The first third of the book shows us that many of our “shared stories” about the “inhumanity of man” are not as simple as we have been led to believe. The author’s approach in Humankind is a bit different. Life on Earth looks much more promising when you finish that book. Bregman takes us here on a journey through the best and most achievable ideas for improving the world around us. I first ran across “professional optimist” Rutger Bregman in his 2017 book entitled, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (Little, Brown and Company, 2017). ![]() My most recent example dilemma was “Is it morally right to cripple the economy in order to save a bunch of old people like me from the Coronavirus?” I know many “good people” on both sides of that debate. What I mean when I say that is not so much this big existential question, but rather my contention that the really hard ethical questions are not like “Thou shalt not kill” commandments, but rather are the numerous issues where men and women of good intention have wrestled one another throughout the ages. This blog has, since its inception, been dabbling into questions of morality and ethics with the continuing tag of “Good People Disagree,” so that may betray my leanings here. We are literally realigning our political parties and religious affiliations based on whether we think human beings are fundamentally good at their core or instead intrinsically evil, and Bregman’s title declares which side he is on. Was George Floyd a bad man or a good man? How about the four policemen who killed him on the street? Were the street protestors outside the White House on June 1 patriots expressing their constitutional First Amendment rights or were they threats to civil order deserving police beatings and the chemical tearing agents deployed by the Secret Service?ĭutch historian Rutger Bregman’s refreshing new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Little, Brown and Company, 2020), has come out at this remarkable point in world history. Bregman presents this idea with his signature wit and frankness, once again making history, social science and economic theory accessible and enjoyable for lay readers.An ages-old morality play has started a new season of “reality shows,” run on television every night since May 25, 2020. The ultimate goal of Humankind is to demonstrate that while neither capitalism nor communism has on its own been proven to be a workable social system, there is a third option: giving "citizens and professionals the means (left) to make their own choices (right)." Reorienting our thinking toward positive and high expectations of our fellow man, Bregman argues, will reap lasting success. In place of these, he offers little-known true stories: the tale of twin brothers on opposing sides of apartheid in South Africa who came together with Nelson Mandela to create peace a group of six shipwrecked children who survived for a year and a half on a deserted island by working together a study done after World War II that found that as few as 15% of American soldiers were actually capable of firing at the enemy. Bregman systematically debunks our understanding of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, and the Kitty Genovese "bystander effect." With Humankind, he brings that mentality to bear against one of our most entrenched ideas: namely, that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested.īy providing a new historical perspective of the last 200,000 years of human history, Bregman sets out to prove that we are in fact evolutionarily wired for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. ![]() If one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea - whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the ratification of marriage equality - was once considered radical and dangerous by the mainstream opinion of its time. From the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success
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