Book review: Humankind, by Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman says in close-up fighting most soldiers never fire their guns PIC: Hulton Archive / Getty Images

This latest book on society, history and anthropology by Rutger Bregman – best known for his best-seller Utopia For Realists, about the case for universal basic income – has many quotable quotes on every page, and is full of powerful aphorisms drawn from the history of political thought. Perhaps the most telling quotation, though, comes from none other than the screen-writer and filmmaker Richard Curtis. “If you make a film,” says Curtis, “about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in the whole of human history – it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society. But if I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the whole theme of Bregman’s book; the demolition of what he sees as the big lie that human beings are fundamentally evil and self-interested, and that our normal civilised behaviour is a veneer that tends to collapse under pressure, revealing the ugly reality. In making his case, Bregman ranges over every aspect of social science, beginning with our evolution as a distinct species of particularly sociable and playful ape, and continuing through our hunter-gatherer pre-history to what for him are the gathering storm-clouds of settled civilisation, involving agriculture, land ownership, inheritance, patriarchal attitudes, strict social hierarchies, enforced hard labour, the emergence of the state, and a general decline from grace.

In the argument between Hobbes and Rousseau over the fundamental character of humankind, Bregman therefore sides with Rousseau, and his idea of the noble savage; it’s not that he denies the human capacity for evil, but that he sees human evil-doing as most often an anomaly caused by those in power, who find it in their interest to divert our natural sociability, and our need to be part of something bigger than ourselves, into perverted forms of violent tribalism. And even then, argues Bregman, most human beings will do all they can to avoid deliberate acts of violence and cruelty; in close-up fighting in war, he points out, most soldiers never even fire their guns.Bregman’s style is sometimes irritatingly chatty and repetitive, as if he were talking to someone with a limited attention-span who won’t tolerate any discourse not peppered with daft analogies and cheery personal anecdotes. The thoroughness of his demolition-job is impressive, though, as he sweeps aside example after example – from the fictional Lord of the Flies, to scientific episodes like Stanley Milgram’s famous electric shock experiment at Yale – of the stories we tell ourselves in order to uphold the myth of our own wickedness.

And we do this, Bregman suggests, because a climate of distrust and mutual fear among ordinary humans tends to suit those in power. His book points out how this negative theory of human nature has been adopted by most authority-structures in recorded human history, from the religious to the political; and how it has been ruthlessly used to divide and rule us. Examples of this kind of strategy in current populist politics are of course too numerous to mention. And after a period of relative enlightenment and rapid improvement in human wellbeing in the decades after the Second World War, in the 1970s we of course ran hard into the current dominant power ideology, in the shape of extreme free market capitalism; bent on convincing us – with self-evident inaccuracy – that we are all primarily motivated only by money, and that the exercise of individual greed and self-aggrandisement, through ever greater material consumption, will eventually set us all free.

The conviction that greed and lust is all there is to the average human being, and that every other moral sentiment expressed is mere hypocrisy and “virtue signalling,” is now the dominant big lie of our time; and it apparently takes a crisis like the current Covid-19 pandemic to remind us, even temporarily, that this is not even half the truth about human nature, and that by building a society based on that assumption, we have in recent decades created a stress-filled world bereft of security and kindness, in which we, the most sociable and friendly of all the apes, increasingly have no time for each other at all.

And this, in the end, is the aspect of Bregman’s book that leaves the sympathetic reader uncertain whether to smile or weep. In detail, its deconstructions of some of the “truths” we have been told about human nature are often fascinating; as riveting as any thriller, and probably deeply necessary, in trying to shift our politics onto new and more productive ground.

In outline, though, this is a long book pointing out what should, in any rational world, be absolutely obvious: that human beings can do evil, but most of the time do not; that we can seek war, but tend, in the vast majority, to prefer peace; that we are sometimes motivated by greed and self-interest, but more often by a simple need to be involved with other people, and to be liked and accepted by them. And above all, that we owe it to ourselves both to believe in the positive and convivial creative genius that has marked most of humanity’s greatest achievements so far; and to seek to build societies and economic systems that make space for the best in us, rather than actively expecting, and encouraging, the worst.

Humankind, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 463pp, £20