The european union, ending a relationship of almost half a century. The trade deal agreed by the two sides on Christmas Eve will avoid the need for import taxes or tariffs but there will be new customs rules and checks for countries to adopt. Nearly 56,000 daily cases of coronavirus have been recorded in the uk in the past 2a hours the highest on record. Several nhs hospitals in london and the south east say they are under extreme pressure due to increasing numbers of people falling seriously ill. Around the world, the new year has been welcomed with fireworks displays, despite coronavirus restrictions. But where covid 19 is the overriding concern, streets have been empty of the usual crowds with people told to stay home and watch on their televisions. Now on bbc news, its hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk, im stephen sackur. In times of crisis, we learn plenty about who we really are. So it is that this global coronavirus pandemic is revealing truths about humankind how we balance self protection against the collective interest. My guest today is the dutch writer and historian rutger bregman, whose book humankind a hopeful history is making waves across the world. Do we humans underestimate our capacity for doing good . Rutger bregman in the netherlands, welcome to hardtalk. Thanks for having me. We are all living in this time of covid 19. It is a Global Health emergency and in times of emergency, perhaps we learn more than usual about the nature of human beings. What do you think this pandemic right now is showing us about humanity . I think it is showing us that most people are actually pretty decent and that, especially in the midst of a crisis, people most people, at least show their better selves, you know . And you see this explosion of cooperation and altruism i think that is one of the most important lesson. I think that is one of the most important lessons. An explosion of altruism im just wondering what you then make how you process some of the other scenes we have seen of people at times literally fighting to get essential supplies from the shops. We have seen people blaming
each other, scapegoating outsiders for spreading the virus, we have seen lots of very difficult things, too. Yeah, absolutely, and i am not denying any of that. I am just saying that, you know, for every toilet paper hoarder, there are 1,000 nurses, you know, doing their best to save as many lives as possible and there are 10,000 people doing their best to stop this virus from spreading further. I think we really have to get away from this old idea that civilization is only a thin veneer and that as soon as something happens an earthquake or a disaster or, you know, a pandemic that we reveal our true selfish self. We actually have a lot of evidence from sociology, going back all the way to the 1960s, you know, hundreds and hundreds of case studies, that show that especially during times of crises, most people start to cooperate together, whether they are left wing or right wing, rich, poor, young, old. Thats what we see. And ive just been looking at social media before coming on air with you and i have been noticing the incredibly
vitriolic debate there is in the United States now between those citizens who want to see society opened up, the economy motoring again, and others who believe that that represents a capitalist instinct to put money before people. Regular citizens on both sides of the argument are knocking lumps out of each other, and we see that all the time on social media. Well, you know, twitter and social media is not real life. I think we have to remember that human beings have evolved, you know, over thousands of years to communicate with each other on a face to face basis, right . We have been designed by evolution basically to be friendly to each other. So biologists literally talk about this process of survival of the friendliest, which means that for thousands of years, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation and you can see this in our bodies still today. So one very fascinating and peculiar fact about human beings is that we are the only species in the animal kingdom, apart from some parrots, that blush. You know, we have this ability to just involuntarily give away our feelings to someone else to show that we care about what they think about us. I think that is a very fascinating thing and itjust shows us that we have been designed by evolution to cooperate and work together. Now, obviously, if you go on twitter, you know, and see all the vitriol there, you may get a different impression, but again, that is not real life. This book of yours which is causing quite a stir around the world humankind a hopeful history it seems to me in its ambition and its span because it really nods to all of human history, the evolution of civilization over millennia what it seems to me to be doing is really going back to the age old philosophical meditation as to whether human beings are intrinsically good, are sort of born innocent and pure or whether, within them, within the very human nature, there is something that takes us toward sin and bad things. Yes. Is that the fundamental argument that you are wrestling with . I think so, yes. You know, there is this very old idea in western culture, as we talked about, that civilization is only a thin veneer scientists call it veneer theory, right . And it goes back to the ancient greeks. If you read the greek historian thucydides, right, he talked about the plague in athens, for example, or the civil war in corcyra, in his history of the peloponnesian war, and he had this observation that, you know, deep down, people are just selfish and animals and monsters. And indeed, if you read the Early Christian Church fathers, Saint Augustine same idea, you know . The idea that we are born as sinners. And you read the enlightenment philosophers thomas hobbes, david hume, even adam smith also often emphasise in the end, people are selfish or at least that politically, we have to assume that, when we build a society. And, you know, ithink that idea is just wrong. It is really
fundamentally wrong. In the past couple of decades, we have seen scientists from very diverse disciplines psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists all moving from a quite cynical view of human nature to a much more hopeful view of human nature. And what i am trying doing in this book is just to connect and what i am trying to do in this book is just to connect the dots and to show that something bigger is going on there. Are you saying far from that that people are basically selfish and bad are you saying that fundamentally, deep down, people are good . I just want to get that clear. No, absolutely not. We are not angels, we are not fundamentally good. Im saying that most people in the end are pretty decent, which i think is a little bit different, and im also saying that what you assume in other people is what you get out of them. So if you assume that most people are selfish, right, and that they just want to get as much for themselves as possible, then you will design your society in such a way, youll create institutions that will bring out the worst in each and every one of us. And i think we have been doing
that for the past a0 years. You know, we have designed schools and marketplaces and organisations in our democracies in a way that have not brought out the best in us. I think we can turn that around. Our view of human nature can be a self fulfilling prophecy. But we did not design everything from shopping malls to political sort of governance on a whim. We were also listening to behavioural scientists. I am thinking of Stanley Milgram and others operating out of the top universities in california, who set up experiments trying to figure out whether ordinary people could be persuaded to do bad things including torture of the other ordinary citizens and concluded that actually worryingly yes, they could be persuaded quite easily. Are you debunking and dismissing all of that evidence . Well, many of it. You know, i used to believe in all of these experiments. You know, i have written earlier books that luckily have not been translated into english, about the stanford prison experiment, for example. It is only recently that i discovered, you know, based on the work of an important french sociologist Thibault Le Texier that it is actually a hoax, you know . We all know this experiment about 2k students who were selected to participate in an experiment with a sort of fake prison. 12 were made into guards, i2 prisoners, and Philip Zimbardo, the researcher, sort of said i willjust sit back and just see what happens. And the story that he told later is that these students, on their own, started behaving in a very horrible way and the message was obviously well, there is a monster in each and every one of us, just below the surface. There is a nazi in each and every one of us. It is only recently that we have learned that, actually, Philip Zimbardo specifically instructed the guards to be as sadistic as possible. That many of those guards said, i do not want to do that. That is not who i am. Then he said, look, you are these 60s hippies, liberals, right . You want to reform the prison system in america as well. Come on, i need these results. I need you to behave in a horrible way, then we can go to the press and say, look, this is what prisons do to people. And so some of them went along this became a huge story and so some of them went along and this became a huge story and it is still in the textbooks of millions of students, while, yeah, in reality, its pretty much a hoax. And i do find that fascinating and you have done a lot of work to debunk some of those theories but your big problem, it seems to me, is that while you might be able to debunk the 60s work, which sort of attempted to say there is a quasi nazi mentality within all of us, what you cant debunk, because it is just factual, is nazism, genocide, and the holocaust itself and not even just the german holocaust, but the genocides we have seen in more recent times, from rwanda to the ethnic cleansing in the balkans and elsewhere these are realities. 0rdinary people conducted themselves in the most terrible ways and i do not see how that fits with your fundamental worldview. Well, i mean, it would obviously be hubristic to sort of pretend that i can give a sort of short explanation for things that we need libraries full of books to understand it, and maybe we still dont understand it, but i can say this i believe there is a connection between our capacity for friendliness and our behaviour that sometimes can be so cruel because so often in history, we do the most horrible things in the name of comradeship and of friendship. I think this is sort of the paradox of my book. 0n the one hand, i am arguing that people have evolved to be friendly and to work together. But then, on the other hand, sometimes it is exactly the problem, because friendly behaviour can morph into tribal behaviour and groupish behaviour. And then people find it hard to go against a group and against the status quo and they start doing these horrible things. But are you not. . But that is just one part of the explanation,
i mean, obviously there are many other mechanisms at play here. But with what you have just said, are you not coming dangerously close to being an apologist for the mass ranks of hitlers armed forces who committed atrocities . And you might say, oh, well. We have to understand them because, frankly, most of them were simply motivated by comradeship and wanting to defend their brothers and look after themselves. That is not good enough, is it . Well, it is certainly a danger i think you are right about that. I think we have to be really careful and make a difference between sort of trying to understand certain behaviour and condoning it. It is the same with the debate about terrorism, right . I think we have a genuine responsibility to understand what drives terrorists, you know, why they blow themselves up. And here again, you have the same dynamic that often they do it in the name of comradeship and of friendship, and that, you know, especially the foot soldiers, are not that ideologically motivated. They often know very little, actually, about the ideology, you know . We have had reports from people
going to syria with books in their bags with the titles like the quran for dummies. But still, they do these horrible things. Again, you know, it is absolutely not about condoning but it is about understanding what is going on here because that is the only way to prevent it, i think. I want to spend a little bit of time on the flip side of your argument, not challenging you with all of the evils that we have seen in recent human history, but actually getting you to explain why you think one of your anecdotes in the book humankind is so very important, and thats the anecdote about what happened to half a dozen tongan teenagers living in a Remote Island on the south pacific, when they decided one night to escape from a school that they did not like. They climbed into a boat, took off into the pacific ocean, found themselves in a storm, shipwrecked, and then on a deserted, very tiny island, where they proceeded to live for the next year and more, on their own, with no contact with the outside world and, far from any sort of lord
of the flies scenario, where they ripped themselves apart, you say all the evidence suggests they lived cooperatively, they cared for each other and, when they were eventually discovered, they were in very good shape. It is a fascinating story, but does it really tell us anything about the human condition . Well, maybe not. I mean, it is obviously not a scientific experiment and that would be very hard, right, to drop lots of kids on islands and have control groups, etc, and then tojudge and study how they behave. I am just saying that if millions of people around the globe still have to read lord of the flies in school and they often become quite pessimistic and cynical after reading it i mean, i remember reading it when i was 16 and i was depressed for a week afterwards. I am just saying that lets also tell them about the one time that we know of in World History that real kids, shipwrecked on a real island and it is the most happy story you can imagine. They lived there for 15 months,
they cooperated really well, and they became the best of friends. Actually, the captain who rescued them an australian captain named peter warner is still soulmates with one of the boys, who is now 70 years old mano totau. I mean, if it would be a movie, a hollywood movie, people would say, oh, this is so sentimental. This is not how people would really behave. This is worse than love actually but it is what really happened. 0n hardtalk we talked to a lot of sort of public 0n hardtalk we talk to a lot of sort of public intellectuals, big thinkers with big ideas about the way we human beings organise our societies today and im thinking of the recent past where we have interviewed Yuval Noah Harari and steven pinker, and these are thinkers who fundamentally i think believe in a notion of human progress. Steven pinker, in particular, will make a point of saying you might think things are bad today, we focus on the wars, we focus on the bad stuff, but actually human beings are living in the best of times. There is more security, better education, more relief from poverty than there has ever been in human history
before. And he would say that is because we are evolving better ways of running our societies. Your message, although you are an optimist about the human condition, seems to be that we are actually not discovering better ways to run our societies, and you seem in some ways anti progress. Well, im absolutely not. We have made extraordinary progress in the last couple of decades, moral progress, technological progress. If you would chose any time to live, it would be now. What i am just saying is that we got the history of civilization all wrong. Steven pinker paints a picture of our history in which supposedly everything was worse, when we were nomadic hunter gatherers, which we were for 95 of our history, we were raging these tribal wars that is sort of the pessimistic view. What i am trying to show
in the book is that actually civilisation was, for most of our history, a big disaster. It started the age of warfare, of patriarchy, of hierarchy, of infection diseases, like we are dealing with right now. And actually the lives of nomadic hunter gatherers were much healthier and happier and more relaxed than the lives of the city dwellers and the farmers who came after it. But how on earth. And why do we remember this because obviously we have made a lot of progress in the last couple of decades. How can you posit that the cave dwellers and the hunter gatherers were a happy people, living in a state of sort of pure innocence . You have no idea they have not left written record and you are just sort of imposing some sort of quasi religious world view upon this sort of age of innocence, arent you . No, im not. It is obviously hard to know how our ancestors lived 30,000 years ago. But we do have two important sources. So we have what anthropologists have studied. You know, tribes who lived
in the 19th or the 20th century and who still lived as nomadic hunter gatherers, and you can look if there are similarities in the way they live, and youll discover, for example, that they have these really egalitarian societies, a relaxed lifestyle, a work week of around 20 30 hours, they are healthier than farmers as well, for example. And you can obviously also study the archaeological records. Now, you are absolutely right, nomadic hunter gatherers did not leave much behind but, if there was really some kind of war against all going on in our deep past, then you would be expected that at some point some artists in the stone age would have said, you know what . I am making a cave painting out of that. But we have not found any there is nothing like that. We have a lot of cave paintings but not about war between people. Then we settled down, we became sedentary about 12,000 years ago, we started doing agriculture, and you find a lot of these cave paintings that are very suggestive and that there is also
the evidence we have from excavation, skeletal remains you can study that. Most experts in the field, most archaeologists and anthropologists believe that war has not been with us forever. And has really been an invention. Its just that these people did not get a lot of attention in the press because they are not telling us this dark story. I think its often seen as more boring. I am just now wondering what all of this means for rutger bregmans analysis of where we are today . You paint this picture of a sort of idyllic prehistory, where hunter gatherers lived in a more pure sort of human condition what does that lead you to conclude about the state of capitalism, for example, today . You have written a lot about what you believe to be the inadequacy of capitalist systems, the failure to deliver a