Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  ‘We began bashing on the windows,’ Ruben recounts.17 Reinier tries to smash one of the side windows, but no luck. Meanwhile, the car tilts and dips, nose down. Reinier brings the brick crashing down hard on the back window. Finally, it cracks.

  After that, everything happens very fast. ‘The mother passed her child to me through the back window,’ Ruben continues. For a moment, the kid gets stuck, but a few seconds later Ruben and Reinier manage to work the toddler free. Reinier swims the child to safety. With the mother still inside, the car is inches away from going under. Just in time, Ruben, Rienk and Wietse help her get out.

  Not two seconds later, the car vanishes into the inky waters of the canal.

  By that time, a whole crowd of bystanders has gathered along the waterside. They help lift the mother and child and four men out of the water and wrap them in towels.

  The whole rescue operation was over in less than two minutes. In all that time, the four men–complete strangers to one another–never exchanged a word. If any of them had hesitated for even a split second longer, it would have been too late. If all four had not jumped in, the rescue may well have failed. And if that nameless bystander had not handed Reinier a brick at the last instant, he wouldn’t have been able to smash the back window and get the mother and child out.

  In other words, Sanne and her toddler survived not in spite of the large number of bystanders, but because of them.

  4

  Now, you could think–touching story, sure, but it’s probably the exception to the bystander rule. Or maybe there’s something special about the Dutch culture, or this neighbourhood in Amsterdam, or even these four men, that accounts for the anomaly?

  On the contrary. Though the bystander effect may still be taught in many textbooks, a meta-analysis published in 2011 has shed new light on what bystanders do in emergencies. Meta-analysis is research about research, meaning it analyses a large group of other studies. This meta-analysis reviewed the 105 most important studies on the bystander effect from the past fifty years, including that first experiment by Latané and Darley (with students in a room).18

  Two insights came out of this study-of-studies. One: the bystander effect exists. Sometimes we think we don’t need to intervene in emergencies because it makes more sense to let somebody else take charge. Sometimes we’re afraid to do the wrong thing and don’t intervene for fear of censure. And sometimes we simply don’t think there’s anything wrong, because we see that nobody else is taking action.

  And the second insight? If the emergency is life-threatening (somebody is drowning or being attacked) and if the bystanders can communicate with one another (they’re not isolated in separate rooms), then there’s an inverse bystander effect. ‘Additional bystanders,’ write the article’s authors, ‘even lead to more, rather than less, helping.’19

  And that’s not all. A few months after interviewing Ruben about his spontaneous rescue effort, I arrange to meet Danish psychologist Marie Lindegaard at a café in Amsterdam. Still shaking off raindrops, she sits down, opens her laptop, drops a stack of papers in front of me and launches into a lecture.

  Lindegaard was one of the first researchers to ask why we think up all these convoluted experiments, questionnaires and interviews. Why don’t we simply look at real footage of real people in real situations? After all, modern cities are chock-a-block with cameras.

  Great idea, Marie’s colleagues answered, but you’ll never be able to get your hands on that footage. To which Marie replied: we’ll see about that. These days, Marie has a database containing over a thousand videos from Copenhagen, Cape Town, London and Amsterdam. They record brawls, rapes and attempted murders, and her findings have started a minor revolution in the social sciences.

  She pushes her laptop towards me. ‘Look, tomorrow we’re submitting this article to a leading psychology journal.’20

  I read the working title: ‘Almost Everything You Think You Know About the Bystander Effect is Wrong.’

  Lindegaard scrolls down and points to a table. ‘And look, here you can see that in 90 per cent of cases, people help each other out.’

  Ninety per cent.

  5

  It’s no mystery, then, why Ruben, Reinier, Rienk and Wietse dived into the ice-cold waters of an Amsterdam canal that February afternoon. It was the natural response. The question now is: what happened on 13 March 1964, the night Kitty Genovese was murdered? How much of that well-known story is true?

  One of the first people to question the apathy of the eyewitnesses was a newcomer to Kew Gardens, Joseph De May. The amateur historian moved there ten years after Kitty’s death and was intrigued by the murder that had made the neighbourhood infamous. De May decided to do some research of his own. He started to go through the archives and turned up faded photographs and old newspapers and police reports. Piece by piece, as he began putting everything together, a picture emerged of what really happened.

  Let’s take it again from the top. Here are the events of 13 March 1964, this time relying on the painstaking investigation carried out by De May and others who followed in his wake.21

  It’s 3:19 a.m. when a horrifying scream breaks the silence on Austin Street. But it’s cold outside, and most residents have their windows shut. The street is poorly lit. Most people who look outside don’t notice anything odd. A few make out the silhouette of a woman lurching down the street and assume she must be drunk. That wouldn’t be unusual, as there’s a bar just up the street.

  Nevertheless, at least two residents pick up the phone and call the police. One of them is the father of Michael Hoffmann, who will later join the force himself, and the other is Hattie Grund, who lives in an apartment nearby. ‘They said,’ she repeats years later, ‘we already got the calls.’22

  But the police don’t come.

  The police don’t come? Why didn’t they tear out of the station, sirens blaring?

  Based on those first calls, the dispatcher may have assumed this was a marital spat. Hoffmann, now retired from the force, thinks that’s why they were so slow to arrive on the scene. Bear in mind these were the days when people didn’t pay much attention to a husband beating his wife, the days when spousal rape wasn’t even a criminal offence.

  But what about those thirty-eight eyewitnesses?

  This notorious number, which would turn up in everything from songs and plays to blockbusters and bestsellers, comes from a list of all the people questioned in the case by police detectives. And the vast majority of the names on that list were not eyewitnesses. At most they’d heard something, but some hadn’t woken up at all.

  There were two clear exceptions. One was Joseph Fink, a neighbour in the building. Fink was an odd, solitary man who was known to hate Jews (the local kids called him ‘Adolf’). He was wide awake when it happened, he saw the first attack on Kitty and he did nothing.

  The other person who abandoned Kitty to her fate was Karl Ross, a neighbour who was friends with her and Mary Ann. Ross personally witnessed the second attack in the stairwell (in reality, there were two attacks, not three), but he panicked and left. Ross was also the man who told police he ‘didn’t want to get involved’–but what he meant was that he didn’t want publicity. He was drunk that night, and he was afraid it would come out that he was gay.

  Homosexuality was strictly illegal in those days, and Ross was terrified both of the police and of papers like the New York Times, which stigmatized homosexuality as a dangerous disease.23 In 1964, gay men were still routinely brutalised by police, and the paper regularly portrayed homosexuality as a plague. (Abe Rosenthal in particular, the editor who made Kitty famous, was a notorious homophobe. Not long before Kitty’s murder, he’d published another piece: GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN.24)

  Of course, none of this excuses Karl Ross’s negligence. Even if he was drunk and scared, he should have done more to help his friend. Instead, he phoned another friend, who immediately urged him to call the cops. But Ross didn’t dare do so fro
m his own apartment, so instead he climbed over the roof to his next-door neighbour’s house and she woke the woman who lived next door to her.

  That woman was Sophia Farrar. When Sophia heard that Kitty lay bleeding downstairs, she didn’t hesitate for a second. She ran out of the apartment, leaving her husband still pulling on his trousers and calling after her to wait. For all Sophia knew, she could have been rushing straight into the arms of the murderer, but that didn’t stop her. ‘I ran to help. It seemed the natural thing to do.’25

  When she opened the door to the stairwell where Kitty lay, the murderer was gone. Sophia put her arms around her friend, and Kitty relaxed for a moment, leaning into her. This, then, is how Catherine Susan Genovese really died: wrapped in her neighbour’s embrace. ‘It would have made such a difference to my family,’ her brother Bill said when he heard this story many years later, ‘knowing that Kitty died in the arms of her friend.’26

  Why was Sophia forgotten?

  Why wasn’t she mentioned in any of the papers?

  The truth is pretty disheartening. According to her son, ‘My mom spoke to one woman from a newspaper back then’, but when the article appeared the next day it said Sophia hadn’t wanted to get involved. Sophia was furious when she read the piece and swore never to speak to a journalist again.

  Sophia wasn’t the only one. In fact, dozens of Kew Garden residents complained that their words kept getting twisted by the press, and many of them wound up moving out of the area. Journalists, meanwhile, kept dropping by. On 11 March 1965, two days before the first anniversary of Kitty’s death, one reporter thought it would be a good joke to go to Kew Gardens and scream bloody murder in the middle of the night. Photographers stood with their cameras ready to capture residents’ reactions.

  The whole situation seems insane. In the same years that activism began brewing in New York City, that Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, that millions of Americans began marching in the streets and that Queens counted more than two hundred community organisations, the press developed an obsession with what it trumpeted as an ‘epidemic of indifference’.

  There was one journalist, a radio reporter named Danny Meenan, who was sceptical of the story about the disinterested bystanders. When he checked the facts, he found that most of the eyewitnesses thought they had seen a drunken woman that night. When Meenan asked the reporter at the New York Times why he hadn’t put that information in his piece, his answer was, ‘It would have ruined the story.’27

  So why did Meenan keep this to himself? Self-preservation. In those days, no lone journalist would get it into his head to contradict the world’s most powerful newspaper–not if they wanted to keep their job.

  When another reporter sounded a critical note a few years later, he got a furious phone call from Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times. ‘Do you realize that this story has become emblematic of a situation in America?’ the editor screamed down the line. ‘That it’s become the subject of sociology courses, books, and articles?’28

  It’s shocking how little of the original story holds up. On that fateful night, it wasn’t ordinary New Yorkers, but the authorities who failed. Kitty didn’t die all alone, but in the arms of a friend. And when it comes down to it, the presence of bystanders has precisely the opposite effect of what science has long insisted. We’re not alone in the big city, on the subway, on the crowded streets. We have each other.

  And Kitty’s story doesn’t end there. There was one final, bizarre twist.

  Five days after Kitty’s death, Raoul Cleary, a Queens resident, noticed a stranger in his street. He was coming out of a neighbour’s house in broad daylight, carrying a television set. When Raoul stopped him, the man claimed to be a mover.

  But Raoul was suspicious and phoned a neighbour, Jack Brown.

  ‘Are the Bannisters moving?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Brown answered.

  The men didn’t hesitate. While Jack disabled the man’s vehicle, Raoul called the police, who arrived to arrest the burglar the moment he re-emerged. Just hours later, the man confessed. Not only to breaking and entering, but also to the murder of a young woman in Kew Gardens.29

  That’s right, Kitty’s murderer was apprehended thanks to the intervention of two bystanders. Not a single paper reported it.

  This is the real story of Kitty Genovese. It’s a story that ought to be required reading not only for first-year psychology students, but also for aspiring journalists. That’s because it teaches us three things. One, how out of whack our view of human nature often is. Two, how deftly journalists push those buttons to sell sensational stories. And, last but not least, how it’s precisely in emergencies that we can count on one another.

  As we look out across the water in Amsterdam, I ask Ruben Abrahams if he feels like a hero after his dip in the canal. ‘Nah,’ he shrugs, ‘you’ve got to look out for each other in life.’

  Part Three

  WHY GOOD PEOPLE TURN BAD

  ‘I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.’

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)

  Not long ago I sat down with a book I wrote back in 2013 in my native Dutch, whose title translates as The History of Progress. Rereading it was an uncomfortable experience. In that book I dished up Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison ‘research’ without an ounce of criticism, as proof that good people can spontaneously turn into monsters. Clearly something about this observation had been irresistible to me.

  I wasn’t the only one. Since the end of the Second World War, countless variations on veneer theory have been put forth, supported by evidence that seemed increasingly iron-clad. Stanley Milgram demonstrated it using his shock machine. The media shouted it from the rooftops following Kitty Genovese’s death. And William Golding and Philip Zimbardo rode the theory to worldwide fame. Evil was thought to simmer just beneath the surface in every human being, just as Thomas Hobbes had argued three hundred years earlier.

  But now the archives of the murder case and the experiments have been opened up, and it turns out we had it back to front all along. The guards in Zimbardo’s prison? They were actors playing parts. The volunteers at Milgram’s shock machine? They wanted to do right. And Kitty? She died in the arms of a neighbour.

  Most of these people, it seems, just wanted to help out. And if anyone failed, it was the people in charge–the scientists and the lead editors, the governors and the police chiefs. They were the Leviathans that lied and manipulated. Instead of shielding subjects from their ostensibly wicked inclinations, these authorities did their best to pit people against one another.

  This brings us back to the fundamental question: why do people do evil things? How come Homo puppy, that friendly biped, is the only species that’s built jails and gas chambers?

  In the previous chapters, we learned that humans may be tempted by evil when it masquerades as good. But this finding immediately raises another question: why has evil grown so skilled at fooling us over the course of history? How did it manage to get us to the point that we would declare war on one another?

  I keep thinking of an observation made by Brian Hare, our puppy expert from Chapter 3, who said: ‘The mechanism that makes us the kindest species also makes us the cruelest species on the planet.’

  For most of human history, as we’ve seen, this statement didn’t apply. We haven’t always been so cruel. For tens of thousands of years, we roamed the world as nomads and kept well clear of conflicts. We didn’t wage war and we didn’t build concentration camps.

  But what if Hare is on to something? What if his observation does apply to the last 5 per cent of human history, from the time we began living in permanent settlements? It can be no accident that the first archaeological evidence for war suddenly appears approximately ten thousand years ago, coinciding with the development of private property and farming. Could it be that at this juncture we chose a way of life for which our bodies and minds were n
ot equipped?

  Evolutionary psychologists refer to this as a mismatch, meaning a lack of physical or mental preparation for modern times. The most familiar illustration is obesity: where as hunter-gatherers we were still slim and fit, these days more people worldwide are overweight than go hungry. We regularly feast on sugars and fats and salts, taking in far more calories than our bodies need.

  So why do we keep right on eating? Simple: our DNA thinks we’re still running around in the jungle. In prehistory it made good sense to stuff yourself anytime you stumbled on a heavily laden fruit tree. That didn’t happen very often, so building an extra layer of body fat was basically a self-preservation strategy.1 But now, in a world awash with cheap, fast food, piling on extra fat is more like self-sabotage.

  Is this how we should also be thinking about the darkest chapters of human history? Might they, too, be the result of a dramatic mismatch? And could that explain how modern-day Homo puppy came to be capable of the most heinous cruelty? In that case, there would have to be some aspect of our nature that misfires when confronted with life in the modern, ‘civilised’ world–some inclination that didn’t bother us for millennia and then suddenly revealed its drawbacks.

  Something, but what?

  In the next three chapters, this is my quest. I’ll introduce you to a young American who was determined to understand why the Germans fought so tirelessly right up to the very end of the Second World War (Chapter 10). We’ll dive into psychological research on the cynicism that comes with power (Chapter 11). And then we’ll take on the ultimate question: what kind of society can you get when people acknowledge the mismatch and choose to adopt a new, realistic view of humanity?

  10

  How Empathy Blinds