In the absence of optimism there is hope
Sue de Groot spoke to Rutger Bregman, the world’s hottest historian, whose hypotheses about human nature are playing out in the pandemic — not that he’s patting himself on the back about it
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, a young Dutch historian called Rutger Bregman berated the assembled billionaires for paying lip service to inequality. “Nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water,” he told the stunned crowd. His intention was not to make a splash, he said afterwards, he was simply fed up. He became an overnight media sensation and his TED talk, “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash”, has been viewed more than 3-million times. Bregman had been invited to Davos on the basis of his first book, Utopia for Realists, which became a global bestseller. His second book, Humankind, recently released in SA, is receiving just as much attention. It posits the theory, based on historical examples, that humans are inherently good despite all the bad things we do. In the book’s opening pages Bregman writes: “There is a persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic. It’s what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call ‘veneer theory’: the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation. In actuality, the opposite is true. It’s when crisis hits — when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise — that we humans become our best selves.”
Encouraging examples
The Covid-19 crisis, which hit only after he’d completed Humankind, has in some ways vindicated his argument. But Bregman, speaking via Zoom from his photographer wife’s office in the Netherlands, insists he is no soothsayer.
“It wasn’t like this crisis made me like, ‘Oh, now everyone’s going to see that I’m right about human nature’. I don’t think that’s the right attitude. But I do think you can argue that the vast majority of the behaviour around the globe, by most people, has been co-operative in nature.”
His book contains encouraging examples of how people respond to crises and disasters, such as when the German people pulled together in World War 2 when their cities were being bombed.
He thinks that what we call the Covid-19 crisis might be better termed an “occupation”, as in the sense of an enemy occupying a city or a country.
“It’s such a strange idea that we’ll be stuck with this until at least the end of next year,” Bregman says. “In many ways this whole thing goes against human nature. We have been shaped by evolution for contact, for touch, for seeing our friends and our family members and for hugging them etcetera. So this is such a highly unnatural thing.”
Historians study events and patterns with the benefit of hindsight, so making any predictions about how the pandemic will shape the world is difficult while we are still in the grip of its jaws.
Unclear long-term effects
“I really think it’s too early to say,” Bregman says of the long-term effects continued isolation from each other might have on society. “It’s such a unique time we are living through, a pandemic in this globalised society with modern information technology … you see all these articles about, oh, this was what happened during the Spanish flu, but that was a completely different era so I think it’s very hard to compare.
“I am quite suspicious of people who use this moment to say, ‘Oh, that is how it will change our lives’. You don’t need a PhD to realise that moments of crisis are extraordinary opportunities for change but I know from studying history that it is so unpredictable.”
It has in some ways changed his own life. “I spend a lot of time in this room, doing talks and book launches online. It’s usually a bit of a disadvantage as an international author to be living in the Netherlands. It’s probably better to live in London or New York, but now it doesn’t matter any more, I can just live in this provincial town called Houten and as long as my internet connection works, it’s fine.”
Bregman has always liked to draw a distinction between optimism and hope. “Hope is about doing something, it impels you to act,” he says. “Optimism can make you a little bit lazy, like, well you know, just sit on the grass, things are going in the right direction.”
He thinks that both hope and optimism are evident in our reactions to Covid-19. “It’s pretty astounding to see how quickly people have adapted and quite radically changed their lifestyles to stop the virus from spreading further. Of course, you can zoom in on nasty stories about people hoarding toilet paper, that’s really not good, but I don’t think that’s the headline of what’s been happening.”
The tribal button
At the same time, he does not discount the polarisation exacerbated by the pandemic, evinced in violent clashes in the US about the wearing of protective masks. But he looks at this in a different way from those of us who throw our hands up in disgust at the selfish attitude of the maskless.
“What has happened, particularly in the US, is that wearing a mask has become politicised. It’s seen as a symbol of your group. So people on the Left and progressives say you should wear a mask, and if you don’t wear a mask you’re selfish. And for Republicans, wearing a mask has become a symbol of ‘those other people’.
“What I see there is the dark side of comradeship, friendship and loyalty. I don’t see selfishness, I think there’s something different going on. If people were being selfish they would protect themselves and wear a mask, but because they feel part of a group they don’t do it, they don’t want to betray their own group. I think that’s the really tragic thing that’s going on.”
In Humankind, Bregman talks about the “tribal button” that humans have in their brains, which is clearly playing out in some places now.
“There’s a huge amount of evidence that we humans have this in-group/out-group mentality,” he says. “It comes back again and again in history. But there aPreRways to overcome this that are also deeply embedded in our nature — the human desire for contact, our curiosity, our playfulness.
“Especially when we can see the other person, it becomes quite difficult to hate one another. It’s not impossible, it’s doable, but it takes a lot of effort. You need to dehumanise the other person. You often need to be conditioned and brainwashed by a lot of complicated ideologies or you just need to increase the distance between people, sometimes by technological means — we know that in the history of warfare most casualties have been caused by long-range weapons.”
Effects of separation
Bregman’s view of human nature as essentially kind is not based on some rose-tinted desire to see the best in everything but on careful analysis of history, biology and even language.
“To me it’s always been interesting that when someone does something really horrible and nasty, we say ‘that’s inhuman’. Already in the way we use our language, we recognise that the default is not to be horrible. It’s not like when someone does an act of extraordinary kindness we say, ‘oh, that’s so inhuman, you’re so kind to other people’. We don’t say that. Intuitively we grasp, I think, that most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”
As the pandemic wears on, however, and with it the social and physical distances between people, Bregman agrees that there may be cause for alarm. “What you saw, especially in the first couple of weeks and months, is that many people had this yearning that they wanted to help, they wanted to contribute and do something. I saw this in my own environment, people who wanted to be of some value to the common good. But then, as the occupation lasts longer our circles become smaller and we are less in contact with other people, the dehumanising effect of separation is something to be really careful of.”
Progressive generation
One of the things that makes him most hopeful is the activism of young people. “Millennials were already a progressive generation. I’m a millennial, but the generation that comes after us, Generation Z — people born after 1996 — are the most progressive generation in the history of the world, when you look at issues from climate change to LGBT rights and racism.
“People may say, yeah, but that’s just what young people are like, right? Maybe they’re left-wing and progressive now, but as they grow older they will become conservative. But it turns out that even though that sounds right, it’s actually completely wrong. We know from a huge amount of evidence that people’s political views are mostly formed in their 20s. They do change afterwards — apparently having kids makes you a little bit more conservative — but mostly your views are shaped by the great historical events in your 20s and the people you speak to then.
“So if you look at this generation, they have gone through the great recession, gone through Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and now Covid-19. Demography is on the side of change, it’s just a matter of time.”
He gives the caveat that we shouldn’t focus too much on generational change because “the older generations, like my mother, are radicalising as well”. But he does wonder whether there are “generational waves” in history.
“If you look at people who were young in the 1990s, and I’m talking particularly about Western Europe because that’s what I know about — that was a generation that was sometimes called Generation Nothing in the Netherlands because it was avant garde to believe in nothing. It was like: ‘You know what, I’m just going to go to Spain, get drunk, I don’t care’. That was sort of cool. It’s very different right now. If you don’t have ideals, you’re not in fashion. You need something to fight for. People are responding to the challenges of their time. If you’re young right now and you have a brain and you look at something like climate change, I mean, you just have to be worried.”
Hope is what sees us through hardship, and this 32-year-old historian is adamant that we have much to hope for.
“It’s fascinating, this contagiousness of ideas,” he says with a huge smile. “It’s not only diseases that are contagious but ideas as well.”