June 16, 2020 - 6:03pm
Freddie Sayers catches up with Dutch historian and campaigner Rutger Bregman to hear why Hobbes was wrong, how civilisation has mostly made people miserable, and why Jordan Peterson is wrong. Have a watch…
Rutger Bregman: Why civilisation is a curse
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SubscribeThat was a bit of a challenging watch for me, but I’m glad I listened all the way through. Thanks Freddie.
I guess I’m more of a Hobbesian and so was all set to disagree vehemently. However Rutger has thought his points through thoroughly which he articulated well and in a measured way. I found him to be rather interesting. What he has to say is at least coherent which is more than can be said of many on the left especially those angry activists and agitators.
The one thing I can almost guarantee: if society had been built the way he now wishes it was, we would never have had Chartres Cathedral or Bach, never mind the pyramids.
The other thing I’d say is that most of it would not have worked out the way he thinks it might nor will it work out after he’s changed all our institutions. He hasn’t allowed for envy, rivalry, resentment all of which in the end lead to violence. He seems to blame the existence of violence purely on hierarchies. Perhaps the hierarchies came about to attempt to control those traits (and so to keep violence in check) rather than leading to them.
Obviously, we mucked up badly in the 20thC. But was it our institutions that led to that or was it those horrid traits?
Gave up when he said “war started”¦ when we became sedentary and hierarchical “¦ and invented patriarchy”¦” Freddie didn’t seem to be ready to push him on any of this, and it all seems very tendentious, –no that’s too polite, flat out wrong– to me.
There’s a myth floating around that before civilization we all co-existed peacefully and bartered with each other for goods. Tribal leaders were kind and caring and everyone listened intently to each other, speaking only when they held the talking-stick. Oh, and they were more matriarchal too.
It’s a variation of the “noble savage” theme – that how the simpler less-civilised person is somehow morally superior – a parallel with children is sometimes drawn, even at times without irony(!)
That this is deeply patronising and even fetishises the other is neither here nor there to proponents
Interesting how someone so educated can be so naive (I’m being generous, stupid would also be correct), His ideas, such as they are, is just basic, cliched and trite left wing virtue signalling nonsense. I’d be interested to see how he would be able to survive in the kind of world he wants. Assuming this interview is representative of his views I won’t be wasting my time buying his book.
Just after listening to this, and while looking for something else, I serendipitously came across this sympathetic but actually rather damning review of his book https://www.aier.org/articl…
Is it now ‘virtue signalling’ to accuse others of ‘virtue signalling’… and so on… ‘virtue signalling’ all the way down?
Thanks for the link to the review, Derek. I noticed Book said that a big problem with reviewing a book by a super-generalist like Bregman is nobody has the expertise in so many fields to know whether Bregman is making a brilliant insight or saying something dumb about everything. Where Book is ignorant, like in psychology, he finds him brilliant. Where he is knowledgeable, like in history and economics, he finds him dumb. Maybe there is a corollary to Conquest’s first law: Everybody is disdainful of Bregman’s views on what they know best.
Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization, has quite a different view of the idyllic, per-agricultural world.
Curious that Rutger’s instinctive source of examples is the USA. .Of all the dynasties he might have referenced, we hear about the Bushes and the Kennedys.
There is good evidence that hunter gathers lived longer lives and had less violent contact with other humans. But it is also clear that this was a dead end.
Hunter gathers will reach a population limit and then eventually collapse, in the same way that populations in the animal kingdom do. The only way to break the endless cycle of rise and fall was to adopt farming. Farming communities gave up some of their quality of life in exchange greater stability and security. Whether you think is was a positive or negative development is irrelevant. The fact is that they out competed hunter gathers, which is why the practice spread across the world.
Beyond survival skills, individuals in Hunter gatherer societies have very little to differentiate themselves with. Once civilisation develops the breadth and depth of human endeavours massively increases and thus so does the degree of differentiation between individuals, so hierarchy develops.
The idea that hunter gathers made a value judgment to be more egalitarian seem naive at best.
I faltered when he said that the protestors had been peaceful and it was the police who are violent, and then I totally gave up when he said policing in the 21st century should be more like social work. Trite infantile garbage.
i can see from the comments that rutger bregman wasn’t much valued. however, i really enjoyed listening to his ideas.
His book is a wonderful read. He is not cynical at all. Alot of what he says rings true. We do become what we imagine. If we treat people as selfish then they will behave that way. I think that in this interview it was obvious English is not his first language. In his book he was able to more succinctly state his ideas. I don’t think he was able to engage in debate with Freddie perhaps because of a slight language barrier aswell. I would not write him off based on this interview. I too agree that the Enlightenment created a rule/reason based system of governance. I believe that we are now reaching the end point of reason in western society and that COVID has fast tracked this process. Where do we go from here? Participatory budgeting, the commons or shall we continue to promote fragility and safetyism as the majority would and lose all the things we have worked so hard to create. Things need to change people wake up and you could do a damn side worse than cooperating and respecting each other which I believe in the end is what Rutger is suggesting which you would see if you could reach through your bias and cynicism.