In 2019, Rutger Bregman went viral. Invited to speak on a panel at the World Economic Forum, the annual self-flagellation session for the super-rich in Davos, Switzerland, the progressive Dutch author railed against the reluctance of the conference’s wealthy attendees to talk about taxation: “Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullsh**, in my opinion.” A video clip of his social-media-ready shot at the 0.1 percent was all over Twitter for several days (a lifetime on that platform).
Bregman’s recent book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, is further evidence of his savvy as a salesman in today’s marketplace of ideas: First, take an important, broad subject. Second, explain a woefully out-of-date conventional wisdom. Third, sweep that cobwebbed thinking aside with a new approach that changes everything the reader thought he knew about how the world works.
In Humankind, Bregman’s big idea is so radical that it has “long been known to make rulers nervous.” It has been “denied by religions and ideologies” and “ignored by the news media.” And yet, he claims, it is borne out by “virtually every branch of science.” If only we took it seriously, “it’s an idea that might just start a revolution.” It is “nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again.”
What is this life-changing, revolution-inducing thesis? “That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”
As Bregman tells it, philosophers, economists, politicians, and priests have for centuries had a dark view of humans as “selfish, aggressive and quick to panic.” He borrows from the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal a phrase, “the veneer theory,” to describe the widely held view that there is a fine line between civilization and chaos and argues that “when it comes to notions about human nature, the continuity throughout Western thought is striking.”
Confusingly, just a few dozen pages later, Bregman tells us that whether humans are “more inclined to be good or evil” is “a question philosophers have grappled with for hundreds of years” and presents the debate as one between Thomas Hobbes (in the “evil” camp) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in the “good” camp). Throughout Humankind, Bregman flip-flops between these two contradictory claims: that we have a settled and incorrect view of human nature and that Western thought has been one long debate over whether we are good or bad. They can’t both be true.
When Bregman isn’t trying to present his unified theory of everything, he’s occasionally capable of spinning interesting research into a compelling narrative, bringing to life experiments that really do reveal something about human nature.
In pursuit of the truth about humanity, Bregman takes the reader to remote Siberia in the 1950s, where Russian geneticists bred wild foxes for friendliness, domesticating menacing beasts and demonstrating the evolutionary benefits of sociability. In the book’s most original chapter, Bregman unearths the forgotten story of a real-life Lord of the Flies. In 1965, six bored teenage boys from a Catholic boarding school in Tonga stole a fishing boat and set sail for Fiji. They soon got lost and found themselves marooned on a small, rocky island. They didn’t descend into a feral, bloodthirsty mob like William Golding’s fictional schoolboys. Instead, according to the Australian captain who rescued them after 14 months, they “set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” They returned home happy and in the shape of their lives.
The famous Stanford prison experiment, in which volunteers were told to play the roles of prisoners and guards, is remembered as evidence of the ease with which otherwise well-adjusted people can morph into monsters. Bregman recounts the ways in which its organizer, Philip Zimbardo, compromised his frequently cited study: He egged the guards on, then claimed they received no instructions, while the cruelest behavior came from one of Zimbardo’s undergraduate students who was hired to play the role of “master sadist.”
These are among the book’s entertaining but ultimately fairly shallow excursions into anthropology, social psychology, history, and evolutionary biology. Rarely do they prove as much as Bregman claims. For example, it may be the case that Steven Pinker’s influential Better Angels of Our Nature includes some misleading data on the violence of a Paraguayan tribe, but does that really disprove Pinker’s central claim, made in great detail over 800 pages, that humankind has grown less violent over time?
As Bregman presents the case for human decency, a very obvious question still needs to be answered: how to explain the many irrefutable examples of cruelty that litter human history? Indeed, for all their theatrics and faults, dark post-war experiments such as Zimbardo’s prison circus or Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s shock machine — in which participants followed instructions to administer what they thought were electric shocks to someone on the other side of a wall, upping the voltage even as they could hear the screams — were attempts to explain the real-world horrors of the Holocaust.
Bregman answers this challenge in three ways. First, he argues that “evil has to be disguised as doing good.” Milgram’s volunteers thought that what they were doing was in aid of scientific research. Nazi cruelty can be explained by comradeship: “They weren’t fighting for a Thousand-Year Reich or for Blut und Boden — ‘blood and soil’ — but because they didn’t want to let down their mates,” writes Bregman. As for the more enthusiastic Nazis, their minds had been “blunted and poisoned” by propaganda. This is not the only time Bregman presents conventional wisdom as paradigm-shifting insight or radically oversimplifies to make the facts fit his thesis.
Second, Bregman argues that a few bad apples are capable of doing an awful lot of damage. The shameless and the sociopathic are the exception to his rule about human nature, and unfortunately they rise to the top, where they are further stripped of their “goodness.” In other words, “power corrupts.” Who knew?
Third, and least convincingly of all, Bregman presents an unreconstructed Rousseauean version of human history. Things were so much better for the hunter-gatherers. “Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out and hook up,” he writes, painting a picture of a proto-feminist Garden of Eden. Then we stopped roaming around and started farming, and everything went wrong: “The 1 per cent began oppressing the 99 per cent” and life became “an endless cycle of disasters.” That may sound like an oversimplification of Bregman’s argument, but there really isn’t much more to his version of human history.
The paradox of Humankind is that a book with such an optimistic central thesis lays out a dark account of the past — a kind of reverse Whig history in which things get progressively worse as we drift farther from our natural state. And in portraying human happiness as nothing more than the satisfaction of our animal needs, his account strips life of any real meaning.
Bregman shows little interest in grappling with complexity. Does he not see civilization as at least a mixed blessing? What about the apparent human need to settle down, to create, to learn, to advance? Nor does he allow room for nuance in his understanding of the “decency” he claims is in us all. We are clearly capable of doing the right thing and the wrong thing, of callousness as well as empathy, of selfishness as well as cooperation, of cruelty as well as kindness. It’s absurd to try to distill these difficult contrasts, with which artists, writers, philosophers, and scientists have been grappling for centuries, to a two-dimensional choice between people being “good” and “bad” — and then to claim that “the science” points to a clear answer.
But the deeper one gets into Humankind, the more obvious it becomes that Bregman isn’t especially interested in getting to the bottom of human nature. Instead, he cherry-picks stories in the service of a progressive populism that sees the world as a battle between the benign masses and a villainous elite of press barons, politicians, and billionaires. It’s the kind of outlook that finds it impossible to envision any problem with defunding the police, or searches desperately for something other than the obvious explanation for why Seattle’s anarchic “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” descended into chaos.
By the end of the book, Bregman is reduced to little more than ideological hectoring and mawkish appeals to the spirit of the German and British soldiers who, in the First World War, left their trenches to play soccer with one another on Christmas Day. It might be heartwarming to think of this break from hostilities as “natural” and the fighting as an aberration. But the truth is rarely that simple.
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