Book of the week

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury) $35

Since Darwin showed that humans are just another animal and Hitler proved we were an unusually vicious species, the broad consensus has been that Homo sapiens is a nasty piece of work. After 1945, this was backed up by numerous psychological experiments and by scientists intent on proving that we are little more than gene-operated robots. But now along comes Rutger Bregman to tell us we were all wrong.

‘‘This book,’’ he says, ‘‘is about a radical idea... That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.’’

Since the success of his 2016 book, Utopia for Realists, Bregman, a Dutch historian, has become a global, Ted-talking star. That book advocated a universal minimum wage, open borders and a 15-hour working week. This book shows such utopian projects are possible because we are not the murderous jerks we thought we were.

It is, largely, a superb read – brisk, accessible and full of great stories. The core of it is the conflicting conceptions of human nature that Bregman finds in two philosophers. Thomashobbes

believed that civilisation and political power saved humanity from lives that would otherwise be ‘‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’’. In the other corner, JeanJacques Rousseau insisted that humanswere naturally good and civilisation had ruined us. Bregman is a Rousseauist, of course.

The primary fun of the book is the way he boldlymarches into a landscape of Hobbesians. In a few pages he batterswilliam Golding, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was all wrong because children stranded on an island don’t behave so badly. He gives the wonderful real-world example from

the 1960s of six boys from Tonga marooned on a Pacific island for more than a year. An Australian sea captain finally found them living in peace and plenty.

Dawkins and Pinker believe we are saved by the ascendancy of human reason. Pinker argues that the world has steadily become more peaceful since the Enlightenment and humanitywas, indeed, brutish. Not at all, says brisk Bregman; he misread the archaeological evidence.

However, there’s the trickier problem of war and, worst of all, the Holocaust, the peak of human evil. At this crucial point, the heroic naif loses his footing. ‘‘The perpetrators believed,’’ hewrites, ‘‘theywere on the right side of history. Auschwitz was the culmination of a long and complex historical process in which the voltage was upped step by step and evil was more convincingly passed off as good.’’

Bregman’s big story runs as follows. For most of human history, warfare and assorted other evils did not exist. We were nomads, but then, about 10,000 years ago, we settled down and became farmers. Private property appeared and it all went horribly wrong.

‘‘The 1 per cent began oppressing the 99 per cent. The days of liberty, equality and fraternity were over.’’

And so we end up here, with lives that are nasty and brutish, but at least long. Bregman acknowledges the improvements provided by the ages of industry and technology, but, he reasons, we could do somuch better. We could give power back to the people. And we will, if we stop believing we are intrinsically bad. ‘‘The new world awaits if we revise our view of human nature.’’

The book’s central problem for me is that neither statement – people are basically good or basically bad – is remotely credible.

Paradisewill never bemade – or, indeed, regained – by humans. Sadly, hell is always within our reach. – Bryan Appleyard, The Times