Coronavirus: Rutger Bregman on human nature and Covid-19 - BBC HARDtalk

welcome to hard talk I'm Steven sakip 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 for 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 [Music] [Music] rude Bregman in the Netherlands welcome to hard talk thanks for having me we are all living in this time of covert 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 crises people most people at least show their better selves you know and you see this explosion of cooperation and altruism I think that's one of the most important lessons an explosion of altruism I'm just wondering what you then made how you process some of the other scenes we've seen of people at times literally fighting to get essential supplies from the shops we've seen people blaming each other scapegoating Outsiders for spreading the virus we've seen lots of very difficult things - yeah absolutely and I'm not denying any of that I'm just saying that you know for every toilet paper hoarder there are a thousand 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 in earthquake or a disaster or you know a pandemic that we reveal our true selfish elf 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're left-wing or right-wing rich poor young old that's what we see and I've just been looking at social media before coming on air with you and I've 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 a capitalist instinct put money before people regular citizens on both sides of the argument are knocking lumps out of each other and we see them 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 still had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation and you can you can see this in our body still today so what a very fascinating peculiar fact about human beings is that we're 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's a very fascinating thing and it just shows us that we've 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's not that's not real life this book of yours which is causing quite a stir around the world humankind a hopeful history as it seems to me in its ambition and its span because it really nods to all of human history the the the 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 is that the fundamental argument that you're wrestling with I think so yes you know there's 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 all the way back to the ancient Greeks if you read the Greek historian to see leaders right he talked about the plague and nathan's for example or the civil war near car serie in his history of the Peloponnesian War and he had this observation that you know deep down people are just selfish in animals and monsters and indeed if you read the early Christian church father st. Augustine same idea you know the idea that we're born as sinners when you read the alignment philosophers Thomas Hobbes David Hume even Adam Smith also often emphasized that you know in the end people are selfish or at least that politically we have to assume that when we build a society and you know I think that idea is just wrong it's really fundamentally wrong in the past couple of decades we've 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'm trying to do in this book is just to 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're not angels we're not fundamentally good I'm saying that most people in the end are pretty decent which i think is a little bit different and I'm 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 of that for themselves as possible then your design your society in such a way you'll create institutions that will bring out the worst in each and every one of us and I think we've been doing that for the past 40 years you know we've designed schools and marketplaces and organizations in our democracies in a way that has 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 we didn't design everything from shopping malls to political sort of governance on a whim we were also listening to behavioral scientists I'm 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 other ordinary citizens and concluded that actually worryingly yes they could be persuaded quite easily are you debunking and dismissing all of that evidence or many of it you know I used to believe in all these experiments you know I've written earlier books that luckily have not been translated in English about the Stanford Prison Experiment for example it's only recently that I discovered you know based on the work of an important French sociologist Ebola dick che that it's actually a hoax you know we all know this experiment about 24 students who you know were selected to participate in an experiment with them sort of fake prison 12 were made into guards 12 prisoners and Philip Zimbardo the researcher sort of said you know I'll just sit back and just see what happens and a 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's there's a monster in each and every one of us just below the surface there's a Nazi in each and every one of us it's only recently that we've learned that actually Philip Zimbardo specifically instructed the guards to be a sadistic as possible that many of those guards said well that I don't want to do that you know that's not who I am then he said look you're you're the 60s hippies liberals right you want to reform the prison system in America as well come on I need these results I need to behave 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 and this became a huge story and is still into textbooks of millions of students Wow yeah in reality it's pretty much and I do find that fascinating and you've 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 the sixties work which sort of attempted to say there's a quasi Nazi mentality within all of us what you can't debunk because it is just factual is not sysm genocide and the Holocaust itself and not even just the German Holocaust but also the genocides we've seen in more recent times and for Rwanda - the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and elsewhere these are realities ordinary people conducted themselves in the most terrible ways and I don't see how that fits with your fundamental worldview well I mean it would obviously be be who you grip your bris to sort of pretend - that I can give a sort of a short explanation you know for for things that you know we need libraries full of books to understand it then maybe then we still don't understand it but I can say this I believe there's a connection between our capacity for friendliness and you know our our behavior that sometimes can be so cruel because so often in history in history we do the most horrible things in the name of comradeship and a friendship I think this is sort of the paradox of my book and on the one hand I'm arguing that people have evolved to be friendly and to work together but then on the other hand sometimes it's exactly the problem because friendly behavior can morph into tribal behavior and group ish behavior and then people find it hard to go against the group and against the status quo and they start doing these horrible things but are you not I mean that's just one part of the exception 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 Hitler's armed forces who committed atrocities and you might say ah well we have to understand them because frankly most of them were simply motivated by comradeship and wanting to defend their brothers and and look after themselves that that's not good enough is it well it's certainly a danger I think you're right about that I think we have to be really careful and make a difference between sort of trying to understand certain behavior and condoning it it's the same with the with the debate about terrorism right I think we have a genuine responsibility to understand what drives terrorists you know what why they blow themselves up and and here again you have the same dynamic that often they do it in the name of comradeship and a friendship and that you know especially the foot soldiers are not that ideologically motivated they may often know very little actually about the ideology you know we've had reports from people going to Syria with books no in their in their backs with the titles like the Quran for dummies but still they do these horrible things again you know it's it's absolutely not about condoning but it is about understanding what's going on there because that's the only way to 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've 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 that's the 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 didn't 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's a fascinating story but does it really tell us anything about the human condition well maybe not I mean it's obviously not a scientific experiment and that would be very hard right to her to drop lots of kids on islands and have control groups etc and to judge how they and study how they behave I'm just saying that if millions of people around the globe still have to read Lord of the Flies in school right and they often become quite pessimistic and cynical after reading it I mean I remember reading it when I was 16 and you know I was depressed for a week afterwards I'm just saying that let's let's also tell them about the the one time that we know of in world history that real kids shipwrecked on a real Island and you know it's the most happy story that you can imagine they live 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 soul mates with with one of the boys who was now 70 years old mono tota I mean it's if it would be a movie a Hollywood movie people would say oh this is so sentimental you know this is not how people would really behave this is worse than in Love Actually but it's it's what really happened on hard talk we talked to a lot of sort of public intellectuals big thinkers with big ideas about the way we human beings organize our societies today and I'm thinking of the recent past where we've interviewed Yuval Noah Harare and Steven Pinker and these are thinkers who fundamentally I think believed in a notion of human progress Steven Pinker in particular will make a point of saying you know 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's ever been in human history before and he would say that's because we are evolving better ways of running our societies your message although you're an optimist about the human condition seems to be that we're actually not discovering better ways to run our societies you seem to be in some ways anti progress well I'm absolutely not you know we have made extraordinary progress in the last couple of decades moral progress technological progress if you would choose any time to live it would be now what I'm just saying is that we we got the history of civilization all wrong so Steven Pinker paints a picture of of our history in which supposedly everything was worse right especially when we were nomadic into gatherers which we were for 95% of our of our history you know we were waging these tribal wars but sort of the pessimistic view what I'm trying to show in the book is that actually civilization was for most of our history a big disaster it's it started the age of warfare of patriarchy of hierarchy of infection diseases like we're dealing with right now and that actually the 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 off to them obviously we've made a lot of last couple of decades posit that the the cave dwellers and the hunter-gatherers were happy people living in a state of sort of pure innocence you have no idea I mean they haven't left a written record and just imposing some sort of quasi religious worldview upon this sort of age of innocence on you know I'm not um it's obviously hard to know how our ancestors lived thirty thousand 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 you know still live there's nomadic into gatherers and you can look you know if there are similarities in the way they live and you'll discover for example that they have these really egalitarian societies a relaxed lifestyle you know a work workweek of around 20 to 30 hours they're healthier than farmers for as well for example and you can obviously also study the archaeological records now you're absolutely right nomadic and together has didn't leave much behind but if there was really some kind of war of organ against all going on in our deep past then you would expect that at some point some artists in the Stone Age would have said you know what I'm gonna make a cave baiting out of that but we haven't found any you know there's there's nothing like that we have a lot of cave paintings but not about war between people then we settle down we became sedentary around 12,000 years ago we started doing agriculture and you find a lot of these cave paintings that's very suggestive and that there's also the evidence you have from excavations you know skeletal remains you can study that most experts in the field most archaeologists and anthropologists believe that war is has not been with us forever it has really been an invention it's just that these people don't get a lot of attention in the press because they're not they're not telling us these this dark story is I think it's often seen as more boring so they don't get that I'm just now wondering what all of this means for Ruger Bergman's analysis of where we are today you know you paint this picture of a sort of in Dilek prehistory where we're 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've written a lot about what you believe to be the the inadequacy of capitalist systems that failure to deliver any sort of equality or justice ordinary people so what are you suggesting that we all find our inner caveman well you know if you look at the model that we've you know had for the past 40 years neoliberal capitalism I think the central dogma has been that most people are selfish and so we designed our institutions around that and I think the results have not been good you know we've had an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety and burnouts and and you know it's it's also not a great way to deal with the pandemic we're in right now so what I hope and I'm not predicting this it's just what I hope it's but it's a possibility is that we can now move to a new age with different values in a more realistic view of human nature where we're all real um rely more on our ability to cooperate and to you know to have this kind of solidarity that's what I hope you are a sort of latter-day Marxist an idealist who know actually it really the opposite you know Marx was convinced that history was driven by material forces right and that ideas were just well who cares about the ideas that was just a how do you say the superstructure right I believe in the power of ideas I really think that ideas that you know are often dismisses and reasonable or unrealistic that will never happen can over time move from the margin to the mainstream right and that's what I think it's been happening actually since the financial crash of 2008 now we're discussing ideas like universal basic income higher taxes on the wealthy a more powerful state that's really willing to invest in our future I mean that's moving into the mainstream if you've seen the the Financial Times editorial for example the beginning of April even there you know really changing their mind right now so I'm not a Marxist at all I believe in ideas it just seems there are some internal contradictions that we're teasing out even in this con because a minute ago or a few minutes ago you said that like Steven Pinker you think this is the best time ever for human beings to be alive in so many different ways and yet you're also telling me that for the last 40 years you think human beings and they're sort of developed capitalist societies have taken a series of wrong turns can both be true at the same time yeah I think so I think I mean historically speaking this is one of the best times to be alive but we can do so much better I don't see any contradiction here and then obviously they're also the big question we have with our current model is is it sustainable right we've got the massive extinction of species around the globe we've got global warming yeah I mean even if we are having a relatively good time right now that's that's an important question to ask is it sustainable yeah and and I'm just looking at for example the words of Sir Angus Deaton one of Britain's most respected economists saying I am still a great believer in what capitalism is done not only for the off cited billions who have been pulled out of poverty as we've discussed but to all the rest of us who have also escaped poverty and decorate bread deprivation over the last two and a half centuries this is progressive and it's real yeah is that I would agree with that as well you know I'm a little bit bored with all those old debates from the Cold War in the 80s about capitalism versus socialism in the market versus the state right I just think that capitalism Esmond underperforming a lot quite a bit in the last couple of decades and it could do so much better it's all about saving capitalism it's about reforming capitalism if you look at the 50s for example in the 60s we had much higher growth much higher rates of innovation and also much higher taxes on the wealthy I think that often taxes on the wealthy for example often let our societies function better so there can be more fundamental research in innovation etc it's a year and a half pretty much since she went to Davos and rather famously lectured a whole bunch of billionaires that the philanthropy really wasn't the answer to any of the world's problems it was all about taxation and the rich paying much more in terms of tax to genuinely redistribute wealth in society not much has really changed since then perhaps you think that the crisis and the emergency that surrounds us with corona virus may be the trigger for some fundamental change that wasn't on the cards before is that the way you see things yes absolutely and I think that actually quite a bit has changed the window of political possibility has really been moving people could say oh but Corbin lost the elections right and Sanders lost the elections and yes I mean that's that's absolutely or the primary so that's absolutely true and it would be nice if you know progressives who sometimes get their act together and win an election for once I mean that would be nice but then if you look at you know the kind of ideas that are that are increasing in power look at Joe Biden's tax plan for example it's twice as radical as Hillary Clinton's tax plan of 2016 if you look at his climate plan it is actually more radical than Bernie Sanders climate plan of 2016 right so things are really shifting but you you can only see that if you zoom out a little bit Rick Bregman we have to end there we have to zoom out completely but it has been a pleasure having you on the hard talk thank you very much indeed thanks for having me [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: BBC HARDtalk

Views: 55,063

Keywords: BBC Hardtalk, Stephen Sackur, politics, interview BBC, Rutger Bregman, Coronavirus, Covid-19, human nature, philosophy, Humankind: A Hopeful History

Id: zyNqpk8pVDE

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020