Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020)
Rutger Bregman (1988)
461 pages
Bregman opens by describing findings from a range of scientific disciplines that reveal that humans, far from being selfish by nature, have in fact evolved to value cooperation. He cites work done by biologists and geneticists over the past half-century, for example, that indicates that Homo sapiens have followed an evolutionary path that favored selection for friendliness, a trait that led to the development of an extremely powerful ability for social learning. This ability meant that relative to Neanderthals, for example, who had larger brains and were possibly smarter individually, Homo sapiens were able to spread new skills decisively faster across large groups.
The historian Noah Yuval Harari makes a similar argument in his captivating work Sapiens, describing Homo sapiens as having, some 200 thousand years ago, developed the capability for fictive language during what he refers to as the Cognitive Revolution. This enabled them to effectively aggregate and transmit large amounts of information about their physical world and their group relationships, and so create social constructs he refers to as imagined orders. These imagined orders, Harari argues, enabled the successful cooperation necessary to support the formation of large, cohesive groups with rapidly evolving social structures, giving Homo sapiens a critical advantage over the other species of humankind. (My review of Harari’s book is linked to at right.)
Bregman and Harari arrive at strikingly different conclusions, however, when turning to the unresolved question of what ultimately happened to the Neanderthals, and why Homo sapiens became the only surviving human species.
The common understanding for the disappearance of the Neanderthals has been that they were in some way overwhelmed by migrations of Homo sapiens into their territory. Harari, for example, suggests that either “Homo sapiens drove them to extinction” by using their creativity to out-complete Neanderthals for resources, or, more dramatically, that a predisposition to intolerance among Homo sapiens led to “the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” (Sapiens, 17-18). Harari justifies his suggestion that Homo sapiens may have carried out an “ethnic-cleansing campaign” against the Neanderthals by extrapolating backward from more recent history, observing that “in modern times, a small difference in color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.” (Sapiens, 18)
In contrast, Bregman argues that for the idea of Homo sapiens
wiping [Neanderthals] out …there’s not a shred of archaeology to support it. The more plausible theory is that we humans were better able to cope with the harsh climatic conditions of the last ice age … because we’d developed the ability to work together. (71)The idea that Neanderthals succumbed to Homo sapiens in aggressive competition or outright conflict is, he argues, an example of the assumed selfishness of human nature leading to conclusions apparently unsubstantiated by existing evidence.
More generally, Bregman rejects what he considers to be the widespread belief that warfare has been a constant part of human history, noting that there has been little indication of large, violent clashes among early humans. On the contrary, war appears to have only become a significant part of human behavior after the transition from hunter-gather to agricultural societies.
Settled farming communities not only increased the amount of possessions to be defended, but their inhabitants generally lived a more precarious existence, due to the rise of diseases from farm animals and an increased susceptibility to natural disasters. [Harari, in his book Sapiens, makes the intriguing argument that the Agricultural Revolution represented an evolutionary trap for Homo sapiens: “the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. … Nobody agreed to this deal.” (83, Sapiens)]
(Along with humans in farming societies becoming more defensive, Bregman suggests that the transition to such settlements and the associated challenges “triggered a seismic shift in religious life … to [a belief] in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done.” (105) The development of a “whole clerical class … in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry” (105) represented a significant shift in religious beliefs and behaviors from what the evidence hints at as having been common among hunter-gatherers.)
An important role in the development of farming communities’ tendency to go to war, Bregman argues, is the apparent human preference for those like ourselves over strangers – he notes recent research that has demonstrated such preferences as already being exhibited by infants as young as six months old.
Admittedly, this result aligns with the spirit of Harari’s “ethnic cleansing” comments, quoted above. Bregman, however, argues that such distrust might have had little impact on hunter-gatherer societies, where meetings with strangers would have tended to take place with small groups of people at a time, and so “any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.” (211)
In the settled communities that developed after the transition to agriculture, however, leaders actually exploited our xenophobic tendencies, in order to promote conflicts. The fomenting of an ongoing feeling of uncertainty about and threat from others allowed (and, for that matter, continues to allow) leaders to promote their importance and so increase their hold on power. In general, warriors who successfully protected their communities became indispensable, and, not surprisingly, learned to profit from the strength of their position.
Bregman acknowledges that the all-to-common descent of such leaders into corruption and self-aggrandizement would seem to challenge his overall hypothesis: if people are basically friendly, why do leaders (in whatever context, at whatever time) so often become mean? In response he attributes this to the well-known observation that power corrupts, noting experiments that show that having power tends to turn-off people’s empathy and to make them feel separate and distant from others, leading them to become socially shameless. And, unlike in hunter-gatherer societies, which were small enough to quickly put such shameless members in their place, within farming societies’ growing, anonymous populations, leaders became so powerful that they could not be easily removed without, say, a revolution – which, as famously observed by The Who in their song Won’t Get Fooled Again, generally tended to result in a new, similarly shameless leader.
Thus, the transition to farming communities introduced an increasingly precarious existence for humankind, and the growth of these settlements led to leaders who exploited these threats and the human tendency for xenophobia to maintain their hold on power. By creating an environment in which, absent the steadying hand of the state, people felt the imminent risk of violence, leaders effectively trained people to assume the inherent selfishness of human nature. And this mistaken understanding of humankind has carried through to the present day.
Bregman’s demonstration of the many consequences of this misunderstanding of human nature represent perhaps the most dramatic portion of his book. Examining several well-known historical events and psychology experiments, he demonstrates how an unwavering belief in the fundamentally selfish nature of humankind has led to false interpretations, and lasting misunderstandings of their implications. In each case, he first lays out the commonly held understandings, before then re-examining them – not re-interpreting them, but rather simply exposing the facts of what is known about them, facts that have not been so much suppressed as ignored, because they didn’t align with the expectations of investigators or the general public.
It would spoil the dramatic impact of his telling of these examples to describe them here in detail. Suffice it to say, however, that most readers will come away with their core assumptions and beliefs about these well-known and seemingly well understood events shattered – as Bregman acknowledges happened to him also. He effectively demonstrates how the basic assumptions that humans are selfish and prone to monstrous evil at the slightest whim have led scientists, journalists, politicians, economists – and, in fact, most all of us – to accept miss-interpretations and at times willful miss-characterizations, and then to pass such conclusions on uncritically, even when contrary evidence is readily available.
Although leaders since the early period after the transition to agriculture have encouraged a selfish view of human nature, Bregman notes that it was during the Enlightenment that this idea became institutionalized. Enlightenment period philosophers and politicians celebrated it, he argues, building institutions based on reason and rationality that aimed to encourage and support each individual’s (apparently inherent) selfish behavior as a path to furthering the greater good. Thus were born: economic systems that encouraged people to focus on a desire to make a profit; democratic systems such as the U.S. constitution that created “a system of ‘checks and balances’, in which everybody kept an eye on everybody else” (246); and more generally a rule of law “governed by reason alone.” (246)
Certainly, acknowledges Bregman, “a few centuries into the Age of Reason [a]ll things considered, … the Enlightenment has been a triumph for humankind … our lives … exponentially better and the world … richer, safer and healthier than ever before.” (247) But he then, in perhaps the most trenchant statement in this engaging and convincingly argued work, fires a direct shot across the bow of the cruise ship filled with end of history celebrants, saying of these Enlightenment approaches to our world: “it was the best answer – until now.” (248)
For, willing to grant the Enlightenment institutions their due in lifting the world over the past several centuries out of the abject poverty and misery that was the inheritance of the shift to an agricultural society, he proposes that these institutions are not the final, best approach. He argues that it has come time to consider the next step in our social evolution, pointing out that:
the Enlightenment also had a dark side. Over the past few centuries we’ve learned that capitalism can run amok, sociopaths can seize power and a society dominated by rules and protocols has little regard for the individual. (248)
The flaw of Enlightenment thinking and the institutions that arose from it, according to Bregman, is in fact precisely the mistaken assumption that selfishness is fundamental to human nature. Convinced that we are by nature generally greedy, easily corrupted and prone to violence, it is little surprise that we lived up to those expectations, and have supported the creation of systems based upon them.
Over the final part of the book, Bregman demonstrates how a world based on an accurate view of human nature could look – predicated, of course, on the possibility of disabusing people of their current, deeply held misconceptions concerning the selfishness of their fellows.
He begins by debunking the Enlightenment (and our) assumption, fundamental to capitalism, that “other people can be motivated solely by money,” (266) or, more generally, that “the only thing powerful enough to spur us to action is the promise of a reward or the fear of punishment.” (267) Reviewing studies that have shown that in fact “bonuses can blunt the intrinsic motivation of employees … and that bonuses and targets can erode creativity” (269), he notes that these approaches actually demonstrate the “parallels between the western capitalist economy and that of the former Soviet Union.” (269)
He deliberately compares the "western capitalist economy" in that quote to the "former Soviet Union", and not communism. For, having expressed his concerns with the central institution that originated out of Enlightenment thinking about selfishness as central to human nature – free-market capitalism – he addresses the elephant in the room head on:
“Communism, we’re told, cannot work. Why? Because it’s based on a flawed understanding of human nature. Without private property, we lose all motivation and swiftly revert into apathetic parasites. Or so the story goes. Even as a teenager it struck me as odd that the case for communism’ ‘failure’ seemed to rest solely on the evidence of bloodthirsty regimes in countries where ordinary citizens had no say – regimes supported by all-powerful police states and corrupt elites.” (307)
Setting aside such totalitarian perversions of the idea of communism, he traces the origins of the word back to Latin to argue that communal ownership – the commons – exists in our present societies to a greater extent than we realize, and in fact represents, he argues, “a vital mainstay of capitalism.” (309)
And returning again to our earliest ancestors, he notes that essentially everything was communal in hunter-gather societies. The transition away from this came, again, with the transition to an agricultural society:
It’s only in the past 10,000 years that steadily bigger slices of the commons have been swallowed up by the market and the state. It began with the first chieftains and kings, who laid claim to lands which had previously been shared by everyone. Today, it’s mainly multinationals that appropriate all kinds of commons. (309)
The trend away from communal ownership saw a brief reversal “in the late Middle Ages [when] Europe witnessed an explosion of communal spirit … an increasing share of pasture land under collective control.” (313) However, this period was ended by “Enlightenment-era economists [who] decided collective farmlands were not maximizing their production potential.” (313) Thus in reality, he argues,
it wasn’t the invisible hand of the market that gently shepherded peasants from their farms into factories, but the ruthless hand of the state. … [The] ‘free market’ was planned and imposed from the top down ... by states. (313-4)
The goal now must then be, argues Bregman, to move beyond free-market capitalism, to build new institutions that can begin to correct the "dark side" that has arisen out of those that grew out of Enlightenment thinking. Along with moving toward participatory democracy – bringing a wider variety of voices directly into the decision making process a more autonomous local level – Bregman finds potential new economic approaches already being pursued in a number of places around the world. He notes, for example, a policy implemented by the Republican governor of Alaska in the late 1970’s, who established a fund that has paid a “wholly unconditional” annual dividend to each Alaskan. Though it was argued that most people would squandered it (again, that enduring assumption of the “stench of human corruption,” to quote from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song Christina the Astonishing), Bregman notes that studies have shown “no adverse effects on employment and that it substantially reduced poverty.” (316) Applying such a dividend (effectively a Universal Basic Income, UBI, though Bregman doesn’t use the term in the book) more broadly he argues “would give each of us the freedom to make our own choices. Venture capital for the people.”
In this, Bregman makes arguments similar to those of Martin Hägglund, in This Life. Though Hägglund uses detailed philosophical arguments to demonstrate that capitalism has fundamental inconsistencies that make it inherently exploitative, his ultimate point, like Bergman’s, is that if what our economic systems valued were not purely the extraction of the value we bring as workers, then we would be free “to educate ourselves and to deliberate on what would count as meaningful activities for us ... rather than being prescribed what should count as meaningful activity by what happens to be profitable for a capitalist at the moment.” (This Life, 259) Also, similar to Bregman’s calls for a more participatory democracy and increased focus on expanding the communal realm, Hägglund argues for what he refers to as democratic socialism, noting that:
To subordinate the state to society is to transform the state into an actual democracy. … While the commitment to serve the interests of society as a whole will always be challenging and contestable, it is in principle impossible to sustain such a commitment under capitalism. Because of the social form of wage labor, democratic politics and democratic states necessarily serve as organs for representing class interests that are competing for control. We cannot actually deliberate on how best to serve the interests of society as a whole, since we must prioritize the private interests of capitalists. This prioritization is not optional, since under capitalism there can be no production of social wealth without the profits of privately owned enterprises. (This Life, 268)
And though Hägglund doesn’t explore the origins of the capitalist system, he mirrors Bregman in arguing that democracy as currently constituted serves as the mechanism for imposing capitalism.
Bregman provides other examples of alternatives to the institutional forms created during the Enlightenment, examining present-day companies built on a “more positive view of human nature” (277) and outlining the success they’ve achieved, both in terms of their bottom line and ability to attract talented employees, as well as in the challenges they have faced from our entrenched ideas and institutions. Similarly, he explores educational systems that avoid the standard, institutional protocols and top-down organization to allow students to instead learn in a more open environment – structured, but not overly constrained. In these ways, Bregman argues, an understanding of humans as fundamentally friendly and cooperative can lead to a radically better path forward for society, one that addresses the current issues of political disenfranchisement and economic inequality.
A fundamental challenge to Bregman’s hopeful vision for better institutions beyond our current capitalist and political systems is one that he himself raises early in the book, but only lightly touches again onward the end: that power corrupts. This idea that leaders tend to become corrupted by the distance their position creates for them from others is a point he also raises during an interview for the radio program On the Media with Brooke Gladstone, in which he nonetheless acknowledges the necessity of institutions – he is not in any sense an anarchist. Bregman never returns to address how to avoid such a problem over the long run. Even institutions that in their first generations have enlightened leaders who value and encourage participatory democracy are susceptible to later leaders who become corrupted, and, in pursuit of wealth or power, actively undercut and eventually destroy the good that has been created.
That said, in Humankind, Bregman offers a profoundly transformative vision of human nature as fundamentally peaceful and cooperative. We are not, he argues, the selfish, violence-prone species that we have been led to believe, a belief that was encouraged by the early leaders of agricultural communities to stoke our tendency to xenophobia and so strengthen their hold on power, and more recently has been at the heart of how our political and economic institutions have been formed since the Enlightenment. These institutions have come to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: to excel, or even survive, within them, people have come to believe that others are selfish and greedy, and that to keep up they themselves must also act selfishly and greedily, despite what they perhaps feel is their better nature.
We have come far as a species, particularly over the past several centuries, but our negative view of human nature – of our fellow humans – threatens to undermine that progress. By recognizing and internalizing a view of our fellow humans as fundamentally good, we have a chance to rethink our political and economic institutions, and so to remake them in ways that will enable us to overcome our current social and economic dysfunction.
Other notes and information:
Bregman discusses his solution to poverty in a persuasive Ted Talk.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
