These things are not the same as these other things

Today, a couple of similar-ish pieces from Pscyhe I think I can get away with combining into a single post.

The first one is very simple, describing how wanting things and liking things aren't the same. This may well seem obvious : I like Star Wars but don't ever want to become a Jedi Knight, I like reading history but have no desire to actually meet Genghis Khan, and I really like chocolate cake but don't want to stuff my face with it continuously. But I have some sympathy for those who, like the researcher in the article, "thought that liking and wanting were just two words for the same process", because I strongly suspect the second piece is also similarly obvious.

Anyway, the neurological distinction between liking and wanting is interesting, especially as to how this was discovered :

When the neuroscientist Roy Wise blocked dopamine in the brains of rodents, he found that they eventually stopped eating, stopped having sex and stopped socialising, presumably because they lost the pleasure of those rewards... By blocking dopamine in the rats’ brains with a drug, Berridge expected to show how their facial expressions switched from liking to disliking. To his surprise, that’s not what happened. Blocking the rats’ dopamine did strip them of their motivation to eat, but it didn’t alter their liking response when they were fed.

I'm going to leave aside the fascinating nugget here that rats have facial expressions otherwise this will spiral into another post altogether.  

A key part of what dopamine actually does is cause wanting: it’s related to the anticipation of rewards, as opposed to the enjoyment of them. Wanting and liking are both associated with a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, but within this region are two distinct areas: some that are involved in generating pleasure and, others, motivation.

By increasing dopamine, Berridge can even make a rat want something that hurts – like an electrified probe.

You might recall this piece from a few years back on Trump becoming addicted to and damaged by the negative attention from his idiotic tweets. I suspect any psychologist who's familiar with gambling addictions or children acting out for attention wouldn't be surprised that people can want to do things they don't enjoy. And I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing was especially common in politicians, who are basically compelled into doing things they personally don't enjoy or want to do*. A demographic study on this would be fascinating. Something something "authentic self", something something...

* There are probably unique factors at work in the Trump case and certainly not all politicians are even remotely like this, however. Still the general tendency might be interesting.

The only other thing I want to mention from this piece is this bit :

There’s an important distinction between the kind of wanting Berridge is talking about and ‘wanting’ in a more aspirational sense. ‘I want to work out more, I want to stop spending so much time on social media, I want to eat healthier – those are cognitive plans,’ Robinson says. This kind of wanting can go along with a more primal want, but it doesn’t have to. It’s the more intense wanting that is affected in addiction.

Well, as before, that's just liking the idea of something, isn't it ? Or liking and wanting the consequences but not the process, not the thing itself. Everyone wants to be fit but lots of people don't enjoy exercise : we want the end result but don't enjoy the process. We might say we want to work out but that's not what we really mean. So there's nothing problematic here, just a bit of nuance about language and the distinction between the ends and the means.

On to the second piece, which is about appreciating things you already have. This one resonates with me. I've long made it a habit, whenever things are pleasantly stable, to a take a moment from time to time to deliberately and actively appreciate that : to realise that things could be much worse, and that because the background level of my daily activity is stable and not a rollercoaster of exciting adventures it's none the worse for that. When things aren't changing, it's easy to miss that you're actually in a very happy place. To deliberately recognise, just occasionally, that you'd miss the things you have if they were ever gone (even those which have really no chance of being lost) is definitely beneficial.

What does this have to do with things that seem similar but aren't the same ? Hold up, I'll get to that. I'm not going to go through the whole "how-to" guide in the essay but there are a few points I want to remark on.

Appreciation, as I use it here, may begin with thankfulness for what you have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.

A certain kind of appreciation might be thought of as a desire for cultivation and continuity, then. I'm not really sure I agree with the author's characterisation of a human desire for a "boom and bust hedonistic treadmill" – that's probably overstating the case. Still I do think we often want a certain sort of combination of stable novelty, something that's unpredictable but with clear boundaries. As I've said before, this is why socialising with friends is so appealing. We get interactions we like but are never quite the same.

The author then raises the excellent point of how the old adage that you should "be happy with what you've got" can be a declaration of repression. And this is where the article does an excellent job of breaking a distinction I've sort of always been aware of but never been able to properly articulate :

If you’re like me, you might also have some political resistance to the idea of appreciation. The idea that we should ‘appreciate what we have’ can strike one as a ruling-class ideology: ‘You peasants should be grateful we feed you slop at all.’ We shouldn’t appreciate – we should have a revolution! I understand this resistance. But over time, I have come to believe that not appreciating what I have is an even crueller way of looking at the world. It’s like a little voice in your head saying: ‘Not only do you not have enough, but you should also be miserable about it.’ 

Just as we should appreciate things in spite of difficulty, so we should appreciate difficulty in spite of progress. It’s this balance that makes for a productive version of ‘elsewhereism’: seeking a better place, collectively, not because we fail to appreciate where we are, but because we know that the good of our time and place is still not enough.

Yes ! The word the author is looking for here is "satisfied". You can enjoy things but still want more without being greedy. To enjoy the latest game but wish it had extra features is not necessarily to be entitled or ungrateful. You can recognise and appreciate the good in progress and development while simultaneously wanting more, for things to be better than they are. Wishing a game had better graphics but enjoying it anyway isn't greedy, but wanting more than would actually satisfy your hunger is. A desire for continual progress isn't the same as being dissatisfied with the current state of development, though these aren't mutually exclusive either.

Should you be "happy with what you've got", then ? Sure, as long as what you've got meets your material needs and you've got things which are uniquely special to you. Here I think the author falls down a bit by advocating us all to appreciate the stars and public libraries and roads and suchlike – sure, but everyone has those, so it's difficult psychologically to see them as special. More importantly, just because you're happy doesn't mean you don't have a right to wish for improvements. And if you are miserable despite living in material and social luxury, well, maybe that's a you problem.

Elsewhereism is, I think, based on a specific kind of forgetfulness: that is, forgetting that even in the new, better elsewhere, there will still be problems. You will still suffer from accidents, from unrequited love, from natural disasters, from new psychological foibles that will simply emerge. That’s just part of our human condition. To better appreciate what you have isn’t to give up on an elsewhere. It’s to understand that there is no elsewhere that is beyond some degree of difficulty, and that, if you’re not appreciative of what you have now, you never will be.

This I think is important. It especially hits a nerve because there is so, so much journalism which is exclusively and ludicrously negative. If you don't take a moment to recognise when you've reached your goals, if it's all about just setting more and more difficult objectives, you'll never be happy. That's not healthy and I think it's a major source of toxicity in the media. That said, I'd add a caveat to the above quote that this probably only applies if your base needs are already at least met and/or exceeded; if there's something fundamental missing from your life, it's not your lack of appreciation that's the problem. And sometimes a change is as good as a rest. Novelty for novelty's sake can be important, it's just a perpetual hunger for change that can be psychologically damaging. There are things we can continuously appreciate but this is not true of all things.

Two final points. First, a favourite pet point about how awful Stephen Pinker is :

It is good to appreciate, for example, that humans now have longer life expectancies than in the past and that we have the technical capacity to feed everyone alive. Those are amazing accomplishments. But sometimes it’s suggested that such progress means the world’s institutions are basically good and progress is inevitable. In a world where billions of people still live in poverty, this is over-appreciation for the progress we’ve made.

Nailed it. Just because things are better now doesn't mean they're anywhere near as good as they could and should be, especially when the causes largely appear to be insane levels of inequality, corruption, naked greed, entitlement and wilful ignorance. Pinker would have us all believe we should "be happy with what we've got" in the worse and most repressive sense; conversely, the media wallows in perpetual misery despite any and all accomplishments. A better, middle way is possible.

Finally :

Because we are all imperfect in some ways, none of us can claim much superiority over others. By appreciating our own imperfections, we come to see that others’ imperfections are not irreparable flaws, but aspects of what makes them equal and meaningful members of our communities.

This is a bit self-helpy but it's valuable nonetheless. We seem to expect not just perfection but also continuously-varying perfection, not just in our own lives but, perhaps more dangerously, in those of others too. Neil Gaiman's preface to Pratchett's A Stroke of the Pen makes it abundantly clear that Pratchett the man was not the same as Pratchett the legend, as capable of anyone else as being a bit of a grumpy old twit from time to time, and not the all-forgiving, ever-wise public figure that's so (rightly) frequently celebrated. I often wonder what it must be like for celebrities, especially new celebrities, trying to juggle this public demand for a perfect persona with a desire to just do normal people things and not be harangued for it. Surely the advice here to expect everyone to be basically like us, warts and all, is at least a decent starting point.

Review : Ordinary Men

As promised last time I'm going to do a more thorough review of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. I already mentioned the Netflix documentary, which is excellent (if you want a counter to this, see the extraordinary movie One Life with Anthony Hopkins). The book of course is even more nuanced – and terrifying. It covers the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101's role in the Nazi holocaust. If that's not your thing, you should stop reading immediately.

I previously described this as horror beyond horror, and that's exactly what it is. Unlike other books I won't even try to rate this one; to do so feels disrespectful. Like One Life, this is in a category all of its own, the kind of book everyone needs to read but not necessarily more than once. Rather than review it, instead I'll try to just summarise the author's main conclusions : a task made easier because Browning lays them all out very clearly and directly. Quite properly, he first covers the history purely as a factual series of events, and this makes up the bulk of the book. He reserves his wider thoughts almost exclusively to the final two chapters, where he sets out his findings in some detail.

In large part Browning presents his arguments as in direct opposition to another work, Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which claimed that it took extreme anti-Semitism for the holocaust to happen. Browning shows, I think all too convincingly, that this is far from the whole story. In this particular case it seems abundantly clear that it can be all too easy to turn ordinary, educated, middle-aged, happily-married men into the most brutal sort of killers. This is much, much more disturbing than ascribing it to a horrific but uniquely peculiar happenstance of history.

The book in brief

First some preliminaries. Ordinary Men is a work that must have truly taken nerves of steel to compile. In fact I think I've never read anything that made me so viscerally, deeply angry that human beings could ever act like this. I've read of the ghastly practises of the Aztecs and Vlad the Impaler and so many other historical nasties in lurid and highly graphic detail, and I'm not easily disturbed by reading about such things. Yet the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were, in their own uniquely terrifying way, worse than all of them.

Part of it is lack of distance. One expects the distant past to be a different place, for extinct cultures to have radically different values and beliefs to us. That's a large part of the appeal in studying it, like visiting another world, safe and secure behind the impregnable mental shield provided by the lens of the text. Ordinary Men is different. While of course there have been enormous cultural changes in the course of the intervening 90-odd years, there are unnerving similarities. It is after all still within living memory, an age of cars, electricity, medicine, global travel, cinema and television, not the almost alien realm of medieval feudalism or or even a Victorian stately home. And the main subjects of the book were, as Browning makes clear, men who were in no significant way different from us. They were recognisably normal.

The book begins with a rather dry documentation of the policing system, how the Nazis sent the reserve police forces (mostly men in their forties, married with children and who had been policemen for many years) into occupied countries to enforce German rule. It's a rather tedious list detailing exactly who went where, who gave which orders to whom, etc. Tedious but necessary : Browning wants the readers to know exactly much unique detail we have about this case, that this is documented thoroughly and actually provably happened. There isn't any doubt about it, as there is in many of the more ancient historical atrocities.

I won't go into the full gruesome details. Browning justifiably does do this, not for the sake of some ghastly titillation but because the public has the right to know and because the full horror of it is necessary to have any hope of understanding it psychologically : to comprehend how such ordinary men could behave so profoundly abnormally.

What happened ?

Nevertheless, I must necessarily lay out the basics. The police battalions were used to supplement the military forces in rounding up Jews for the holocaust. Primarily this consisted of forcibly deporting them on trains to extermination camps but it also involved a very great deal of direct murder. There was overlap between the two : transportation could often involving shooting Jews in the street if they refused to move, leaving the bodies where they lay. On the trains alone, hundreds or thousands died from heat exhaustion. 

But the direct actions were the most disturbing of all, marching men, women and children into the forest and shooting them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. As I said, horror beyond horror, and I need not go into the full grim detail as Browning does. 

Browning estimates the number of Jews shot by Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone at 38,000. The number they crammed onto trains to the Treblinka extermination camp was about 45,000. In some individual actions each policeman shot on average 14 Jews, with that figure rising to about 80 for their whole period of deployment in Poland. The great majority of them quite literally became serial killers. Unlike soldiers fighting armed opponents, they were virtually never under threat : their victims were unarmed civilians.

These averages reflect the disturbing fact that the "smallest group comprised the non-shooters". Some did object to the action, though only one single individual made a stand on moral principles : the rest tried to excuse themselves on grounds of illness or by making themselves scarce. Perhaps 10 or at most 20% managed to avoid personally killing anyone. At the other extreme there were of course traditional sadists and psychopaths who actively enjoyed murder and torture. But crucially :

The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalised, they felt more pity for themselves for the "unpleasant" work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanised victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not think, period. As one policeman stated : "Truthfully, I must say that at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then." Heavy drinking helped : "most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober."

Few of them actually wanted to take part, let alone enjoyed it, yet the majority committed the worst of atrocities. In the initial actions most were sick afterwards, physically disgusted with what they had done. One officer in particular expressed no emotional or intellectual disapproval (if anything the opposite) with the actions but still fell ill every time a killing was ordered. As time went on this subsided, with Browning speaking of a group who massacred elderly Polish villagers (importantly, not Jews, as I'll return to) by day and relaxing in the cinema in the evening.

After the war, none of them did anything remotely like this ever again. They were "willing executioners" in that they followed orders, but they were also hardly enthusiastic genocidal maniacs in the way Hitler was* : had they not been ordered to, it's doubtful any of them would every have killed anyone. This is in spite of them brutally murdering entire families.

* 75% were not Nazi Party members, though Browning notes that the 25% who were is an unusually high fraction for a police battalion.

Why did they do this ? How could it happen ?

The obvious explanation : racism

Browning takes us through this point by point. While he firmly rejects demonization of the killers, trying to see them as real, multi-layered, complex individuals, that doesn't mean he has any sympathy for them. "Explaining is not excusing. Understanding is not forgiving."

Why does he so firmly reject the obvious, simple demonization of people who carried out unarguably evil and monstrous acts ? The afterword of the book is a prolonged rebuttal of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which Browning quotes Goldhagen as describing the perpetrators' "Jewish blood lust" and "killing for pleasure". This is an obvious explanation, but as Browning notes, there are many arguments against it. Without doubt, anti-Semitism must surely be the driving factor behind the "desk murderers" who formulated policy and strategy, but this is not Browning's remit : he wants to know about the people pulling the triggers.

Undeniably some of them were simply evil sadists, but most were not. They were willing to kill but hardly enthusiastic about it. Even the battalion commander Major Trapp hated the whole prospect, openly weeping when he gave the initial orders. In fact Trapp not only allowed anyone who wanted to freely excuse themselves, but actively protected those who did.

At the larger scale, Browning draws a picture of a more complex relation between anti-Semitism and Naziism than is usually given (but for an intelligent counter-argument, see Niall Ferguson's The War of the World). To discriminate against something, he says, is not the same as wanting to stop it entirely, especially when that concerns people. He quotes another historian as saying that "Ordinary Germans knew how to distinguish between an acceptable discrimination... and the unacceptable horror of genoicde." 

This is an important point, one which is often difficult to keep in mind. On reading some chapters I felt a physical level of disgust and outrage at anyone agreeing with even the mildest form of racial or xenophobic policies, because why would you ever want to take even a single step down this road ? And yet, if they were really so closely linked, human history would be far more bloody than it already is. This is in fact something I've pointed out previously, though I have to admit it was very hard to maintain any sort of rational perspective while reading the book.

Anti-Semitism is now of course the main thing associated with the Nazis, but at the time it wasn't their main selling point. Achieving no more than 37% of the vote, it seems very unlikely that all those who did vote for them were of the same order of evil as the party leaders. Browning suggests that the primary attractions of economic policies, authoritarianism and nationalism acted as the draw to anti-Semitism, rather than the other way around. And as he sets out at length, there were plenty of killings of non-Jewish people that were just as horrific as those of the Jews. Furthermore, the non-German peoples participating in the holocaust behaved much the same despite lacking a supposedly uniquely-German anti-Semitic cultural brainwashing.

The biggest role anti-Semitism may have played was not in causing ordinary people to actively and personally shoot Jews, but in apathy. The general population might not have actually wanted to kill anyone or even wanted anyone else to kill on their behalf, but they were open to the idea of "limiting, or even ending, the role of Jews in German society." Indifference may have allowed the holocaust to happen but anti-Semitism wasn't the reason that ordinary middle-aged policeman would murder entire families in the forest. As Browning says, the relationship between discrimination, hatred and actual cruelty is more complex :

But we are still left with an unresolved question that cannot be solved by simple assertion : is a culture of hatred the necessary precondition for such a culture of cruelty ? Goldhagen has posed an important question. I do not believe that we have found a satisfactory answer.

If anti-Semitism is not the explanation for why hundreds of policeman committed acts of barbarity, then what is ? Browning carefully and systematically addresses many suggestions before settling on a single likely root cause. 

The calculated banality of evil

First, this was atrocity by policy, not a series of barbarous acts committed in an uncontrolled frenzy. Like the extermination camps it was a coldly calculated procedure which actively and deliberately accounted for the natural human tendency not to want to murder each other. The amount of direct shootings the policeman were ordered to undertake was (with some exceptions of the truly sadistic commanders) "minimised" and their roles limited as much as possible to loading the Jews onto trains – this was itself a barbaric process, but a step removed from direct murder; or limited only to cordon or other duties. The policemen were not told in advance of their tasks so not given a prior opportunity to withdraw, but if anyone asked to be excused (such as for being unable to shoot women and children), they were allowed. After the first shootings, volunteers were requested or policeman chosen who were already known to be willing to carry out further killings.

All of this was anticipated by and accounted for by Nazi High Command :

Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, "one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say : Good, go take your pension."

This was a regime which was absolutely focused on its goal. They knew they were asking things fundamentally opposed to basic (or rather, civilised) human nature but they didn't demand making men into "mad dogs". Rather, says Browning, brutalisation was the effect, not the cause, of the killings. In fact while the policeman were no less indoctrinated with anti-Semitism than everyone else at the time, they were not especially more so either. While they were given some additional propaganda materials, none of it was designed to appeal to middle-aged married men with families, and none of it was designed to excite them to such bestial acts.

Instead, the killings themselves brutalised the men. They became inured to it, initially witnessing horrific injuries caused by their tendency to aim too high (quite possibly so as to subconsciously try and miss), and then adjusting to point-blank, careful shots aimed along the bayonet to guarantee a kill. Likewise, some of them justified killing entire families as a "kindness" as opposed to the cruelty of leaving the children alive. 

Nor were the policeman an especially unusual bunch. If anything, says Browning, they were the dregs, the only source of manpower available for their assigned task, and not the sort anyone would normally choose for something like this. There was certainly no deliberate selection on the part of the government nor any self-selection at work in who joined up, because they weren't told in advance as to what they would do, only learning of their initial duties on the morning of the first massacre. Officers certainly weren't selected for their sadistic tendencies either, with their being no indication of Major Trapp's open weeping as being anything other than sincere.

Another key point is that they weren't "only following orders".

Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defence attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of post-war trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly dire punishment... even putative duress dot not hold for Reserve Police Battalion 101. From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" at Józefów and protected the first man to take up his offer from Captain Hoffmann's wrath, a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion.

That is, the men knew they didn't have to kill anyone and no serious consequences would befall them. Yes, they might be shamed by their comrades and yes, shame is unpleasant. But one would reasonably expect that the shame of murder would be infinitely greater. 

So what was going on ?

Group conformity

Browning's answer is group conformity. This is not the same as obedience to authority : rather, the men carried out their orders out of the expectation that everyone else would too. This was a government-approved, legitimate action, so while they might not have believed it to be a good thing (certainly few were ever enthusiastic about it), they did accept that it was necessary. Just as in Milgram's shock experiments, the most successful encouragement to action was not in emphasising that the order was given, but that the action was necessary and beneficial to society.

Browning does a better disection of Milgram's findings than Bregman here (see previous post), acknowledging the differences between the situations. He notes that Major Trapp was a somewhat weak authority figure but invoked the "anything but weak" authority of the Nazi government, and respected by the men. He seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the men's obvious disturbance at the prospect of their horrifying task, which may have made them respect him more, not less. That they knew they had a get-out option may, ironically, have helped many of them to overcome their discomfort. It wasn't so much fear of being shamed by the group that may have been the crucial factor in compliance, but in the fear that by not doing their fair share of this grisly task, they would be letting their friends down.

The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them – at least initially – were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Why ? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the "dirty work" to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one's share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one's comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism – a very uncomfortable prospect within the tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population.

For this reason those who objected did so almost entirely on the grounds of "weakness", not moral principles. Weakness, it seems, is excusable, but moral objection meant open defiance of the group. Anti-Semitism and widespread cultural notions of German superiority, of what it meant to be a good citizen, definitely played a role here, even if only a second-order effect. Defying orders wasn't a problem so much out because of the disobedience itself, but because you'd be going against cultural norms. Conversely by obeying these terrible orders, you would, so the perverted reasoning goes, actually be helping your fellow men and wider society.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Conclusions 

Perhaps the most disturbing implication of Ordinary Men is not that racism leads to genocide, but that genocide can be perpetrated by those with no great ideological commitments. Yes, it took extreme racism coupled with hatred and a particular kind of evil intelligence for the "desk murderers" to formulate their policy. These men were diabolically evil. The brand of extreme malevolence that ran wild with the Nazi faithful is, fortunately, rare, and to couple this with the analytic intelligence needed to implement its insane policy in a workable, coherent way is rarer still. But the same simply cannot be said of those who actually pulled the triggers. Their motivations were altogether both more subtle and more common.

Circumstance, I think, appears to be very heavily dominant in human behaviour. Whether raising awareness of this helps us to make better choices, to be less swayed by group behaviour which goes against our own moral principles, remains poorly unanswered. Balancing the strengths of our collectivist and individualist tendencies against their respective deficiencies is a formidable challenge, and until we solve this most subtle of problems, I think we will remain forever haunted by the threat of hatred, war, and genocide. 

Review : Human Kind

I suppose I really should review Bregman's Human Kind : A Hopeful History, though I'm not sure I want to. This was a deeply frustrating read when at various times I wanted to grab Bregman by the shoulders, give him a good hard shake and scream "Not like that, you fool !" and at other times I just wanted to tell him to sod off for being a twat. It ranks among the most idiotic things I've ever read.

In terms of a book it reminds me very much of Planta Sapiens : it's highly, pro-actively defensive to the point of often saying very little. It isn't quite as bad as that one (it at least presents a great deal of evidence) but it wastes a lot of time saying how much the author has been derided for ideas instead of actually making claims, and after a little while one has to wonder that if everyone hates it, maybe it's just stupid. After all, if everyone around you is an arse, maybe you're the arse.

The annoying thing is that I liked his previous book Utopia For Realists very much. I did find it a bit breathless though, so this time I forced myself to slow down a little and try more actively to critique things as I went along. But I think I needn't have worried. While there are some genuinely insightful bits here and there, most of this is pop psychology I knew anyway, with the conclusions painted with a brush so broad you could fly a plane through them and so rabidly, uncritically ideologically driven that.... sigh. I despair. I suspect the author is really just another Suella Braverman or Lee Anderson, on the other side of the fence to be sure, but utterly lacking in self-awareness. 

In terms of writing, as with UFR it's highly readable, although towards the end the short, impactful statements become over-used and extremely irritating. Other than that it's only the content which lets it down : it's an eminently readable bit of absolute tripe. Whereas UFR was a persuasive appeal but backed by a pretty solid analysis, this one is much more of a straightforward polemic.

Here's a very brief TLDR summary :

The central claim is that humans are, basically, when you get right down to it, fundamentally good. They want to be nice to each other unless they themselves are ill-treated by others, and it's civilisation that's the main reason this happens. We were all much happier as chillaxing apes in the jungle living our best, anarcho-communist-hippie lifestyles. I swear to goodness that I am not exaggerating this at all – this is literally what he claims.

The main strength of the the work is in writing popular summaries of individual incidents. He's genuinely very good at this. Give him something specific to tackle and he does a good job of analysing it in a decently-critical way, looking at things from different perspectives to see if there was any missing data or confounding facts. He even does include some examples which run counter to his main conclusion, and tried quite sincerely to account for them, toning down his conclusion in response. Few authors with an axe to grind ever do this, so kudos to him for that.

The principle weakness is in drawing wider conclusions. At this he's shite. Absolutely shite. Here his critical thinking skills abandon him like rats leaving a sinking ship, which does, in fact, sink. He totally and utterly fails to consider any alternative hypotheses whatsoever and drones on and on about how he must be right because nobody believes him. At times, he reaches an almost Liz Truss level of lack of self-awareness. His conclusions simply don't make any sense and he can't accept any of the (often fairly obvious) counter-arguments. He's driven here by pure ideology and nothing else.

If you just want to know if you should leave it on the shelf, you can stop here (if I have to rate it, I give it a dismal 3/10). For those who want a bit more depth, let us continue.

The Good

Credit where credit is due, Bregman does have some good points to make. For example, he covers the famous Prison Experiment quite well and reinforces (as I already knew) that it was a literal fraud. I also knew about the bystander effect being something of a fallacy, but Bregman's debunking is especially thorough and convincing. In particular he digs into the details of the famous case of Kitty Genovese, supposedly left to die by 38 eye-witnesses and finds that nothing of the sort took place : of those 38, only two actually saw anything. One of those was a racist and the other a homosexual (this was the 1960s) drunk and worried about contacting the police.

What's less widely reported, and was news to me, was that the famous Robber's Cave experiment was also little better than any of these misconstrued and misreported incidents. In this experiment a summer camp of two "tribes" of children were contrived to fight each other and then unified by a common enemy. But Bregman digs into the research and finds that all the hyper-competitive games the children played were chosen for them by the experimenter, with any spontaneous attempts at cooperation (of which there were many) immediately suppressed. It's hardly the compelling proof of how naturally vicious tribalism develops that it's so often been portrayed to be. And the experimenter had actually tried the same thing a previous year, which hadn't worked : the assistants didn't like it, the children didn't like it, and ultimately realised they were being manipulated so the whole thing was called off.

Probably Bregman's best point concerns the famous electro-shock experiments of Stanley Milgram. He notes that only half the participants actually believed they were inflicting electrical shocks on the supposed victim, and most of those who believed it was a setup (as of course it was) refused to continue. Milgram himself, in private at least, expressed some pretty strong doubts about the validity of the experiment. And in fact excessive pressure by the experimenter for the subjects to keep going actually had the opposite effect : the stronger the pressure, the more likely they were to stop. This hardly fits the common "we're all slaves to authority" take-home message that the experiment is so often associated with. 

To his great credit, however, Bregman admits that still, many people did simply continue with the experiment and these results have been replicated many times. There is an aspect of obedience to authority, sort-of, but I'll get back to that later. Elsewhere he concedes that other experiments do show an innate tribalism, or at least that it's relatively easy to induce – though not nearly so much as the Prison Experiment and Robber's Cave would suggest. You can't make ordinary people into villains that easily, or so he claims.

Finally, he makes the important point that that humans' main cognitive strength is in social learning. There are few true geniuses, but once someone figures out a solution, we're very good at copying them. Tribalism has its weaknesses but this can be a tremendous strength : what requires genius to figure out for the first time can become commonly utilised by almost everyone.

The Bad

Unfortunately the 500-odd words in the above claims really are the sum total of the best bits of a 400 page book. All the rest, apart from a handful of trivialities here and there, is considerably worse. Let's start with the assertions he makes which are straightforwardly wrong or absolutely unprovable.

One thing that Bregman keeps coming back to is that nomads are all lovely people. They would "rather talk out their problems or just move on", he says, and they're "constantly getting together to party". They also "got plenty of exercise". For thousands of years they kept clear of conflicts, and "the chiefs of nomadic tribes were all modesty."

FFS. Anyone who knows anything about the fall of the Roman Empire or the Great Wall of China will be immediately screaming : MONGOLS ! HUNS ! XIONGNU ! ALANS ! VISIGOTHS ! SCYTHIANS ! And literally hordes of others besides. Bregman's idea of the hippie nomadic lifestyles is cherry-picking run amok. The Mongols alone had the second largest empire the world has ever seen. Tamerlame was famous for grinding cities into dust, sowing fields of barley among the ruins and building towers of skulls out of the victims. They. Were. Not. Nice.

To blatantly ignore all of these very famous examples (none of the above are ever mentioned) is pretty insulting to one's intelligence. Furthermore, he insists that nomads manage to do this despite having large social networks far exceeding the monkeysphere, thus supposedly questioning how many people we can associate with before we dehumanise them. The problem is that this ignores the obvious point that they probably didn't know all of their sometime friends all at once.

It's true that evidence for ancient warfare is sparse. War may well have had a beginning, but Bregman is reaching here : plenty of other animals do get into conflict with each other, so quite possibly it's always been with us. Especially given the difficulty of obtaining evidence. Even some of the more recent battlefields don't leave much in the way of archaeological traces; plenty of well-documented Roman battles have never been found at all (neither for that matter have entire cities). Couple this insistence that humans are "simply not wired for war" with the rabid belief in perfectly peaceful nomads (!) and things start to get downright silly. It's just daft. War keeps happening, over and over and over again. His denials of this seem to be based on the flimsiest of evidence, that sometimes the soldiers wanted to stop fighting. Well of course they fucking did you twit. Anyone who's ever watched the news will be able to tell you instantly that this in no way diminishes human propensity for warfare.

Perhaps worse, he simply states without any justification that early hunter-gathers were likely "proto feminists" for some reason. Well, that's entirely possible, but without explaining how we know this it's a vacuously stupid statement. With similarly little justification, Bregman claims that the Enlightenment invented racism. I mean, sure, Enlightenment values can absolutely be questioned. But this is a garbage claim with no merit to it. It's incredibly, deeply frustrating to reduce deep and complex issues to absurdly over-simplified barely coherent nonsense, especially coming from someone who is clearly capable of careful and critical thinking.

Finally, some modern stuff. I don't really disagree with the idea that we should prefer intrinsic motivation to trying to give people rewards as motivation : as long as we're paid fairly, a whopping great big bonus is more of an incentive to greed than to doing a good job. But the idea that teachers give bad grades as a punishment to children is deeply offensive. I would never do that. My mum would never do that. None of the schoolteachers I've ever met would ever do that, not would any of the lecturers. It's a moronic, throwaway claim that insults an entire and extremely valuable profession for no reason whatever.

And for crying out loud... the idea that the government will violently assault us if we give up our desk jobs (sorry, "cages", as Bregman calls offices)... dude, what are you even talking about. This is the kind of uber-cynical, ultra-naïve meme-based protest politics that is such a big problem on the internet. It is not the slightest bit worthy of a published book, even if intended as hyperbole. Even weirder, and far less excusable as rhetoric, is that Bregman appears to be genuinely against the idea of political checks and balances. This is mad. Properly mad, to the point I have to start seriously wondering if the guy is feeling okay.

The Ugly

By far the biggest problem, however, are the weird claims. The ones that are a mixture of truths, half-truths, mistakes, incomplete data, and wild speculation; likewise ones where a conclusion that's perfectly valid for a specific case is deemed without proper consideration to apply to the whole of human society in perpetuity.

Bregman begins the book with a summary of the failure of strategic bombing in WWII to have the devastating affects on morale that both respective sides hoped they would inflict. But much like this article on the myth of panic, it's ill thought-through. Yes, true, it didn't lead to nationwide calls to end the war, or simply make everyone too depressed or panic-stricken to fight. Fair enough, that's a good point and worth making, especially since it was true of both sides. But both authors view the effects not so much as simply "not as depressing as expected", which is perfectly respectable, but "actually good".

'Scuse me ? So you'd... want to live in a war zone then, would you ? What's that ? Didn't quite catch it. Oh, you wouldn't want to live there ! No, I thought not.

There's a subtlety here that both of them seem to miss, and it's nothing terribly complicated. Surely, having a foreign nation bomb your cities will make you hate the enemy, and cause most people to band together in a state of nationalistic fervour against the oppressor, but that doesn't mean it makes them fundamentally happy. They don't enjoy watching their loved ones get blown to bits. They don't actually like making do with mediocre and minimal food, poor shelter, lack of power... good lord man, just because it makes them more determined to fight back doesn't for a moment mean that they actually want to live like that. Honestly, this isn't difficult*. 

* See Lucy Worsley's excellent documentary Blitz Spirit for a more detailed analysis, which unarguably shows that actually yes, the bombing did induce a measure of panic amongst the population, if still not anywhere near breaking national morale. She also makes very good points about how much the government controlled the flow of information.

One of the most serious aspects of the book is also the most deeply frustrating. Bregman notes at various points the reluctance of soldiers to fire on the enemy, claiming that contact reduces conflict and distance causes hate. I appreciate the sentiment; I've heard others make the same claims. And it's definitely a very interesting conundrum. The problem is that Bregman hasn't read Ordinary Men (which I plan to review properly in the next post). This is an incredibly powerful counter-example in which ordinary German policeman rounded up Jews in WWII and shot them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. These weren't indoctrinated fanatics or even soldiers – they were normal, mostly educated, middle-aged policeman who, except for this one ghastly moment of horror beyond horror, would live completely unremarkable lives.

But when the moment claim, they did as they were told : they rounded up the Jews, shot them in the street and left them there, rammed others onto overcrowded trains were hundreds died of sheer heat, and took others into the forest and shot them in the head. These weren't clean kills. It was gruesome in the extreme, and they did this not because they even wanted to, or because of consequences if they refused (which were negligible). No, they did it largely out of simple group conformity, and with precious little in the way of any serious reluctance.

This is very different from simple obedience to authority. To be fair, Bregman understands this, stressing that Nazi soldiers fought out of a sense not of ideology but of group camaraderie, something lacking from the one-on-one experiments of Milgram (though, interestingly, those who did continue to inflict shocks were often persuaded by the value of the research to the community). The problem is, that since he also acknowledges that tribalism and racism are easy to induce, this would seem to render his whole project a colossal waste of time. If you concede that it's actually quite easy to transform ordinary people into a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, you have conceded everything. Maintaining that humans are basically nice in spite of this is as mad a claim as anything I've ever heard.

On a related note, Bregman notes that empathy can be a key part of racism in binding us together with people who seem to be like us. This is something Paul Bloom, who he cites, has examined in some detail. I'm still not convinced by this (though Bloom's arguments are intelligent and lucid), but Bregman does himself no favours by immediately claiming in the very next chapter that empathy is central to compassion – with no reference to the previous claims that it's an essential part of racism !

Finally, there are the wild extrapolations. Okay, Bregman likes Agora/Montessori schools, but doesn't offer any evidence at all that these less structured methods actually result in cleverer or nicer people : he just takes it for granted that they do. Then there's the claim that private property is the root of all evil, based on the deeply absurd claim that peaceful nomads became warlike settled peoples only when they decided that they could own things (likewise the idea that farming led to...wait for it... bestiality). That's so stupid I don't know where to start, so I won't. And then there's the part where he advocates for full-on literal Communism, cherry-picking all the times it actually worked out quite well while happily ignoring the much more famous examples where it really, really didn't.

The idea that we were built to "chill out", though, (but racism comes naturally when we live together) ... that's the heart of it. I mean, sure, there's far more to life than material concerns, but it's fucking stupid to pretend they don't matter at all. And there's something much more fundamental here that Bregman simply cannot understand. He insists we must have some base, primal, instinctive nature, and that culture only obscures and corrupts it. He cannot consider the possibility that, in spite of understanding our deeply social nature, maybe being social is our nature. That maybe we simply don't have any innate higher-level tendencies, any more than we are hard-wired to play the flute or build cathode-ray tubes. He's caught in a trap of his own making.

Summary : A Hopeless History

Bregman falls into his principle error fairly early on. He gives a nice overview of Rosseau and Hobbes – Rosseau depicted mankind as being fundamentally good and it was only ever that pesky veneer of "civilization" that led us all astray, whereas Hobbes viewed as all as naturally in a state of "war against all", and only a powerful ruler could save us from ourselves. While Bregman does sometimes consider nuanced versions of this, for example acknowledging that sometimes tribal peoples commit violence (and I think trying earnestly to keep everything consistent), he utterly fails to consider the underlying premise. The lack of any discussion whatever about feral children is, in a book about our innate nature, a criminally silly omission.

His sometimes astonishing lack of self-awareness betrays him. Having examined many theories very carefully and critically, he'll sometimes go off on one about something absolutely silly and irrelevant, like a bizarre connection between sin and the nature of eyes. Worse, having acutely demonstrated the errors of previous experiments and their conclusions, he has an unshakeable "we've got it right this time" attitude which does him no credit. Nobody reading this long and well-compiled series of different mistakes and interpretations ought to go away with anything like this much self-belief. The right response to this series of changing conclusions isn't to be crippled with doubt, but it damn well demands a measure of caution, a careful tempering of findings and a willing acceptance that they must be provisional.

And this whole notion that we lived in a sort of blissful paradise until about 1800, that 95% of human history was quite lovely until only very recently... this is so palpably silly that I don't have adequate words to express just how daft the whole thing is. I mean, okay, you like the hunter-gatherer tribal people lifestyle, eh ? Well, go and live in the jungle then. No, seriously, off you pop. Oh, you actually quite like living in a solid house and not having to deal with innumerable dangers and diseases ? You'd love to go but you won't be able to charge your laptop in the jungle ? Oh deary deary me, what a terrible shame that must be. 

Idiot. It takes some seriously next-level weirdness to conclude that mankind would be happiest if we all lived in the jungle with other people lobbing high explosives at us all day, but that's literally what Bregman is claiming. It's the old "noble savage" fallacy but supercharged to the nth degree.

The thing that's most stuck in my head from the whole book is a diagram Bregman reproduces from a psychology review paper. This compares the evolution of wolves to dogs with early hominids to modern humans. The more I've let this one mull over, the more I've concluded that it's practically a modern version of phrenology : claiming that big eyes and small brow ridges are a mark of friendliness, and that the opposite traits are clearly indicative of nasty, brutish attitudes. We are, Bregman says, Homo Puppy, whereas the Neanderthals clearly weren't.

Righto then. The claim is essentially that early, ugly humans were beastly thugs, whereas modern ones are clearly much better-looking and lovely. To my mind this is very, very racist, a prospect which never seems to even occur to Bregman.

Yet Homo Puppy is deeply flawed concept. The big problem here, the root problem, is that he's determined to find the earliest humans who lived in a "state of nature". This in my view is a nonsense idea. I say instead not that there is no such thing as society, but rather no such thing as a natural society. There is no one right way in which we're supposed to live, any one way in which we're meant to be. We are far, far more adaptable and malleable than that. If we have a base nature it's that we're governed by our circumstances : our resources and culture alike. 

It's not that there's no such thing as society, as that ghastly witch Maggie claimed, but that we are society. This I will develop more in a couple of posts time. For now, I'll just say that I'll never read anything by Bregman ever again, because he's clearly a complete pillock.