Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Original Dutch 2019, English Translation Little, Brown Boston 1921. NF; 12/25.

Both a good friend and a random Instagram post recommended this and so reaching around as usual for something interesting I read it. Bregman has a lovely optimistic idea: human beings are fundamentally decent. The trouble is I end up worried that his scholarship and logic might do his fundamental message more harm than good. We are told Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau represent opposite understandings of human nature. For Smith we are selfish, for Rousseau we’re humane. Bregman presents a vignette to illustrate:

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

I wish this kindly author had stopped there. We do get to choose don’t we?

But our choices are rarely simple, often poorly informed, and can lead to consequences we don’t like or even know anything about. I’d love to describe that lovely vignette to a school-age little boy who just might remember it once he’s grown up, as long as circumstances don’t force or trick him into feeding both of the wolves.

Mr. Bregman has plausible speculation for us too about how we got to be not so nice in the first place. We used to be a cheery playful easy-going bunch of hunter-gatherers until about 10,000 BCE when we got seduced into settling down and farming in the fertile Middle East. Right away we started squabbling over private property, gave one another diseases, became victims of psychopathic leaders and government, and had to make up imaginary gods to explain our misery. I don’t think you need to be an academic to wonder whether that’s really the whole story.

More recent examples belie the bad outcomes in for example Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In the real world a bunch of schoolboys were stranded on an island and did just fine. But somehow that true story was suppressed. Easter Island serves as another example of basic human decency but a bit confusingly there we end up with both good and bad things happening.

Schools in various parts of the world are described where instead of being force fed the common wisdom kids are allowed to explore and discover, and wonderful achievements result. There’s no reference to why it’s now obvious that after a couple of decades of laissez-faire pedagogy lots of students at university can’t do simple algebra and in some cases can’t read or write.

Our species Homo sapiens prevailed over extinct Neanderthals during the Pleistocene age not because we were smarter or more warlike (Neanderthals we are told had bigger brains and better tools) but because we were friendlier. This leads Bregman to rename us “Homo puppy”. He cites scientific studies to support the idea that kindness outdid brains and brawn. This idea cheered me up quite a bit. And Bregman invokes Science repeatedly to change our minds in a positive direction and away from all our nasty characteristics and history. There’s a new objective reality he says showing human successes when progressive-sounding characteristics prevail: “Hobbes and Rousseau, after all, were armchair theorists, while we’ve been gathering scientific evidence for decades now.”

This seemed impressive. But when I started tracking down several of his references I found that “scientists” or researchers turned out to be journalists, and some cited soft science papers supporting the author’s theories concluded the opposite of what he wanted to convince us of. My own experience of sometimes justified fading public trust in health science suggests we have diluted the definition of science to the point where it doesn’t mean much anymore. This worries me but also got me started being a little more sceptical of some of the theories in this book.

I don’t speak Dutch so I’m not sure whether Bregman’s enticing humility and folksy style crept in in the translation or was already there in his native language. If you are the kind of reader that wants to jump up and cheer at what this author has to say you might enjoy his banter. I had started to feel uncomfortable about some of what I was reading soon enough that I kept finding the repeated “don’t get me wrong”, demotic language, and backtracking disingenuous.

Another trouble I have with Mr. Bregman’s cheerleading progressive sentiment based on speculation and false claims to objectivity is that his observation that people are very often quite wonderful strikes me as just obvious. There may not be much need to lie to ordinary people to convince us that we have hearts, metaphorically speaking. The optimistic message of this book is great, but nothing in it describes what I think is the real human condition which is, well, mixed. Nor how and why we can get to a better world and inner life by focusing only on the bright side of the fascinating chiaroscuro of ordinary reality.

I ended up finding many of Rutger Bregman’s arguments contrived. I could imagine that worry warts even worse than I might even start to wonder what hideous truths he’s trying to cover up by writing this kind of a book. I picture him seeing himself as doing the world a well-deserved favour and figuring that exaggeration and mendacity are means justified by a positive and beneficial end.

I’d love to subscribe to the positive thesis here but I have to say that sadly I’m not convinced.

Scoring presents a problem. The fundamental idea is wonderful and true but the alleged support for it isn’t. Content? Sort of a 9+/5-. Style? Either you like his down-home humility or you don’t.