12/24/2023 0 Comments Rutger bregman humankindMany of us read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in high school, with its haunting portrait of well-educated boys reverting to tribal chaos (poor Piggy!) when isolated and deprived. One of Bregman’s most helpful contributions is to expose that many of the most vivid examples used to support the pessimistic view of “human nature” collapse when we look at evidence from the real world. But Bregman’s remarkable book shows that when we actually look at the real world of human social life, and get past the powerful pessimistic tales about original sin, the state of nature, the darkness in all of our hearts, etc., we find that human beings are, on the whole, far more inclined to be sociable and selfless than “treacherous and knavish.” Alarmingly, most people do seem to hold a cynical or pessimistic view of other people, seeing them as untrustworthy. It is a dangerous one, too, because believing in it can shape the policy choices we make and the way we treat each other. Bregman, perhaps best known for driving Tucker Carlson nuts by daring to criticize Carlson on his own show, claims this is nothing more than a myth or fable about humanity. The primatologist Frans de Waal coined the term “veneer theory” to describe the idea that morality and civilization are essentially a thin veneer that is easily cracked, and that beneath it is a “natural” state in which we are warlike and irrational.ĭutch historian Rutger Bregman, in Humankind: A Hopeful History ( newly issued in paperback), destroys this story utterly. Civilization could easily be destroyed if you tamper with it, and we could lapse back into barbarism. But this progress is fragile and depends on maintaining our existing institutions roughly as they are. Free markets can actually direct humans’ natural selfishness toward socially beneficial ends, and laws backed by the threat of violence are able to ensure that a semblance of order is maintained. Fortunately, civilization has gradually brought out the better angels of our nature. Prehistoric human beings were violent barbarians. ![]() Sometimes this view is accompanied by a story about human development: once upon a time, life was nasty, brutish, and short, a war of all against all. One common view of human beings is that we are “by nature” selfish, violent, cruel, and untrustworthy, and that, to the extent we manage to restrain these base instincts, it is because we are taught to be generous, and punished if we go around hurting others. ![]() “No one likes to think they’re a Nazi, but everyone is one.” “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” - Jordan Peterson 1.“Remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life-food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security-and we all go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.” - Timothy Garton Ash*.“As a rule men do wrong whenever they can.” - Aristotle.“Our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle.” - John Calvin*.“For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites.” - Machiavelli*.But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it’s all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.” - Steven Pinker ![]() The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers.
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