Humankind: A Hopeful History 

Original Dutch 2019: De Meeste Mensen Deugen: Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Mens
Rutger Bregman
Bloomsbury
2021
426 pages
ISBN: 9780316418539

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Rutger Bregman is a Dutch journalist, and author of four books on history, philosophy, and economics.  This his latest work, Humankind has been translated into over thirty languages and was a New York Times Best Seller.

In the book he makes the case against the “persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish” and defends the basic goodness of mankind. For Bregman, the pessimistic view of man stems from a variety of sources: the media, which aggravates our “negativity bias”; economists with their presumption that we act always for personal gain; the greats of the Western canon itself, from Thucydides to Freud; Christianity (in particular Augustine and Calvin) and the doctrine of original sin and many other notable Western thinkers such as Machiavelli and Freud.

His theorising, in particular his heavy use of pop evolutionary biology, is interspersed with some very gripping real life stories, in particular from the two world wars, but also from post-war America, and even shipwrecks. He describes the amazing story of a group of Tongan schoolboys marooned on an island for a year in the Sixties; these boys lived in admirable harmony before finally being rescued. This he contrasts with William Golding’s famous 1954 novel Lord of the Flies with its shocking portrayal of what even English public schoolboys will do when they revert to their natural state.

Bregman uses historical events like this as well as anthropological and sociological studies, pop psychology and personal observations to make his case against the dark Hobbesian vision of human nature. Bregman shows Thomas Hobbes to be the father of much of modern pessimism regarding human nature, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be father of modern optimism.

Bregman’s argument hinges on his conviction that evolutionary biology has formed a basic tendency towards niceness and altruism in human beings, as a quality most conducive to human survival and propagation, or “the survival of the friendliest” as he terms it. Humans are ultrasocial, and niceness facilitates this sociability and with it survival and thriving.

He revisits Rousseau’s doctrine that civilisation is to blame for occluding the natural goodness of man, and expands the notion that private property is the root of all evil in this regard. For Bregman the initiation of private property somewhere back in antiquity ended “the days of liberty, equality and fraternity”. Private property and farming also brought to an end “the age of proto-feminism”, ushering in the age of infectious diseases and even STDs (asserting bestiality to stem from the ownership of private livestock). And with the rise of STDs comes “the male obsession with female virginity” and “the idea, still upheld by millions today, that sex before marriage is a sin.”

Bregman’s assertions covering the development of societies, religious practice, economics, law, the relationship of the sexes etc are too vast not to stretch our credulity. For instance, he asserts that money, marriage, law, writing, coinage all “started out as instruments of oppression”.  And yet he doesn’t seem to consider the ubiquity in societies worldwide of such instruments of oppression with his thesis that man is basically altruistic. At times one wonders whether he himself isn’t a bit skeptical of some of the vast claims he makes: “For millennia, we picked the nice guys to be in charge… But 10,000 years ago it became substantially more difficult to unseat the powerful.”

As might be expected Bregman wonders whether such events as the horror of Auschwitz does not give the lie to his theory. His answer is that “Auschwitz was the culmination of a long and complex historical process in which the voltage was upped step by step and evil was more convincingly passed off as good. The Nazi propaganda mill … had had years to do its work, blunting and poisoning the minds of the German people.” This is a strange assertion, for the Nazi party’s rise in Germany was famously meteoric (from 3% of the poll in 1928 to 18% two years later), and the first concentration camp, Dachau, was opened less than two months after Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. It appears to me that Bregman simply fails to face the key question: What is evil? The undeniable presence of evil in society and (as Solzhenitsyn famously asserts) lying at the very centre of each human heart, is a mystery Bregman never really addresses. Certainly to explain it away as consequence of too much exposure to too much propaganda is simply a fudge.

While Bregman’s efforts to correct an excessively pessimistic view of human nature appears well placed, and the heart-warming stories of wartime camaraderie etc are very engaging, the book is severely deficient in any kind of scientific rigour and philosophical depth. A period of scarcely more than a decade – that of the Nazi build up to Auschwitz – is described as “a long and complex historical process”, while anthropological developments in prehistory spanning many thousands of years across a multitude of geographical locations, are treated with blasé over-simplification. Nor does he see the terrible fallacy in his reasoning that human beings are basically good (kind, altruistic, etc). This stems from an evolutionary principle whereby friendly (“puppy-like”) organisms will survive and thrive better than unfriendly ones. And so for Bregman “goodness” is nothing more than genetically hard-wired social chumminess. If that is the case, then it is hardly worth getting so excited about: “altruism” is simply a device employed by evolutionary biology for the success of the species.

It is very telling that today a book could be written on the subject of goodness without a clear conception of what goodness might actually be. Of course we’re very clear that nasty things like Nazis, and slave-owners and despotic rulers are not good. But after that we’re left in the dark. The most he can say is that “doing good also feels good”. “We like food because without food we’d starve. We like sex because without sex we’d go extinct. We like helping because without each other we’d wither away. Doing good typically feels good because it is good.” What a sad conclusion: real human goodness doesn’t actually exist; it is just biological necessity by another name.

Perhaps it is in his arguments for atheism that Bregman is at his most simplistic: “And so rulers needed someone to keep tabs on the masses. Someone who heard everything and saw everything. An all-seeing Eye. God.” With such breath-taking ease the author explains away millennia of the most impressive religious intuitions and creations of human cultures worldwide: sacred festivals, sacred art, worship, mysticism, personal prayer, ethical systems, sacred buildings and spaces.… Just “rulers had to keep an eye on the masses”. Elsewhere we’re told something slightly different: religion arose from the need to explain catastrophes, and with that “we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done …. For the first time in history, we developed the notion of sin.” Just so.

It is a pity that the book is so marred by both its simplistic theorising on the basis of evolutionary biology, and its failure to analyse the fundamental concepts of good and evil. Its presentation is very attractive and the heart-warming stories do – in their anecdotal way – help to remind us of fact that there are many good people in the world.