Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  1

  Morris Janowitz was twenty-two at the outbreak of the Second World War. A year later, a draft notice from the US Army arrived on his doormat. Finally. Morris was on fire to enlist. As the son of Jewish refugees from Poland, he couldn’t wait to don a uniform and help beat the Nazis.1

  The young man had long been fascinated by the social sciences. And now, having just graduated from college at the top of his class, he could put his expertise to work for the cause. Morris wasn’t being sent into combat with a helmet and rifle, but wielding pen and paper. He was stationed at the Psychological Warfare Division in London.

  At the agency’s headquarters near Covent Garden, Morris joined dozens of top scientists, many of whom would later go on to illustrious careers in sociology and psychology. But this was not the time for abstract theorising. Science had been called to action. There was work to be done and not a moment to lose.

  While the smartest physicists were cooking up the first atomic bomb in the town of Los Alamos in the American South West, and the cleverest mathematicians were cracking the Germans’ Enigma Code in the English countryside at Bletchley Park, Morris and his colleagues were grappling with the toughest task of all.

  They had to unravel the mystery of the Nazi mind.

  By early 1944 there was one conundrum that had scientists stumped. Why did the Germans continue to fight so hard? Why weren’t more of their soldiers laying down their arms and conceding defeat?

  Anyone surveying the battlefield could see what the outcome would be. Vastly outnumbered, the Germans were sandwiched between the advancing Russians in the east and an imminent Allied invasion in the west. Did the average German on the ground not realise how heavily the odds were stacked against them, the Allies wondered? Had they been so thoroughly brainwashed? What else could explain why the Germans continued fighting to the last gasp?

  From the outset of the war, most psychologists firmly believed that one factor outweighed every other in determining an army’s fighting power. Ideology. Love of one’s country, for example, or faith in one’s chosen party. The soldiers who were most thoroughly convinced they stood on the right side of history and that theirs was the legitimate worldview would–so the thinking went–put up the best fight.

  Most experts agreed that the Germans were in essence possessed. This explained their desertion rate that approached zero, and why they fought harder than the Americans and the British. So much harder, historians calculated after the war, that the average Wehrmacht soldier inflicted 50 per cent more casualties than his Allied counterpart.2

  German soldiers were better at just about everything. Whether attacking or defending, with air support or without, it made no difference. ‘The inescapable truth,’ a British historian later observed, ‘is that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was the outstanding fighting force of World War II, one of the greatest in history.’3

  And it was this army’s morale that the Allies had to find a way to break. Morris and his team knew they needed to think big–very big. On the Psychological Warfare Division’s recommendation, tens of millions of propaganda leaflets were dropped over enemy territory, reaching as much as 90 per cent of the German forces stationed in Normandy after D-Day. The message they rained down over and over was that the German position was hopeless, the Nazi philosophy despicable and the Allied cause justified.

  Did it work? Morris Janowitz didn’t have the foggiest idea. There was little chance of finding out from the confines of his desk, so he and fellow researcher Edward Shils decided to draw up a detailed survey to measure the leaflet campaign’s effect. A few months later, Morris set off for liberated Paris to interview hundreds of German prisoners of war. It was during these talks that it started to dawn on him.

  They’d got it all wrong.

  For weeks Morris interviewed one German captive after another. He kept hearing the same responses. No, it wasn’t the draw of Nazi ideology. No, they didn’t have any illusions that they could still somehow win. No, they hadn’t been brainwashed. The real reason why the German army was capable of putting forth an almost superhuman fight was much simpler.

  Kameradschaft.

  Friendship.

  All those hundreds of bakers and butchers, teachers and tailors; all those German men who had resisted the Allied advance tooth and nail had taken up arms for one another. When it came down to it, they weren’t fighting for a Thousand-Year Reich or for Blut und Boden–‘blood and soil’–but because they didn’t want to let down their mates.

  ‘Nazism begins ten miles behind the front line,’ scoffed one German prisoner, whereas friendship was right there in every bunker and trench.4 The military commanders were well aware of this, and, as later historians discovered, used it to their advantage.5 Nazi generals went to great lengths to keep comrades together, even withdrawing whole divisions for as long as it took new recruits to form friendships, and only then sent everyone back into the fray.

  Envisaging the strength of this camaraderie in the Wehrmacht isn’t easy. After all, we have been inundated for decades with Hollywood epics about Allied courage and German insanity. That our boys laid down their lives for one another? Logical. That they grew to be inseparable bands of brothers? Makes sense. But to imagine the same of the German hordes? Or, worse, that the Germans might have forged friendships that were even stronger? And that it was because of those friendships that their army was better?

  Some truths are almost too painful to accept. How could it be that those monsters were also motivated by the good in humanity–that they, too, were fuelled by courage and loyalty, devotion and solidarity?

  Yet that’s precisely what Morris Janowitz concluded.

  When the researchers at the Psychological Warfare Division put two and two together they suddenly understood why their propaganda campaign had virtually no impact. Writing about the effect of the millions of leaflets dropped behind enemy lines, Janowitz and Shils noted that ‘Much effort was devoted to ideological attacks on German leaders, but only about five per cent of the prisoners mentioned this topic [when questioned].’6

  In fact, most Germans didn’t even remember that the leaflets criticised National Socialism. When the researchers asked one German sergeant about his political views, the man burst out laughing: ‘When you ask such a question, I realize well that you have no idea of what makes a soldier fight.’7

  Tactics, training, ideology–all are crucial for an army, Morris and his colleagues confirmed. But ultimately, an army is only as strong as the ties of fellowship among its soldiers. Camaraderie is the weapon that wins wars.

  These findings were published shortly after the war and would be reiterated by many subsequent studies. But the clincher came in 2001 when historians discovered 150,000 typed pages of conversations overheard by the US Secret Service. These were transcripts of things said by some four thousand Germans at a wire-tapped POW camp at Fort Hunt in Washington DC. Their talk opened an unprecedented window into the lives and minds of ordinary Wehrmacht servicemen.

  The Germans, these transcripts showed, had a tremendous ‘martial ethos’ and placed a high value on qualities such as loyalty, camaraderie and self-sacrifice. Conversely, anti-Jewish sentiment and ideological purity played only a small role. ‘As the wiretap transcripts from Fort Hunt show,’ writes one German historian, ‘ideology played at most a subordinate role in the consciousness of most Wehrmacht members.’8

  The same was true of Americans fighting in the Second World War. In 1949, a team of sociologists published the results of a vast survey among some half million US war veterans, which revealed they had not been motivated primarily by idealism or ideology. An American soldier wasn’t fuelled by patriotic spirit any more than a British one was by democratic rule of law. It wasn’t so much for their countries that these men fought as for their comrades.9

  So deep were these ties that they could lead to some peculiar situations. Servicemen would turn down promotion if it meant transferring to a different division. Many who were injured and sick refused
leave because they didn’t want a new recruit to take their place. And there were even men who sneaked out of their infirmary beds to escape back to the front.

  ‘Time and again,’ one sociologist noted in surprise, ‘we encountered instances when a man failed to act in accordance with his own self-interests [for fear of] letting the other guys down.’10

  2

  It took me a long time to get to grips with this idea.

  As a teenager growing up in Holland, I’d pictured the Second World War as a kind of twentieth-century Lord of the Rings–a thrilling battle between valiant heroes and evil villains. But Morris Janowitz showed that something altogether different was going on. The origins of evil, he discovered, lay not in the sadistic tendencies of degenerate bad guys, but in the solidarity of brave warriors. The Second World War had been a heroic struggle in which friendship, loyalty, solidarity–humanity’s best qualities–inspired millions of ordinary men to perpetrate the worst massacre in history.

  Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists ‘the myth of pure evil’. In reality, our enemies are just like us.

  This applies even to terrorists.

  They’re also like us, experts emphasise. Of course, it’s tempting to think that suicide bombers must be monsters. Psychologically, physiologically, neurologically–they must be every kind of screwed up. They must be psychopaths, or maybe they never went to school, or grew up in abject poverty–there must be something to explain why they deviate so far from the average person.

  Not so, say sociologists. These stoic data scientists have filled miles of Excel sheets with the personality traits of people who have blown themselves up, only to conclude that, empirically, there is no such thing as an ‘average terrorist’. Terrorists span the spectrum from highly to hardly educated, from rich to poor, silly to serious, religious to godless. Few have mental illnesses and traumatic childhoods also appear to be rare. After an act of terror the media often show the shocked response of neighbours, acquaintances and friends, who, when asked about the suicide bomber, remember them as ‘friendly’ or ‘a nice guy’.11

  If there is any one characteristic that terrorists share, say experts, it’s that they’re so easily swayed. Swayed by the opinions of other people. Swayed by authority. They yearn to be seen and want to do right by their families and friends.12 ‘Terrorists don’t kill and die just for a cause,’ one American anthropologist notes. ‘They kill and die for each other.’13

  By extension, terrorists also don’t radicalise on their own, but alongside friends and lovers. A large share of terrorist cells are quite literally ‘bands of brothers’: no fewer than four pairs of brothers were involved in the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers were brothers, and so were Salah and Brahim Abdeslam, responsible for the Bataclan slaughter in Paris in 2015.14

  It’s no mystery why terrorists act together: brutal violence is frightening. As much as politicians talk about ‘cowardly acts’, in truth it takes a lot of nerve and determination to fight to the death. ‘It’s easier,’ one Spanish terrorism expert points out, ‘to take that leap accompanied by someone you trust and love.’15

  When terrorists strike, the news media primarily focuses on the sick ideology that supposedly fuelled the attack. And, of course, ideology does matter. It mattered in Nazi Germany, and it certainly matters for the leaders of terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS), many of whom have been moulded by a youth spent devouring books on radical Islam (such as Osama bin Laden, a known bookworm).16

  But research shows that for the foot soldiers of these organisations, ideology plays a remarkably small role. Take the thousands of Jihadists who set out for Syria in 2013 and 2014. Three-quarters were recruited by acquaintances and friends. Most, according to responses to a leaked IS poll, scarcely knew the first thing about the Islamic faith.17 A few wisely bought The Koran for Dummies just before their departure. For them, says a CIA officer, ‘Religion is an afterthought.’18

  The thing we need to understand is that most of these terrorist agents were not religious fanatics. They were the best of friends. Together, they felt a part of something bigger, that their lives finally held meaning. At last they were the authors of their own epic tale.

  And no, this is in no way an excuse for their crimes. It’s an explanation.

  3

  In the autumn of 1990, a new research centre opened at the university where Stanley Milgram conducted his shock experiments thirty years earlier. Yale’s Infant Cognition Center–or ‘Baby Lab’ as it’s known–is doing some of the most exciting research around. The questions investigated here trace their roots right back to Hobbes and Rousseau. What is human nature? What’s the role of nurture? Are people fundamentally good or bad?

  In 2007, Baby Lab researcher Kiley Hamlin published the results of a groundbreaking study. She and her team were able to demonstrate that infants possess an innate sense of morality. Infants as young as six months old can not only distinguish right from wrong, but they also prefer the good over the bad.19

  Perhaps you’re wondering how Hamlin could be so sure. Babies can’t do much on their own, after all. Mice can run mazes, but babies? Well, there is one thing they can do: babies can watch. So the researchers put on a puppet show for their pint-sized subjects (six and ten months old), featuring one puppet that acted helpful and another that behaved like a jerk. Which puppet would the infants then reach for?

  You guessed it: infants favoured the helper puppet. ‘This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend,’ one of the researchers later wrote. ‘Just about all of the babies reached for the good guy.’20 After centuries of speculating how babies see the world, here was cautious evidence to suggest we possess an innate moral compass and Homo puppy is not a blank slate. We’re born with a preference for good; it’s in our nature.

  And yet as I dug deeper into the world of baby research, I soon began to feel less optimistic.

  The thing is, human nature has another dimension. A few years after this first experiment, Hamlin and her team came up with a variation.21 This time, they offered infants a choice between Graham Crackers and green beans to establish which they preferred. Then they presented them with two puppets: one that liked the crackers, the other the beans. Once again, they observed which puppet the babies favoured.

  Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority gravitated towards the puppet that shared their own taste. More surprising was that this preference persisted even after the like-minded puppet was revealed to be mean-spirited and the other puppet nice. ‘What we find over and over again,’ said one of Hamlin’s colleagues, ‘is that babies will choose the individual who is actually mean [but similar to them] to the [nice] one who had the different opinion to themselves.’22

  How depressing can you get?

  Even before we learn to speak, we seem to have an aversion to the unfamiliar. Researchers at the Baby Lab have done dozens of experiments which furthermore show that babies don’t like unfamiliar faces, unknown smells, foreign languages, or strange accents. It’s as though we’re all born xenophobes.23

  Then I began to wonder: could this be a symptom of our fatal mismatch? Could our instinctive preference for what we know have been no big deal for most of human existence, only to become a problem with the rise of civilisation? For more than 95 per cent of our history, after all, we were nomadic foragers. Any time we crossed paths with a stranger we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.

  Nowadays, things are very different. We live in anonymous cities, some of us among millions of strangers. Most of what we know about other people comes from the media and from journalists, who tend to zoom in on the bad apples. Is it any wonder we’ve become so suspicious of strangers? Could our innate aversion to the unfamiliar be a ticking time bomb?

  Since that first study by Kiley Hamlin, many more have been conducted to test babies’ sense of morality. It’s a fascinating field of research, albeit on
e that’s still in its, um, infancy. The big stumbling block with this kind of research is that babies are easily distracted, which makes it difficult to design reliable experiments.24

  Fortunately, by the time we reach eighteen months, humans are a good deal smarter and therefore easier to study. Take the work of the German psychologist Felix Warneken. As a Ph.D. student, he became interested in investigating how helpful toddlers were. His supervisors rejected the whole idea, believing–as was common in the early 2000s–that toddlers were basically walking egos. But Warneken was not to be deterred and set up a series of experiments that would eventually be replicated around the world.25

  Across the board, their results were the same. The experiments revealed that even at the tender age of eighteen months children are only too eager to help others, happily taking a break from fun and games to lend a hand, helping a stranger even when you throw a ball pit into the mix.26 And they want nothing in return.27

  But now for some bad news. After learning about Felix Warneken’s uplifting research, I also encountered quite a few studies whose findings are less rosy, showing that children can be turned against each other. We saw this with Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment (see Chapter 7), and it was demonstrated again by a notorious experiment from the 1960s, launched the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

  On 5 April 1968, Jane Elliott decided to give her class of third-graders at a small school in Riceville, Iowa, a hands-on lesson in racism.

  ‘The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room,’ Elliott began. ‘They are cleaner and they are smarter.’ In capital letters she wrote the word MELANIN on the chalkboard, explaining that this is the chemical that makes people smart. As kids with brown eyes had more of it, they were also more intelligent, whereas their blue-eyed counterparts ‘sit around and do nothing’.28

  It didn’t take long for the Brownies to start talking down to the Blueys, and then for the Blueys to lose their confidence. A normally smart blue-eyed girl began making mistakes during a maths lesson. During the break afterwards, she was approached by three brown-eyed friends. ‘You better apologize to us for getting in our way,’ one of them said, ‘because we’re better than you are.’29