Homo civilis
Humankind: A Hopeful History
By Rutger Bregman Bloomsbury £20
Rousseau, walking from Paris to Vincennes in 1749, was struck with a dazzling revelation. It suddenly occurred to him that ‘man is naturally good, and that it is through [social] institutions alone that men become wicked’.
He saw civilisation as the root, rather than eradicator, of strife; he recognised the noble savage; he located our fall from grace in the first enclosure of a plot of land. Rousseau ‘beheld another universe’ and his vision helped change this one. But only theoretically. Movements made in its name (the French Revolution; the heady lawlessness of the Sixties) rarely work quite in the way intended.
The fall-back position is that of Hobbes: only draconian authority can prevent perpetual ‘war of all against all’. According to Dutch writer Rutger Bregman, the unanimous starting point – for Christians, capitalists, communists and climate-change campaigners alike – is that ‘human beings, when left to their own devices, behave like beasts’. A premise, he says, that is further bolstered by evolutionary biology, which stresses our animality, sneers at the possibility of altruism and bruits ‘the selfish gene’.
Bregman argues that humans are innately benevolent. His strategy is to cite familiar examples of human beastliness – and then discredit them. He retells the story of the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, when 18 male students from Stanford University were arbitrarily divided into prisoners and guards, and left to themselves in a simulated gaol. Within a few days, the ‘gaolers’ were performing their roles so well that the experiment had to be stopped. It was taken to demonstrate that those given unaccountable power, however previously peaceable, ‘morph into monsters’. Then he shows how it was rigged.
Similarly, he sketches the accepted view of the Easter Islanders’ extinction only to maintain that they were wiped out not, after all, by civil war and cannibalism but by slavers and rats. Against Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, often invoked as a fable of original sin, he opposes its ‘real-life version’: schoolboys, marooned without adults on a deserted Pacific island in 1977, far from descending
into savagery, managed to live peaceably, ingeniously and happily until they were rescued 15 months later.
Offered this fascinating plethora of anecdotes and purported refutations, what is the reader to do? Google them to see how approximately they can be corroborated? Check the meagre footnotes? Moan ‘Yes but: the Holocaust, rape and pillage, slavery, pogroms, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Congo – and massacres of Maoris, Aborigines, Tutsis, Hutus, Hindus, Muslims, Armenians, just about everyone…’
Bregman admits the fact of atrocities, only to bounce back, like an imperturbable rubber duck. Archaeological unearthings of ancient slaughters? Steven Pinker’s tally of these is grossly inflated. Ruthless Wehrmacht troops? Interrogated after the war, they were (it turns out) fuelled far less by antiSemitism and fascism than by esprit de corps. As are all armies, insists Bregman, who points out what a small proportion of soldiers actually kill the other side in battle; most deliberately don’t.
Ultimately, Bregman’s thesis seems to rest on a recherché experiment begun in 1958 by a Russian geneticist who bred the least fierce of a pack of silver foxes over successive generations, and remarkably soon produced tail-wagging, friendly, barking, responsive surrogates for dogs. ‘Meet Homo puppy,’ triumphantly cries Bregman.
Like the doggified silver foxes, we (he contends) are the upshot not of a bloodthirsty ‘survival of the fittest’, but of ‘survival of the friendliest’: ‘a snuggle for survival’. Brutality, military or otherwise, is just the downside of sociability once it becomes siphoned into exclusive tribes. Our nomadic ancestors – until they began settling down, farming and owning property – happily communed with passing strangers. They were ‘allergic to inequality’; women were unrestricted and uncovered, ‘free to come and go as they pleased’.
What bliss! But, if so, that was 12,000 years ago. Even Rousseau, as Bregman seems to forget, reluctantly conceded that man’s chains had become unbreakable.
As for now, Bregman implies that his is a lone voice advocating natural human goodness. At the same time, he gives glowing descriptions of humane prisons in Norway; open, pupil-directed schools such as Agora in the Netherlands; participatory democracy in the Venezuelan municipality of Torres; Dutch businesses run with ‘hands-off management’. All of which appear to flourish without his advocacy.