Kind Humankind: The Dawn of a New Normal! Rutger Bregman bells the cat
Jose T Thomas
Enter a 32-year old investigative journalist-historian who with a toolkit of metajournalism takes on those who manufactured evolutionary scientism out of Darwin’s science of evolution: Rutger Bregman, the cool Dutch.
After his 2019 blockbuster appearence at WEF/Davos, the unaired interview with Carlson of Fox News and the best-selling Utopia for Realists, Bregman in his latest book Humankind: A Hopeful History exposes the Selfish Gene myths of the last century which seems to rule the world even in the early decades of the new millennium.
Who made Darwin the Darwinian a Darwinist and an expounder of the Survival of the Most Selfish? You guessed it correctly: the news media. Independently of A.R. Wallace, Charles Darwin came up with the science (scientific theory) of evolution by his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in The Struggle for Life in 1859. The newspapers had their own ideas of “favours” and “struggles” and, as Britannica puts it, “drew the one conclusion that Darwin had specifically avoided: that humans had evolved from apes, and that Darwin was denying mankind’s immortality”. Thereafter cut-throat selfish competitiveness has been portrayed and believed as the hallmark of human nature. In our times, its summit was economic globalization, liberalisation and privatization.
In this rat-race, real and imagined, where does the science of evolution really stand? Though Darwin thought women inferior and considered blacks lower race, in The Descent of man (1871) he holds the key to our real human nature:
“I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important… To do good in return for evil, to love your enemy, is a height of morality to which it may be doubted whether the social instincts would, by themselves, have ever led us. It is necessary that these instincts, together with sympathy, should have been highly cultivated and extended by the aid of reason, instruction, and the love or fear of God, before any such golden rule would ever be thought of and obeyed” ( The Descent of Man; Chapter IV )
This is real Darwin exploring the Truth about the facts of evolution that is Survival of the Compassionate. The reporters, editors, professors and preachers of more than one and a half centuries missed it. Now in our new epoch of networked friend-lists, without dwelling much on Darwin or the non-Darwinian Darwinists, Rutger Bregman metajournalistically explores and recaps the prehistory and history of evolution and projects “Survival of the Friendliest “ into our future.
For those whom a single sentence of wisdom is enough, here’s Bregman on page 9: “Our grim view of humanity is […] a nocebo”. A self-reinforcing negative expectation. For those who need a little more: “To believe people are hardwired to be kind isn’t sentimental or naive. On the contrary, it’s courageous and realistic to believe in peace and forgiveness”. Or, “When we hole up in our trenches, we lose sight of reality. We’re lured into thinking that a small, hate-mongering minority reflects all humankind. Like the handful of anonymous internet trolls that are responsible for all the vitriol on Twitter and Facebook” (p.380).
For those who are in need of more data, information, knowledge and review of knowledge, he provides chunks of them microprocessed. From prehistoriography to breaking-news journalism, from philosophy to child psychology, from evolutionary theory to anthropology, military research, management science, economics and the psychology of power, Bregman unravels the story of purely scientific studies being misreported, under-reported or not reported. And more shockingly, the fake research which gets patronage from the powers to be – the media, industry, military and the academic elite. They perpetuate the myth of that ever-competing, ever-exploiting, selfish and mutually destructive worms called Homo Sapiens who are in a perpetual war of all against all from time immemorial.
As in a study tour with ample camaraderie, Bregman the investigator conducts the readers around the skeleton-filled cupboards and dusty archives of modern research which rolled out fake justifications for coercion, profiteering, corruption, clientelism, racism, xenophobia and every inhuman project in the name of that human nature with a capital H and N.
And this brilliant campaigner of Universal Basic Income reports the good news:
- The Hobbesian image of humans, judging from the most common evidence, is empirically wrong. Humans are hardwired for solidarity, and this is what makes violence so difficult.
- How much archeological evidence is there for early warfare? How much proof is there that war is in our nature? The answer is almost none.
- Though civilization has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and decline, in reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around [And there is a way out].
- [Not reported by the media, all around the world) there are managers who have total faith in their staff, teachers who give kids free rein to play and elected officials who treat their constituents as creative, engaged citizens – People who recreate the world in their own image.
- Following a period of enclosures and market forces, a silent revolution has been simmering at the bottom to an explosion of initiatives like care co-operatives, sick day pools, energy co-ops [more Commons and, of course, one of the biggest movements of the 21st century: Participatory Budgeting experiments].
- One of the most promising alternatives to the existing capitalist model has actually been around for quite a while. Not in progressive Scandinavia, red China or in Latin America’s cradles of anarchy. It comes, rather unexpectedly, from a US state where terms like ‘progressive’ and ‘Socialist’ ase used as insults. From Alaska with the community property philosophy ever since 1976. A different road, heading towards a new society, in which everyone has a share.
- ‘Turning the other cheek’ works on a large scale – in prisons and police stations, after terrorist attacks or in times of war.
Some may ask: “Then what about Hitlers, Stalins and Pol Pots?” Read Bregman firsthand. I don’t want to be a spoiler.
Something personal: Saluting the new epoch which spans a new world of new generations from the 1990s, placing it in the whole his & her-story of human cultural evolution and projecting the arrow of evolution to the unity in compassionate love (anpu) from an Indic perspective, I published Bhavivicharam (On Our Future) in 2016. Initial responses were dim. Many readers commented: “Unbelievable hope”. Malayalam readers were enthusiastically reading Harari’s Sapiens, copies of which flooded the second-hand (and pirated) book shops. Homo Deus followed. Dystopia (or mistopia?) of the elite Malayalees heightened.
Now, on the cover of Bregman’s book, Yuval Noah Harari loudly admits: “Humankind challenged me and made me see humanity from a fresh perspective” (Paperback time for Harari fans to take a U-turn).
Hats off to you, Rutger Bregman, from the other hemisphere, from another language family, from a man double your age! In between optimists and pessimists you cleared the path for probabilists.
