Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  Haidt calls this emotion ‘elevation’. People are wired so that a simple sign of kindness literally makes us feel warm and tingly. And what’s fascinating is that this effect occurs even when we hear these stories from someone else. It’s as though we press a mental reset button that wipes away our cynical feelings so we once more have a clear view of the world.

  X. Be realistic

  And now for my most important rule to live by.

  If there’s one thing I’ve sought to do with this book, it’s to change the meaning of the word ‘realism’. Isn’t it telling that in modern usage the realist has become synonymous with the cynic–for someone with a pessimistic outlook?

  In truth, it’s the cynic who’s out of touch. In truth, we’re living on Planet A, where people are deeply inclined to be good to one another.

  So be realistic. Be courageous. Be true to your nature and offer your trust. Do good in broad daylight, and don’t be ashamed of your generosity. You may be dismissed as gullible and naive at first. But remember, what’s naive today may be common sense tomorrow.

  It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In January 2013 I got a message from Dutch philosopher Rob Wijnberg asking if I wanted to grab coffee. He told me he wanted to discuss plans for launching a new journalism platform. He envisaged a publication with no news, no advertising and no cynicism. Instead, we would offer solutions.

  Within months, what would become De Correspondent had set a new world record in crowdfunding, and I had a new job. This book is the result of seven years of working at De Correspondent. It’s the product of innumerable conversations with readers who honed, improved, or overturned my ideas. And it’s the result of the privilege of being able to pursue my own fascinations and be powered by that magical stuff known as intrinsic motivation.

  My thanks go to all my colleagues there. To Rob, of course, who energises me like no one else. To Jesse Frederik, who taught me to be more critical of my own ideas. To Milou Klein Lankhorst, who once more proved the best book publisher in Europe. And to Andreas Jonkers, whose contributions as deputy book publisher were invaluable for this book.

  I had the good fortune that Harminke Medendorp agreed to edit the original Dutch text. Harminke is among the best in her field, able with a few pointed questions to make you realise what you’re actually trying to say. My thanks also to all the colleagues who read versions of the Dutch manuscript: Tomas Vanheste, Maurits Martijn, Rosan Smits, Marnix de Bruyne, Sanne Blauw, Michiel de Hoog, Johannes Visser, Tamar Stelling, Jelmer Mommers, Arjen van Veelen, Maite Vermeulen, Riffy Bol, Charlotte Remarque, and Anna Vossers. When you get to work with people like them, it’s hard to be cynical.

  I would also like to thank Matthias van Klaveren, Sem de Maagt, Huib ter Horst and Carlijn Kingma, who read parts of the original book and offered valuable advice. Carlijn is one of the most talented artists in Europe and the artwork she created based on this book will probably hang in galleries long after my pages have all been recycled.

  For this English translation, I’m immensely grateful to Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. Translation is a difficult and often undervalued craft, and an art they’ve mastered like no other. I also thank my editors Ben George at Little, Brown and Alexis Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury, who helped further hone the text, my literary agents Rebecca Carter and Emma Parry, who believed in this book from the start, and copy editor Richard Collins, for his excellent work.

  Finally, I owe a huge debt to my family, to my sisters and brothers-in-law and to my friends. To Jurriën, for being a wonderful friend. To Maartje, for everything (including the English book title). And to my parents, Peta and Kees Bregman, to whom this book is dedicated.

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  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Rutger Bregman is one of Europe’s most prominent young historians. Utopia for Realists was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been translated from the Dutch into thirty-two languages. He has twice been nominated for the prestigious European Press Prize for his work at The Correspondent, and his writing has also been featured in the Washington Post and the Guardian. His TED talk, ‘Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash’, has been viewed more than three million times. He was ranked number 10 in the Big Issue’s Top 100 Changemakers of 2020.

  @rcbregman | rutgerbregman.com

  ALSO BY RUTGER BREGMAN

  Utopia for Realists

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. Churchill said this in the House of Commons on 30 July 1934.

  2. J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London, 1923), p. 150.

  3. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind (Kitchener, 2001), p. 19. Originally published in 1896.

  4. Richard Overy, ‘Hitler and Air Strategy’, Journal of Contemporary History (July 1980), p. 410.

  5. J. T. MacCurdy, The Structure of Morale (Cambridge, 1943), p. 16.

  6. Quoted in Richard Overy, The Bombing War. Europe 1939–1945 (London, 2013), p. 185.

  7. Angus Calder, The People’s War. Britain 1939–1945 (London, 1991), p. 174.

  8. Overy, The Bombing War, p. 160.

  9. Robert Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War (Manchester, 2002), p. 261.

  10. Quoted in Overy, The Bombing War, p. 145. In early 1941, only 8 per cent of bomb shelters were still being used. See Overy, p. 137.

  11. Sebastian Junger, Tribe. On Homecoming and Belonging (London, 2016).

  12. Richard Overy, ‘Civilians on the frontline’, Observer (6 September 2009).

  13. Mollie Panter-Downes, London War Notes 1939–1945 (New York, 1971), p. 105.

  14. Overy, The Bombing War, p. 264.

  15. Even friends who knew Frederick Lindemann well characterised him as someone who ‘always thought that he was in the right about everything, and was never prepared to yield or admit failure’, ‘was prone to regard views opposite to his own as a personal insult’ and ‘was never deterred from pontificating about a subject because he did not understand it’. See Hugh Berrington, ‘When does Personality Make a Difference? Lord Cherwell and the Area Bombing of Germany’, International Political Science Review (January 1989).

  16. Quoted in Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian, J. D. Bernal. A Life in Science and Politics (London, 1999), p. 176. Two thousand children were assigned to write essays about their experiences. Reading those essays today, their bravery is astonishing. ‘I was buried, I was cut but I still helped to pull out the dead and injured,’ one ten-year-old boy wrote of his destroyed house. See Martin L. Levitt, ‘The Psychology of Children: Twisting the Hull-Birmingham Survey to Influence British Aerial Strategy in World War II’, Psychologie und Geschichte (May 1995).

  17. Solly Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords. An Autobiography, 1904–1946 (London, 1988), p. 405. In the first edition of this book, published in 1978, Zuckerman added the title page of the Hull report as an appendix, thus violating the embargo that was in force until 2020.

  18. Quoted in Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1935–1945 (London, 1961), p. 332.

  19. C. P. Snow, ‘Whether we live or die’, Life magazine (3 February 1961), p. 98.

  20. Overy, The Bombing War, p. 356.

  21. Quoted in Jörg Friedrich, The Fire. The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945 (New York, 2006), p. 438.

  22. Quoted in Friedrich Panse, Angst und Schreck (Stuttgart, 1952), p. 12.

  23. Friedrich, The Fire, pp. 418–20.

  24. The British report was not released until fifty years later. See Sebastian Cox (ed.), British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, 1939–1945. The Official Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit (London, 1998).

  25. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life
in Our Times (Boston, 1981), p. 206. The million-dollar question, of course, is what would have happened if the Allies had invested less in their air force and more in the army and the navy? After the Second World War, Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett wrote that the war would have ended six to twelve months earlier. And the Germans reached the same conclusion. Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, said he had been most concerned by attacks on German infrastructure, while Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring mainly remembered the strikes on the German oil refineries. By the fall of 1944, German oil reserves were dwindling. Tanks stalled, aircraft were stuck in their hangars and artillery were being carted around by horses. But that didn’t deter the British from bombing German civilians. In the last three months of 1944, 53 per cent of the bombings targeted urban areas, and only 14 per cent were aimed at oil refineries. By that time the British had virtually stopped using firebombs, knowing there was not much left to burn. In the meantime, German oil production resumed. See Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London, 1979), pp. 327–34.

  26. Edward Miguel and Gerard Roland, ‘The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam’, Journal of Development Economics (September 2011), p. 2.

  1 A New Realism

  1. Tom Postmes, email to the author, 9 December 2016.

  2. Jack Winocour (ed.), The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors (New York, 1960), p. 33.

  3. Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York, 2009), p. 187.

  4. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist. In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York, 2013), p. 43.

  5. Gary Younge, ‘Murder and Rape–Fact or Fiction?’, Guardian (6 September 2005).

  6. Quoted in Robert Tanner, ‘New Orleans Mayor Orders Police Back to Streets Amid Increasingly Violent Looting’, Seattle Times (1 September 2005).

  7. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘It Always Lies Below’, Guardian (8 September 2005).

  8. Jim Dwyer and Christopher Drew, ‘Fear Exceeded Crime’s Reality in New Orleans’, New York Times (29 September 2005).

  9. Havidán Rodríguez, Joseph Trainor and Enrico L. Quarantelli, ‘Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe: The Emergent and Prosocial Behavior Following Hurricane Katrina’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (No. 1, 2006).

  10. Matthieu Ricard, Altruism. The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (New York, 2015), p. 99.

  11. Enrico L. Quarantelli, ‘Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities’, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences (No. 3, 2008), p. 885.

  12. Quoted in AFP/Reuters, ‘Troops Told “Shoot to Kill” in New Orleans’ (2 September 2005).

  13. Trymaine Lee, ‘Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence’, New York Times (26 August 2010).

  14. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, p. 131.

  15. Quoted in CNN Money, ‘Coke Products Recalled’ (15 June 1999).

  16. B. Nemery, B. Fischler, M. Boogaerts, D. Lison and J. Willems, ‘The Coca-Cola Incident in Belgium, June 1999’, Food and Chemical Toxicology (No. 11, 2002).

  17. Victoria Johnson and Spero C. Peppas, ‘Crisis Management in Belgium: the case of Coca-Cola’,’ Corporate Communications: An International Journal (No. 1, 2003).

  18. Quoted in Bart Dobbelaere, ‘Colacrisis was massahysterie’, De Standaard (2 April 2000).

  19. Karolina Wartolowska et al., ‘Use of Placebo Controls in the Evaluation of Surgery: Systematic Review’, British Medical Journal (21 May 2014).

  20. Clayton R. Critcher and David Dunning, ‘No Good Deed Goes Unquestioned: Cynical Reconstruals Maintain Belief in the Power of Self-interest’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (No. 6, 2011), p. 1212.

  21. Sören Holmberg and Bo Rothstein, ‘Trusting other people’, Journal of Public Affairs (30 December 2016).

  22. Jodie Jackson, ‘Publishing the Positive. Exploring the Motivations for and the Consequences of Reading Solutions-focused Journalism’, constructivejournalism.org (Fall 2016).

  23. See, for example, Wendy M. Johnston and Graham C. L. Davey, ‘The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins: The catastrophizing of personal worries’, British Journal of Psychology (13 April 2011).

  24. Hans Rosling, Factfulness (London, 2018), p. 50.

  25. Chris Weller, ‘A top economist just put the fight against poverty in stunning perspective’, Business Insider (17 October 2017).

  26. Toni van der Meer et al., ‘Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News. The case of airplane crashes’, Journalism Studies (16 January 2018).

  27. Laura Jacobs et al., ‘Back to Reality: The Complex Relationship Between Patterns in Immigration News Coverage and Real-World Developments in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers (1999–2015)’, Mass Communication and Society (20 March 2018).

  28. Nic Newman (ed.), Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Tracking the Future of News (2012). See also Rob Wijnberg, ‘The problem with real news–and what we can do about it’, Medium.com (12 September 2018).

  29. Quoted in Michael Bond, ‘How to keep your head in scary situations’, New Scientist (27 August 2008).

  30. Rolf Dobelli, ‘Avoid News. Towards a Healthy News Diet’, dobelli.com (August 2010).

  31. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, pp. 38–9.

  32. Michael Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley, 1974), p. 247.

  33. Joseph Henrich et al., ‘In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies’, American Economic Review (No. 2, 2001).

  34. David Sloan Wilson and Joseph Henrich, ‘Scientists Discover What Economists Haven’t Found: Humans’, Evonomics.com (12 July 2016).

  35. Quoted in David Sloan Wilson, ‘Charles Darwin as the Father of Economics: A Conversation with Robert Frank’, The Evolution Institute (10 September 2015).

  36. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner (1972), pp. 242–5.

  37. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by Maria Boulding (2012), p. 12.

  38. Thomas Henry Huxley, The Struggle for Existence in Human Society (originally published in 1888).

  39. Herbert Spencer, Social Statistics, Chapter XVIII, paragraph 4 (1851).

  40. ‘I refuse to believe that the tendency of human nature is always downward,’ said Mahatma Gandhi, the legendary leader of India’s independence movement, whom Churchill dismissed as a ‘half-naked fakir’. ‘Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished,’ said Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for twenty-seven years by a criminal regime.

  41. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Stillwell, 2008), p. 29. Originally published in 1910.

  42. This was Marie Lindegaard, whom we’ll meet in Chapter 9.

  2 The Real Lord of the Flies

  1. William Golding recalled this in the introduction to his audiotaped reading of the book produced in 1980s. See William Golding, Lord of the Flies. Read by the author (Listening Library, 2005).

  2. John Carey, William Golding. The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (London, 2010), p. 150.

  3. William Golding, The Hot Gates (London, 1965), p. 87.

  4. Arthur Krystal (ed.), A Company of Readers. Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling (2001), p. 159.

  5. Quoted in Carey, William Golding, p. 82.

  6. Ibid., p. 259.

  7. In ‘Dit gebeurt er als je gewone kinderen vrijlaat in de wildernis’, De Correspondent (6 June 2017).

  8. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, p. 214.

  9. MaryAnn McKibben Dana, ‘Friday Link Love: Doubt, Virginia Woolf, and a Real-Life Lord of the Flies’, theblueroom.org (3 May 2013).

  10. Susanna Agnelli, Street Children. A Growing Urban Tragedy (London, 1986).

  11. Jamie Brown, ‘Mates Share 50-Year Bond’, Daily Mercury (12 December 2014).

 
; 12. Quoted in Kay Keavney, ‘The Dropout Who Went to Sea’, The Australian Women’s Weekly (19 June 1974).

  13. Except where stated otherwise, all quotations by Peter Warner and Mano Totau in this chapter are from my own interviews with them.

  14. See in particular Keith Willey, Naked Island–and Other South Sea Tales (London, 1970).

  15. Steve Bowman, an Australian filmmaker, interviewed David in 2007 and kindly shared his (unpublished) footage with me. This quote is from Bowman’s documentary.

  16. Willey, Naked Island, p. 6.

  17. Quoted in Scott Hamilton, ‘In remote waters’, readingthemaps.blogspot.com (18 November 2016).

  18. Peter Warner, Ocean of Light. 30 years in Tonga and the Pacific (Keerong, 2016), p. 19.

  19. This is how Sione remembers it too. ‘We stayed very close together,’ he told me over the phone. ‘Any time there was a quarrel, I tried to calm the boys down. Then they’d cry, they’d apologise, and that was the end of it. That’s how it went every time.’

  20. Actually, this was lucky. Believing themselves near Samoa, the boys set a course south, whereas in fact they would have had to go north.

  21. Willey, Naked Island, p. 33.

  22. Warner, Ocean of Light, p. 89.

  23. Charlotte Edwardes, ‘Survivor Game Show Based on Public School’, Daily Telegraph (3 June 2001).

  24. Robert Evans and Michael Thot, ‘5 Ways You Don’t Realize Reality Shows Lie’, Cracked.com (7 July 2014).

  25. Girl Scout Research Institute, ‘Girls and Reality TV’ (2011).

  26. Robert Sapolsky, Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London, 2017), p. 199.

  27. Bryan Gibson et al., ‘Just “Harmless Entertainment”? Effects of Surveillance Reality TV on Physical Aggression’, Psychology of Popular Media Culture (18 August 2014).

  28. Quoted in CBC Arts, ‘George Gerbner Leaves the Mean World Syndrome’, Peace, Earth & Justice News (8 January 2006).