"If you look at the data... most people are pretty decent". Rutger Bregman on his new (and timely) book, Humankind: A Hopeful History
With what looks like uncanny timing, the historian Rutger Bregman’s new book - after his very successful Utopia for Realists - is titled “Humankind: A hopeful History” (Bloomsbury, May 2020).
In the light of all the mutualist activity that’s been spontaneously arising in the midst of Coronavirus, Bregman’s attempt to reframe what we’re noticing about the cooperative and supportive aspects of our collective reality couldn’t be more timely. Two extracts here from recent interviews about the book.
First from the German newspaper, Deutsche Welle:
DW: In your new book you maintain that kindness is a fundamental part of human nature. But aren't people essentially egotistical and selfish, especially during a crisis?
Rutger Bregman: There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us. We revert to our true selves and we're all selfish and turn out to be animals. This is an old idea in western culture. You find it as far back as the ancient Greeks and with the founding fathers of the Christian church and with the Enlightenment philosophers. I think it's one of the central dogmas of our current capitalist models.
But scientifically we know now it's wrong. What we've seen in the past 15 to 20 years is that scientists from diverse disciplines, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, you name it, have moved to a much more hopeful view of humanity. If you look at the data and at the actual behavior of people and experiments in history, you see that most people are actually pretty decent.
But is the corona crisis bringing out our darker, more selfish side?
Obviously, today it's also relatively easy to see the selfishness. You just switch on the TV and you see reports about panic purchases, or people hoarding or fighting over toilet paper. Although I think that the vast majority of the behavior we're seeing right now is pro-social in nature.
For every panic buyer, there are a thousand nurses working as hard as they can. For every hoarder, there are a thousand civilians setting up WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups and people in the neighborhood trying to help each other. I've been really astonished to see this explosion of cooperation and altruism in a very short period of time.
And we'll need much more of that, we will need a lot of that, because this might take quite a while. So, it's a real test for our societies. But so far I think the signs are hopeful.
Will this pandemic change us?
If we only look at the economics of it, it's bigger than the financial crash of 2008.
My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.
Since the 70s and the 80s you see the rise of neoliberalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism was that most people are selfish. So, we started designing our institutions around that idea, our schools, our workplaces, our democracies. The government became less and less important.
But now as we're living through a pandemic we realize we need to do these things together. We need a strong and powerful government. We need the experts. We need universal health care. We need cooperation on a huge scale, on a global scale. So, my hope is that this crisis can help bring the neoliberal age to a definite end, so that we can move into a new age which I would like to call the new realist age, where we have a new view of human nature and don't look at human beings as fundamentally selfish anymore but as pretty decent.
The internet is full of hatred and fake news. Where is the decency there?
I think that the internet is doing a huge amount of good in these days as well. If you see how quickly knowledge is spreading, how people use the internet to spread the message of social distancing, how important it is to wash your hands. If you make the calculation, you'll get that the vast majority of all the messages on social media is actually serving a positive future right now.
But we are obviously more shocked by the negative stuff or by the fake news that is spreading. Because that really angers us. We have to be aware here of our own negativity bias. This is what psychologists call it. The negativity bias means that the bad stuff makes a bigger impression on us. That's just how your brain works.
Is the corona crisis the beginning of the end of globalization?
It is way too early to say. This is what a crisis does: It makes you question the status quo. That doesn't mean that after a crisis we move into some kind of utopia. But it is an opportunity for political change. We can talk about the role of government and the economy. Decades before there was this era where we said, the government has to get out of the way, because the government is just a drag on the economy.
In an environmental respect we know that after the pandemic we need to start working very hard on the biggest challenge of our time, which is climate change and we also need an ambitious government to lead the way.
Next from the International Politics and Society Journal:
In your book you claim that in catastrophes people don’t panic, they support each other. Have you tried to buy toilet paper during the last days?
Sure, there are examples of what you could call selfish behaviour right now. However, the vast majority of the behaviour we’re currently seeing is actually kind. You see all kinds of initiatives from the bottom up which are about helping each other.
When it comes to panic buying, it’s simple capitalist entrepreneurial theory of how supermarkets work. This is just in time delivery, so if there is 20, 30 or maybe 40 per cent more demand, then all the shelves are empty. I think we shouldn’t overemphasise that. There’s a lot of that in the news right now, but actually what is happening right now is the same what you see during other crises, like natural disasters. It’s that most behaviour is actually pro-social in nature.
In one chapter of your book you mention the Holocaust. If humans are naturally good, why are they acting in horrible ways?
Obviously, this is one of the big questions of history. One of the main points of my book is that human beings have evolved to be friendly. Biologists have found out that over the course of human evolution it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. This is literally what they call “survival of the friendliest”.
But if I discard the old idea that people are fundamentally selfish or aggressive, then how can we explain the darkest pages of our history? Wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing.
I do not have the pretence that I can give a short answer to that question. In the book, I go on about it for hundreds of pages. There’s a dark side to friendliness as well. You can call it groupish or tribal behaviour. We want to be part of a group and find it hard to go against that group; and that sometimes in those group dynamics, we can start doing horrible things in the name of loyalty, friendship and comradeship.
How can we overcome dynamics of group identity?
It’s relatively easy to assume the best in people who are close to you. Friends, colleagues, family members. It becomes more difficult for us when we talk about people who are far away, about criminals or terrorists, about immigrants or refugees. For us, these people are more abstract. I devote quite a big part of the book to making the conclusion that we need to use our rationality here and go against our intuition, to assume the best also in those who are far away from us.
For example, prisons in Norway are organised in a very counter-intuitive way. Their inmates, who have done quite horrible stuff sometimes – murders, rapes – still get the freedom to go to the cinema. There’s a library in the prison, they can make their own music. It seems very counter-intuitive, but then you look at the scientific data, how these prisons are performing, and you realise these are the best prisons in the world because they have the lowest recidivism rate – the lowest chance that someone who’s gone to prison and gets out will commit another crime. It doesn’t really matter if you’re left-wing or right-wing or whatever your worldview is. The data tells us that this is the most effective prison.
It becomes more difficult to assume the best in people who are farther away from us, but that’s also where it becomes really important to do so.