Humankind by Rutger Bregman

From the author of New York Times bestseller UTOPIA FOR REALISTS, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success. If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea -- whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality -- was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested. By providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, and the Kitty Genovese "bystander effect." In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace; a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together; a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy. The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving "citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right)." Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success. Bregman presents this idea with his signature wit and frankness, once again making history, social science and economic theory accessible and enjoyable for lay readers.

This book infuriated me, for more reasons than one. This fury was compounded by the realization that this it's conclusions will successfully appeal to the woolly-mammoth sized prejudices of the average college-educated person. Bergman's sanitized narrative of a idyllic prehistorical utopia is not just inaccurate and simplistic- its is an actively harmful outlook for understanding human nature. Bergman's core argument is that human beings are fundamentally ‘good' (that is, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, feminist, and opposed to violence)—unless or until their minds happened to be poisoned by property ownership or corrupt leaders, which Bregman claims were lacking for most of human history since humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. To back this core thesis Bergman presents historical and anthropological ‘evidence' that comes badly undone after the most basic amount of topical research on the subject.

Following is an example of why selectively reading your preferred values and rationalizations into history is bad: Bergman claims that “in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased,” and that it was only with the rise of agriculture that we began to see arranged marriages and male control over female sexuality, but this is pure fiction. Among the !Kung hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, anthropologist Richard Lee—a source Bregman selectively references for his claims about hunter-gatherer's inherent peacefulness–notes that “All first marriages are arranged by parents, and the girls have little say in the matter.” Among the Kaska nomadic foragers of British Colombia, anthropologist John Honigmann writes that, “Ideally a man feels entitled to beat his wife if he suspects that she has been untrue to him,” although “not all men avail themselves of this permitted behavior.” Arranged marriages are customary across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, and violence, directed towards one's wife and/or another man, is a common male response to actual or suspected infidelity.”

Speaking of “war against the enemy”, Bregman claims that it was the beginnings of sedentism and property ownership that led to the origins of warfare, “Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.”

In fact, however, in every region of the world where there is evidence of different nomadic forager groups neighboring each other, there are cases of intergroup violence. This pattern is thoroughly reviewed in a 2012 paper by anthropologists Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, who write that, “External war has been described in each of the areas we reviewed based on evidence of intergroup killing, explicit fear of strangers, and/or avoidance of border zones,” and adding that the “cases of hunter-gatherers living with different societies of hunter-gatherers as neighbors show that the threat of violence was never far away.”

Keep in mind there are a hundred such claims that are easily falsifiable, scattered throughout the book. Moreover they have been carelessly presented for an audience uninterested in probing the opposite case- making the text a mammoth disservice to society.

A thought provoking history/psychology/philosophy book. Worth the read.

I absolutely loved this book. Very well researched, written in a totally accessible style and incredibly optimistic. Bregman's theory is that as a species we are programmed to be sociable and to assist each other rather than to be at war and hate each other. Along the way he disproves some classic social experiments and theories including the Stanford experiment where students pretending to be guards were sadistic to prisoners and the famous Yale experiment where people administered shocks to lab assistants getting quiz questions wrong. Absolutely fascinating and very well argued, Bregman can sometimes come across as a little bit naive, but this is a great antidote to the pessimism in the news.

Got overly sentimental and optimistic at the end, but the book speaks the truth: people are inherently kind and that cynicism is the laziest heuristic to have. It is so easy to simply assume the worst in people, but it often takes less than courage to be kind - it is our default, perhaps marred by social barriers inherent in society.