Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  Under the weight of all the statistics trotted out in this hefty tome, the case seemed closed. For years, I thought Steven Pinker was right, and Rousseau cracked. After all, the results were in and numbers don’t lie.

  Then I found out about Colonel Marshall.

  3

  It’s 22 November 1943. Night has fallen on an island in the Pacific, and the Battle of Makin has just begun. The offensive is unfolding as planned when something strange happens.12

  Samuel Marshall, colonel and historian, is there to see it. He’s accompanied the first American contingent ashore as they try to take the island, which is in Japanese hands. Rarely has a historian been this close to the action. The invasion itself is a perfectly isolated operation, almost like a lab experiment. It’s the ideal opportunity for Marshall to observe how war plays out in real time.

  The men advance three miles that day in the blistering heat. When they halt in the evening, nobody has the energy to dig themselves in, so they don’t realise there’s a Japanese camp a short distance away. The attack starts after dark. Japanese forces storm the American position, making eleven attempts in all. Despite being outnumbered they nearly manage to break through American lines.

  The next day, Marshall wonders what went wrong. He knows there’s only so much you can learn by peering at flags on a map or reading the officers’ logbooks. So he decides to do something that’s never been tried. It’s revolutionary in the world of historical scholarship. That same morning, he rounds up the American soldiers and interviews them in groups. He asks them to speak freely, allowing lower ranks to disagree with their superiors.

  As far as strategies go, it’s genius. ‘Marshall almost immediately realized he had stumbled onto the secret of accurate combat reporting,’ a colleague would later write. ‘Every man remembered something–a piece to be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle.’13 And that’s how the colonel makes a baffling discovery.

  Most of the soldiers never fired their guns.

  For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill.

  But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14

  The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger.

  Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training.

  Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty.

  They failed to shoot.

  In the years after the Second World War, Samuel Marshall would become one of the most respected historians of his generation. When he spoke, the US Army listened. In his 1946 book Men Against Fire–still read at military academies to this day–he stressed that ‘the average and normally healthy individual […] has such an inner usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life’.15 Most people, he wrote, have a ‘fear of aggression’ that is a normal part of our ‘emotional make-up’.16

  What was going on? Had the colonel uncovered some powerful instinct? Published when veneer theory was at its peak and Raymond Dart’s killer ape model all the rage, Marshall’s findings were hard to take in. The colonel had a hunch that his analysis wasn’t limited to Allied servicemen in the Second World War, but applied to all soldiers throughout history. From the Greeks at Troy to the Germans at Verdun.

  Though Marshall enjoyed a distinguished reputation during his lifetime, in the 1980s the doubts began to surface. ‘Pivotal S. L. A. Marshall Book on Warfare Assailed as False,’ declared the front page of the New York Times on 19 February 1989. The magazine American Heritage went so far as to call it a hoax, alleging that Marshall had ‘made the whole thing up’ and never conducted any group interviews at all. ‘That guy perverted history’ a former officer scoffed. ‘He didn’t understand human nature.’17

  Marshall was unable to defend himself, having died twelve years earlier. Other historians then dived into the fray–and into the archives–and found indications that Marshall had indeed twisted the facts at times. But the group interviews had been real enough, and he certainly asked soldiers if they’d fired their M1s.18

  After days of reading Marshall, his detractors and his defenders, I no longer knew what to think. Was I just a little too eager for the colonel to be right? Or was he really onto something? The deeper I delved into the controversy, the more Marshall struck me as an intuitive thinker–not a stellar statistician, granted, but definitely a perceptive observer.

  The big question was: is there any further evidence to back him up?

  Short answer? Yes.

  Long answer? Over the last decades, proof that Colonel Marshall was right has been piling up.

  First of all, colleagues on the front observed the same thing as Marshall. Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Wigram complained during the 1943 campaign in Sicily that he could rely on no more than a quarter of his troops.19 Or take General Bernard Montgomery, who in a letter home wrote, ‘The trouble with our British boys is that they are not killers by nature.’20

  When historians later began interviewing veterans of the Second World War, they found that more than half had never killed anybody, and most casualties were the work of a small minority of soldiers.21 In the US Air Force, less than 1 per cent of fighter pilots were responsible for almost 40 per cent of the planes brought down.22 Most pilots, one historian noted, ‘never shot anyone down or even tried to’.23

  Prompted by these findings, scholars began revisiting assumptions about other wars as well. Such as the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg at the height of the American Civil War. Inspection of the 27,574 muskets recovered afterwards from the battlefield revealed that a staggering 90 per cent were still loaded.24 This made no sense at all. On average, a rifleman spent 95 per cent of the time loading his gun and 5 per cent firing it. Since priming a musket for use required a whole series of steps (tear open the cartridge with your teeth, pour gunpowder down the barrel, insert the ball, ram it in, put the percussion cap in place, cock back the hammer and pull the trigger), it was strange, to say the least, that so many guns were still fully loaded.

  But it gets even stranger. Some twelve thousand muskets were double-loaded, and half of those more than triple. One rifle even had twenty-three balls in the barrel–which is absurd. These soldiers had been thoroughly drilled by their officers. Muskets, they all knew, were designed to discharge one ball at a time.

  So what were they doing? Only much later did historians figure it out: loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it. And if it happened to be loaded already, well, you just loaded it again. And again.25

  Similar findings were made in the French army. In a detailed survey conducted among his officers in the 1860s, French colonel Ardant du Picq discovered that soldiers are not all that into fighting. When they did fire their weapons, they often aimed too high. That could go on for hours: two armies emptying their rifles over each other’s heads, while everyone scrambled for an excuse to do something else–anything else–in the meantime (replenish ammo, load yo
ur weapon, seek cover, whatever).

  ‘The obvious conclusion,’ writes military expert Dave Grossman, ‘is that most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy.’26

  Reading this, I suddenly recalled a passage about the very same phenomenon by one of my favourite authors. ‘In this war everyone always did miss everyone else, when it was humanly possible,’ wrote George Orwell in his Spanish Civil War classic, Homage to Catalonia.27 This is not to imply there were no casualties, of course; but according to Orwell, most soldiers who wound up in the infirmary had injured themselves. By accident.

  In recent years, a steady stream of experts has rallied behind Colonel Marshall’s conclusions. Among them is sociologist Randall Collins, who analysed hundreds of photographs of soldiers in combat and, echoing Marshall’s estimates, calculates that only about 13 to 18 per cent fired their guns.28

  ‘The Hobbesian image of humans, judging from the most common evidence, is empirically wrong,’ Collins asserts. ‘Humans are hardwired for […] solidarity; and this is what makes violence so difficult.’29

  4

  To this day, our culture is permeated by the myth that it’s easy to inflict pain on others. Think about trigger-happy action heroes like Rambo and the ever-fighting Indiana Jones. Look at the way fist fights go on for ever in movies and on TV–where violence spreads like an infection: a character trips, falls on someone else, who lands an accidental punch, and before you know it you’re in the middle of a war of all against all.

  But the image cooked up by Hollywood has about as much to do with real violence as pornography has with real sex. In reality, says the science, violence isn’t contagious, it doesn’t last very long and it’s anything but easy.

  The more I read about Colonel Marshall’s analyses and subsequent research, the more I began to doubt the notion of our warmongering nature. After all, if Hobbes was right, we should all take pleasure in killing another person. True, it might not rate as high as sex, but it certainly wouldn’t inspire a deep aversion.

  If, on the other hand, Rousseau was right, then nomadic foragers should have been largely peaceable. In that case, we must have evolved our intrinsic antipathy towards bloodshed over the tens of thousands of years that Homo puppy went about populating the earth.

  Could Steven Pinker, the psychologist of the weighty tome, be mistaken? Could his seductive statistics about the high human toll of prehistoric wars–that I eagerly cited in earlier books and articles–be wrong?

  I decided to go back to square one. This time, I steered clear of publications intended for a popular readership and delved deeper into the academic literature. It wasn’t long before I discovered a pattern. When a scientist portrayed humans as homicidal primates, the media was quick to seize on their work. If a colleague argued the reverse, scarcely anyone listened.

  This made me wonder: are we being misled by our fascination with horror and spectacle? What if scientific truth is diametrically different to what the bestselling and most-cited publications would have us believe?

  Let’s revisit Raymond Dart, the man who back in the 1920s examined the first unearthed remains of Australopithecus africanus. After inspecting the damaged bones of these two-million-year-old hominins, he decided they must have been bloodthirsty cannibals.

  That conclusion was a hit. Just look at movies such as the original Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey (both 1968), which cashed in on killer ape theory. ‘I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man,’ confirmed director Stanley Kubrick in an interview, ‘because it’s a true picture of him.’30

  Not until many years later did scientists realise that the forensic remains of Australopithecus africanus pointed in an altogether different direction. The bones, experts now agree, were damaged not by other hominins (wielding stones, tusks, or horns), but by predators. So, too, the individual whose skull Raymond Dart analysed in 1924. In 2006 the new verdict came in: the offender had been a large bird of prey.31

  What about chimpanzees, our near kin who have been known to tear each other limb from limb? Aren’t they living proof that blood lust is baked into our genes?

  This continues to be a point of contention. Among other things, scholars disagree on the question why chimps go on the attack. Some say human interference itself is to blame, charging that if you regularly feed chimps bananas–like Jane Goodall in Tanzania–it sparks them to be more aggressive. After all, nobody wants to miss out on these treats.32

  As tantalising as this explanation sounded at first, in the end I wasn’t convinced. What clinched it was a big study from 2014 presenting data collected in eighteen chimp colonies over a period of fifty years.33 No matter which way they looked at it, the researchers could find no correlation between the number of chimpicides and human interference. The chimpanzees, they concluded, were equally capable of savagery without the external stimuli.

  Fortunately our family tree has more branches. Gorillas, for example, are far more peaceable. Or, better yet, bonobos. These primates, with their attenuated neck, fine-boned hands and small teeth, prefer to play the day away, are as friendly as can be and never completely grow up.

  Ring any bells? Sure enough, biologists suspect that, like Homo puppy, the bonobo has domesticated itself. Their faces, incidentally, look uncannily human.34 If we want to draw parallels, this is where we ought to start.

  But how relevant is this heated debate over our nearest kin really? Humans are not chimpanzees, and we’re not bonobos either. All told there are more than two hundred different species of primates, with significant variations between them. Robert Sapolsky, a leading primatologist, believes apes have little to teach us about our own human ancestors, saying, ‘The debate is an empty one.’35

  We need to return to the real question–the question that gripped Hobbes and Rousseau.

  How violent were the first human beings?

  Earlier I said there are two ways to find out. One: study modern-day hunter-gatherers living the same life our ancestors did. Two: dig for old bones and other remains our ancestors left behind.

  Let’s start with number one. I already mentioned Napoleon Chagnon’s The Fierce People, the bestselling anthropology book of all time. Chagnon showed that the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil have a thing for war, and that homicidal Yanomami men fathered three times as many children as their pacifist counterparts (‘wimps’, in Chagnon’s words36).

  But how reliable is his research? The current scientific consensus is that most tribes still living the hunter-gatherer life today are not representative of how our ancestors lived. They’re up to their ears in civilised society and have frequent contact with agriculturalists and urbanites. The simple fact that they’ve been followed around by anthropologists renders them ‘contaminated’ as a study population. (Incidentally, few tribes are more ‘contaminated’ than the Yanomami. In exchange for their help, Chagnon handed out axes and machetes, then concluded that these people were awfully violent.)37

  And Chagnon’s assertion that killers fathered more children than peaceniks? It literally doesn’t add up. That’s because he made two serious errors. First, he forgot to correct for age: the killers in his database were on average ten years older than the ‘wimps’. So the thirty-five-year-olds had more kids than twenty-five-year-olds. No big surprise there.

  Chagnon’s other fundamental error was that he only included the progeny of killers who were still alive. He disregarded the fact that people who murder other people often get what’s coming to them. Revenge, in other words. Ignore these cases and you might as well argue that, after looking solely at the winners, it pays to play the lottery.38

  After the anthropologist’s visit, the Yanomami added a new word to their vocabulary: anthro. Definition? ‘A powerful nonhuman with deeply disturbed tendencies and wild eccentricities.’39 In 1995, this particular anthro was barred from ever returning to Yanomami territory.

  Clearly, Chagnon’s bestseller is best ignored. But we still have psychologist Steven Pinker’s ei
ght hundred plus-page testimony with all its graphs and tables as authoritative proof of our violent nature.

  In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things.

  This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups.

  Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots.

  But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem.