Dan Snow's History Hit - History and Human Nature

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

It's a belief which has dictated the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Freud and Dawkins - that humans are fundamentally selfish and governed by self-interest. But Rutger Bregman has made a convincing case that this simply isn't true. Starting off with a real version of The Lord of the Flies - where humans stranded on a desert island were driven by kindness and common responsibility - we took a deeper look at human beings through the lens of the past. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It was great last week to have Rutger Bregman on the podcast. He's the Dutch historian who is making waves, talking about a new realism about our human natures. He wades in on this argument. Was Hobbes right? Is life nasty, brutal and short in a state of nature without a leviathan keeping us in line? And was Rousseau right? Everyone just hang out and things were great. We were all noble savages until leviathans turned up and made us into, you know, soldiers, farmers, prison guards, podcasters. Rutgers got some really powerful evidence and he punctures a lot of myths that you will have heard of. It was great. We had this on the Zoom call. So subscribers to History Hit TV are able to join in on these Zoom calls. We've got Caleb McDaniel this week, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in the

US this year. We had Peter Frankopan on the week before. We've got Kate Lister coming on to talk about sex in the lockdown. Please join that Zoom. Look out for it if you're a subscriber to History Hit TV. It's free for you guys. Come in and just listen, ask questions, then I steal your best questions and present them as my own on the podcast. So thank you very much for that.

If you want to go to History Hit TV, we we got tons of new documentaries up at the moment it's got a big drop of documentaries including david starkey talking about the churchill family so please go to history hit tv use the code pod one p-o-d one and then you get a month for free and then you get the following month for just one pound euro or dollar so please go and check all those new documentaries out in the meantime everyone here is Rutger Bregman talking about humankind Rutger Bregman thank you very much coming back on the podcast thanks for having me Dan so much fun to be here again well you know what that's very nice you say so buddy but I know because your voice must be hoarse you have been everywhere in the world a little bit before

you expire of boredom telling your story again can we just get the lord of the flies bit out the way start from the beginning you just sat there on a keyboard with internet connection go for it you know i never get tired of telling this story actually i've been telling it at birthday parties for three years now and it's i'm still enjoying So Lord of the Flies, this dark story of how kids behave horribly when they end up on an uninhabited island. You know the novel from 1954 by William Golding. So I read the book when I was 16 and I thought well you know this is depressing but it's probably true. So I thought no more Harry Potter for me. No more little princes on prairies.

This is probably, you know, a more realistic take on human nature. So it felt a bit like a coming-of-age experience. And I think it's been that way for many, many people. It was only later that while researching this book that I thought, you know, has it ever actually really happened? Is there one historical example of kids shipwrecking on an island? And yeah, what did they experience? I started on this journey that started on Google, you know, as a proper investigative journalist, you just Google

real life Lord of the Flies or kids on an island or something like that. And the first thing you find is horrid reality shows, right? You don't want to know what all these horrible television makers have tried in the past. But anyway, after a while, I found this anecdote that supposedly this had happened in 1977 near Tonga, which is an island group in the Pacific Ocean. And I started searching for this and started ordering books. But again and again, I found the same anecdotes, same wording, same phrases, no real source to back it up. It was only by pure accident,

again after a couple of weeks, that I was searching through a newspaper archive of Australian newspapers. By accident I was looking in the 60s instead of the 70s and then boom! I saw it on my screen. 1966 Australian newspaper called The Age that said Sunday showing for Tongan castaways. Turns out it actually did happen, not in 1977. That was a typo, but in 1966. So pure coincidence, I found it.

So what happened is that six kids had shipwrecked on an island, survived for 15 months, were rescued by an Australian captain named Peter Warner. And I discovered that in almost every single way, the real Lord of the Flies is the opposite of the fictional Lord of the Flies. So if people would make a movie about this, or would say, well, this is a fictional movie about kids on an island, we would all say,

oh, this is so sentimental. That's not how kids would really behave. Because the real Lord of the Flies is about friendship, about cooperation, about human resilience. Yeah, it's a quite happy story. It's a really happy story. And you go around through the book slaying all these shibboleths that give us to believe we're all monsters and concentration camp guards deep down. And we'll come to some of those in a bit.

But the heart of your thesis is pretty big, dude. You're judging between Rousseau and Hobbes, the two big guys. They stand like two kind of pillars don't they two poles perhaps at the heart and kind of enlightenment thinking is it all nasty brutish and short or i remember reading russo when i was 17 and of course the weird thing is in your book really brought this home to me you were that kind of kid reading russo at 17 don't pretend you weren't, dude. Don't put that on me. Come on, man. Anyway, and I remember thinking, this guy's crazy.

He's a hippie. He's an idiot. I'm into Hobbes. And it's like, why did I think that? I've never had any Hobbesian experiences. I'd had Rousseau experiences my whole life. And yet for some reason, I was sitting here in a suburb of London,

affluent, happy, lying in the grass all day, having a nice social life, thinking it was all Hobbesian. Like, why do we trick ourselves? Yeah, that's a fascinating question isn't it throughout history Rousseau has I think mostly been described as the romantic right the naive guy the guy with the dreams and the ideals and Hobbes is described as the father of realism right so often we equate cynicism with realism and vice versa if there's one thing i try to do in this book is to redefine what it means to be a realist because there's been this sort of

movement in science or this silent revolution in the past 15 to 20 years of very diverse scientists you know anthropologists archaeologists sociologists psychologists who've all moved from a quite cynical view of human nature, from quite Hobbesian view of human nature, to a much more Rousseauian view. I'm not saying they're going all the way. I mean, Rousseau maybe went a bit too far, right? Human beings are definitely not angels. We're capable of the most horrible cruelty, right? I think you could even argue that we're one of the most cruel species in the animal kingdom. But there's a lot of ground for hope as well. And so what I wanted to do in this book is just to connect all the dots

because all these brilliant experts doing their brilliant research, they're so specialized that they often don't see what's going on in the field next to them, right? So, yeah, I was just in a privileged position where I could zoom out a little bit and then for three or four or five months really go deep into the history of Easter Island and then for a couple of months learn everything I could zoom out a little bit and then for three or four or five months really go deep into the history of Easter Island and then for a couple of months learn everything I could about the bystander effect or psychology then do six months of anthropology right and then you bring

it all together and you see this bigger picture that is emerging and that's what the book is about could we go into some of our deep past and talk about the what you call homo puppy how in fact you think we might have evolved to reward the nice people amongst us so obviously one of the big questions of history is why us right so why did we conquer the world why are we building pyramids and spaceships and musea? And why are the Neanderthals on display there instead of the other way around? I mean, why was it Neil Armstrong on the moon instead of a cow, you know, or a chimpanzee or something like that? What's so special about human beings?

And things start thinking. And the most common answer that people give here is, well, we're really intelligent. And, you know, I like to believe that. But no, we're really intelligent. And, you know, I like to believe that, but no, we're really not. I mean, we're not that intelligent. If you have an intelligence test and you let a toddler compete with a pig, you know, a human toddler, then often the pig wins, right? Also intelligence tests, chimpanzees, bonobos against human toddlers, you know, there's not much of a difference, which I mean, you should keep in mind the next time you eat bacon as well. I mean, animals are way smarter than we often think, but there's something special about us.

It is also not that we're so strong. I mean, chimpanzees are clearly more powerful. I think that the reason that we conquer the globe and not the other animals is that we can cooperate on a scale that other animals just can't. And we can do that because we're one of the friendliest species in the animal kingdom. There's even a term for this in biology now. Biologists literally talk about survival of the friendliest. So what has happened is that for centuries, millennia even, it was the friendliest among us who had the most kids and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. Sort of the scientific term for this is self-domestication. We all know, I think, what domestication is, right? What we did to cows

and sheep and you name it. Or you have a wolf and you domesticate it by selecting, you know, the tamest and the cutest, etc. And then you have a chihuahua, sort of a wolf to chihuahua. That's domestication. Well, the same thing happened to us. We sort of self-domesticated. And I think that that is also the reason why we sort of conquered the globe in the end. It is our true secret superpower. huge amount of archaeology and change around that yeah certainly in the last few years yeah you now think that our wandering tribes of hunter-gatherers would have found it fairly easy to coexist with neighboring people they came across yeah i mean it's obviously very hard to know how our ancestors lived 30 000 years ago right we don't really have many sources we don't have written sources or anything so there are sort of two main ways to answer that question. We've got anthropology and archaeology. So anthropologists have studied

nomadic hunter-gatherers, and we know that for the biggest part of our history, 95% of our history, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. And they have studied nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in the 19th and 20th century. You see some striking similarities in the way they live. And obviously, you can also sort of study the archaeological remains, right? What they left behind. Now, the difficulty here is they didn't leave much behind, but we can learn a couple of things. Now, if you put that together, a very different picture emerges than the picture of the Hobbesian war of all against all. It's actually the opposite. I believe that war is a quite recent invention. It's an invention of civilization. So if you look at excavations of skeletons, for example,

you find hardly any skeletons that have clear signs of violence before the moment we became sedentary, before we settled down and started building villages, and then after that doing agriculture as well. But after that, we see a lot of evidence for that. If you look at cave paintings, if there really was a war of all against all going on in our deep history, then you would expect that at some point, some artist would have thought, you know, this is a pretty significant part of our lives. Let's make a nice painting of this war of all against all. It's not there. You know, we've got a lot of cave paintings of hunter-gatherers hunting, you know, other animals,

but hunting other people, it's not there. But then after we became sedentary, you do actually start finding these kind of cave paintings. So piecing this all together, and you know, I need quite a lot of chapters to make it all work in the book, because this is obviously a hard question to answer. But I think the evidence points in a sort of hopeful direction and not in the hobbesian direction yes it does point a hopeful direction except there's one massive problem right which is everything was fine until the invention of civilization i'm really hopeful except you know kind of think i'd be into hunter gathering but there are big problems and you do attempt to deal with this when you talk about democracy but i'd like to ask you a bit about that now.

How do we have a hopeful view of human nature, realise that civilisation can all too often lead to the gates of Auschwitz or the genocide that we saw during our lifetime in Rwanda? How do we translate that hopefulness into also wanting to live in a sedentary world where we have food supplies and dating apps. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies

teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week you know the standard story that they taught me when i was in school was the history of our species as sort of the march of progress right how everything gets a little better over time and all the milestones of civilizations are something that we should celebrate right agriculture the invention of the wheel and then writing and you name it right these

are all great triumphs for humanity well actually it's been pretty much the opposite so many of these great inventions were actually ways to oppress other people even more, right? So the first writings we have are often about, you know, debts and about slavery, etc. When we settled down these first villages and cities, well, they're terrible for our health. Infection diseases started spreading, pandemics. If you think about what we're going through right now, it's a very modern phenomenon, right? It's a product of civilization. All these terrible diseases like polio and the plague and malaria,

they're all products of us living too close to our domesticated animals, right? Actually, hunter-gatherers were healthier than farmers and city dwellers who became after them. Now, why don't we know this? Because we've obviously clearly made a huge amount of progress in just the last couple of decades. I mean, we're richer, we're healthier, we're safer than ever. If you would choose any period to live, it would be now. But if you would have the choice to live as a nomadic hunter-gatherer or in the period of what we call civilization, right, the last 10,000 years,

and you wouldn't know where in the history of civilization you would end up, right? But just you would be randomly dropped somewhere. If I can give you any advice if you ever get that choice in your life be a nomadic and together because the vast majority of the population was up until say the french revolution or even after the industrial revolution was living a terrible terrible life very nasty brutus in short as hobbes would have said actually that's the irony at the heart of the book which is the Hobbesian world that we were supposed to have escaped by building these

leviathans for us actually cast us into the pit of the leviathan but then at the same time I mean we have made extraordinary technological and also moral progress in the past couple of decades the question that we just have right now is is is it sustainable? Right. So I always love this anecdote that, you know, so many wonderful historical anecdote never actually really happened. But who cares? This Chinese politician, you'll remember his name. Anyway, he was asked in the 70s what he thought about the French Revolution, the 1970s, so 50 years ago.

And he said, too early to say. And I always love that answer, right? Sort of the long term thinking. So if you ask me, what do you think about civilization? My answer is too early to say. Right. We don't know yet. It was Zhao Enlai, buddy. I learned that from your book. I mean, come on. You actually do address that in the final section, which I might ask you about a little bit later on. But first, I just want you to slay a couple more of these things that we've all heard of smash up the Stanford prison experiment just give me two minutes on that early 1970s one of the most famous experiments in psychology done by the professor Philip Zimbardo still one of the most famous psychologists alive very dark message so he had a group of 24 students

he made 12 of them into guards 12 prisoners put them in the basement of Stanford University and just sit back, relaxed and wanted to see what happened. And the standard story that's still being taught to, well, millions of students around the globe that became so famous and ended up in all the textbooks was about how these pacifist students, these hippies, you know, these very nice guys morphed into monsters who behaved in a horribly sadistic way and again the message was look civilization is just a thin veneer you know deep down we're all animals we're all beasts i used to believe this i've been telling this story for quite a long time i had it in earlier books that luckily have not been translated into english but it's only recently that a french sociologist tibala texier and his book hasn't been translated into English. But it's only recently that a French sociologist, Thibaut Letexier, and his book hasn't been translated into English,

which is really a tragedy, which is why now I can be the cool guy and tell this story. But he went into the archives for the first time, which is mind-blowing to me that it took 50 years for a sociologist, not even a psychologist or historian, but a sociologist to go into the archives as part of some kind of film project he was thinking about. And so he started studying how this experiment actually happened and discovered that it was a complete hoax. There's no other way to

describe it. I mean, Philip Zimbardo specifically instructed his students to be as sadistic as possible. Then many of those students said, I don't really want to do that. That's not the kind of guy I am. Then he said, look, I need you to do this because then I can go to the press and then we can tell this story about how prisons are horrible environments and we can reform the whole prison system in the US. That's what you want, right? You're the liberal hippie. Come on, help me with this. And so some of them went along and this is how it became the big story. You know, three days or a couple of days after the experiment, he already went to the television. This bizarre episode in the history of psychology. And this became one of the most famous experiments.

Le Texier, I asked him, you know, is there still something we can learn from the Stanford Prison Experiment? And he dryly remarked, well, you know, it's a pretty good summary of everything that can go wrong in science. And the BBC recreated it with a prison reality TV show that was incredibly boring because they all sat around drinking cups of tea with each other. Yeah, they made the big mistake. So the BBC thought we're going to have this great show that will be fantastic for ratings because these random guys will behave in a very sadistic way again, you know, just like the original

experiment. But they work with two British psychologists who said okay we want to work with you but only if we don't interfere and then the BBC said yes and so yeah they created this experiment and it's just I sacrificed hours of my life to watch it and I know that I'll never get those hours back it's so boring it's like literally in the first episode one of the guards says you know we can just talk this out together as human beings and then the last episode they have created a pacifistic commune and they're all sitting in the cantina the guards and the prisoners and they're drinking tea and playing cards together it's good for human nature but it's terrible and boring television okay but then let's come to the point, which is why then when I go into prisons,

which I do with my wife quite a lot, she's a prison activist, why are they terrible places where there is brutality? These are places where there is a huge divide between the guards and prisoners, and there's a lot of poor treatment that results. So who's making us do that? One of the central messages of the book is what you assume in other people is what you get out of them. So your view of human nature can often be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume that those other people are selfish, then you'll start designing your institutions in a way that will bring out the worst in yourself and other people as well.

And I think that's so often what we've done, especially in the past 40 to 50 years. If you look at the standard American prison, it's a horrible environment. The anarchist Kropotkin once remarked that prisons are universities for crime. You put someone in there for a small drug offense and out comes a really hardened criminal, right? Who's capable of the most horrible things.

You can turn this around. So if you look at the Norwegian prison system, for example, in the 70s, it was still very strict. But then they really changed the whole system. And now it's the most effective prison system in the whole world with the lowest recidivism rate. So the lowest chance that someone will commit another crime after he or she gets out of prison. And how do they do it? Well, it's very simple.

They treat people like people. So, I mean, people can just Google it. For example, the prison Holden or the prison Bastoy. Bastoy is my favorite. You just find images of prisoners relaxing and sunbathing on sort of a utopian island where they have created this pacifistic commune with the guards. The guards don't even wear uniforms. And the inmates have the freedom to go to the cinema. They often have a job on the guards. The guards don't even wear uniforms. And the inmates have the freedom to

go to the cinema. They often have a job on the mainland. They have their own music studio. They even have their own music label, which is called Criminal Records. Some of the inmates have participated in the Norwegian Idols. You hear about it first and you think, well, this is nuts. This is crazy. This would never work. Well, actually, according to the scientific evidence, it's the most effective prison system in the world. While we're on the subject of slaying all these myths, you did Lord of the Flies, you did Stanford Prison, and then you did the Yale Electrocute one.

Quickly, give me that one as well. Well, everyone knows this experiment. It's maybe even more famous than the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? Stanley Milgram, who was at the end of his 20s, a very young psychologist, came up with the idea of letting subjects participate in a memory test, or at least they thought that was what it was. So they would come in and then would be asked by some kind of authority figure to push a button and to give electric shocks to someone else who's in another

room, and then to increase the voltage every step along the way. So if the other person made some kind of mistake and gave the wrong answer, then they had to increase the punishment. So from 15 volts to 30 volts, from 30 volts to 45 volts, and so on, all the way to 450 volts, which is potentially fatal. And the striking finding of this experiment that sent shockwaves around the globe was that 65% of participants were willing to go all the way. They were willing to electrocute a random stranger just because some authority figure was telling them to do so. And obviously this finding came just after the Second World War while people were wondering, you know, how could the Holocaust happen? How do we explain that is there a nazi in each and every one of us or what's going on here and that was basically milgram's answer

the milgram experiment i think is more nuanced than the stemford prison experiment i think there's still value in it so there's an australian psychologist gina perry who's done also quite recently done a lot of digging in the archives and she's found a lot of dirt so basically Milgram himself believed or doubted whether he was actually doing real science or that it was just theater why did he doubt this well because he was putting a lot of pressure on many of his participants to go as far as possible there were a lot of irregularities going on behind the scene so probably 65 is too high of a number but then you think about it for a while longer and you realize well maybe it's not 65 maybe it's 50 maybe it's 40 maybe it's 30 but it's still way too high

right there are still way too many people willing to do this and to electrocute a random stranger so i sort of had a hard time getting to grips with this experiment because i think in the end it reveals a sort of central paradox about our species which is where as we talked about one of the friendliest species in the animal kingdom but we're capable also of such cruelty and we often do that cruelty in the name of friendliness in the name of comradeship and then in the name of loyalty and that is my interpretation of the milgram experiment is that people just found it hard to go against the status quo here, to sort of let the experimenter down. They just wanted to be a good subject.

And obviously they were in doubt about it. It's not as if they were robots and just pushing the button. They were really worried about what was going on. I mean, there's this wonderful, very dark book as well, written by Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. And he also uses the Milgram experiment to explain how this sort of battalion of German soldiers was capable of doing the most horrible things,

shooting innocent men, women, children in the history of the Holocaust. Christopher Browning uses that to explain how these soldiers, who were not like evil maniac assessors, right? They were not brainwashed by Nazi ideology. They were actually late to join the war, but still they did these horrible things. And if you read his book, you see that group pressure and loyalty played such a big role. And that's a very dark truth, I think, about our species is that so often we do the most horrible things in the name of what we think is good, you know, of not letting our friends down. Absolutely. What are the mechanisms we can build? How do we create a civilization? How do we go on,

nurture the civilization that we're creating, where we bring out the best in our human natures? And you talk about experiments of direct democracy, for example. What's happening in the world at the moment that you think is particularly exciting and might allow this more positive, realistic version of ourselves to live together in these complex societies? Well, I think we can now say that we're living through a moment that will really be remembered by historians, right?

The financial crisis, well, of 2008, we'll probably, you know, forget that 50 years from now, that it won't be such a significant event. But this, the whole world is going through this right now. And it's very easy to see how it could lead us down a very dark path, right? We know that throughout history, crises have been abused by those in power. Power corrupts. I've got a full chapter on that in the book. The long summary of my book would be, most people are pretty decent, but power corrupts got a full chapter on that in the book the long summary of my book would be most people are pretty decent but power corrupts and that's a real danger here again that you had the burning of the Reichstag and then you had Hitler right you had 9-11 and two illegal wars and massive surveillance of citizens by the government so it could easily something

like that happen again but then on the other, there are also real reasons for hope. I think the political zeitgeist has really shifted in the past couple of years. You know, ideas that were dismissed as quite unreasonable or unrealistic are now moving into the mainstream. You know, whether we talk about fiscal solidarity or the idea of universal basic income, you know, which we talked about before in the previous episode we did together. So that excites me. I mean, this is obviously what historians always say, you can't predict the future or anything, because it's fundamentally open. This is also, I think, why it's so exciting to be a historian, right? It's the most subversive of all the sciences, because it just shows you that things can be different. You know, there's nothing inevitable about the way

we've structured our society and economy right now. And if there's one thing for certain, it is that things are really shifting quickly right now. It's not inevitable. It's not immutable. I'm really grateful. We've taken so much of your time, and I'm sure you've got lots of these on. So Rutger Bregman, the book is called? Humankind, A Hopeful History. It was such a privilege to read that. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review purge yourself give it a glowing review i'd really appreciate that it's tough weather that law of the jungle out there and uh i need all the fire support i can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it i'd be very very grateful

thank you