Rather, predictably, the seeds of destruction of indigenous peoples are sown when outsiders bring disease and a tragically misguided superiority complex.Ĭase in point: On first landing in the Bahamas and realizing how peaceful and welcoming the population was, Christopher Columbus observed, “They would make fine servants…With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” A year later, he returned to enact his plan, thereby inaugurating the Atlantic slave trade.Īnother section of Humankind is dedicated to deconstructing the bad science and lazy reportage that has either initially driven or later misrepresented - or both - every sociological case study that we ever read about in school. The initial section of the book is dedicated to deconstructing the bad science and lazy reportage that has misrepresented primitive societies as being more bloodthirsty and self-destructive than modern civilized ones. “So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.” It took civilization - specifically, the concept of private ownership, which, in turn, required defense of property - to begin to decay that built-in urge toward cooperation. He suggests our innate eagerness to please and to be liked - and, crucially, our ability to feel shame - makes us more like “homo puppy.”īregman realizes that lots of people disagree with his central argument. The premise of Bregman’s book is that evolving into big-brained homo sapiens demanded extensive cooperation, so we’re hard-wired to be social, work in groups, and consider what’s best for the collective. The author points out that though archaeology has turned up examples of large cooperative endeavors in pre-agrarian societies, such as Turkey’s 11,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe temple, it has not turned up equivalent evidence of warfare or slaughter. In the ageless argument represented by Thomas Hobbes (that natural man is a brute who demands the firm hand of civilization) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (that it is civilization itself that has ruined humanity), Bregman unsurprisingly lands on the side of Rousseau. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate time for Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History to be released, here in the middle of what seems like an inflection point in American history, the long-overdue reckoning with this nation’s endemic and systemic racism.Īs we watch or participate in the protests across the country - indeed, around the globe - and consider both the violence that precipitated them and the sometimes brutal government-sanctioned reaction to them, Bregman’s thesis may seem hard to swallow: that humankind is made up of humans who are inherently kind.īregman, the young Dutch historian and thinker who previously brought us Utopia for Realists, methodically builds his case in this overview of human history to illustrate where things started going sideways, and to interrogate the ways we can change our attitudes in order to change our outcomes.
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