Insights
Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is something
on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman in his new book
“Humankind,” we have a rather pessimistic view—not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else.
We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy, and dangerous, and therefore we behave towards
them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas
Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent
anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.
But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human
nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18thcentury French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilization—
with its coercive powers, social classes, and restrictive laws—that put him in chains.
Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument, and it’s no
surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and
paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo
sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature. Then we discovered agriculture, and for the
next 10,000 years, it was all about property, war, greed, and injustice.
It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then domesticating animals, says Bregman, that
brought about infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria,
cholera, and plague. This may be true, but what Bregman never really seems to get to grips with
is that pathogens were not the only things that grew with agriculture—so did the number of
humans. It’s one thing to maintain friendly relations and a property-less mode of living when
you’re 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers following the food. But life becomes a great deal more complex
and knowledge far more extensive when there are settlements of many thousands.
“Civilization has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and
decline,” writes Bregman. “In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”
Whereas traditional history depicts the collapse of civilizations as “dark ages” in which
everything gets worse, modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in which the
enslaved gain their freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book, the truth is
probably somewhere between the two stated positions.
In any case, the fear of civilizational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It’s the result of
what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls “veneer theory”—the idea that just below the
surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out. There’s a great deal of reassuring human
decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of evidence in
support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been deleteriously
distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau and Hobbes
when, clearly, humanity encompasses both.
