Humankind: A Hopeful History

So, would anyone else benefit from reading his book? We think pretty much everybody would. Certainly, it's got plenty of tips for managers trying to foster a caring and collaborative team culture. But it's also thought-provoking for general readers.

So, keep listening to hear how we've come to have a false idea of human nature, what happens when the novel "Lord of the Flies" is played out in real life, and why it's important not to pay too much attention to the news.

Bregman organizes his text into an introductory section, five numbered parts, and an epilog titled "Ten Rules to Live By." The Introduction dives straight into the historical case studies that provide the meat of the book. For example, it examines why the strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two couldn't break civilian morale.

The theory among the military and political leaders of the time was simple: civilian morale would collapse as soon as cities were subjected to a sustained campaign of heavy bombing. Civilized society would disintegrate into despair, lawlessness and violence. People simply wouldn't be able to cope.

But the evidence from the Blitz of 1940, when Germany bombed London – and the heavy bombing of German cities later in the war – was quite different. People came together to help one another. Communities organized shelter, food and clothing. Morale rose in response to a shared threat.

So how did the leaders get things so badly wrong?

Their thinking relied on what Bregman calls "veneer theory." This argues that all the order and benefits of civilization are just a thin skin, barely containing an unruly mass of human drives and urges. Given the opportunity, this dark matter will burst into the open, sweeping the benefits of civilization away. According to veneer theory, we're all only a few missteps away from reverting to savagery.

In literature, the classic study of this theory is William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies." A group of English schoolboys are stranded on a desert island by a plane crash, with no adult supervision. Left to their own devices, they become a small society ruled by fear, superstition, and the threat of violence.

The novel has been a hugely popular and influential driver of veneer theory. This is what happens, it says, when you withdraw the framework of civilization from people – even young, impressionable ones. The veneer splits, and chaos takes over.

But is that true? Bregman begins Part One with his experience of tracking down and interviewing people who've been in that situation in real life. He talks to members of a group of Fijian boys, who were shipwrecked on a small island six decades ago.

Did they become savages? Did the strongest rule the weak through fear? No. They co-operated, drew up a set of rules to ensure they'd get along, and awaited rescue. They grew food and shared it. They stayed physically fit and healthy. And when tempers flared, they agreed ways to back off and cool down, not fight. Their experience could hardly have differed more from that of their fictional counterparts.

So, does that mean veneer theory is wrong? You only have to glance at the news headlines for evidence of humanity's underlying tendency to violence and disorder. Crime, terrorism and war are media staples.

But Bregman makes the point that the news media are not neutral. They need to get the big stories in front of their viewers and readers – and the big stories are usually about people behaving badly to others. Or they're about big, exceptional events. Our day-to-day kindness to one another gets much less emphasis.

Also, many outlets have a particular political agenda they want to spread among their audience. And it's easiest to do this by provoking anger and fear. All this skews the news agenda toward stories of human wickedness.

But the suppression of a kinder view of humanity doesn't begin and end with the media. It's woven into the very fabric of civilization.

Bregman takes a long view. He points out that, for 95 percent of human history, we haven't been "civilized" at all. Our forebears roamed the world as hunter-gatherers. And where hunter-gatherer societies have survived into the modern age, they have very different values to ours. They tend to be collaborative, and genuinely democratic. Anyone seeking to rule by coercion will likely be driven out of the group.

This all changed with the development of agriculture. Having fields to tend led people to settle down in fixed communities. It also gave them something to lose. The idea of property was born.

In time, people banded together in larger groups. They identified as tribes, and finally nations. And group identification caused the strongest members of the communities to put themselves forward as leaders. We got chieftains, and kings.

But through all of this we never quite lost our ability to be collaborative, social animals. Bregman uses the expression "Homo puppy" to describe the highly socialized, generous creatures we've always been.

So yes, veneer theory has got it wrong. Civilization is not preventing us from lapsing into savagery. All too often, it's getting in the way of us being as sociable as we could be.

Problem is, the idea of essential human evil has become entrenched. Some of the world's greatest thinkers have subscribed to the idea that people need to be led and controlled. Otherwise, everything falls apart.

Bregman calls this version of human nature a "nocebo effect." It's the opposite of the placebo effect. A nocebo is something that you believe is doing you harm, even if it's harmless. In the same way, if you're told people are basically vile, you'll believe that, and see evidence for it everywhere.

Take Easter Island, for example. That's the mysterious island in the Pacific dominated by huge stone statues, called Moai. Until recently, the theory was that the islanders had competed to build these statues, carving stone and felling forests until they destroyed their own resources and turned on each other, resorting to war and cannibalism.

But new research shows that the forests were more likely destroyed over time by accidentally imported rats. The islanders adapted and continued to thrive. They only died out when supposedly civilized European slavers ransacked the island in the 1860s. But the story of a brutal society that destroyed itself from within is still popular. It supports our assumptions about evil human nature, so it's the explanation we favor.

But surely there's just too much evidence from our recent past to support veneer theory? What about the Holocaust? Decent people in a previously civilized society turned into monsters in a matter of a few years. This must point to an underlying tendency toward evil.

Not so, says Bregman. True, he doesn't take on the detail of the Holocaust. But in Part Two, titled "After Auschwitz," he does focus on influential researchers whose work was informed by the horrors of Nazism.

Take Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo was a researcher at the University of California at Stanford. In 1971, he carried out an experiment to study the effects of power, rules, and group identity. He created prison conditions, with a group of volunteer students divided into guards and prisoners.

The guards abused their power, degrading and humiliating their charges. The guards' behavior became so bad that the experiment had to be stopped. Left to their own devices, the guards had reverted to their brutal natural tendencies. Or so it seemed.

Stanley Milgram's experiments at Yale University were in a similar vein. His volunteers were led to believe that, by pressing a button, they were inflicting electric shocks of increasing severity on a subject in another room. In fact, the screams of the subject were an act. But the volunteers didn't know that. And when told to, they continued to inflict apparently awful pain on their victims.

Again, the conclusions appeared to support the evidence from Nazi Germany. People followed orders, no matter what the moral objections.

But Bregman traces the histories of both Zimbardo's and Milgram's experiments, and reaches a different conclusion. He suggests that their findings were a form of confirmation bias. Subjects were manipulated into behaving in a certain way, because that was the way in which the scientists wanted them to behave.

He also notes that in Milgram's experiments, the volunteers behaved the way they did because they were told that what they were doing was scientifically important. They thought they were doing good.

Chillingly, Bregman notes that the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann fervently believed people would come to see him as having been a good man. He wasn't just following orders. He was conforming to a warped idea of goodness, of doing the right thing.

It's a shockingly counterintuitive conclusion, and it's not the last one Bregman reaches. In Part Three, titled "Why Good People Turn Bad," he states that empathy is an emotional skill of limited value.

That's the same empathy that lies at the heart of Positive Psychology, and is taught as a key skill in developing emotional intelligence. The problem with empathy is that it focuses our attention on a very narrow subject area, often an individual person. As a result, it goes against our natural tendency to be sociable animals. Our focus narrows, and we lose sight of our wider emotional and social landscape.

And some people don't have much of a view of that in the first place. Bregman notes that many leaders seem to have antisocial tendencies. It seems as though narcissism, dishonesty and immorality give them a head start when it comes to seizing and wielding power. They're the characteristics praised by many advocates of amoral political practice, like Machiavelli.

So what hope is there for the future? Plenty, according to Bregman. In Parts Four and Five of "Humankind," he explores ways of doing things differently, with an emphasis on the sociability and basic decency of human beings.

One example is the Norwegian prison system, in which prisoners are allowed a range of freedoms to manage their own lives. Such a regime would be impossible in most parts of the world; conservatives might decry it as a soft option. But it seems to work. Norwegian ex-convicts are much less likely to reoffend than their equivalents in the U.S. or Britain.

More controversially still, Bregman suggests that the best way to overcome the threat of global terrorism is not military intervention or drone strikes. It's dialog. Civilized people can find common ground with even the most fanatical nationalist or religious extremists. And when they do, they can turn around seemingly intractable conflicts, like those in Colombia and South Africa.

Recapturing a vision of humanity as collaborative and sociable is a tough ask. We've been living with the assumption that we're fundamentally bad for a long time. It underpins most Christian theology, for example. But there are things we can all do to change that.

In his epilog, Bregman lists ten things we can all do to correct our faulty self-image and help us be better. They range from always trying to assume the best in people, to avoiding the news. If you think about those two, they're pretty tough demands. But they're also within everyone's capabilities.

So, what do we make of "Humankind"? First of all, it isn't a history as such, despite its subtitle. It's a polemic. It draws on historical fact to make its case, but the argument is the focus, and the book is too partisan to be objective.

And there's plenty to argue with. Yes, humans have been simple hunter-gatherers for most of their history. But we've moved on. The development of agriculture and civilization may have had a negative impact on our simple souls, but they aren't going anywhere. And it's hard to see them as negative factors in human progress.

But "Humankind" is brilliantly written, and very enjoyable. There's a real sense of pace and enthusiasm, and Bregman deploys his examples with skill and wit. It's also a tribute to his translators that the book maintains its lively, conversational feel from the original Dutch.

Overall, "Humankind" makes a powerful argument for the fundamental decency of human beings. And that can be no bad thing.

"Humankind: A Hopeful History," by Rutger Bregman, is published in the U.S. by Little, Brown and Company, and in the U.K. by Bloomsbury Books.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.