Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

Nicole wrote about Humankind by Rutger Bregman and I was looking for a non-fiction book to add to my reading list last month, so it was with her enthusiastic thumbs up that I went into this book.

Bregman argues that humans are actually community-minded and cooperative by nature, not selfish and self-interested and so he walks through history with this perspective. He then ends the book with a ten point plan for how to live your own life by incorporating a more positive view of human nature than most of us have.

While I appreciate Bregman's efforts at trying to reach cynical people like me (honestly, I really did), I am one of the overly cynical people who sort of thought Bregman missed the point. I don't think most people are selfish, I think some people are selfish and those are the people who run countries and major corporations. Moreover, I think it's hard for the non-selfish views of the majority to fight against the selfish ones. That is why the world sucks. It's not that most Germans in WWII were terrible, but the leaders were so persuasive and loud and charismatic that they were able to do terrible things. It's not that most members of the military want to kill enemies, but if there are just a couple of people in each troop who do, then they can do a lot of damage.  It just takes that one guy in the neighborhood to make the rest of the neighborhood a nightmare to live in.  Bregman doesn't really address any of this.

Bregman does, however, present an interesting lens to look at a lot of historical events and adds nuance to a lot of incidents, particularly involving war and politics. He also talked a lot about the replication crisis in the social sciences without really naming it - the fact that a lot of findings in psychology, economics, medicine, and other fields do not hold up to scrutiny or attempted repetition by different researchers. His favorite person to pick on is Philip Zimbardo, the creepy* psychologist behind the Stanford Prison "Experiment" (SPE)** whose work is absolutely unethical and unrepeatable because of that fact, but somehow gets cited over and over again. I appreciate his criticisms of Zimbardo because he's one of my favorite punching bags, too. (He also has a thing about James Q. Wilson that I also enjoy.) 

*He was dating a grad student at the time of the SPE, who was the only person who apparently felt she was able to tell Zimbardo to stop the experiment because a) it was destroying the lives of young men and b) was scientifically bullshit. As you know, I have an issue with professor/student relationships.

**This is not an experiment. He didn't have multiple scenarios, including a control group. People use the world experiment all willy-nilly, as if it doesn't have a precise definition in psychological research.

Anyway, I'm too cynical for this book and Bregman knows it. He called me out on it early in the book and I'm glad he did so. But I don't think Bregman has fully explained how the Holocaust happened or why people like Trump get elected.  (This book was first published in 2019.)  *shrug* I'm glad I read it, though.

3.5/5 stars

Lines of note (I read this on the Kindle and so I only have Kindle locations, not page numbers):

 
The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.

First to open up this field of research, back in the 1990s, was George Gerbner (1919-2005). He also coined a term to describe the phenomenon he found: mean world syndrome, whose clinical symptoms are cynicism, misanthropy, and pessimism. People who follow the news are more likely to agree with statements such as "Most people care only about themselves.." They more often believe that we as individuals are helpless to better the world. They are more likely to be stressed and depressed. (location 331)

I used to teach classes and had to stay up on the news. I don't regularly check the news anymore and it has definitely improved my mindset. It's also made me a less informed, less effective citizen, so that's a thing.

In the lab, rats double in number every forty-seven days. That means that in just three years, a single pair of rats can produce seventeen million offspring. (location 1773)

This was Bregman's solution to what happened at Easter Island. Rats didn't have native predators and took over the island. Seems as likely as anything else, I guess. I love to see exponential growth in real life.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists 'the myth of pure evil'. In reality, our enemies are just like us.

This applies even more to terrorists.

They're also like us, experts emphasize. (location 2756)

Right, and just like us, they're prone to following the lead of a charismatic leader. 

Most of the time, wartime killing is something you do from far away...Over the course of history, weaponry has got even better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. (location 2925)

The section on war was most interesting to me. Most soldiers don't kill, even in battle. Who knew?

Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanize the other - say, by portraying them as vermin - it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman. (location 2931)

This. I wish he'd talked more about dehumanizing vocabulary used by law enforcement and racists and dog whistles. I think dehumanizing other people is the first step in a lot of terrible things.

For centuries, many soldier couldn't even bring themselves to pull the trigger. Bayonets went unused. Most casualties were inflicted at a distance, by pilots or gunners who never needed to look their enemies in the eyes. (location 3210)

Again, I thought this was super interesting.

A recent poll among twelve thousand parents in ten countries revealed that prison inmates spend more time outdoors than most kids. (location 3665)

!!! Every family needs a dog is what I'm learning.

In the US, working mothers spend more time with their kids today than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. (location 3679)

The expectations of mothers today is outrageous.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the number one global disease. (location 3876)

Interesting. I wonder if the pandemic moved the needle on this at all.

Contact engenders more trust, more solidarity, and more mutual kindness. It helps you see the world through other people's eyes. Moreover, it changes you as a person, because individuals with a diverse group of friends are more tolerant towards strangers. And contact is contagious: when you see a neighbor getting along with others, it makes you rethink your own biases.

But what also came out of these studies was the finding that a single negative experience (a clash or an angry look) makes a deeper impression on us than a joke or a helping hand. (location 4665)

The human mind is a crazy thing. We really do hold on to the negative much more easily than the positive. 

Person I looked up:

Thomas Henry Huxley (aka Darwin's Bulldog) - English anthropologist, staunch advocate of Darwin's theory of evolution.