Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. (New York: Little Brown, 2020, ISBN: 978-0-316-41853-9). 461 pp. Hardcover, $30.00.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History was just released in June, and already it’s being compared to Yuval Harari’s Sapiens.[1] Like Sapiens, it will enrich your understanding of the human animal. Like Sapiens, it’s a work of big-picture nonfiction by a rising public intellectual. Like Sapiens, it’s ambitious, erudite, and compulsively readable.[2] But where Harari tells an eminently sobering tale, Bregman threads his narrative with a strange and subversive optimism. A thirty-two-year-old Dutch journalist, Bregman is best known for his bestselling Utopia for Realists—that, and his delightful YouTube skewering of propagandist Tucker Carlson. A skilled debunker and storyteller, Bregman sets out to upend the prevailing picture of human nature and, in the process buoy our hopes for humanity. But does he succeed at the former? And should he succeed at the latter?

Bregman argues that the dominant conception of human nature is unduly cynical; for a combination of reasons, we tend to see each other as more selfish and manipulative than we really are. Our built-in “negativity bias” causes us to brood over evidence of human depravity and attend too little to the niceness that predominates in most of our dealings. The effect is compounded by the daily news cycle, which is constantly highlighting the exceptional and the ugly. Literature, pop culture, and history, it turns out, further skew our understanding. We read gruesome crime novels, watch shows that feature scheming antagonists, and write histories that focus on war and conflict. Meanwhile, everyday acts of decency and kindness are busy not becoming the stuff of attention-grabbing stories. The implication is that they’re always and everywhere undercounted.

Bregman’s Exhibit A is the bestselling novel The Lord of the Flies. Written by British schoolmaster William Golding in the 1950s, it depicts a band of schoolboys descending into barbarism on a deserted island. The implicit message? A thin mantle of civilization is all that restrains our dark and violent nature. Golding’s story was pure fiction, but it had the zeitgeist behind it. Released in the aftermath of World War II, its depressing portrayal of human nature struck a chord and helped a shellshocked world make sense of the Holocaust. (Bregman conjectures that cynical views of human nature also resonate because they absolve us of responsibility. If we’re constitutionally corrupt, our failures to make the world a better place are excused.) Golding went on to sell tens of millions of copies and receive a Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee even hailed his “realistic narrative art” as “illuminat(ing) the human condition.”

But Bregman shows just how unrealistic Golding’s view of human nature really is. For starters, a real-life Lord of the Flies scenario played out differently. When six Tongan boys were marooned for over a year on a nearly uninhabitable island, they came together, worked out how to cooperate and survive, and became lifelong friends. The more uplifting real-life story received little press, though, and was almost lost to history. (Bregman’s rescue of it from history’s discard pile itself makes for a fascinating story.) But why did the fictional account propagate like crazy and the factual account all but disappear? Because cynical stories sell better than realistic ones, just as lies spread faster than the truth online.[3] As Jonathan Swift put it: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Bregman brings home the point by showing that the producers of “reality” TV shows go to extraordinary lengths to induce human nastiness—or have their shows canceled for lousy ratings. (The hit show Survivor was itself inspired by Golding’s novel.) It seems our taste for dramatic stories systematically skews our picture of human nature.

Nor is science immune from these distorting effects. On Bregman’s telling, the Holocaust left humanity in need not just of stories, but also of research capable of delivering absolution. And in the 1950s and 1960s, opportunistic researchers began supplying the latter—in the form of findings that support a cynical picture of human nature. In Muzafer Sherif’s famous Robbers Cave experiments, boys at a summer camp were pitted against each other, and an ugly tribalism broke out. Only Bregman reveals that Sherif had to work overtime to instigate the conflict that supposedly flows so readily from human nature. In Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiments, human guinea pigs participated in the cruel abuse of other test subjects—but only because the experimenters bullied them to abuse. In Stanley Milgram’s acclaimed obedience experiments, test subjects appeared willing to administer painful electric shocks at the behest of a “scientist,” but closer examination reveals that many of them didn’t believe the shocks were real. Meanwhile, the brutal 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese seemed to demonstrate the callous indifference of bystanders—but only because an ambitious New York Times reporter distorted the facts to create a sensational story. (This warped story is now routinely used to dramatize the so-called “Bystander Effect.”) Each of these “findings” found their way into introductory psychology textbooks despite shoddy scientific reasoning and appalling ethical lapses. In each case, the researcher had to hide key elements of context to create a media sensation and become a celebrated scientist. Together, these ambitious men painted a dark picture of human nature—one still reinforced, year in and year out, in introductory psychology courses.

Bregman also assembles a credible case that Homo sapiens was “self-domesticated” for friendliness. Domesticated animals exhibit a curious bundle of traits: among other things, they appear more youthful and feminine than their wild counterparts. A pivotal experiment by the Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev showed that you can turn the fierce silver fox into a fawning puppy simply by selecting for friendliness. In just a few generations, his foxes began looking and acting like dogs. Biologists believe that canines are the product of selection for friendliness, and it’s beginning to look like we and our bonobo cousins are too.[4] Distinctive features of our bodies and minds tell the tale: in their choice of mates and tribesmen, our ancestors probably prioritized friendly, cooperative instincts, thereby transforming us—their descendants—into “ultrasocial” primates.

In fact, the intelligence we humans take such pride in is starting to look like a byproduct of selection for friendliness. Neanderthals possessed larger brains, but our Homo sapiens ancestors had a knack for social learning—the inclination to share information and build shared understanding. Of the various explanations of humanity’s linguistic, cultural, and technological prowess, this trait—sometimes called intention-sharing—now appears to have been pivotal.[5] It may explain why we survived while other hominin lineages died out. Bregman calls cooperative learning our ancestors’ “superpower” and encapsulates biology’s changed view of human nature with the nickname Homo puppy. It’s all part of his effort to give our species a brand makeover, and I for one find it curiously compelling.

Cynical pictures of human nature—like those of Machiavelli and Hobbes—are forever being touted as “realistic,” but in actual fact, argues Bregman, they are anything but. Now Bregman’s view needs to be reconciled with the many atrocities that scar humanity’s track record. He does this by showing that, where it is not exaggerated, human awfulness can usually be traced to the “nurture” component of the nature-plus-nurture equation. For example, power corrupts by shutting down neural circuitry designed to produce mutualism and compassion. (In fact, people in power are measurably more callous. They’re more “impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant, and rude … they’re more likely to cheat on the spouses, are less attentive, and less interested in other people’s perspectives.”[6]) Also, power-hungry leaders twist empathy for “us” into enmity against “them.”

On Bregman’s account, modern institutions are major contributors to our moral corruption. Modern military practices create psychological distance between warriors and their targets, allowing us to slaughter as never before. Capitalism takes human selfishness as axiomatic and excuses obscene levels of inequality. Multinational corporations normalize shamelessly exploitative behavior. Social media giants give us online anonymity and enable billions to participate in the dehumanization of others. For Bregman, human depravity is the result of a “mismatch” between human nature (which is overwhelmingly kind and egalitarian) and the environments we create (which are altogether too hierarchical, desensitizing, exploitative, and riven by power imbalances).

Bregman’s case is not without flaws. At times, he struggles to absolve human nature. He points out that the very neural hormones that trigger in-group love and affection (notably oxytocin) also play a role in mobilizing murderous tribalism, but he fails to note that oxytocin’s involvement is in no way exculpating. He downplays evidence that our hunter-gatherer ancestors practiced warfare and genocide and takes the lack of cave-paintings depicting warfare as an indication that it may be a byproduct of civilization—a questionable inference at best. Bregman emphasizes our capacity to welcome strangers into an extended network of mostly cooperative tribes and suggests that, in prehistoric times, that may have been the norm. He eagerly characterizes civilization as a “curse,” only to backpedal on the claim. (He does this by asking whether civilization is a good idea and concluding that it’s “too soon to say.”)

Bregman confesses to being a motivated reasoner: “I wanted to bring Milgram’s experiments crashing down,” he writes. But he’s also conscious of the need to guard against motivated reasoning: “I was plagued by a nagging doubt. …Was I a little too keen to kick [Milgram’s] shock-machine to the curb?” To his credit, he concedes that Milgram’s results have been replicated. This leads him to reinterpret the shock-administering test subjects not as willing sadists but as well-intentioned altruists eager to help advance science. He’s not wrong to draw attention to their helpful motives, but their willingness to administer pain remains shocking, and their native obedience to authority is surely part of the ugly, underlying truth. A similar point can be made about the neural mechanisms that dampen compassion in the powerful: they too are part of human nature, and they too are complicit in evil.

To my thinking, Bregman is a bit too eager to defend the noble-savage archetype. A curious dimension of his argument, though, helps to explain—and partially justify—his take on human nature. For unlike many scientists, Bregman is acutely sensitive to the consequences of our beliefs. Beliefs about human nature aren’t just logically related to various bits of “upstream” evidence; they also have “downstream” effects: they shape our expectations and alter behavior in ways that affect our wellbeing.[7] Now science as traditionally conceived looks exclusively at the upstream evidence. The idea is to determine and believe the truth, whatever the costs. A more rigorous form of idea-testing, though, would be mindful of the fact that beliefs also have causal properties. Why not demand that our core beliefs be both well-evidenced and beneficial?[8] Long story short, we need a picture of human nature that is both evidence-based and capable of bringing out the best in us. It’s this dimension of Bregman’s work that makes it special.

Bregman argues that cynical views of human nature are “nocebos.” Just as a placebo can induce the expectation of healing—and bring about the healing itself—a nocebo can induce a self-fulfilling negative expectation. Expect little from an athlete, and he or she will underperform. Expect little from a student, and  he or she will struggle to excel. Expect the worst from your fellow human beings and, often, that’s precisely what you’ll get. Expect human beings to act like self-interested utility-maximizers, and you get a profoundly problematic economic system.

Expectation is an underappreciated determinant of human behavior, and the science of expectation deserves to be far better known. Two findings are especially important: the “Pygmalion Effect” occurs when people are empowered by positive expectations, and the “Golem Effect” occurs when people are disempowered by negative expectations. Bregman is surely right that the Machiavellian and Hobbesian pictures of human nature are nocebos: they have a “Golem Effect” on us. Modernity, he suggests, is the product of two things: a salutary emphasis on reason and science, and a mistaken and damaging picture of human nature. The depressing picture of human nature we inherited from early modern philosophers accounts for the Enlightenment’s “dark side.” So why not embrace a rosier picture of human nature and leverage the power of positive expectation? Why not expect the best from each other and thereby bring out the best of what human nature allows?

Having tracked down Peter Warner, the sea captain who rescued the six Tongan boys, Bregman is gifted the memoirs chronicling Warner’s remarkable life. On the first page, he finds a message that resonates beautifully with his own philosophy: “Life has taught me a great deal, including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.” Amen. The hard part is doing this without ignoring the evidence of human cruelty. Bregman makes an exceptionally good go of it and points the way to a deeper and more humane humanism. I highly recommend this book, and not just to humanists. It’s a marvelous contribution to our self-understanding and a beacon of hope in dark times.

But can Bregman’s picture of human nature transform us into creatures that truly deserve the designation Homo puppy? Too soon to say.

Notes

1. Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (New York: Little Brown, 2020), and Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper Perennial, 2018).
2. Sapiens is a bona fide publishing phenomenon, with some twelve millions copies sold. Still, Harari’s treatment of humanism in the book is highly problematic. See Tom Flynn, “Smearing Humanism” (FI, June/July 2017) and Andrew Norman and Yuval Harari, “The Meaning and Legacy of Humanism: A Sharp Challenge from a Potential Ally” (FI, April/May 2018).
3. Peter Dizikes, “Study: On Twitter, False News Travels Faster Than True Stories,” MIT News March 8, 2018. https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308.
4. See also Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest (New York: Random House, 2020).
5. Bregman, Michael Tomasello, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian Hare each present versions of this mind-sharing hypothesis, which was pioneered by Tomasello in The Origins of Human Communication (New York: Bradford, 2010). My own spin on the idea is developed in “Why We Reason: Intention-Alignment and the Genesis of Human Rationality,” Biology and Philosophy 31 (5) (2016). See also my Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, forthcoming from HarperCollins in spring 2021.
6. Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox (Penguin: New York, 2017), pp. 99–136.
7. The philosophical movement known as pragmatism brought this distinction into mainstream philosophy.
8. I develop the idea and apply it to the problem of stopping the spread of bad ideas in Mental Immunity (forthcoming from HarperCollins in Spring 2021).