Humankind: A Hopeful History

This book infuriated me, for more reasons than one. This fury was compounded by the realization that this it's conclusions will successfully appeal to the woolly-mammoth sized prejudices of the average college-educated person. Bergman's sanitized narrative of a idyllic prehistorical utopia is not just inaccurate and simplistic- its is an actively harmful outlook for understanding human nature. Bergman's core argument is that human beings are fundamentally ‘good' (that is, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, feminist, and opposed to violence)—unless or until their minds happened to be poisoned by property ownership or corrupt leaders, which Bregman claims were lacking for most of human history since humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. To back this core thesis Bergman presents historical and anthropological ‘evidence' that comes badly undone after the most basic amount of topical research on the subject.

Following is an example of why selectively reading your preferred values and rationalizations into history is bad: Bergman claims that “in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased,” and that it was only with the rise of agriculture that we began to see arranged marriages and male control over female sexuality, but this is pure fiction. Among the !Kung hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, anthropologist Richard Lee—a source Bregman selectively references for his claims about hunter-gatherer's inherent peacefulness–notes that “All first marriages are arranged by parents, and the girls have little say in the matter.” Among the Kaska nomadic foragers of British Colombia, anthropologist John Honigmann writes that, “Ideally a man feels entitled to beat his wife if he suspects that she has been untrue to him,” although “not all men avail themselves of this permitted behavior.” Arranged marriages are customary across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, and violence, directed towards one's wife and/or another man, is a common male response to actual or suspected infidelity.”

Speaking of “war against the enemy”, Bregman claims that it was the beginnings of sedentism and property ownership that led to the origins of warfare, “Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.”

In fact, however, in every region of the world where there is evidence of different nomadic forager groups neighboring each other, there are cases of intergroup violence. This pattern is thoroughly reviewed in a 2012 paper by anthropologists Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, who write that, “External war has been described in each of the areas we reviewed based on evidence of intergroup killing, explicit fear of strangers, and/or avoidance of border zones,” and adding that the “cases of hunter-gatherers living with different societies of hunter-gatherers as neighbors show that the threat of violence was never far away.”

Keep in mind there are a hundred such claims that are easily falsifiable, scattered throughout the book. Moreover they have been carelessly presented for an audience uninterested in probing the opposite case- making the text a mammoth disservice to society.

For those who have internalized the myth that “human beings are fundamentally greedy, selfish, & cruel, this book will set them straight. The “studies” and anecdotes people often cited by people claiming otherwise are all bullshit: “Stanford-Prison Experiment”, “Milgram Shock Experiment”, Easter Island, “Lord of the Flies”, all hoaxes, myths, and tall tales. There was a real “Lord of the Flies” incident and the children were quite peaceable. The 1914 Christmas Peace is another great example.

What this book shows is that humans are sociable creatures who want to help others, do a good job, and work toward a common goal. Sometimes they get misguided in believing a truly evil goal is for the greater good. The further the people are away from the actual acts, the more zealous and extreme they become.

This book has confirmed to me that we must flatten hierarchies, encourage autonomy, eliminate the useless managerial class, encourage direct democracy, encourage commons.

This book covers a lot and I am definitely not doing it justice. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks “humans are inherently greedy/cruel/evil”. Maybe you'll learn something.

Even for someone like me who is hardwired to think “Everyone is good at core” Bergman's approach is too simplistic.

I would still recommend this book for people who have given up on others, do not believe that kindness is core to the society.

I liked some chapters a lot but in some I felt Bergman went full Gladwell way to prove his point. IYKYK