Humankind by Rutger Bregman review – why we are all deep-down decent

 

Humankind by Rutger Bregman review – why we are all deep-down decent

 

From peacenik hunter-gatherers to helpful toddlers … a ‘hopeful history’ argues that the underlying nature of human beings is not savage but essentially nice

 

 

Steven Poole

The Guardian

Wed 10 Jun 2020

 

A chapter on Easter Island attempts to disprove the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and population collapse. Photograph: All Canada Photos/Alamy

 

Like most big-idea books, this one begins by absurdly overstating the novelty of its argument. The author promises to reveal “a radical idea” that has been “erased from the annals of world history”. It is, even, “a new view of humankind”. Some measure of bathos is presumably intended when we learn that this radical new view is that “most people, deep down, are pretty decent”. But there appears to be no authorial shame over the laughably bogus claim that this idea has been “erased” from history, presumably by a dark centuries-long conspiracy of secretive misanthropes, to some bafflingly obscure end.

 

Not yet erased from the annals of history, for example, is the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom the author regularly calls for his view that humans are naturally nice, and it is the institutions of civilisation that have corrupted us. Bregman contrasts this with what he calls, following the biologist Frans de Waal, “veneer theory”: the view (attributed to Hobbes among others) that civilisation is a thin skin of decency barely concealing the savage ape underneath.

 

You might suspect that there is something to both these views simultaneously, but Humankind is a polemic in the high Gladwellian style and so aims to be a simple lesson overturning our allegedly preconceived ideas, with the help of carefully selected study citations and pseudo-novelistic scenes from the blitz and other teachable stories. The “veneer” theory, Bregman insists, is totally wrong.

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Rutger Bregman. Photograph: Maartje ter Horst

 

What is his evidence? Infants and toddlers, studies suggest, have an innate bias towards fairness and cooperation. When some Tongan children were shipwrecked on a Pacific island for over a year, they cooperated generously rather than re-enacting Lord of the Flies. In the first world war, German and British soldiers played football on Christmas Day. (Rather courageously, the author chooses this overfamiliar fable as his sentimental endpiece.)

 

Such anecdotes are heartwarming, but perhaps you want more evolutionary meat. Why, for example, did early humans survive while our cousins the Neanderthals did not? Veneer theorists suspect grimly that we simply killed them all. “The more plausible theory,” Bregman writes, “is that we humans were better able to cope with the last ice age because we’d developed the ability to work together.” That sounds nice, but apparently the author has forgotten how, just a few pages earlier, he observed that Neanderthals “built fires and cooked food. They made clothing, musical instruments, jewellery and cave paintings”. In other words, they worked together too. So his explanation makes little sense.

 

Such inconsistencies bedevil the book, particularly in its argument (again following Rousseau) that the great tragedy of human history was the invention of agriculture and cities around 10,000 years ago. That brought the drudgery of work and the rise of political leaders and war. Until then we were all happy peacenik hunter-gatherers. “Any time we crossed paths with a stranger,” Bregman writes confidently of this prehistoric idyll, “we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.” But here, unless he owns a time machine, he is simply making things up. And cherry-picking his evidence again: at least one modern hunter-gatherer society, the !Kung people, were found to be very violent, particularly towards strangers. At length, Bregman’s wilfully Edenic view of prehistoric society prompts the reader to wonder why, if he loves the hunter-gatherer lifestyle so much, he doesn’t go and live there.

Signs of savagery … the 1963 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Ronald Grant

 

Since Bregman is a priori sure that all nasty stories about human nature must be “myths”, he tries to puncture several. The chapter on Philip Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford prison experiment ably collects the recent discoveries that the whole thing was a hoax, with the guards being coached in their cruelty to the prisoners. On the other hand, a bizarre chapter about Easter Island attempts to disprove, on the basis of some inconclusive fragments of evidence, the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and population collapse. This never happened, concludes Bregman blithely, even though the Easter Islanders themselves say it did: a vivid example of his gift for dismissing inconvenient evidence.

 

That approach, however, won’t wash with Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” experiments, in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to give (fake) electric shocks to people in another room, and continued to do so even when the “victims” seemed to be in terrible pain. Disarmingly, Bregman admits that he originally wanted to bring this story crashing down, but he can’t: the findings have been robustly repeated. Instead he reframes the subjects’ “obedience” as “conformity”, which might sound to you like a distinction without much of a difference. Our social instinct to conform, along with the well-known camaraderie between soldiers, is what Bregman finally offers as an explanation for the Holocaust, in place of some story about fundamental human evil. Which even if plausible, notably fails to explain the actions of the Nazi leaders themselves.

Any claim that complex human beings are essentially wicked or lovely, one single thing or another, is a fairytale

So far, so less radical than originally sold to the reader. But Bregman also wants to reshape human society in the light of his not-very-new news. This would involve, for example, widespread hyper-local participatory democracy, in which many more people go to endless town-hall meetings, though politics nerds who champion such arrangements might be overestimating the general public’s appetite for political participation. (The grand bargain of modern liberal democracy is that citizens pay a professional political class so that, most of the time, they don’t have to think about politics.) Bregman also points at how nice Norwegian prisons are, and visits a hippyish school where there are no set lessons or curriculum. If we believed in human decency, he suggests, this is how things could be everywhere.

 

 

But plainly the attempt to replace a story about humans’ essential wickedness with a contrasting story about humans’ essential loveliness has already run aground – as it was bound to, since any claim that complex human beings are essentially one single thing or another is a fairytale. “I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures,” Bregman writes – as though this is a brave thing to argue, though absolutely no one in the world disagrees with it – “but sometimes our sociability is the problem.” Well, sure. Gun-toting anti-lockdown protesters in the US are being sociable; so are criminal gangs and far-right activists. On the other hand, because things are more complicated than such books allow, sometimes being anti-social is the problem.

 

Bregman unwittingly provides a perfect illustration of this when he goes to meet the director of the hippy school. “Drummen is one of those people who never lost his knack for play, and who has always had an aversion to rules and authority,” Bregman writes admiringly. “When he comes to pick me up from the railway station, he leaves his car parked flagrantly across the bike path.” So this maverick pedagogical hero, who loves freedom from rules, is actually a dysfunctional egotist who unthinkingly restricts the freedom of others. Any cyclist who had to navigate around this buffoon’s vehicle that day would have been just that little bit less inclined to agree that people are fundamentally good-hearted.

 

• Humankind: A Hopeful History is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.