‘Disasters bring out the best in us’

With its theory that the ‘Blitz spirit’ is universal, this is the book we need right now, says Tristram Fane Saunders

‘MHUMANKIND by Rutger Bregman 496pp, Bloomsbury, £20, ebook £16.80

ost people, deep down, are pretty decent.” That’s the philosophy of Rutger Bregman, 33, the Dutch historian who found fame in 2016 with Utopia for Realists. As coronavirus shakes our old certainties, that book’s ideas, such as a universal basic income – which Boris Johnson said in March he was considering introducing as a temporary relief measure – look less outlandish.

Utopia took a scattershot approach, but this follow-up – although enormously wideranging, with fascinating digressions about everything from Russian foxes to Easter Island statues – has one unifying purpose. Bregman wants to disprove “veneer theory”, the idea that a thin layer of civilisation is all that keeps us from giving in to an alleged natural inclination for violent anarchy.

He argues instead that our natural impulse is really to communicate, co-operate, learn from each other and avoid conflict. Humans “domesticated” themselves, evolving through a process that anthropologist Brian Hare terms “survival of the friendliest”; Bregman calls us “homo puppy”, noting that “social learning” (one of the few measures of intelligence where toddlers score notably better than gorillas and chimps) is essential to our nature. He says that the damage caused by “lack of human contact is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day”: a grim thought for those of us in lockdown alone.

Bregman bookends Humankind with British military history, arguing that stories we’ve come to see as one-off miracles are in fact representative case studies. It ends with the Christmas Truce of 1914, proof, he says, that humans “simply aren’t wired for war” and can be persuaded to drop arms with the right kind of nudge. (A PR company, inspired by that example, ran a successful campaign with Christmas fairy lights that inspired mass desertions among Colombia’s FARC guerrillas).

Humankind begins with the

Colombian guerrillas were inspired to stop fighting by a display of Christmas fairy lights

Blitz, as evidence that “disasters bring out the best in us”; the “Blitz spirit” is universal. Studies show that, in crises, people generally don’t panic or turn to crime, they support those around them. We knew this at the time: Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s favoured scientific adviser, sent a team of psychologists to study heavily bombed areas of Birmingham and Hull, to prove that similar bombing would destroy German spirits. When they concluded “there is no evidence of breakdown of morale”, he ignored their findings, and encouraged carpet-bombing German cities anyway.

We repeatedly ignore the data, preferring to believe the myth of man’s wickedness. Despite claims of a “bystander effect”, 90 per cent of the time we will intervene to help someone in danger. The most shocking studies that sought to prove our susceptibility towards evil – such as the Stanford Prison Experiment – have been debunked as rigged pseudoscience, but their hold on the popular imagination endures. Richard Dawkins cut his claim that people are inherently selfish from later editions of The Selfish Gene, but it’s the first edition that we remember.

Decades on from that book and its imitators, publishing has lately seen a new wave of popular anthropology – let’s call it anthropop. Homo puppy may be predisposed to avoid conflict, but that hasn’t stopped this young anthropop-star from picking fights with the genre’s silverbacks. Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari and Frans de Waal (who have both provided chummy blurbs for Humankind’s cover) are challenged on key points but get off relatively lightly. Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker and

Jared Diamond aren’t so lucky.

Pinker is pulled up for dubious figures about tribal warfare; Diamond is mocked for a quote he misattributed to Captain Cook. The problem is, Bregman is at times guilty of similar sloppiness. For instance, he quotes a pithy line about Lindemann’s influence –

whole animal kingdom to blush?” he asks on p56; on p238 he says “of all the species in the animal kingdom, we’re one of the few that blush” (italics mine). An endnote mentions a study suggesting macaws can blush, too, but the earlier claim goes uncorrected.

At the risk of prompting further blushes, let’s talk about genital warts. Bregman says sexually transmitted diseases were “virtually unknown” before we started farming. This claim is one of many put forward to support Humankind’s Roussauian thesis that the world, for hunter-gatherer nomads, was Eden; our decision to settle down, about 10,000 years ago, led to the invention of war, pestilence, famine, and so on.

The citation for Bregman’s claim that pre-farming life was an STD-free idyll leads to The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible. That anthropop book came out to very mixed reviews in 2016, a few months before a paper in a peer-reviewed journal showed early homo sapiens actually caught a strain of genital wart-causing papillomavirus from their Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins tens of thousands of years before the shift to agriculture, a noteworthy study that Bregman seems to have missed.

That Bregman cites a book that sought to build a bridge between evolution and the Bible is revealing. “This book is not a sermon on the fundamental goodness of people,” he says. I beg to differ. Though a non-believer himself, Bregman quotes more than once from the Sermon on the Mount and ends Humankind with his own set of 10 commandments.

A preacher’s son, he’s inherited an evangelist’s gift for rhetoric. Watch his Ted Talk on poverty (which has had a million YouTube views), or his unaired Fox News interview (2.7 million views), or just tune in to his online Hay Festival event this afternoon, and you’ll see what I mean. As a speaker, Bregman is charismatic, droll and quick-witted. On the page, he can sound stuck in Ted-mode. He believes in our kindness, not our attention spans. Here’s a stretch of four paragraphs:

Is there another way?

Could we go back to a society with more room for freedom and creativity?

Could we build playgrounds and design schools that don’t constrain but, rather, unchain our need to play?

The answer is yes, and yes, and yes.

Is this patronising? Annoying? Does it hold your attention nonetheless? Yes, yes, yes. Despite its flaws, I enjoyed Humankind immensely. It’s entertaining, uplifting, and very likely to reach the broad audience it courts. Its most attractive thread shows how the placebo effect can be applied to human behaviour: tell people they’re selfish, and they’ll be selfish; tell them they’re kind and they’ll be kind. If Bregman is right, this book might just make the world a kinder place.

is more a story of the individual soldier on the ground – on both sides – than of the deliberation of general staff officers and politicians far from the action. He describes the heroic feats of men who either never came back, or came back so scarred, physically or mentally, that they were never the same again.

Some of the names are well known: William Manchester, the writer whose account of the assassination of President Kennedy remains a classic, was a sergeant whose obstinacy saw him deny himself a commission, but who fought almost to the end in Okinawa before being wounded; and war correspondent Ernie

Pyle, who had followed US troops through North Africa and Europe and won an enormous audience in doing so. Welcomed to

Okinawa as a hero by the soldiers fighting there, he was killed by a sniper just over a fortnight into the battle: some of the men said his death hit them harder than Roosevelt’s.

But most of the heroes had no public profile at all, until they received the Congressional Medal of Honour for their exploits. One such was a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector who trained as a medic, Desmond Doss, who on Hacksaw Ridge, under constant enemy fire, helped winch down at least 50 wounded soldiers on stretchers, saving their lives.

While some of the legendary names of American warfare swagger John Wayne-like through these pages – General Douglas MacArthur, for example, and