Humankind by Rutger Bregman
When something like a war or a disaster scratches away the veneer of civilisation from humans, then we revert to primitive and brutally selfish behaviour. This profoundly pessimistic view has been dominant as long as…well the foundation stories of the major faiths, with their view of original sin, and because of important philosophical texts such as Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ that characterised human existence as nasty, brutish and short. The consequence of this dominant view, as Hobbes’ explained, was that the only way to save ourselves from our baser natures is to establish authoritarian regimes and a framework of rules and regulations to regulate our behaviour. You only have to see the daily reports from disaster and war zones, or any occasion such as tribal sports events, or at the Capitol building, when the mob gathers, to realise the truth of this evaluation of human behaviour.
The Dutch author of this book, Rutger Bregman, a young, fashionable historian, would beg to differ. He sets himself firmly in the camp of Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher, who took a diametrically opposite view from Hobbes. He believed we were born innocent with a strain of decency and kindness that was gradually corrupted by those very features of the civilised world that Hobbes believed stood between humans and anarchy.
Although an optimistic soul, I came to this book with a fair degree of cynicism but also curiosity, particularly after reading Hans Rosling’s book ‘Factfulness’ with its evidence based defence of a world where, on the whole, life is getting better for most of us. Bregman is as rigorous in the examination of the facts as Rosling but in this book his main evidence is drawn from research studies by behavioural psychologists. Nevertheless, he is also willing to go down fascinating tangential paths to explore real life stories and historical and archeological research, wherever it comes from, in order to decide if we are bad to the bone or filled with human kindness.
One of his earliest examples comes when he tries to test out the ideas explored by William Goulding in ‘Lord of the Flies’. Okay, Goulding was a heavy drinking, miserable old git but his seminal work only seemed to dramatise something we all believed to be true: by putting his public school boys in a primitive world with no grown up rules or authority, they behave like murderous, selfish savages. However, when Bregman tracks down a long forgotten real life story from 1963 that replicated many features of the novel – several teenage school boys marooned on a Pacific island for over a year – the results were directly opposite to Goulding’s fictional conclusions. The boys cooperated peacefully, calmly, instituting sensible methods for conflict resolution and cohesive routines for survival. When they were eventually rescued, they left the island as friends and free of trauma.
It is stories like this that provide fascinating colour between his forensic examination of a series of world famous behavioural studies, most of which took place in America in the decades after the second world war. You will possibly be aware of many of these studies. For example, in 1971 Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, conducted research with student volunteers who were assigned roles as either prison guards in uniform or prisoners in cells. Over the two week long simulation of a prison environment, the members of both groups lost their individual character traits and behaved in accordance with their roles which meant that the guards were increasingly brutal and authoritarian and the prisoners became dysfunctional, chaotic and lacking in self-esteem. As I say, this was just one of several such studies – another famous one being Milgram’s electric shock treatment where research volunteers follow orders to administer potentially fatal electric shocks to other volunteers who fail to answer questions correctly – all of which reveals the brutality and indifference to suffering that lies beneath the surface. As Bregman highlights, there was just one problem with these world famous, concept defining studies – they were irredeemably flawed. What I hadn’t realised is that for each of these eye catching studies there was a ton of archive materials (notes, recordings, interviews,etc). These archives are in effect the evidence about the methodology and rigour of the research; and in case after world famous case, Bregman shows that over the years each of these studies was run in a dubious, downright unethical and dishonest way. Zimbardo briefed the students how to behave, and coaxed and cajoled guards to be more brutal when they expressed reservations about the treatment of the prisoners, amongst many other actions that made his findings unreliable. At the time, academic peers did not bother themselves with the archives because the findings seemed to confirm their unconscious bias about human nature and explain why, for example, Germans were able to say that they were just following orders during the war.
Time and again, Bregman shows how the methodology was flawed and was only questioned many years afterwards when Zimbardo, Milgram and their like had made their reputations. Worryingly, despite the fact these studies have now been discredited Zimbardo still holds a senior role amongst the psychological establishment and his and other ideas seem to be well entrenched.
This is perhaps my strongest impression from this book, a certain cynicism about accepted ideas regarding human behaviour based on “so called” research evidence. I just hope that the flabbiness around methods and research rigour, present in academic circles in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, is a thing of the past.
It is hard not to come away from Bregman’s beguiling mix of research, anecdotes and historical precedents with a sense that most people are pretty decent. He tackles head on all the obvious rejoinders to this optimism such as the holocaust and the Eichmann trial; and I think he does a pretty solid job but this is such a sensitive issue that readers will have to make up their own minds about the way Bregman frames this behaviour.
As I say, my naturally sunny personality makes me unconsciously biased to believe that even in the most extreme situations people will do the right thing. Bregman uses an initial example of a questionnaire that is used to test how people would react when trying to get out of a crashed plane and this certainly sets the tone for this book. The vast majority of people surveyed were clear that they would trample over everyone to escape. However, in real life in examples over many decades, the opposite is true: the vast majority invariably help others first.
The first part of this book is well worth reading just to make you feel better about humankind. In the second half, when Bregman tries to establish systems to enable this decency to be the foundation of the way the world runs, I found this less successful. Yes, he provides good examples of true communal government but seems to easily excuse the failed examples. I am also suspicious of any books that tell us humankind was more happy and fulfilled as hunter gatherers before the yoke of an agricultural, fixed society emerged about 10,000 years ago. It’s not that I don’t believe this is a reasonable possibility but I don’t know how one can know.
Despite those caveats, I really enjoyed this book and the examples of people doing the right thing whether from Nazi occupied Denmark or during the blitz were uplifting. And remember, don’t listen to those pesky psychologists, they're mountebanks and hucksters not academic gurus.