I listened to this week’s episode of On the Media this morning, the public radio program produced by WNYC in New York which is also available as a podcast. It included an interview with an economic historian, Rutger Bregman, who has just published a book called Humankind: A Hopeful History. In the book he argues that whereas people may not be precisely good, they are generally decent. This is, of course, the opposite of what rulers throughout history would have their subjects and citizens believe. They’ve always insisted that without them, chaos would ensue.
As Bregman says in the interview, “There’s a very old idea in Western culture which says that civilization is only a thin veneer, and that when something happens — a crisis, for example — we become savages, animals, monsters…that we reveal who we really are.”
But, he says, “The veneer theory is simply wrong. There’s a huge amount of evidence from sociology, anthropology, archeology and psychology that points in a very different direction — that deep down most people are pretty decent.” He offers one caveat: power corrupts.
As for why things look the way they do today, Bregman suggests that “negative expectations yield negative outcomes. What we assume about other people is what we get from them. If we assume that most people are selfish, then we’ll design our institutions around that idea — our schools, our workplaces, our democracy — and we’ll bring out exactly that kind of behavior.”
One of the topics discussed in the interview is William Golding’s book, The Lord of the Flies, in which a group of boys are stranded on an unpopulated island and descend into savagery. It’s required reading in many schools and is Exhibit A for anyone making the case for the “thin veneer” theory that human beings are essentially Hobbesian. But of course, The Lord of the Flies is fiction. Bregman looked through history for any instance where a group of boys was actually stranded on a deserted island, and he found one.
In 1965, six kids in Tonga who were fed up with the strictures of boarding school “borrowed” a boat for a getaway. They were caught in a storm and became shipwrecked on the unpopulated island of Ata. The boys collaborated, working in teams to tend a makeshift farm and keep a lookout for passing ships. After three months they managed to get a fire started and then never let it go out. In short, this real Lord of the Flies was in every way the opposite of the fictional one.
“It’s important to recognize,” Bregman says, “that a cynical view of human nature has always been used by those in power because it legitimized their power. If we can’t trust each other then we need them, we need kings and presidents, the army and the police, to keep us in check.” He suggests that our cynicism is exacerbated by the news we watch. “Trump is very happy if we watch Fox News and CNN all day because then we become scared. And it’s easier to rule people who are scared.”