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

Let me start by saying that this book rips to shreds all those negative theories about human behavior we learned in social psychology back in 1977. Bregman looks closely at the science behind those negative theories that arose from research long ago, and he discovers lots of flaws in the way the research was conducted. The author shares, in addition, lots of the research and anecdotes that support his idea that most humans are basically good. And he is able to explain the terrible things that have occurred throughout history in a way that supports this idea, noting that these occurred, in general, by people who thought they were doing things to make things better.

Some of the things I took away from the book:

Most guns are not fired in battle (only about 20% are).

To destroy racism, people need to be around a diverse group of people.

Power does corrupt good people.

The twin brothers and Nelson Mandela story.

Oslo prisons.

Julio Diaz and his mugger.

Agora, the school.

Not empathy but compassion.

Elinor Ostrom and her findings.

I absolutely loved this book. Very well researched, written in a totally accessible style and incredibly optimistic. Bregman's theory is that as a species we are programmed to be sociable and to assist each other rather than to be at war and hate each other. Along the way he disproves some classic social experiments and theories including the Stanford experiment where students pretending to be guards were sadistic to prisoners and the famous Yale experiment where people administered shocks to lab assistants getting quiz questions wrong. Absolutely fascinating and very well argued, Bregman can sometimes come across as a little bit naive, but this is a great antidote to the pessimism in the news.

Got overly sentimental and optimistic at the end, but the book speaks the truth: people are inherently kind and that cynicism is the laziest heuristic to have. It is so easy to simply assume the worst in people, but it often takes less than courage to be kind - it is our default, perhaps marred by social barriers inherent in society.