I blogged in June about an interview with Rutger Bregman that I’d heard on the public radio program “On the Media.” Bregman had just published a book entitled Humankind: A Hopeful History. I was so intrigued by what he had to say that I immediately ordered the book. I finished reading it yesterday.
As I wrote in that earlier post, Bregman examines the historical evidence for two contrasting beliefs about the fundamental nature of human beings. On the one hand is the view promoted by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes that human beings are savages at heart, whose selfish and even murderous behavior is held in check only by the constraints of civil society and the rule of law. On the other hand is the view espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that human beings living in a pre-civilized “state of nature” were peaceable and cooperative, and that it was civilization that corrupted us.
I discovered Rousseau when I was in college and was immediately enamored of his sunny perspective on human nature. Like many others, though, I subsequently came to believe that Rousseau’s views amounted to wishful thinking. What convinced me was anthropological evidence of continual warfare between competing pre-civilized tribes and dark sociological studies like the Stanford prison experiment.
But Bregman offers a convincing case that much of the evidence for a Hobbesian view of human nature has been either misinterpreted or outright fabricated. Anthropological evidence of violence committed by ancient humans against each other has more recently been attributed to injuries by other causes. And intertribal warfare has been demonstrated only between tribes who have been exposed to “civilized” society. There is in fact no evidence, Bregman says, of warring between tribes during the tens of thousands of years humans existed prior to the agricultural revolution.
And the most infamous studies providing supposed contemporary evidence of human beings’ essential inhumanity, such as Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment at Stanford and the infamous shock machine experiments performed by Stanley Milgram at Yale, have since been revealed to have been misrepresented or outright faked.
But if human beings are essentially decent, as Bregman asserts, why is there so much evidence today of people behaving badly? One of the concepts Bregman discusses is what he calls the nocebo effect. We’re all familiar with the placebo effect, where a patient’s positive expectations lead to beneficial outcomes when they are administered an inactive substance that they believe is an effective drug. The nocebo effect is the opposite, in which a damaging outcome results entirely from negative expectations. Bregman cites a raft of evidence for the power of the nocebo effect, such as studies of schoolchildren who are arbitrarily categorized as being either smart or slow and who then fulfill those expectations to an extraordinary degree.
Bregman suggests that various factors in our society promote and reinforce a negative view of human nature. The news, for example, pays little attention to people behaving well — being generous, kind and cooperative. Stories like that wouldn’t attracts readers, clicks or eyeballs. Rather, news serves up shocking events and aberrant behavior. As the decades-old TV mantra says, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Prisons are another profound example of the nocebo affect in action. Prisoners are assumed to be human scum who can only be controlled by the most brutal and coercive methods. Our prisons model the behaviors we expect from prisoners, and the nocebo effect ensures that they live down to those expectations.
Bregman describes prisons in Norway in which prisoners and guards are regarded as members of the same community. They work and play together. These prisons model the kinds of behaviors that we want from prisoners when they rejoin civil society. Tellingly, the recidivism rates for these Norwegian prisons are much lower than they are for prisons in the US, notwithstanding the fact that US prisons are much less desirable places to go back to.
Perhaps the most astonishing anecdote in Bregman’s book is an example of what he calls non-complimentary behavior. Normally we mirror the behavior of others — if someone is nice to us, we’re nice in return, but if someone messes with us, we retaliate. Non-complimentary behavior refers to the act of responding to negative behavior with positive behavior rather than responding in kind. Here’s the incident Bregman relates to illustrate the concept:
Not long ago, Julio Diaz, a young social worker, was taking the subway from work to his home in the Bronx in New York. As he did almost every day, he got off one stop early to grab a bite at his favorite diner.
But tonight wasn’t like other nights. As he made his way to the restaurant from the deserted subway station, a figure jumped out from the shadows. A teenager, holding a knife. “I just gave him my wallet,” Julio later told a journalist. Theft accomplished, the kid was about to run off when Julio did something unexpected.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he called after his mugger. “If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”
The boy turned back to Julio in disbelief. “Why are you doing this?”
“If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars,” Julio replied, “then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me . . . hey, you’re more than welcome.”
The kid agreed, and moments later Julio and his assailant were seated at a booth in the diner. The waiters greeted them warmly. The manager stopped by for a chat. Even the dishwashers said hello.
“You know everybody here,” the kid said, surprised. “Do you own this place?”
“No,” said Julio. “I just eat here a lot.”
“But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.”
“Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”
“Yeah,” the kid said, “but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way.”
When Julio and his mugger had finished eating, the bill arrived. But Julio no longer had his wallet. “Look,” he told the kid, “I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill because you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”
The kid gave him back his wallet. Julio paid the bill and then gave him $20. On one condition, he said: the teenager had to hand over his knife.
When a journalist later asked Julio why he’d treated his would-be robber to dinner, he didn’t hesitate. “I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”
I can sympathize with anyone who would object, “But that’s rewarding bad behavior!” On an emotional level, the idea of giving our jacket to a mugger so that he won’t be cold while he proceeds to rob other people conflicts with our deepest proclivities. (Indeed, Bregman notes that when he told a friend about Julio’s act of kindness, his friend’s response was, “Please excuse me while I barf.”) And even on a practical level, we assume that rewarding bad behavior will only encourage it.
But Bregman makes a persuasive case for the erroneousness of that assumption. As in the example of the Norway prisons, or the non-violent civil disobedience promoted by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., meeting anger with anger, force with force, and violence with violence does not vanquish the anger, force and violence, but typically begets more of the same.
There are two broad theses to this book. One is that human beings, while not necessarily good, are for the most part inclined to be decent. In fact, it’s our capacity for playing fair with each other that has enabled the peaceful cooperation that has fueled our rise to preeminence on the planet. But there’s an important caveat: power corrupts. Most people in power become more self-serving, less principled and less compassionate the longer they rule. And their governance becomes increasingly repressive as they judge their citizens to be as self-serving and untrustworthy as they are themselves.
The other, related thesis is that much of what we think we know about how to promote peace and harmony in human society is wrong. The evidence and the historical record have been misinterpreted and/or misrepresented.
I know a lot of people who would vehemently reject everything Bregman contends in this book. Many would dismiss him as a wild-eyed crackpot. But I found Humankind to be the most illuminating and heartening book I’ve read in a long time, and I recommend it to anyone who is willing to examine the evidence for the humanity of humanity.