Humankind, human nature, and misanthropy
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Humankind, human nature, and misanthropy Rutger Bregman: Humankind: a hopeful history, trans. Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, xxii+496pp, £12 HB Ian James Kidd1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
‘This is a book about a radical idea’ announces Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman: ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent’ (2). Humankind is a sequel to his bestselling 2016 book, Utopia for Realists. Its 18 chapters offer a happier vision of human nature and an upbeat case for future progress. In a cutesy term, humans are really Homo puppy—essentially friendly, gentle, and attuned to the feelings of others. Our evolution was not a Spencerian ‘struggle for survival’, but a cuddly ‘snuggle for survival’ (100). Early chapters skilfully critique some famous experiments purported to confirm darker visions of our nature, key villains being Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Others offer cheery accounts of cooperation among juvenile castaways (less Lord of the Flies, more Garden of Eden) and the well-documented reluctance of most soldiers to actually shoot at their enemies (less of an obstacle to killing in an age of drone strikes). Later chapters get political, offering trendy political proposals (less testing and more play at school, shorter working weeks) and platitudinous moral advice of the ‘Be The Change You Want To See In The World’ sort. Bregman begins by urging a ‘new realism’ about human nature, announcing that, to tackle climate change and other ‘challenges of our times’, where ‘we need to start is our view of human nature’ (9). We fall victim to pessimistic accounts of ourselves as competitive, selfish, and violent and then build social and economic systems that reshape us in that image. Certainly, this is a welcome corrective to crasser ideologies of selfishness of the Selfish Gene sort, but there are two problems. First, those ideologies were quickly challenged by ethologists and primatologists who noted that individual selfish behaviour presupposes stable backgrounds of cooperation. Second, Bregman is wrong to think that dealing with major ‘challenges’ requires focusing on human nature. Another option he consistently downplays is attending to structures and cultures—to what has come to be humanity. Our evolutionary history shapes our inherited behavioural dispositions. But if and how those dispositions manifest * Ian James Kidd [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
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depends on the imperatives and possibilities afforded by our shared ways of living. Crucially, those structures often fuel the failings that fire those ‘challenges’—arrogance, brutality, dogmatism, greed, enmity, manipulativeness, tribalism, and wastefulness. By downplaying structures, Bregman can retail cosily heart-warming stories, free of any complicating realities. The ‘courage and charity’ of survivors of Hurricane Katrina, for instance, was partly necessitated by the sustained neglect of the city and its people, before and
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