![]() This is evident in times of crisis - the Titanic, the Blitz, 9/11, hurricane Katrina - where our true colours reveal themselves. True, research on toddler morality indicates that the price for our kindness is xenophobia - we need ‘others’ to hate and be wary of in order to appreciate and love our kind - but it was in the cauldron of ‘the snuggle for existence’ that our mettle was forged. It was ‘civilisation’ which brought out all the bad in us for, as primatologists and child psychologists have shown, at our roots we are prone to connect and to sympathise. So were the myths of the state and of currency invented, the scripts that would enforce the structures of hierarchy, and the laws that ensured loyalty and order. Only with the advent of farming did personal property become important, producing chieftains and kings who would enslave whole peoples and raise armies to protect the riches they were now accumulating. Citing studies in archaeology, palaeontology and anthropology, Bregman claims that nomadic, hunter-gatherer cultures more easily eschewed strongmen, depending instead on group altruism and on humour and shame and gossip to bind the community together. We were slower, but better connected.’ Born to learn, to bond, to play, Homo sapiens is in fact Homo puppy.īefore we settled the land, we were happier and more egalitarian. Compared with the brawnier, larger-brained Neanderthals who had ‘a super-fast computer’, Bregman writes, ‘we were an old-fashioned PC - but with wifi. Our blushing - a sign of the internalisation of social norms - is unique too (except, perhaps strangely, in blue and yellow macaws).Īs with domesticated pigs and rabbits and silver foxes, selection for sociability made our heads and brains smaller, our jawbones childlike, or paedomorphic. ![]() Both helped us get into the mind of another. Look at our sclera, the whites surrounding our eyes: we’re the only mammal who has such distinct ones. A domesticated species, we are to Neanderthals what dogs are to wolves, having self-selected to become more social, and hence dependent on one another. The real story, we’re told, goes back to our evolutionary origins. Providing a tonic to rattled liberals, he too is just a sign of his times. Even the inveterate optimist Steven Pinker gets it wrong when he argues that civilisation and scientific reason are what have extricated humans from misery and violence. Richard Dawkins convinced a generation and more that we were puppets manipulated by selfish genes and economists such as Garrett Hardin pronounced that ‘freedom in a commons brings ruin to all’. He distributed hand-axes and machetes to his bloodthirsty subjects and completely mangled his own statistical results. Or Napoleon Chagnon, the intrepid anthropologist who studied an ‘unsullied’ Amazon tribe, and wrote the bestselling book Yanomamö: The Fierce People. It’s those who reach positions of power who aren’t Ordinary people, we’re assured, are trusting and altruistic. According to Zimbardo, the guards were never given any directives, but in reality the world’s most famous psychologist simply lied. Or Philip Zimbardo and his Stanford prison experiment, which randomly assigned college students to be either ‘guards’ or ‘inmates’ in a makeshift ‘prison’, and observed how quickly savagery evolves. Most participants didn’t actually believe they were inflicting pain, and a majority of those who did quickly called it quits. Turns out Milgram was after fame and fudged his results. Take, for example, Stanley Milgram, of obedience to authority fame, who showed that ordinary people would administer electric shocks of up to 450 volts to innocents if only told to do so by a person dressed in a white lab coat. Scientists have been lying to us for a long time. And science, according to Bregman, says that we’re good. ![]() How do we know? Hobbes and Rousseau were armchair theorists, but today we have science. In the clash between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was the Genevan, not the man of Malmesbury, who had it right. Left to their own devices, children will not tear each other apart on an island: quite the opposite. Deep down, at least most of us are pretty decent. Here’s ‘a radical idea… a mind-bending drug… denied by religions and ideologies’, we’re told. For a treatise on human kindness, Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind has surprisingly many villains. So was William Golding, creator of Lord of the Flies, himself a child-beater* and a drunk. ![]() Thucydides, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud - all were wrong about our natures. Machiavelli deemed that humans are ‘ungrateful, fickle hypocrites’, and even the founding father John Adams, the paragon of American democracy, was sure that all men would be tyrants if they could. Augustine had it that ‘no one is free from sin, not even an infant’.
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