Humankind: A Hopeful History
The Problem with Human Nature
Socialists can press home telling arguments against capitalism. We can show that it is social system based on class exploitation. We can show that, for the working class, the consequences of the profit system are war, poverty and unemployment. And we can demonstrate, by the continued failure of social reformism that capitalism can never be able to work in the interests of all society.
Yet despite our sound and valid case for socialism there is still resistance. And that resistance often comes in the form of the human nature argument. We are told that socialism is against "human nature". We are informed that we are too greedy, war-like, selfish, sinful and violent for socialism to work.
Our opponents think the human nature argument is a knock down reply to our socialist case against capitalism. We are told that human nature cannot be changed. Competition rather than co-operation is innate. Genocide, war, violence, death and destruction are our fate. Or, so we are meant to believe.
So it is refreshing to come across a book which shows that there is no scientific reason why socialism cannot be established, why we cannot have production directly to meet human need. We are, in effect, a co-operative species that can transcend the exploitive social system in which we currently live in. HUMAN KIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY (2020), by the historian and writer, Rutger Bregman, is a breath of fresh air, an optimistic view of human nature that provides evidence to allow the possibility of a better socialist future.
Human Kind: A Hopeful History?
HUMAN KIND: A HOPEFULHISTORY begins with "The Psychology of the Masses", a book written in 1895 by the author, Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon is supposed to be indicative of those who believe we have flawed human natures. Le Bon defends the most commonly held view that civilisation is only skin deep and underneath we are all violent and selfish yahoos. When there is a crisis it is every person for themselves. The frail get brushed aside. The ruthless dominate and the weak go to the wall. However, according to Bregman, crises bring out not the worst, but the best in people.
Bregan begins with his "radical" idea: "That most people, deep down, are pretty decent" (p. 2). There are many examples in human history of people rising to meet natural crises, like the spontaneous solidarity after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Thousands of people give selfless devotion to all manner of voluntary efforts including free and co-operative work for political parties. And in 2020, during the Coronavirus pandemic, thousands of people gave their services to help the sick, the aged and those who could not get food. And health workers, treating the ill, worked co-operatively while facing daily danger, made worse by a lack of adequate protective equipment.
Bregman says that it is a persistent myth that humans are "aggressive and quick to panic" (p4). He goes on to say:
"If we believe most people can't be trusted, that's how we’ll treat each other, to everyone's detriment" (p. 9)
He then asks the important question about human nature:
"Why do we imagine humans are bad? What made us start believing in the wicked nature of our kind" (P.12).
Our supposed "wickedness", Bregan shows, is rooted in religion. The Bible, in particular, with its myth of Adam and Eve and original sin, has held human beings responsible for evil actions for thousands of years. Christian theology has polluted the thinking of millions of people by making them transmit negative ideas of human nature, from one generation to the next.
Human nature as innate selfishness, Bregan shows, has many advocates from the Greek philosopher, Thucydides, the Catholic Church, right on up to the Enlightenment and America's "founding fathers"; many of whom were slave owners. Here is the theologian Augustine on human sin:
"No one is free from sin not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day" (p.17).
What chance do we have of establishing a better society for our children? We are told that we are born sinful, selfish and violent. We are told that we are driven by sin from the day we are born.
Millions are taught about supernatural evil, the Devil and mortal sin as though they are real. The Catholic Church still exorcises demons; driving them out of human beings and no one raises an eye brow at this absurd irrationality. Through religion, people hold the dogma that we are sinful and are unable to lead co-operative lives for the benefit of all.
When socialists come along with a different narrative about how it is possible to get people as a whole to work together to their mutual advantage we are seemingly on for a hiding to nothing. Our socialist ideas are dismissed for no other reason than that religion got there first. What can socialists do in the face of an organisation like the Southern Baptist Convention with its 15 million evangelical members literally believing in the certainty of the Bible and denouncing Darwinian science?
One wit said we should pray!
The Poverty of Economics
Negative conceptions of human nature are also to be found in subjects like economics. Bregan argues that irredeemable selfishness is the primary assumption of economics. He writes:
"Economists defined our species as "homo economicus": always intent on personal gain, like selfish, calculating robots. Upon this notion of human nature economists built a cathedral of theories and models that wound up informing legislation" (p. 16).
Self-interest in economics refers to actions that bring personal benefit and riches. We are told to admire and applaud billionaires. Adam Smith, worshipped as the father of modern economics, explained that the best economic benefit for all can usually be accomplished when individuals act in their self-interest. Competition rather than co-operation gives us the best of all possible worlds. Smith wrote:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages"
An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1
Economics, Bregan demonstrates, is a flawed theory of human beings and how they think and behave. The longer students study economics, the more selfish they become. They become what the subject matter taught. They cling onto the theory of competitive markets because they perceive people to be selfish with "infinite wants", always trying to cram more and more commodities into their basket. According to economic theory we are maximising agents with no interest in others. "Greed is good" we are told.
Human beings are cursed by two Adams: One fictional, found in the Garden of Eden biting the apple of knowledge; the cause of original sin, the other is historical, writing his book THE WEALTH OF NATIONS whose premise is the intrinsic selfishness of human nature. In short, a spiritual and secular defence of capitalism and the profit system.
To lift this double curse requires the acceptance of one simple idea. In socialism, a society based on free and voluntary social labour, each person would be free to take what they need to live their life to the full. There would be no point in anyone taking more than they need. There would be no need for selfishness.
Richard Dawkins and Selfishness
Another target for Bregman is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and his book THE SELFISH GENE which had a wide readership in the 1970s, even influencing the National Front.
Dawkins promoted the philosophy of an innate and selfish biological human nature. He wrote:
"a society base simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society...Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature...because we are born selfish" (THE SELFISH GENE, Chapter 1. page 3, 1999)
But Dawkins' doctrine of everlasting selfish doom, a kind of an evolutionary original sin, contains mistakes. He over-estimates his theory from incomplete genetic categories, and makes an error known as, "the fallacy of composition". The fallacy of composition infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Dawkins was forced to admit that he was wrong. He had made a fundamental error. In the 30th anniversary edition of THE SELFISH GENE, he conceded that "born selfish is misleading"
. However the damage had been done.
Bregman asserts that human beings are young in evolutionary terms - the result of blind evolution. However we are social and learn socially. Bregman states we are "ultra social learning machines." (p.69). And Bregman shows, against Dawkins, that rather than being inherently selfish we are inherently co-operative. Dawkins say says nothing on our dependence on social life and our need for human contact and interaction. It is crude biological determinism and reductionism.
Contra Dawkins, Bregman introduces us to the Russian geneticist, Dmitri Brlyaev, who showed the opposite of the selfish gene. Bergman said:
"Dmitri Belyaev's theory was that people are domesticated apes. That for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans had the most kids. That the evolution of our species, in short, was predicated on 'survival of the friendliest'" (page 64).
Belyaev's "survival of the friendliest" as opposed to Spencer.s "survival of the fittest" is a useful retort to one of the most pernicious ruling class ideas in circulation.
Bregman goes on to say:
"We're born to learn, to bond, and to play..'blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. Blushing is,.., quintessentially social - it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation" ( P.69). Co-operation, Bregman concludes, is far more critical in evolutionary terms than selfishness.
Bregman recalls the disastrous application of Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" theory to the real world of capitalism. The CEO of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling was a Dawkins fan. He really believed in the selfishness of human beings. He thought that selfishness was grounded in evolution. Skilling carried out Dawkins ideas of innate genetic human selfishness and competition and applied them to the organisation of Enron (p.71). At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systemic and creatively planned accounting fraud. The result was that Enron went bankrupt and Skilling went to prison.
Humans excel at gentleness in comparison to other primates; it is not our desire for competition but cooperation that explains our biological advantage.
Human Nature and "Basic Communism"
In his book Bregman contrasts the seventeenth century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes with the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Hobbes believed in the wickedness of human nature. Civil society was necessary to save human beings from their base instincts. In a state of nature there would be "a war against all" (Leviathan 1651), as he put it. Hobbes gave us this fanciful thought experiment, beloved of conservatives. We had to enter into a contract with the State to save us from ourselves even if this meant governments, politicians, lawyers, armies, bureaucrats, prisons and the public executioner. The state might need to be small but it had to be coercive for our own sake. This is the convenient fiction to justify the private ownership of the means of production.
On the other hand, Rousseau (DISCOURESE ON INEQUALITY, 1755) said that the problem for human beings began with the imposition of private property ownership. The state of nature was corrupted by civil society. The need for a state was to protect private property: "The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society".
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/inequality/ch02.htm
Bregman believes that human beings suffer a collective mass hysteria that convinces us, without evidence, of our own evil. It is the same irrational fear about the "alien", "the stranger" and the "other". We are indoctrinated into believing a fiction about human nature which we cannot let go of. We want it to be true.
As Marx noted:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living".
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
This raises the interesting question of how Bregman has freed himself from negative conceptions of human nature which the rest of us our afflicted by. How has Bregman escaped "The tradition of all dead generations"? What gives Bregman this privileged position?
Unlike liberals, the constituency for socialists is the world working class; our class who are forced to work for a wage or salary and who are exploited as a class in the productive process. Can a sufficient majority of workers free themselves from the believing that social existence is impossible without private property, money, wages, profits, the State, boundaries, wars and all the other features of capitalism? Why do those who use negative human nature arguments against socialism never apply it them to themselves? Only other workers are selfish and evil!
human nature" which tie us to capitalism? Can we, as a class of workers, free ourselves by our own political efforts through co-operation and solidarity? On this question, there is, from Bregman, just silence.
There is no historical agency for revolutionary change identified by Bregman. There is no working class making history. Unlike socialists, Bregman believes in a liberal state exercising social reform for the good of everyone. The liberal elite, of which Bregman is a member, is immune to negative ideas of human nature and sees through them. They form a privileged group, which is why, we suppose, he chose to champion Rousseau rather than Marx.
Not that Bregman ignores communism. Bregman believes that society consists of a "basic communism" that humans practice on a daily basis with friends and family, at home and at school. Yet he does not extend communism to encompass the means of production and distribution. There is no awareness by Bregman of class and a class society. There is no understanding of class struggle. And there is a complete absence in his account of human nature of class politics and ruling class ideas. His notion of communism is co-operative acts within capitalism rather than a revolutionary break by the working class with the profit system (pp 306-9).
What about Marx and Socialism?
Unfortunately this is where Karl Marx should have come into the discussion of society and human potential. Marx had useful things to say about communism. He famously said that communism (or socialism) was to be based on the principle "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs".
We need to consider social systems, why they come into being and why they were replaced. Really important ruling class ideas like the Divine right of Kings no longer exist. They no longer exist because society changes. Society is not static. We need a materialist conception of history and a political theory of class struggle. But Bregman ignores Marx. Instead he opts for the French philosopher, J. J. Rousseau.
Rousseau strongly believed in the existence of a benign form of government that can give the members of society a level of freedom that at least approximates the freedom enjoyed in the state of nature. In THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, Rousseau outlines these principles and how they may be given expression in a modern state through the imposition of "authentic needs" and avoidance and removal of "artificial needs".
Marx rarely mentions Rousseau in his writings and for a very good reason; he has no bearing on working class politics. Socialism was going to be the work of the working class themselves. " the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" (COMMUNIST MANIFESTO) where "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (ibid).
The state plays an important role in Rousseau's theory but for Marx socialism is based on an administration of "things" not people. The state under capitalism protects the private ownership of the means of production and distribution. The state is the exercise of class power using violence and war to protect trade routes, minerals, territory and spheres of strategic importance.
The state is important for socialists because a socialist majority has to gain control over the machinery of government through the revolutionary use of the vote and socialist delegates. This is how capitalism is abolished and socialism established. In socialism there will be no coercion, no rational elite imposing their will on the majority in the belief that they know better than someone else. Socialism will be democratic, in which production will be directly take place to meet people’s needs. The needs of individuals will not be imposed and determined by someone else.
Bregman gives us a list of behavioural platitudes for humankind but stops short of advocating socialism. Bergman’s politics would be more in line with the proposals of the economist Richard Wolfe who argues for the establishment of co-operatives (which he erroneously calls socialism) but wants to retain markets, wage labour and buying and selling. It is doubtful if Bregman shares the socialism put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which is disappointing to say the least.
Bregman should have picked Marx not Rousseau for his walk through human history. He would then have made the correct conclusion: the need for the establishment of a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. It means that the 399 pages of Humankind do not lead to a socialist conclusion but to some unspecified social reformism probably around the imposition of universal benefit income (proposed by Bregman in his previous book UTOPIA FOR REALISTS). At Davos a few years ago, Bergman's political solution for poverty was for the capitalist class to pay more taxes. What does Bergman think governments exist for? And socialists are accused of being utopian!!!
Humankind has a lot of useful things to say about why historical and contemporary conceptions of human nature are wrong. However, in the end Bregman does not say much on how and by what means we are going to liberate ourselves from negative views of "human nature" except to be kind to people and to co-operate with them. This is not good enough. Workers need to engage democratically in a socialist politics to free ourselves from the exploitation and poverty of capitalism. Negative conceptions of human nature have to be overcome, but so too have other barriers; barriers like futile proposals for social reform rather than the necessity of socialist revolution.