Reading Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A hopeful history for New Scientist, 10 June 2020

In 1651 English philosopher Thomas Hobbes startled the world with Leviathan, an account of the good and evil lurking in human nature. Hobbes argued that people, left to their own devices, were naturally viscious. (Writing in the aftermath of Europe’s cataclysmic Thirty Years War, the evidence was all around.) Ultimately, though, Hobbes’s vision was positive. Humans are also naturally gregarious. Gathering in groups, eventually we become more together than we were apart. We become villages, societies, whole civilisations.

Hobbes’ argument can be taken in two ways. We can glory in what we have built over the course of generations. Or we can live in terror of that future moment when the thin veneer of our civilisation cracks and lets all the devils out.

Even as I was writing this review, I came across the following story. In April, at the height of the surge in coronavirus cases, Americans purchased more guns than at any other point since the FBI began collecting data over 20 years ago. I would contend that these are not stupid people. They are, I suspect, people who have embraced a negatively Hobbesian view of the world, and are expecting the apocalypse.

Belief in innate human badness is self-fulfilling. (Bregman borrows from medical jargon and calls it a nocebo: a negative expectation that make one’s circumstances progressively worse.) And we do seem to try everything in our power to think the worst of ourselves. For instance, we give our schoolchildren William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies to read (and fair enough — it’s a very good book) but nobody thinks to mention that the one time boys really were trapped on a desert island for over a year — on a rocky Polynesian atoll without fresh water, in 1965 — they survived, stayed fit and healthy, successfully set a lad’s broken leg, and formed friendships that have lasted a lifetime. Before Bregman came along you couldn’t even find this story on the internet.

From this anecdotal foundation, Bregman assembles his ferocious argument, demolishing one Hobbesian shibboleth after another. Once the settlers of Easter Island had chopped down all the trees on their island (the subject of historian Jared Diamond’s bestelling 2011 book Collapse), their civilisation did not fall apart. It thrived — until European voyagers arrived, bringing diseases and the slave trade. When Catherine Susan Genovese was murdered in New York City on 13 March 1964 (the notorious incident which added the expression “bystander effect” to the psychological lexicon), her neighbours did not watch from out of their windows and do nothing. They called the police. Her neighbour rushed out into the street and held her while she was dying.

Historians and reporters can’t be trusted; neither, alas, can scientists. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, conducted in August 1971, was supposed to have spun out of control in less than two days, as students playing prison guards set about abusing and torturing fellow students cast in the role of prisoners. Almost everything that has been written about the experiment is not merely exaggerated, it’s wrong. When in 2001 the BBC restaged the experiment, the guards and the prisoners spent the whole time sitting around drinking tea together.

Bregman also discusses the classic “memory” experiment by Stanley Milgram, in which a volunteer is persuaded to electrocute a person nearly to death (an actor, in fact, and in on the wheeze). The problem here is less the experimental design and more the way the experiment was intepreted.

Early accounts took the experiment to mean that people are robots, obeying orders unthinkingly. Subsequent close study of the transcripts shows something rather different: that people are desperate to do the right thing, and their anxiety makes them frighteningly easy to manipulate.

If we’re all desperate to be good people, then we need a new realism when it comes to human nature. We can’t any longer assume that because we are good, those who oppose us must be bad. We must learn to give people a chance. We must learn to stop manipulating people the whole time. From schools to prisons, from police forces to political systems, Bregman visits projects around the world that, by behaving in ways that can seem surreally naive, have resolved conflicts, reformed felons, encouraged excellence and righted whole economies.

This isn’t an argument between left and right, between socialist and conservative; it’s but about what we know about human nature and how we can accommodate a better model of it into our lives. With Humankind Bregman moves from politics, his usual playground, into psychological, even spiritual territory. I am fascinated to know where his journey will lead.