Humankind

Rutger Bregman is one of the 18 writers who feature in the table I drafted earlier this year to illustrate my theory that those who straddle different worlds (whether of nationality, profession or discipline) are both more creative and clearer writers than more insular types. Bregman wrote the little book Utopia for Realists (2016) which thrust him into the global league.

He graduated as an historian but has, since 2013, been a journalist at a fascinating Netherlands journal De Correspondent whose funding was crowdsourced; operates on a membership basis; and sets its face against “news” as such. This has given him the 

“privilege to pursue my own fascinations and be powered by that magical stuff known as intrinsic motivation”

That’s a quote from the Acknowledgements in his most recent (and larger) work – Humankind – an optimistic history (2020). He clearly has a great English translator but his material is written so clearly and in such highly readable short chapter chunks - each of which introduces us to some well-known but generally false research such as the “broken windows” criminological “explanation”. 

His style has some similarities with that of Malcolm Gladwell – so I finished its 400 pages in a couple of days.

It’s been generally well received – although this sniffy, caustic review writes it off for being too simplistic 

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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

What I really appreciated about the book was how easily it wove theory into the narrative. That’s no easy thing to do and was particularly well done in the chapter on “The Power of Intrinsic Motivation” which gave pride of place to the Buurtzog model of social care which I faulted Goodhart’s “Head Hand Heart” for ignoring. Jos de Blok is its founder and has some very critical things to say about both management and academia! Pity that Bregman didn't elaborate.....

The book finishes with “Ten Rules to Live by” – the most disappointing section.

The business model used by “The Correspondent” has attracted its share of criticism – a positive Guardian article here but a more critical piece from Niemanlab which, in itself, looks an interesting media site.