The unbearable goodness of being: A review of 'Humankind' by Rutger Bregman

The book engages with questions about broken, unequal societies created by humans and considers them in the light of the argument that all people are decent

Rutger Bregman, author of the New York Times bestseller, Humankind: A Hopeful History, attempts to address some important central questions of our times: Why do human societies today appear fundamentally broken, with depressing levels of inequality and a pathologically polarising media ecosystem? And what to do about it?

Bregman proposes a sweeping solution and one that overestimates its own merit – he asks us to put faith in the idea that humans are inherently decent and approach the problems plaguing our political life from this philosophical plane. It’s a daring idea that is, no doubt, open to challenge, especially given his way of proving it. To illustrate, he backs this claim with a motley crew of convenient examples, including the humanitarian response following Hurricane Katrina and the spontaneous Christmas Truce of 1914. These examples, albeit heartwarming, are entirely anecdotal. Anecdotes, if taken seriously, can prove almost any hypothesis. For instance, it is possible to argue that there is no conclusive evidence regarding the "goodness" of human nature because there were no Christmas Truces during the First World War after 1914. But Humankind has no room for counter-anecdotes.

Yet, the book has the potential to make us look at crucial questions about the condition of human societies afresh and ask whether philosophers and intellectuals in the Western canon have got something very wrong in seeing human nature as inherently violent.

Bregman approaches the issue by pulling the rug from under Enlightenment, the intellectual lodestar of Western democratic values and institutions. He alleges that Western civilisation stands upon a long intellectual and cultural tradition that denies that deep down almost all humans are decent. From Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, there is ample philosophical support for the assumption that humans are savage, selfish beings that need to be reined in by the coercive power of the State or the invisible hand of markets. This assumption, according to Bregman, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When institutions are built assuming the worst of human nature, they facilitate the creation of deeply unequal and unhappy societies in the name of law. The collective dissatisfaction and anger of those residing in these societies are then amplified by the perverse incentive structure of the media ecosystem and exploited by manipulative politicians and businesspersons in their pursuit of power. Thus, institutions created to protect humankind from its worst instincts end up facilitating the rise of the most crooked individuals.

All foundational myths must be supported by the soft power of science and art, and the ‘veneer theory’ of civilisation is no exception. Bregman cites Milgram’s Shock Experiment, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and the Bystander Effect, as evidence for the deep-rooted dogma within the social sciences of viewing human nature as fundamentally brutish. Despite their non-adherence to standard research ethics, and shocking inadequacies in data collection, the aforementioned experiments continue to be taught as central truths in social psychology courses across the world. Similarly, critically acclaimed and widely-read works of literature, like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (in which a group of young boys marooned on an island descend into savegry and murder when attempting to govern themselves) serve to further the myth in popular imagination.

Humankind also offers a biting critique of modern-day media ecosystems that sensationalise brutal crimes, provide fame to bigoted politicians and offer half-truths as objective reportage. This broken incentive structure is further corrupted by the dopamine-fuelled urgency of social media. Yet, it is this shameful state of the media that proves to be the strongest evidence in favour of Bregman’s argument of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

That said, Bregman, despite what his Wikipedia page claims, is not a historian. He is a polemicist. Humankind: A Hopeful History is not a work of serious historical scholarship. It is a manifesto. It uses historical scholarship insofar as it serves the political goals of the book. The biggest hint of this is in the book’s subtitle, ‘A Hopeful History’, which is a subtle contradiction. After all, history is what has already passed, while hope is a future-directed emotion. The heart of the book lies in this contradiction. Like the ‘veneer theory’ of civilisation, Bregman wants his “humans are decent” model of human nature to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He understands that his model is limited, which is why the book is as prescriptive as it is descriptive. What he cannot explain, he recommends.

Humankind for all its flaws is a rare work that straddles the world of fiction and nonfiction in the best sense of the two terms and for this reason alone, if nothing else, deserves to be widely read. Bregman uses limited literal truths, along with speculation, to espouse an allegorical truth. Nobody really knows if there is such a thing as a single, universal human nature, but that does not matter to Bregman. He argues that by learning to expect the best from people, by avoiding the news and allowing themselves to be hopeful of the future, humans can overcome the cynicism that prevents meaningful change.

(Atish Padhy is a student of the Technology and Policy programme at The Takshashila Institution)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.