Humankind: A Hopeful History – Busting the myth of our innate selfishness

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Author: Rutger Bregman

ISBN-13: 978-1408898932

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £20

In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, the city was taken over by roving gangs, who proceeded to kill, rape and loot at will. Inside the Superdome where 25,000 people were trapped without food, water or electricity, children had their throats cut. When helicopters came to the rescue, snipers fired on them.

As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Guardian “Remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life ... and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all ... A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.”

Except none of this was true. It was widely reported by reputable journalists, and it was widely believed. The National Guard was called in, and, expecting the Hobbesian hellhole that had been so widely conjured, shot and killed entirely innocent people. Only later did it emerge that here had not been a single reported rape or murder. The “gangs” of “looters” were mostly organised groups who went looking for food, clothing and medicine and distributed them to those most in need.

Why were these events so appallingly misrepresented? Because the idea that human beings “naturally” and almost instantly revert to savagery when the thin veil of civility is ripped off in a disaster is a dominant trope of modernity. This was what journalists and politicians “knew” would happen. Scratch the surface and you see our true selves: feral, monstrous, devoid of compassion or altruism.

It is nonsense, but powerful nonsense. It suits rulers: if it were not for the firm hand of Big Daddy, you apes would all be murdering each other within hours. More honourably, it also seems to explain war crimes, terrorist atrocities, concentration camps and gulags. They are our nature.

Bregman examines some of the most famous scientific and journalistic 'proofs' of mankind's innate savagery

In the first half of his lively and illuminating demolition of this truism, Rutger Bregman, the Dutch writer whose Utopia for Realists was a bestseller in English translation in 2017, digs into some of its modern fictional and supposedly factual foundations.

One is William Golding’s immensely influential dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, a product of the post-Holocaust period of pessimism about humanity and cold war paranoia. In it, a group of well brought-up English schoolboys is marooned alone on a desert island after a plane crash. It quickly dissolves into power games, bullying, tribalism and murder.

In his best piece of original research, Bregman rather wonderfully locates a real-life Lord of the Flies story. In June 1965, six boys from a boarding school, aged between 13 and 16, were marooned alone on a small rocky uninhabited island off Tonga after being shipwrecked. They were not rescued until September 1966.

What happened on the island? They worked together to catch and grow food, store rainwater, keep a fire permanently lit, play games and even make music. They kept each other safe, healthy and sane. Why is there no blockbuster movie about them? Because invented stories such as Lord of the Flies and the New Orleans hellhole, tell us what humans are “really” like. Why spoil a good story?

Bregman, building on the work of Gina Perry and others, also does precisely that for some of the most famous scientific and journalistic “proofs” of mankind’s innate savagery. The Stanford prison experiment of 1971, in which student volunteers were divided into guards and prisoners and the guards quickly turned into sadists? Entirely bogus – the guards were told what to do in advance to achieve a pre-ordained result.

When the BBC allowed two psychologists to repeat the experiment in 2001, presumably hoping for the same drama, the result was crushingly boring: after six days the guards and the prisoners ended up sitting around chatting amicably together.

The Milgram experiment in which ordinary people ended up delivering what they thought were fatal electric shocks to volunteers on the orders of the supervisors? Over half of them had figured out that the whole thing was fake. Of the rest, many refused to comply and those who did so had to be subjected to fierce pressure by the experimenters. The ones who carried on did so because they trusted the men in white coats to do the right thing.

The infamous Kitty Genovese murder case in New York in 1964 when 38 people watched from their apartment windows but did nothing while a young woman was repeatedly stabbed outside, showing our indifference to others? They didn’t. People called the cops, Kitty died in the arms of a neighbour who rushed to help and “bystanders” subsequently apprehended the killer. But the false story launched a thousand think-pieces on the wretchedness of humanity and it is still a point of reference in the US media.

What the evidence actually shows is that humans succeeded as a species by being extremely good at co-operating with and learning from each other.

Bregman is not so naive as to suggest that we are not capable of doing the most horrendous things to each other. His point, rather, is that we do not so instinctively – the vast majority of us have to be bullied, indoctrinated into dehumanising the Other, and/or convinced that we are under attack. (The US army was disturbed to find in the second World War that most soldiers did not fire their weapons, even in combat. So it developed new training techniques that “improved” performance in subsequent wars.)

In the second half of the book, Bregman argues convincingly that the dominant assumptions about behaviour in modern capitalism are upside down. They start from a belief that the default position of humanity is nasty selfishness and that we therefore respond only to threats and rewards. In fact the default is the opposite: most people behave well in most circumstances. Good management should be about creating the conditions in which they can get on with doing so.

Even a few months ago this might have seemed, as Bregman claims, “a radical idea”. The coronavirus crisis has made it blindingly obvious. Under its pressure, what we see are millions and millions of people risking their own lives to help others, not under threat of dismissal and not because of financial incentives, but because it’s what comes naturally.

If we “revert” during a disaster, it is not to being apes or angels. It is to being merely, decently human.