Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World by Sarah Rose Cavanagh

Author:Sarah Rose Cavanagh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-09-02T23:00:00+00:00

So they’d roll a few joints and smoke them while watching the executions and the porn—the body parts moving around on the screen in slow motion, an underwater ballet of flesh and blood under stress, hard and soft joining and separating, groans and screams, close-ups of clenched eyes and clenched teeth, spurts of this or that. If you switched back and forth fast, it all came to look like the same event.

Could we be affected similarly? I find myself wondering whether these newer, close-up, more graphic videos of the sorts that litter Facebook and Twitter at times and which were the generative fuel for the Black Lives Matter movement could hold greater potential for “virtual trauma” than the likes of the old, distant videos of the towers falling. They are close-up, vivid snapshots of real-life violence and threat shared on social media. They also seem to depict things that could happen in one’s life at any time—rather than the surreal, infrequent nature of events like 9/11.

It is in this context that I was greatly moved by a talk by Smith College professor Nnamdi Pole at a convention of research psychologists. Nnamdi’s talk focused on the link between traumatic experiences in police officers and their risk for using inappropriate force in subsequent encounters. The hivemind narrative surrounding law enforcement reform is yet another example of our penchant for false binaries: that you can either be grateful for the good that so many police officers do or you can be horrified by the racial inequities present in every level of our criminal justice system. In contrast, Nnamdi’s talk exemplified compassion for all of the communities involved, which I found compelling.

Nnamdi is a clinical psychologist, which means that in addition to academic research and teaching he also performs psychotherapy. His research focuses on both trauma and biobehavioral synchrony between therapists and clients during the process of therapy. This double intersection of our interests was too much to resist, and so I contacted him for an interview.

Happily, he agreed.

One icy morning in midwinter I head out to meet Nnamdi at Mosaic, a Mediterranean café in Northampton, Massachusetts. The sky is dark and heavy and the trees on either side of the highway droop with their burden of ice, giving my route the feel of an enchanted frosty tunnel. My teeth are too clenched for me to fully appreciate the scenery, though, since I assume that the same ice that glitters on the trees is spread thinly across the pavement I’m driving on.

It is a relief to reach the quiet downtown and enter the warmth of the small café and Nnamdi’s welcome company. In addition to the requisite coffee to dial back the headache radiating upward from my jaw, I order a crepe stuffed with goat cheese, red peppers, and wild mushrooms. Nnamdi opts for a large heaping of steaming tangier chicken stew. We dig in to the comforting food and eagerly chat and discover several unexpected intersections of our social and academic networks.

I tell

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