Humankind: A Hopeful History Hardcover – Illustrated, June 2, 2020

The quote on the page before “Prologue” is by Anton Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like”. Following this is the author's statement that this is a book about the idea, which the author termed a radical idea, that most people, deep down, are pretty decent.To expound this “radical” idea, the author presents a number of investigations of historical events that support it. These include the finding that the majority of soldiers in the two World Wars did not shoot, the rescue of Sanne and her toddler by bystanders, soldiers of both sides of the conflict came out of the trenches to celebrate Christmas in 1914, and the twin brothers Constand and Abraham Viljoen saved South Africa from the brink of Civil War and helped end apartheid in 1993. On the stories and experiments that purport to show human beings are basically bad, including the Stanford Experiment by Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram and the Shock Machine, the death of Susan Genovese as reported by the news, the destruction of Easter Island, the broken-window theory, etc., the author went over the mega-analysis and study-over-studies that showed the fallacies of the assumptions in some of these experiments and the biased and selective reporting of the newspapers and magazines which tainted the results. Out of the experience of writing this book, the author offers the readers his ten rules to live by, which he believes will lead to a more hopeful world.While I am glad to learn of the many uplifting stories and believe that most people deep down are kind and decent, I have to admit that I do not feel more hopeful about the future of humankind after reading the book. Although it is heart-warming to learn that the majority of soldiers did not want to kill, it does not negate the fact that a large number of gun violence occurs in the United States, and it has been impossible for Congress, supposedly made up of highly educated and intelligent people, to pass any legislation on gun control. It was shocking that, in 2019, a former Governor told “the former guy” that he was God’s chosen one to lead the United States. In 2018, a US Senator, an avowed Christian and former preacher, told the former guy that “…you're living up to everything I thought you would. You're one heck of a leader and could turn out to be the greatest President”! It certainly does not bode well for legislation to combat climate change when a Senator believed there was sufficient evidence that global warming was a hoax since he could hold a snowball in his hand in February in Washington, D. C.The author seemed to have a low opinion of Machiavelli. However, it is difficult to refute Machiavelli‘s statement in “The Prince” that “Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.“ Examples abound: Nazi Germany; January 6, 2021; prison reform in the U.S. halted by the broken-window theory; network anchors spreading Covid misinformation etc.Two rather novel ideas are advanced by the author. One is that, in real democracy, there should not be various governing hierarchies such as mayors, governors and Congress. The power should be given back to the people, who somehow should be able to govern themselves. The other idea is that present-day school structures prohibit the development of students’ innate curiosity, creativity and the new school model should be one that let the kids learn and play by themselves. Examples are given in some towns in Holland and Europe as well as Alaska and successes are claimed. Such models may have shown to be successful on small scales, but I am somewhat skeptical that they work well in large cities, states or nations.In his ten rules to live by, the author finds the golden rule (Confucius) falling short and recommends the platinum rule instead. The platinum rule is attributed to George Bernard Shaw and is a variation of the golden rule. As someone whose native language is not English, I must admit that the platinum rule as quoted by the author is not as easy to understand as the golden rule:Golden rule: “Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.”Platinum rule (as quoted in the book): “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”.Until I fully understand the Platinum rule, I’ll stick with the Golden rule.

“What if propaganda not only sows discord, but can also bring people back together...”This line from the book defines the core of what I grasped from Brugman’s writing style. The underlying intent of the book is to make us aware that yes, in a certain sense, he is writing a "propaganda piece"; he is spinning the narrative to promote his new realism. He is speaking of alternate facts to well-known truisms about human nature (we are always one small step away from lie, kill, cheat, steal). He is claiming that its time to get real: by seeing our fellow humans as friendly, helpful, kind, and peaceful, and, by spreading this news to others in real-time, we can shape a new reality though what he calls new realism. "The war is over, if you want it." But it won't end until we actively participate in forming such a reality.What is this new realism? If you have read his Utopia for Realists you might be familiar with proposals for a shorter workweek; basic income; open borders. In Humankind, he opens up our personal borders and allows us to let others in. There is very little sentimental writing or empathetic reasoning. His is a new realism, yes. And this realism is so surprisingly realistic that it can easily seem idealistic. And he backs up his words with deep research.He provides ample evidence that it can work and does work. His alternate facts are such that debunk others’ spun facts (see the original version vs Brugman's version of prison experiments, Lord of the Flies, Kitty Genovese). Bregman even calls out historians such as Harari and Diamond for weak research points. Where they seem to take for granted certain historical accounts, Bregman gracefully calls out where stories are born and he rewrites these myths. And they seem all the more realistic as he provides ample evidence for his case.This is one of Harari’s central tropes: that we tell ourselves stories. We heard it on the news, we saw it on YouTube and ... even if we don't believe it is true... we are still right in the midst of it. The stories we tell ourselves created money, society, religions. Bregman says its time to tune out from the stories others form for us, to tune out from the harmful news and online activity and tune into what is right in front of us. And, as Harari (though still vegan and trim and stoic) and kin grow larger in fame…certain storylines will be formed just as a canal is formed; some will be true and some will form into myth. Bregman is a tributary of these recent giants in intuitive-intellectual presentation and has this reader/reviewer interested in the streaming waters of this newly dug out waterbed. Thinking of making my home in his waters. The great thing about all of these streams is that they are all headed in the right direction. They swim against the waters, struggling to get upstream…once there, they reach new islands that promote a better vision. Bregman’s stories may also become mythic once he rises in popularity, and he is not without critics. But in a cosmos of cluttered, divisive thought, his hopeful history is a welcome one.This life stance of trusting others, seeing innocence before guilt, avoiding sensationalist news, personal gain…this has been my point of view throughout my life. Yes, at times I have been dominated, cheated, left behind, left bereft. But it has always felt true to me…it just seems realistic. “to believe people are hardwired to be kind isn’t sentimental or naive. ..it’s courageous and realistic to believe in peace and forgiveness.” I have been afraid to speak this point of view, fearful that this realism is too idealistic for our times. Brugman has helped me to internally articulate this position of “new realism” …now it’s time to let others know too.

This book is terrible. It’s a shame, as I had hoped it would be a useful addition to the discussion about human progress.Unfortunately, the author seems DESPERATE to believe humans are fundamentally nice. He accepts any argument for humans being nice, no matter how weak the evidence.To be fair, he does list a few arguments for humans not being fundamentally nice. But he dismisses all of these by accepting the first argument he can find against them, despite most of these being incredibly weak.This absolute scepticism of arguments against his position, and unquestioning acceptance of any evidence supporting his view, is exasperating. The author can think. He’s just so desperate to believe humans are nice, he is incapable of fairly assessing the evidence. I will provide a few examples of each below.First, I will outline his main argument:He argues that before agriculture and settled communities, people were hunter gatherers and led very peaceful egalitarian lives. But agriculture allowed surpluses that could be stored, so some people could dominate resources, increase their power, and become elites. He says this created patriarchy, heirarchical society, and led to lots of horrible oppressive behaviour we now see as normal. If only we could get back to that psychological state, we would unleash our inner hunter/gatherer loveliness and people would be much happier! So society should more often start with the assumption that people are nice, and everyone's lives will be better!Problems with the book:1) Hunter gatherers are not always niceHe accepts without question various stories about pre-agriculture being nice, post agriculture being nasty. However, he completely ignores the evidence for permanent settlements in pre-agriculture societies where there were enough resources, such as Ainu Japan. Historically, "hunter gatherer" native americans in Florida and the Pacific Northwest were able to settle due to using marine resources (salmon in the NW). Permanent settlements then allowed the creation of warrior elites, a caste of hereditary slaves, and slave raids on surrounding amerindian groups. Given the historical and archaeological examples of this, there is good reason to think this would have happened pre-agriculture where resources were rich enough.He also has a rose tinted view of hunter-gatherer lifestyles as being egalitarian and non-sexist. But many hunter gatherer groups that are seen as egalitarian today have arranged marriages (sometimes arranged before the children are even born). Many have historically raided for wives. Other historic examples have involved a group massacring the men of a nearby rival group and forcing their widows to marry them. By modern standards this would be sex-slavery. Some groups have very high levels of domestic violence against women and children. So the evidence that hunter gatherers are lovely is pretty weak.2) ridiculous arguments about farming and sexHe accepts the fairly ridiculous argument that settled farming caused humans to gain sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This idea has been around for at least a century, an no evidence has been found to support it. Basically his argument is: 1) Prior to agriculture, humans lived in small scale societies with too few people for STIs to persist, so humans did not have STIs before agriculture. 2) People created settled communities, allowing a big population increase. 3) A male elite forms and dominates the surplus agricultural resources. 4) The elite used their increased power to take multiple wives, so many non-elite men could not find a wife. 5) So the unwed men started having sex with farm animals! 6) This allowed STIs from farm animals to pass into humans. So agriculture caused humans to start having STIs.There are a lot of problems with this argument. But the author does not mention any of them, but instead just blindly accepts this argument and states it as a fact. Here are some of the major problems with his argument.1) Humans and their ancestors have had pubic lice for 2 million years. So we did have STIs long before agriculture. So STIs do not have to come from farm animals.2) HIV was transmitted to humans within the last century. No one thinks this happened through sex. So STIs could pass to humans from animals through non-sex pathways during hunting. There is no need for the salacious bestiality theory at all...3) Syphilis came from the Americas. The only domesticated mammals of a suitable size there are dogs and llamas. It cannot have come from dogs, because they would have had it before they arrived in the Americas, unless they somehow evolved it in the Americas. And researchers specifically looked for evidence of syphilis in llamas and relatives to test this “STIs come from domesticated animals” theory, and found no evidence for it.4) In general, this theory has been tested and debunked. But the author ignores that literature.3) failing to disprove high rates of violence in hunter-gatherer societiesHe discusses the evidence put forward in Steven Pinker’s 2011 book “Better Angels of our Nature” which reviewed anthropology evidence for rates of violence in current and historical societies, finding that modern societies have vastly lower murder rates than small scale and hunter gatherer societies. This is obviously a huge problem for Bregman’s argument.He dismisses all this evidence by discussing evidence that the study of the Yanomami in the Amazon was biased, carried out by deeply biased researchers who wanted to prove humans were fundamentally violent.There are several huge problems with this. First, even if he is correct about the Yanomami data, that does nothing to disprove all the other data points. One bad study does not disprove the weight of evidence. It is absolutely shoddy of Bregman to imagine that disproving one data point is enough. If he wants to show that hunter-gatherer and small scale societies are peaceful, he needs to disprove the high-violence data for most of them, not a single case.But even his Yanomami criticism is false. He relies entirely on a book by Patrick Tierney, whose work has been completely debunked. Even just reading the Wikipedia page on this would find all this information, with links to the various official reports by learned societies, including ones hostile to the anthropologists involved. All conclude that Tierney was deeply biased, and made most of the allegations up himself. Any proper journalist or just vaguely competent investigator would have found all this. This is embarrasingly shoddy research by Bregman.After these three absolute failures of basic research, I just gave up on the book. If he can accept these arguments without any scepticism, I really cannot trust anything he writes.To be fair, the section of the book about the shipwrecked children who had to survive on an island together is really nice and well written. But if you want to better your understanding of humanity, this book is worse than useless. The author is so blinkered by his bias, you really cannot trust anything he says.

This is one of those books that’ll change the way you see the world. I had always thought that people were intrinsically good and this book proves it. Suddenly, the ideas are in sharp focus and my thoughts seem to be reinforced, giving me a more rounded view of humanity. The book gives me hope for the future and the changes humanity needs to make, in order to have a progressive humanist society based on needs not money.

I love this book. It made me smile from the first chapter.I have recommended it to so many people and have already bought it for friends.

I bought this book because I was watching a late night talk show and they were discussing the case of "the real" Lord of the Flies case. In the book, the boys who are left stranded on a desert island eventually turn into a band of murderous beasts who run roughshod over the "nicer" or less physically able boys. When they are found they have murdered three of the boys, and left the island in ruin. This book was the embodiment of what happens when boys are left to their own devices, that they will revert to no rules, violence and become warlike. It is argued that this is human nature. Good versus Evil. Right versus wrong. Kind versus mean. Are humans born warlike and are taught to be civil or are they born kind and learn to be evil? There was a real story of some school boys in 1966, who stole a fishing boat and set out from Tonga, then caught in a storm and shipwrecked on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. Was this the story that proved the Lord of the Flies theory? In fact it was the opposite. The boys survived for more than a year on the island of Ata. They were rescued by an Australian sea Captain. Once the boys reached this little island, the boys agreed to work in teams of two. They had a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. If they quarrelled, they solved the problem with a "time out" between the squabblers. After four hours they would bring them back together and make them apologise. They all stayed friends. They had made a promise to stay friends and they did even long after they were rescued. So it was the opposite of what happened in the Lord of the Flies story. Well this enticed me to read the book, but I'm afraid that was the only part which held my interest and it's at the beginning of the book. After that it contains studies of various human behaviors, like the Stanford Prison Guard study and the one where the subjects think they are applying electric shocks to people to see how far they will go. I have seen these studies in documentaries over the years or read something on them before and this book gives a different opinion on whether people are good or evil. And of course the age old story of the Nazis. Evil or just following orders?I just found the question of this too long, not conclusive in any real way and boring. Sorry.

Rutger Bergman’s Humankind - an excellent well written book; the author establishes with strong evidences that people are generally good; but the media spreads hatred; spreads fake news; exaggerates incidents; creates avoidable sometimes irresponsible emotional impact ; brain washes the minds of the innocent people with negativity; He further alerts people and warns them not to allow themselves to be misled by media. He has done enormous research to prove that ‘developing contacts’ with strangers erases prejudices from our minds. The book is very thought provoking; highly enlightening and educative. The book starts and ends with beautiful chapters and generally enjoyable; and is certainly a page turner. This is a book to be read by everyone.