Inheritance by Harvey Whitehouse review

A thought provoking look at social forces, and the ways ordinary people can change the world

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.