Humankind: A Hopeful History

An idealist can be right her whole life, and still be dismissed as naive. This book is intended to change that. Because what seems unreasonable, unrealistic, and impossible today, can turn out to be inevitable tomorrow. It is time for a new realism. It is time for a new view of humankind.

With the subtitle “A Hopeful History”, Humankind is exactly the kind of optimistic read I think I needed right now. With so much negative going on, I keep hearing, “What do you expect? People are the worst, a plague on the Earth!” And not only does that not solve anything, but it's so fatalistic as to suggest that nothing short of total human extinction could solve anything. With this new review of human history, Rutger Bregman not only busts a bunch of myths (and especially those based on social science experiments) about how rotten we humans are at the core, but by adding in stories of human decency and exploring some better ways of setting up entrenched institutions, Bregman shines a light on a more hopeful way forward. If the “nocebo effect” (If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we'll treat each other, to everyone's detriment) is as powerful as Bregman suggests, then a book like this that proves that humans are not basically evil is the first step towards building the society that works better for everyone. Just what I needed. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There is a persistent myth that by their very nature, humans are selfish, aggressive, and quick to panic. It's what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call “Veneer theory”: the notion that civilization is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation. In actuality, the opposite is true. It's when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.

For most of this study, Bregman reviews what famous thinkers, philosophers, social psychology researchers, and recent pop historians have written; often finding source material that contradicts what we've been led to believe their evidence shows. Bregman starts with the opposite philosophical poles of Hobbes (“The man who asserted that civil society alone could save us from our baser instincts”) and Rousseau (“Who declared that in our heart of hearts we're all good” and that “'civilization' is what ruins us”). Bregman decidedly comes out on the side of Rousseau (and from more recent times, on the side of Yuval Noah Harari of Sapiens fame), who all believe that the dawn of agriculture was the downfall of happy human co-existence (and Bregman even takes issue with Steven Pinker and his hopeful books about how violence has decreased over time because, according to Bregman, there's zero evidence to support the widely accepted idea that nomadic/hunter-gatherer societies were anything but peaceful). To counter the dim, but popular, view of uncontrolled humanity in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Bregman recounts the true story of a group of six Tongan boys who survived on a deserted island for over a year by creating a totally egalitarian society; to dispute the notion that men are jingoistic warmongers, he shares the incredible stats about how few soldiers in the major wars actually fired their weapons; to try and explain why it was the comparatively weak and smaller brained Homo sapiens who survived out of several competing hominids in prehistory, Bregman uses a recent study on the domestication of foxes to suggest that it came down to “survival of the friendliest”. If nothing else, Humankind is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection of stories.

I'm going to be honest. Originally, I wanted to bring Milgram's experiments crashing down. When you're writing a book that champions the good in people, there are several big challengers on your list. William Golding and his dark imagination. Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene. Jared Diamond and his demoralizing tale of Easter Island. And of course Philip Zimbardo, the world's most well-known psychologist. But topping my list was Stanley Milgram. I know of no other study as cynical, as depressing, and at the same time as famous as his experiments at the shock machine.

So, not only does Bregman confront Golding, Diamond, and Dawkins (actually, although I had never heard this, apparently Dawkins has disavowed his early notion of the “selfish gene”), but Bregman also spends a lot of the book writing about Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's shock experiments. I remember learning about Zimbardo and Milgram in more than one Psych course – as they both demonstrated something fundamentally awful and important about us humans – but I don't remember ever being told that Zimbardo was basically a fraud who manipulated his process and his results (but sure loved the fame that followed) and it hasn't become commonly known that while, yes, test subjects under Milgram were convinced to administer ever-increasing levels of painful shocks to unseen confederates of the experimenter, the results are much more nuanced than that (for example, subjects uniformly refused to continue if they were ordered to administer the shock instead of being encouraged to do it for the good of the experiment; believing that they were being helpful caused most to continue, against their own better natures, in the name of doing something good for society at large). Apparently, these experiments are still being taught because they seem to confirm what we all know – that people are just this thin veneer of civilisation away from brutality – and that's why we don't trust each other, and that's why we allow our governments to use lethal force against other countries and our own fellow citizens.

Myths are so insidious. I remember reading somewhere recently something like, “What do you think that dude on Easter Island was thinking as he cut down his island's last tree? Could he not see that he was literally cutting down his own civilisation?” This was written in the context of climate change – and why are humans so self-interested as to continue to do those specific things that will lead to our own doom – so it was fascinating to me to read here that, although deforestation is the accepted explanation for the collapse of the Easter Island society, Bregman didn't need to dig too deeply into the evidence to discover that the islanders didn't cut down their vast forests (as Malcolm Gladwell reported and which everyone then accepted as fact) to the very last tree, but that an invasive tree rat was carried to Easter Island on Peruvian slave ships: slavers took the healthiest people and unknowingly left the rats (which had no natural predator on the island) and of course their civilisation collapsed.

Other myths that deserve to be broken: The “bystander effect”. We've probably all heard about the murder of Kitty Genovese – killed on the doorstep of her NYC apartment building while thirty-some people watched and figured someone else would call the cops – but it turns out that her murder didn't happen that way (and when someone tried to correct the official account, the leading article's writer at The New York Times refused, saying that positive details would ruin the story). Also, the “broken windows” theory of crime control: Sure, the stats for serious crime went down when this practise was adopted in NYC, but it turns out that undue pressure was put on beat cops to make massive arrests for small misdemeanors and to discourage the reporting of major crimes (and apparently it was Zimbardo, once again, who did the one flawed experiment that served as the basis for this theory?) And also the notion that mass incarceration is the only way to deal with criminals because softer rehab options don't work (the sociologist who inspired this practise, Robert Martinson, eventually killed himself when he saw how his conclusions were applied; apparently, this former civil rights activist wanted to prove that all punishment was ineffective and “everyone would realize prisons were pointless places and should all be shut down”.)

And why these myths matter today: As Bregman notes, the broken window strategy for policing is a racist system:

Data show that a mere 10 percent of people picked up for misdemeanors are white. Meanwhile, there are black teens that get stopped and frisked on a monthly basis – for years – despite never having committed an offense. Broken windows has poisoned relations between law enforcement and minorities, saddled untold poor with fines they can't pay, and also had fatal consequences, as in the case of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 while being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes.

In an earlier story, Bregman recounts the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – when, despite terrible newstories of opportunistic murders, rape, and looting – it turns out that most residents acted with “courage and charity”. Even so, first responders were also hearing the stories of a city in chaos – the thin veneer had been breached and 72,000 troops were called in – and “on Danziger Bridge on the city's east side, police opened fire on six innocent, unarmed African Americans, killing a seventeen-year-old boy and a mentally disabled man of forty”. The myths we tell ourselves about human nature matter, and more insidiously, we shouldn't allow the myths perpetuated by trauma-hungry media (or other entrenched institutions) form the entirety of our perceived reality.

Could this be the thing that the Enlightenment – and, by extension, our modern society – gets wrong? That we continually operate on a mistaken model of human nature? We saw that some things can become true merely because we believe in them – that pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When modern economists assumed that people are innately selfish, they advocated policies that fostered self-serving behavior. When politicians convinced themselves that politics is a cynical game, that's exactly what it became. So now we have to ask: Could things be different? Can we use our heads and harness rationality to design new institutions? Institutions that operate on a wholly different view of human nature? What if schools and businesses, cities and nations expect the best of people instead of presuming the worst?

In the last section of Humankind, Bregman tells the stories of various institutions (a factory, a school, a healthcare service, a prison, a municipal government) that found ways to do away with bureaucracy and middle managers, and instead, empowered individuals to follow in the direction of their own instincts and motivation. His examples sound Utopian – if you treat people like they're good and smart enough to do things right, they will – but they don't sound universally applicable; still, it was hopeful to end on such an optimistic note. Maybe we'll get there.

I wrote about a lot here, but the book contains even more stories, experiments, and busted myths. I suppose because it contains so much, Bregman couldn't follow every strand out to my full satisfaction, and I found some of his quirks annoying (and especially, after suggesting we thrived through survival of the friendliest, Bregman continually refers to humanity as “Homo puppy”; dumb), but the good far outweighs the quibblesome; four stars is a rounding up.