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.