Humankind By Rutger Bregman

This latest book on society, history and anthropology by Rutger Bregman – best known for his best-seller Utopia For Realists, about the case for universal basic income – has many quotable quotes on every page, and is full of powerful aphorisms.

Perhaps the most telling quotation, though, comes from none other than the screen-writer and filmmaker Richard Curtis. “If you make a film,” says Curtis, “about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in the whole of human history – it’s called a searingly realistic analysis of society. But if I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.”

And there, in a nutshell, is the whole theme of Bregman’s book; the demolition of what he sees as the big lie that human beings are fundamentally evil and selfinterested, and that our normal civilised behaviour is a veneer that tends to collapse under pressure. Bregman ranges over every aspect of social science, beginning with our evolution as a particularly sociable and playful ape, and continuing through our hunter-gatherer pre-history to settled civilisation, involving agriculture, land ownership, inheritance, patriarchal attitudes, strict social hierarchies, enforced hard labour, the emergence of the state, and a general decline from grace.