A Hopeful History of Humanity
A Review of Rutger Bregmen's Humankind
I read a truly masterful book on human nature, Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Bregman really is the Dutch Malcolm Gladwell as stated in the blurb on the back cover. Like Gladwell, he is so easy to read, but the scholarship is much deeper. His fundamental point is also very similar to Gladwell’s most recent book, Talking to Strangers. If our default patterns of behavior are to trust people’s in-built desire for decency and to belong to the social group—what Bregman calls Homo puppy—we will benefit from this trust more often than trust is abused by scammers and sociopaths.
The problem is that this is not how we have chosen to structure our societies. According to Bregman’s account, humanity started to go astray from homo puppy with the introduction of farming and the establishment of cities. Paradoxically, the Enlightenment, the belief that reason can be an engine of human progress as Pinker so eloquently defends, only led us further astray from our homo puppy roots, ossifying the veneer theory of civilization proposing that we are only a few degrees removed from the descent into barbarism.
Bregman flips the script on this veneer theory narrative. Civilization itself, if it is not attuned to the homo puppy nature that enabled homo sapiens to explode onto the evolutionary scene and outcompete our hominid ancestors, will decisively shift to barbarism. Early in the 20th century, the anarchist Rosa Luxemburg predicted that the uber-nationalist states of her day faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. Similarly, Bregman’s defense of utopian realism includes another quote from Luxemburg’s contemporary, Emma Goldman, who lamented the tendency for elites favoring the status quo to invoke human nature as an excuse for perpetuating injustice:
Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! …The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite the insistence on wickedness, and weaknesses of human nature.
As I noted in my reflection on Klein’s book on how to avert catastrophic climate breakdown, these elites have never truly went away breeding cynicism on the possibility of environmental and social justice, an endeavor that is not correctly characterized as utopian but one that avoids calamitous fantasies of our current trajectory and bring human societies everywhere “down to earth”.
From true story of The Lord of the Flies to the Stanford prison experiment to Milgram’s shock machine to the shocking death of Kitty Genovese, Bregman has uncovered something very powerful about the process of manufacturing consent. People will consistently elevate those veneer theories to the pop psychology canon because they so often feel true. Humans are more than any other successful species that has ever existed intrinsically vulnerable to physical threats. Because of our physical limitations when we fail to band together, the fears that capture our psyche are those fictional universals, popular stories, psychological experiments that ask us to imagine a hypothetical, an alternative to existing state of affairs, where human relations really have descended into a free-for-all competition of man against man. The reason why the psychic capture is so strong is people intuitively understand that our superpower lies within our sociality and capacity for cooperation. Take this superpower away and we will almost certainly perish, either from the elements or conniving schemes of fellow human beings.
The theoretical and psychological power of these mental schemas as coming from conjuring up a system’s negation sharply resonates with LSE anthropologist David Graeber’s critique in The Utopia of Rules. The book proposes that people secretly desire the structure of rules provided by bureaucracy and fear the perils of less structured forms of organization based on the play principle. The radical experiments Bregman describes in his book, such as health care management that relegates the concrete tasks of management, must therefore overcome obstacles arising from doubts of structurelessness.
These barriers are not new and never purely incidental. They are constructed to manufacture consent, especially of the upper crust of college educated citizens who are sophisticated enough to formulate a coherent view of public affairs, the group Chomsky identifies as critical. For centuries, images of the Roman circuses filled this role to guard against periodic movements in favor of expanding democratic control. From the Enlightenment to the start of the 20th century, “liberal” educated men could think of nothing but the violent fanaticism of the games. The lesson is the way to tout a system’s virtues is to construct a mental image of what world would be like in its absolute negation.
Graeber answers the paradox of proliferating bureaucracy seen in the Taylorist billing, paperwork, and monitoring of nearly all modern professions from law to health care in the fear of play. The play principle is seen as frightening because it leads to novelty and serendipity, which engenders more aversion than the predictability and transparency of games. We want to be put in a sandbox, not the bombed-out junkyards of the kind Bregman emphasizes are more conducive to pure play.
Of course, there is a reason why Graeber characterizes our innate desire for the structure of rules as “utopian” and therefore misplaced. It is impossible to exhaustively devise a system of rules to address every possible problem of human interaction. As the legal scholar Braitwaite argues in his theory of legal certainty, rules are even more compromised in the multiplying domains where the actions are complex, the systems are dynamic, and the stakes are high. Graeber therefore inverts pragmatic realism and utopian theorizing in a similar way to Bregman’s new realism. Why is an existing arrangement of organization viewed as pragmatic when its results are not only inefficient (i.e. worse outcomes at greater cost), but unsustainable? Similarly, why are policies that are aligned with the status quo viewed as realistic when they require wonderfully abstract assumptions of homo economicus, which can only be held up by the high priests of academic citadels, and are not attuned to the actual human nature of homo puppy?
The inversion of utopianism—that the truly utopian thinkers are those elites and mental charlatans who occupy Latour’s out-of-this-world vector—is a necessary but not sufficient condition to promoting a new narrative of how human societies function, undermining the total institutions that thrive under perfect hierarchy. The inversion is necessary because it allows unconventional thinkers to neutralize the psychic power of negation. The status quo is often ill-structured and therefore accelerates the calamities it intends to avert.
Yet it is not sufficient for the reasons outlined by The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in his book, Out of the Wreakage: The New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Protest movements so frequently fail because they lack structure; they are successful in refuting a dominant frame, but refuting it only reinforces it, Monbiot writes. This is why Bregman’s discussion of experiments in Norweigian prisons, non-hierarchical management of health care, and guided peer learning in Dutch education are so necessary to create an alternative frame that could potentially displace the dominant frames of our economy and society that are often not only unfair and immoral, but inefficient.
The most revealing example of the kind of change both Monbiot and Bregman envision is in the discussion of participatory budgeting in the developing world. Rather than the politics-based change of coalition building, like the Bernie Sanders movement in the U.S. or the Corbynistas in the U.K., Bregman sees greater possibility and more potential for democratic flowering in policy-based change. When citizens participate directly, they are more likely to support greater taxation that allows developing countries to escape the middle-income trap because they have real power to direct funds into health, education, and other goals valued by the community, rather than have those public funds diverted into the pet projects of clientelistic politicians.
In Bregman’s view, democratic publics around the world have been feeding themselves a great lie. That lie is simply that self-government is a noble vision, but ultimately elusive and must delegate economic policymaking to technocrats in capitals from Beijing to Washington to Brussels. To correct the nocebo effect of this lie, we must take a leap of faith to a more evolved view of government that restores people power to its ancient origins. The opener of Monbiot’s book is ultimately correct:
Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.
Democracy may not currently exist in its pure form, but it is slipping way and unless we allow a new narrative to take hold based on a hopeful view of humankind, we will soon lament its disappearance.
I have some doubts about how experiments to adjust policy to Bregman’s correct view of human nature would function in practice and at scale. The most topical would be how to “defund the police”, or, more accurately, promote police reform to expand the competencies of public order professionals to engender a decisive shift away from warrior style training to wrap around social services. To “get to Denmark”, this is a vital step in the evolution of the state that encourages trust and inclusion. The reason why it is the final step of the transformation of Hobbes’ Leviathan is because it is fundamentally aligned with human nature to help others, while the constant provocation of violence is not.
In ways appreciated by Graeber, the obstacle to overcome is the imagination of negation. In a world where all police are not armed and guns are still ubiquitous and unregulated within society, our mind drifts into the chaos that could ensue if we took “defund the police” seriously and literally, meaning embarking in a radical experiment of public order that optimizes trust by minimizing provocations from the state’s ominous threat of violence. That example seems to suggest that Bregman’s narrative of human nature could only coalesce around a workable policy vision if it took hold as a “big bang” event. Rather than segmented policy change in police, prison, political, climate, and education reform, all these reforms must occur at once, which cannot come about by explicitly articulating policy platforms, but acculturating society to the norms consistent with Bregman’s account of human nature. That is, sabotage is so rare and can be effectively policed by compatriots when it does occur, that the synergistic benefits of patterns of behavior based on trust are overwhelmingly positive, and contain the great hope for humanity’s future.
Trust also has a dark side though. The section on the nature of grotesque evil, from Nazism to Islamic terrorism, was enlightening on this point. As it turns out, empathy that binds is a double-edged sword because many can be convinced to do evil disguised advancing the good of their compatriots. The lesson is that empathy—a virtue that is often internalized in the youngest elementary school children—is not a good vision to achieve justice. Depending on the particular individual’s moral psychology, it can either lead people to exclude others who do not share a common identity heightening the us/them mentality or the thought of another individual’s suffering can be so mentally demanding that it fosters disillusionment and inaction. The alternative to empathy is compassion, and we have an obligation to expand the circle of compassion, even as we recognize that expanding empathy is both undesirable and an impossibly high demand.
Compassion is the natural state of being for homo puppy that must be rediscovered if we are to advance to a higher state of being, not of wealth, but of justice. Activists from Bryan Stevenson to Liu Xiaobo have made this point, and returning to this kingdom of justice requires that myths used by those in power to manipulate those below must not be tolerated. Overcoming these lies and the sickness Native Americans identified as weitiko, learned hatred that prevents feelings of compassion and compromises innate desire to help others, has one simple solution—contact. Division and separation is what enables lies to thrive and mutate into truly grotesque forms, generating both enemies and hatred. Hence, no enemies, no hatred, and no lies, the slogan often repeated by the Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.
The ambitious yet simple program that Bregman introduces is what it would look like if public policies and institutional structures were put in their proper place and informed by a narrative of compassion. The proper place of individuals within the spiritual universe does not revolve around people creating stories, which, in turn, confirm the imagined narrative. All great religious and spiritual traditions have creation myths that suggest the antecedence of stories, “a scenario in which the story was already unfolding in the cosmos before, and even as a result of which, man came into being,” so wrote the novelist Chinhua Achebe.
Adopting the atheistic vision of Bertrand Russell, a philosopher the author began to admire as a young undergrad, Bregman believes that cosmological stories of man’s place in the universe and reason for being are not strictly necessary to believe that the proper place of man is compassionate. The coldly rational logic of evolutionary theory, not Darwinian survival of the fittest but the compassion of homo puppy, is the deep story that creates people who have potential to develop that story further.
Still, Bregman is not quite as rigidly atheistic as Russell instead adopting the perspective of the theologican Reinhold Niebuhr that what religion believes —our basic decency—is not wholly true, but it may become true if it is not doubted. The Will to Doubt may be what has allowed us to attain the wealth associated with scientific and engineering marvels, but the Will to Believe in our compassionate nature is what will enable humanity to construct a world house fitting of our cosmological destiny.