Every Thursday at precisely 8pm I perform a sacred ritual.
It is ‘The Ace Of Spades’, by Motörhead, and, played at maximum volume inside a sealed bedroom, it can just about drown out the tinkling of wooden spoons on saucepans at the windows.
When it comes to the Health Service pot-bashers, I’m torn. On the one hand, there is something creepy about the party line we’re being squeezed into. Praising Our Beautiful NHS seems a mania: an all-too-convenient distraction from deeper, messier questions. On the other, I recognise the instinct. We all want to help. Many seem to have been waiting their whole lives to know what they would have done during the Blitz. Now we have our answer: 750,000 NHS volunteers inside a week, ungrumbling financial hara-kiri by small businesses, and fistfuls of notes shoved down the negligée of Captain Tom. We’re amazing. But in our heightened state, we’re also at the whim of various madnesses of any number of crowds.
It is this paradox that Rutger Bregman stumbles into in his new book, Human Kind: A Hopeful History. It’s not clear he makes it out alive.
“We are basically nice”, is Bregman’s big idea. Just this weekend, Bregman went viral on the Guardian website with a story from Human Kind about a real life Lord Of The Flies, arguing that the book was more a product of William Golding’s own abberant, alcoholic psychology than any model for human nature. When six real boys became stranded near Tonga, he points out, they made a pledge never to quarrel, and shared out their scant water supplies equally, initially at a cup a day.
As ideas go, Bregman’s is a whopper. After all, “What is fundamental human nature?” is the bedrock of all politics — you don’t need Jonathan Haidt to tell you that much of how we each dispense justice in the world goes back to a deeper view of who we are, which nests in our childhoods and even our genes. It’s certainly nice to find someone who is willing to have a go at a question this big. Academia has a tendency only to offer us A+ answers to C+ questions. Human Kind addresses an A++ question, but even at 400 pages, it can only really gesture towards answers; Bregman is like a man with a pen knife cutting chunks off a blue whale.
Far from being rapacious apes, Bregman says, humans have been bred to be the most pro-social species. He introduces what he calls Homo Puppy — the idea that it was the most sociable — those who could count on their neighbours — not the most aggressive who ended up winning the evolutionary race. We’ve been told we’re like chimpanzees — violent and territorial. But in fact we’re more like bonobos — co-operative, mild, fans of delicious free love. He cites the work of Dmitri Belyaev’s Soviet scientists who turned snarly wild silver foxes into cuddly domestic tail-waggers in thirty generations. We are those foxes.
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SubscribeGreat point at the end of the piece about groupthink. It is a key weakness in government and many, if not all, large organisations. We must encourage challenge by those outside the group, other wise we will continue to take risks such as the one we are dealing with now. To encourage appropriate challenge we need greater transparency.
Didn’t Dawkins sort this out 40+ years ago in The Selfish Gene? Yes we’re (mostly) good. We’re good because when it mattered “good” – or at least altruism – was a better strategy for gene survival than the alternatives. Because “maths”.
Human nature is a mixed bag & history & experience demonstrate people aren’t innately good, though some may incline more to the good just as others incline to the bad.
Thinking people are, or can be made, good is the source of much institutionalised misery.
Under normal circumstances people seem to range from good to not especially bad in their behaviours. But given the right (or wrong) circumstances some at least are capable of quite terrible acts.
The idea we are all innately good is harmless if naive. But if this belief becomes frustrated it does seem to turn rather easily into a desire to remodel humanity by whatever means.
Human nature ensures that a belief in man’s innate goodness will always be frustrated.
“Bregman, whose last book argued strongly for Open Borders, of course explains Brexit as being a result of whites who have no non-white neighbours voting Leave because they had limited contact with ‘the other’.”
This totally ignores the large numbers of British Indians who voted Leave. It appears that many did so because it seemed to them (hint: they were correct) unfair that their relations, however well-qualified, had to jump through burning hoops to enter the UK, but a white Continental European could just saunter in because he held an EU passport.
I have also never had it adequately explained to me why my preference for a job in Britain to go to a black kid from Brixton over a white lad from Bialystok makes me a racist. I see the Pole as a friend, and will never forget the contribution of Polish pilots to the Battle of Britain, but the black man was born here, and that makes him family.
Could this also be the reason men, rather than women, came to dominate society? Just wondering.
It seems more likely that there has always been a tension between in group cooperation (with the odd free rider) and inter group tension and aggression. Any group tending towards intra group aggression would tend to fall apart, any group failing to pursue its own interests when faced with rival groups would face marginalisation or extinction.
Put another way, in a world of easy going hippie communes based on universal love and cooperation and cohesive gangs of skinheads, the skinheads would come out on top.
Indeed, we may have a candidate for the “skinheads” in the form of the Yamnaya who seem to have wrought havoc everywhere they went – but left a huge legacy behind them in the form of the indo European languages.
‘Put another way, in a world of easy going hippie communes based on universal love and cooperation and cohesive gangs of skinheads, the skinheads would come out on top.’
I think you underestimate the innate nastiness of most hippies and the working class decency of most skinheads. Not that either of these groups really exists any more – you seem to be in a 1969 time warp.
You can joke – I’m trapped in here with Jeremy Corbyn.
You may be right about hippies – but the “working class decency” of most skinheads owes more to revisionist history than fact.
The unthinking acceptance of lockdown by so much of the population is another clear proof of the Ascht hypothesis, is it not?