policy requirements to serve those principles effectively?
“That would admittedly be bad news for some people and good news for others, and that is complicated to navigate. But maybe if we could establish a policy framework that we all agree on, it wouldn’t matter what coalition of parties gets in at any point. If the people had spoken and a long-term plan had been agreed, future governments would just have to follow it.”
Inheritance – The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, by Harvey Whitehouse (Penguin Random House, $40), is on sale from Friday, June 14.
