Humankind: a hopeful history | LSE Online Event

hello and welcome everybody it's amazing to see so many people and so we're gonna get right into it so let me start by introducing myself in the event and then I will introduce our guest for today my name is Nima pie de party I am an anthropologist and historian and I am currently the LSA fellow in inequalities in the sociology department and today's event which is hosted by the International inequalities Institute and the Department of Sociology is a chance for us to explore the new book humankind a hopeful history by Rocco Bregman this is the part of the event where I say for all those who have joined us our author hardly needs an introduction but I'm going to go ahead and introduce him nonetheless so Rocco is a Dutch historian and he is the best-selling author of the 2016 book utopia for realists how we can build an ideal world his TED talk poverty isn't a lack of character it's a lack of cash was selected as one of the top 10 TED talks of 2017 and his latest book which he's joining us to discuss today humankind a hopeful history was just released two months ago is that right yes indeed so very very recently so first of all everybody join me in welcoming Rutger welcoming all of you we're going to have about a 30 minute discussion you can feel free in the meantime to put your questions either into the Q&A on zoom' or on Facebook and we will leave but half an hour at the end to get to as many questions as we are able to so the new book humankind argues well I will actually give me just one moment I'm going to try and read from the book it's self but it says in the book that you make a very simple argument which is that by nature as children when crisis hits when war breaks out humans have a powerful preference for our good side there has been a pervasive myth that humans are in fact by their very nature competitive destructive and highly selfish and so this book is a very readable lovely attempt to push against all of those needs so I want to try and get into where those myths come from and what it means what's the significance of trying to argue otherwise but I will start understandably by taking a look at exactly where your book begins your book begins with descriptions of Blitzkrieg of Katrina in the u.s. of these moments of crisis and we have been told through science fiction through philosophy that when a crisis hits people revert to their most selfish natures they will look out for themselves first and think of others only later and your argument is in fact that that is not actually what mostly happens but in a moment of crisis people really lend each other a helping hand obviously the book was written before you know pandemic what do you see from there what have you been seeing and observing in the last couple of months and do you think that this is bearing out the thesis of your book well the old theory that's so influential in Western culture is indeed the notion that civilization is only a thin veneer and that when something like this happens a pandemic you know ghovat hits is that we all start looting and plundering and become very selfish and cooperation breaks down and we reveal who or what we really are savages beasts animals and indeed this is I this idea you you find it everywhere in Western culture goes back all the way to the ancient Greek story founded in Orthodox Christianity the notion that rule sinners I think with many enlightenment philosophers you can find the same notion with the founding fathers of the United States and even if you look at the modern capitalist system I think the central dogma has been for a very long time is that people are just selfish and that we have to deal with it or that maybe it's even a good thing like the greed is good mantra and what I argue at least in the first chapters of the book is that veneer theory is really wrong is that actually pretty much the opposite happens so I first look at what happens after natural disasters because we've got a lot of evidence about that there have now been more than 700 case studies of floodings or earthquakes or tsunamis or something like that and sociology just have studied what happens now that's pretty much the opposite of what you always see in the news I mean we know what the news reports after disaster especially than Katrina as you mentioned is a good example 2005 New Orleans was flooded and the press was full with stories of looting plundering you know people killing each other you know the terrible things that were happening in the Superdome at that moment lots of horrible rumors that really give you this impression that civilization was breaking down it was only later that real researchers instead of journalists that were just you know reporting on rumors but real researchers find out that actually pretty much the opposite happened an explosion of cooperation and altruism people from the left to the right rich poor young old working together and doing their best to save as many lives as possible um so yeah when this this crisis started I was I was really wondering is a pandemic similar to a natural disaster or there are obvious differences of course I mean you can't really see a virus I mean you can see the effects of it but it's not as clear or striking as a as an earthquake or something like that but then I think we can say by now that actually there are striking similarities if you zoom out a little bit then yes you can find instances of people behaving in a little bit of an RC way hoarding toilet paper or something like that and we can count on the press to really focus on that day after day there's especially in the first weeks but I think we now we can say now that actually most of the behavior has been cooperative and pro-social in nature and then indeed it's pretty astonishing that billions of people around the globe very quickly quite radically changed our lifestyles to stop the virus from spreading further that is the real headline to me so part of your book deals then with why it is that we spend so much time thinking about these this more negative portrayal what explains the popularity of this negative portrayal why is it so pervasive why do we come back to it and in fact there is indeed something seductive about it as told us just in your examples the the news likes to sell us this image that we are in fact deeply divided that it is very hard to get along what expenses you know it's a great question and I think I have a very long answer because I think there there are actually four important reasons so the first reason is indeed the kind of information that we get every day which is mostly the news right we know our friends we know our co-workers we know our family members and we generally like them and trust them but but then when we want to know what other people are like those other people far away we mainly have to rely on the news right and 90% of all people in developed countries follow the news on a daily basis and the news is not a neutral product even when you have so-called objects if reporters doing their job you know they still focus mostly on the negative stuff on things they go wrong on corruption on crises on terrorism on violence you name it and psychologists have long known that the news in this way is actually a mental health hazard and there's a term for this they call it mean wolf syndrome that people who follow the news too much they become more cynical they become more pessimistic and they have this misguided view of human nature and the the state of our society now obviously I think that the news is a bit of a superficial explanation here because well this darker view of human nature was already there way before the mother news industry existed so I think we have to dig a little deep so the second reason would be really to look at or think the important thing to would be to look at Western culture where where this this notion of veneer theories so deeply embedded but then the question is why why does it come back and again and again and then we come with the third reason which is that it's often in the interest of those in power they want you to be cynical they want you to think that most people can't be trusted and that they're just selfish because if we can actually trust each other then we don't need that then we can build a much more genuinely democratic and egalitarian society so I think that's important to keep in mind that cynicism is often a tool of those in power and it's used to justify a very hierarchical and an equal society but then finally the fourth reason I think why we fall for this all the time it's a little bit in our own nature as well psychologists call this the negativity bias um you know I experienced that as a as a writer as a journalist maybe you as an academic is that say you you write something and you get ten compliments or fifty or a hundred and well that's nice but then you get one piece of criticism and that's what keeps you up at night right that's that's really what makes a bigger impression evil is just stronger than good it simply is we have this negativity bias we focus more on the negative and there's probably some evolutionary reason for that probably you know during the Stone Age that helped us to survive but now in this world where we're being bombarded with bat stuff happening every day and where the news seems to be asking the question you know journalists get up with the question what is the worst thing that happened in the world today because that's supposedly the most important thing for us to know then yeah this sort of negativity bias has become a quite dangerous thing that we need to be wary of so yeah that's my answer sorry it's a bit of a long house to unpack there and so I hope we come back to a lot of that both in our conversation and in the Q&A to follow but I want to kind of stick with this moment a little bit to think about because in many ways and is not exactly new but it has been really illuminating crises both show us things that have always been there that we have and they also subvert or overthrow a ways of doing things that we've always done that we've taken for granted we thought we could never shift and so I think this is a really instructive kind of moment to think about and to think you know alongside your book with and so so I agree that this is a moment where you can see a lot of different kinds of behaviors as you can in any crisis selfish ones as well as altruistic ones but it has actually been for me a moment where I've seen a great deal of social solidarity and you see it when in this very strange way well you know many of us feel very isolated we are at home where you know maybe with our families but you don't see many many of the people that we used to have face to face contact with and yet we are doing this not just for our own sake but very explicitly we're doing it for other people or our friends and neighbors and family who we want to protect our colleagues in at the LSE we're doing it for our students and her community both now and you know in the year ahead and so there's this real sense that we are really in this together nevertheless I wonder whether we shouldn't just be talking about human nature are we to you know are we selfish or are we altruistic but what are the social conditions that allow us to be one way or the other and what I mean by this is that so I'm an American and when I even though I'm sitting here in the UK when I see things in the US I see not people being incredibly selfish but a kind of politics that's incredibly divisive so that something like wearing a mask has become a symbol for one side of the political divide or the other when people refuse to wear masks sometimes a rhetoric looks like I'm not going to have my own freedom and pinched upon it looks like a selfish reason but often actually it is a social reason it says that I belong to a certain group or to a certain kind of politics or to a certain viewpoint and I will not really be co-opted into a different viewpoint and so in this moment thinking alongside of your argument in your book can you help us think about the social behaviors that either bring us together or delight us yeah I think you made a brilliant point there that indeed they're not wearing on masks it's more like you should look at it and think of group identity and that they just want to show they're part of a different group and it's about commerce chip and solidarity and cooperation actually and that is that is disturbing at the same time so in my book I argued that on the one hand we human beings we've evolved to be friendly there strong evidence now from evolutionary anthropology and from biology that for millennia it was actually the friendliest among us the most pro-social among us who had the most kids and so the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation the scientific term for this is self domestication I think we all know what domestication is right you've got goats you've got sheep and you've got cows who've been domesticated by us we select it for tameness and then yeah well you let's say you start with a wolf and you end up with a chihuahua that's what the mest occasion is now we know what the result of that is of domesticating a species there's a long list of traits so they become they just look more friendly they have thinner bones they've got salt a smaller brains and whatever it's domesticated species are just a bit more childish it seems like they never really grow up anymore they're their pop if I die I'd like to say and then you look at us at human beings and it seems that we've always also been domesticated and I've got my own term for this ayah I call us Homo poppy which is I hope that I'll be remembered by science for that probably not but maybe and and so we're a little bit like domesticated apes baby chimpanzees and that is actually our true superpower it has helped us to cooperate on a skill that no other species has been able to do in in the in history um but it's important to remember here that there's a real dark side to this friendliness there's a also this capacity that we have for group ish behavior or try behavior as they as they often call it and that is that is sort of the dark side of this is that we often do the most horrible things in the name of friendship in the name of comradeship in the name of loyalty and if you look at the real heroes in our history they're actually often quite unfriendly they're quite nasty and difficult and they were willing to go against the status quo we often forget about this so think about someone like Martin Luther King it was now been sanitized and we have the Martin Luther King Day in the US and say oh he's we all love him he's a row well actually in the 1960s it was a very polarizing figure and many white Americans absolutely hated him we've yeah we they basically chose to forgot about that but this is important to keep in mind is that friend being a friendly human being is not necessarily the same as being a good person sometimes circumstances actually call for unfriendliness and for NOS eNOS and for being in difficult and being a pain in the ass I was going to say that so I'm one of the core instructors for the LSE Embassy in inequalities and so for my class last year you were quite a hero for being the person at Davos who was the only person talking about taxation rather than philanthropy sometimes you have to be the person in the room who is willing to say the thing that everybody needs to yeah yeah well that seemed more heroic afterwards than it really was in a moment because I was just you know it with the conference and no one was watching the livestream so I was like you know what whatever but if I would have known that so many people would have watched it I probably wouldn't have danced but indeed right it's easy to be the person who is friendly to everybody it is sometimes yeah asks hard treats yeah exactly yeah so to get to that right you say in your book and now you've said it in a few interviews now and I really want to draw you out on this that to say that Humanity is in fact you know us by our very human nature's are not these negative things that we've been portrayed to be by nature selfish and divisive the you have said that this is a radical argument this is a subversive argument this is an argument that is a very importantly political argument because it then imagines a very different way of organizing our politics that's what I'd like you to say more about what is this you know what is radical or subversive about this well what you assume in other people is what you get out of them so our view of human nature tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy we've got evidence for this in economics so for a long time economists taught their students that we human beings are Homo economicus that were these selfish rational agents that are maximizing our own gains at least that's how they portrayed is in there they're models and so what's interesting is that actually an American economist Robert Frank discovered that as students progressed in their studies you know they went from the first year to the second year and then to the third year they started behaving more like Homo economicus they sort of they became what they were taught so ideas are never merely ideas stories are never the stories they tend to become true if we if we believe in them so this is why I think it's important to update our view of human nature to a more realistic one because then we can design our institutions around them obviously humans are in many ways produced by their institutions by the schools they go to or the workplaces or how we do democracy or even our prisons and in the past couple of decades I think you could argue that we've so often designed these institutions around the notion of selfishness that you have to basically yeah almost force kids to learn anything that you need a hierarchical school with the curriculum and teachers who say well you need to do this you need to do that that they don't have their own intrinsic curiosity many organizations are like that as well whether you have these layers of hierarchy and of management where again the notion is that there's no intrinsic motivation that people need to be told what to do and I think that sort of creates the kind of people that we don't really want surely I think we can move in a very different direction and so in the book I talk a lot about a lot of case studies of people and organizations and schools that are already trying to do this who have moved to a different view of human nature and are trying to create the kind of people that their theory presupposes but in the idea that this is subversive and radical there's also I think the argument it comes out in certain parts of the book that it serves the purpose of elites mmm-hmm for us to believe that in fact we can only be governed through hierarchy yeah sure I think this is the classic argument that was described by a philosopher like Thomas Hobbes you know his book Leviathan in the 17th century made the argument that back in the state of nature as they they called it back then when we were still nomadicant together as living in the Stone Age we lived these lives that were nasty brutish and short and we're engaging in a war of all against all but then luckily at some point we made the decision to give up our Liberty and we got security and return by appointing a Leviathan an all-powerful ruler this is I think the argument that still made today when in the u.s. politicians talk about law and order or you know that we need police in the army to protect and serve because otherwise you know we would all kill each other or something like that that is that is basically the argument so I think that often those at the top who have been I think often corrupted by power this is sort of this the short summary of my book would be most people are pretty decent but power corrupts now those at the top they want you to be wary of other people they want you to watch as much CNN and Fox News as possible because then you'll be afraid and it's just easier to rule people who are afraid and it's very difficult to rule people who believe in their fellow citizens because they tend to work together they tend to cooperate etc etc and they're not they're not quick in being submissive to some kind of rule or something like that so yes I I really think that cynicism is is a gift to those in power and believing in the good of humanity is an act of defiance and certainly we're seeing some of that same debate being played out in the US where the abolish the police defund the police like movements are trying to imagine different ways of cooperatively solving problems within communities or reallocating resources to other forms of problem solving techniques rather than policing and much debate about whether that is desirable possible but again this is a moment that is opening up some of those avenues that perhaps had not been on the table or not been on the table as publicly as they are currently so this yeah yeah yeah and we've got great examples of different ways of policing another place is in there around the globe actually so in my book I devote one chapter to the criminal justice system of Norway which is pretty much the opposite of the American system where for example you have prisons where the prisoners have the freedom to socialize with the guards guards often don't even wear uniforms prisoners can make music together they've got their own music studio they've got their own musical label which is called criminal records and then you look at the results you look at the scientific evidence behind it and it turns out that actually they've got the lowest recidivism rate in the world the lowest chance that someone will commit another the crime once he or she gets out of prison now the US has pretty much the opposite they've got these traditional prisons which are I think universities for crime so they bring in people for small drug offenses and they turn them into into real criminals and this is all being funded by the taxpayer it's a pretty crazy system if you ask me and the same is true for policing so if you if people are protesting peacefully and you show up in riot gear what do you expect right it's sort of you get what you get with you what you what you bring and I think there are other ways of policing what they call community policing and we've got a huge amount of evidence that that's way more effective actually it was Elinor Ostrom the the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 she became famous because she did brilliant research into the Commons you know sort of the Third Way after the market in the state of people just working together in a democratic way but not many people know that in 270 she's was one of the first experts to lead a study into policing in the US and she found that policing departments who are just smaller and you know work more in a local and human skill are consistently better deliver you know better at solving crimes have a higher satisfaction from citizens etc etc so that we've known that for a very long time and but I completely understand sort of the the slogan defund the police because it's become so bad in the US that maybe you just need to defund the whole thing and then start over again to pick up on that and I see some of the questions that have now started to pop up in the chat as well that there's a lot of questions about cooperation so say that you know we're ready to embrace this new idea of human nature that we are not divisive and selfish but we are by nature caring and concerned about our fellow citizens that we are far more cooperatives and kind nevertheless how do we build societies that encourage this kind of cooperation so what I mean by that is that I might very much care about you know people who are near and dear to me who are you know my family who I want to protect but how do we channel some of those possibilities towards much larger forms of cooperation for tackling things like the climate catastrophe or tackling things like this current moment which requires huge amounts of cooperation not just within nations but across them hmm so a couple of things in the first place I didn't want to write a self-help book there are a lot of self-help books out there and I think most of you most of them don't really don't really help this is really about a applying an idea on an institutional level and in in the book I just give a couple of examples of people who really inspire me who I think you know just great case studies of how you can redesign your organization with much less hierarchy much less management if you actually start trusting your employees and then you can work on a actually on a huge scale with with only self-directed teams I also talked about how this would work in education which has pretty radical implications as well I think you can just ditch the idea of homework or of different classes that you can mix all the ages you can mix all the levels and you can give kids the freedom to follow their own curiosity and create their own learning path so that is I think really inspiring but there are probably many many more examples and and I'm not an expert on on all of those the only thing that I do know is that once you change your view of human nature oh pretty much everything changes so my job I guess as a rider is to tell different kind of stories because we humans we often are or we become the stories that we tell ourselves stories are never just stories so one of one of my personal favorites stories in the book is about this real live Lord of the Flies story where I mean we've all read I think at least heard of Lord of the Flies where you have this group of British boarding school kids who shipwreck on an island then quickly turn into savages and at the end of the novel three of them are dead and so I wondered whether it had ever really happened and found this case in 1966 where six stolen kids that shipwrecked on a on an island in there in the Pacific near island is called otter and they survived for 50 months and they're still the best of friends today now that's obviously not a sort of a scientific experiment but I do think that if we still let millions of kids read Lord of the Flies around the globe then they also deserve to know about that one time that real kid shipwrecked on a real island because that's a very diff kind of story and so my hope is that yeah telling different kind of stories can help us to ya behave in a different way and create a different kind of society I'm gonna ask one final question and I think we'll then open it up to questions from our audience so my final question because this is being hosted by the inequalities Institute and a lot of our audience might have come to us because they were also interested in your earlier work as well so I'm wondering if there's a connection or how you would tease out the connections between this work and you know your book utopia which is to say that one which is arguing for things like universal basic income what are the kind of connections there so I think that utopia realist is a very what's the term in English like a wonky book right with a lot of research and statistics and numbers and I try to convince people that something like a universal basic income is a good idea because we've got so much evidence that it actually works we've got experiments going back all the way to the 1970s that show that if you just give people money they tend to use it quite well actually poverty as I like to say it's just a lack of cash it's not a lack of character now I published a book and then I had the privilege of talking about it with a lot of readers and again and again after 30 or 40 minutes I found myself discussing human nature with people because they were sort of interested in all these experiments but then often the argument came up like oh this is this is just something that works on a local scale or maybe in Canada in the 1970s but you can't really scale it up because human nature people are just selfish and then I started to realize that actually so many of the really exciting ideas that have been gaining traction in the in the past couple of decades I think like universal basic income but also the notion of deliberative democracy participatory democracy you know moving to a genuine democracy where you don't have career politicians but actually involve average citizens all these ideas rely on a different view of human nature but then I realized that I actually didn't believe in that optimistic view of human nature because I I mean I had studied history and I knew about you know the depressing social psychology experiments of the 60s the Stanford Prison Experiment the Milgram experiment I knew about you know what kind of horrible things were capable of is of I used to believe in veneer theory I didn't know that officer natural disaster people mostly start over cooperating so writing this book has been a reckoning with my own ideas trying to reconcile my sort of my belief in something like universal basic income and trying to see whether I could actually find and make the argument that indeed it's it's also in our nature for something like that to actually work right well thank you and thank you for showing us a little bit of the journey that has taken you from those concerns to this one which and I can see how this book then becomes a certain foundation for some of those other things you have advocated in your other work including things like yeah yeah I should have written them the other way around it should have a guide first in there well I think it's you know a way of saying cuz I see this a lot right there's all these arguments in the universal basic income debates about if you just give people cash what would we spend it on right they will spend it in these that are you know deeply selfish and so this is a way of saying you know it helps to have faith in people if it even helps to have faith in oneself because that then opens up the possibility of what we yeah trusting oneself and yeah yeah one final thing here is that you should accept a little bit of collateral damage this is true for your personal life but also on a societal level is that yes there were always people who will you know will will calm the system who will commit fraud or something like that that that's what happens but its collateral damage you should accept it so if you've never been called in your life you should see a therapist because your basic attitude to life is not trusting enough and I think the same is true for societies do we want to ride our loss for the 1% or the 0.1% or do we want to ride them for the 90.9 99.9 percent for the vast majority of people and if you look at the welfare system we create all these checks and all this bureaucracy and we ask people again and again if they're depressed enough if they're sick enough if they're really a hopeless case that we'll never get anything done in their life and then maybe at the end of that process we give them a little bit of money but that produces dependency that produces people who are depressed and don't have the energy to do something and contribute in the real world so basic income is about turning that around and saying hey I think you've got great at it is hey I trust you to to handle this venture capital and to come up with something interesting and I can't wait to see what its gonna be interesting okay wonderful and with that I'm going to start taking questions from audience so I'm gonna start with a question that has been that was asked really early on it comes from John Smith was an LSE student from Newcastle and his question is what do you think would be one would be the one change of policy which would have the biggest impact so given now your work in its totality if you could change one thing about how we approach our public policies what would that one change mean one oh that's a really difficult question so let me just bang on about basic income here because because there are two effects that I think are really important that many people overlook so it's much more than just improving the welfare system it's actually a tool I think to help us transition to a post-capitalist society with very different kind of values now what do I mean by that what we've seen in the past couple of months is that governments around the globe have published these lists of so-called essential workers and you look at these lists and you can't find the bankers and the hatch fringe managers you you see teachers and nurses and care workers and garbage collectors who are actually doing much more important work but not earning as much money as they should now a basic income will be significant here because it will give much more bargaining power to the essential workers they can go always go on strike and we know what happens if they go on strike we're in big trouble now if the telemarketers go on strike we're like yeah that's fantastic you know come on strike much longer so I think that a basic income will help us to move towards an economy where the wages of people will much better reflect the social value of the jobs that they do and the other important mechanism here is that imagine that you're young say you're 17 or 18 years old and your parents ask you well what do you want to study and you say well I want to study anthropology at LSE and then they they look at you shocked like no no don't do it get a real job please and then there you go on and you studied Business Administration or you and resource blah blah or something like that you're working a job that you consider completely socially meaningless for 20 years then you have this midlife crisis you have burnout you go in there into therapy and then you decide you know what I'm going to study anthropology after all what I think basic income will help people to do is to sort of skip the 20 years of waste and immediately do what they actually want to do because they can say to their parents don't worry about me it can always fall back on my basic income so the long-term changes of giving everyone the long-term implications of giving everyone actual freedom to give them venture capital and and the ability to make their own choices which is now often a privilege for the rich I think that will be extraordinary I think it can really have extraordinary consequences for society and that's why I would say basic income is one of the most promising and awesome ideas out there right now well thanks for that answer I'm gonna move to the next question which comes from Franco Roche art I apologize I mispronounced a lot of names along the way but franca is a LSE alum from social and cultural psychology and is a researcher at the Young Foundation in London and asks how can you and we make sure that our that your idea of humans being kind and collaborative doesn't only resonate with within a political left and educated silo how do we turn the idea into political action oh that's a terrific question so what I've been trying to do in my work in the past couple of years and I've been criticized quite a bit by the for that by the people on the left by the way is that I've tried to use a more inclusive language or if try to find some kind of genuine Third Way so no I'm not Tony Blair's a third way but to fight sort of a combination between left-wing and right-wing thinking now what do I mean by that again basic income is a good example the left likes it's because you get this eradication of poverty the right is often interested in it because it's about individual freedom and you need less government paternalism so it's people actually making their own choices instead of the government saying you need to do this or you need to do that I think there are many ways to sort of morally reframe the same idea so that you can actually make a larger audience care about something so another example is what you can do in in the age of climate change climate change tends to be something that mainly progressives worry about and progressives tend to not really be patriotic or at least they're not they're not like really you know walking around with a flag and saying I love the US or I love the UK or something like that but there is a huge potential actually in feelings of patriotism and nationalism so it's it's I think a mistake to just give that away to the other side of the political spectrum and not use it and so I recently wrote an essay in Dutch where I make the argument that actually our fight against the water you know we are a country the Netherlands that doesn't really shouldn't really exist you know we're like meters below sea level I'm currently I think I'm below sea level right now anyway um well I make the argument that actually we've been fighting the water for a thousand years and that we should be a guide country and that right now for the rest of the world and be in the front in the battle against climate change and it's something to be proud of because we've shown earlier for example after a terrible disaster in 1953 when the country was partially flooded and you know almost 2,000 people died and then we built these great Delta Works which are still you know one of the wonders of the modern world that protects us against the sea and now we need a new Delta plan a big ambitious infrastructural scheme which is something like the Dutch greenio deal so I think that is something that we should try to do more it's also my frustration as a European is that often we import this American language so I hear European politicians talking about a new deal or a green deal and like come on come on come up with your own terms you know that is that is American we can find our own or connect to our own culture and heritage because climate change is such a big story that you probably need a thousand stories to do enough or a 10,000 right to convince enough people that they should do their best in contributing something so again very long answer sorry and I don't I'm not even sure if I get questioned but hopefully this is helpful we have another question from RB bagus who works in international development and humanitarian aid says agreed people are altruistic and not merely self-centered but altruism can quickly turn into white Saviour ISM for instance foreign aid causing more harm than good what are your thoughts about how we balance the desire to help when ensuring our actions don't cause further harms hmm that's a great point so one of the interests one of the reasons that I'm interested in cash just giving people money is that it's about respecting other people's autonomy it basically says I think that you're an expert in your life and I actually know very little about your life I don't know what your dreams and your ambitions and your skills and expertise is that expertise are so the great thing about money is that people can use it to spend they can spend it on things that they actually need instead of things that some kind of white person in an SUV thinks they need so yes I think and this is a thick and exciting development in in development aid is that more and more there's discussion around yeah who are the real experts here and do we really give people the tools to make their own choices you know this is saying about don't give a man a fish but teach him how to fish and I've always hated that saying I hated it because what if you're a vegetarian what if what if there's there's no lake or a sea nearby I mean it's just a very stupid saying just give people money and maybe they'll do something completely different that you've never heard about and couldn't imagine that they would do it so our next question comes from Amy Barton was a professor in philosophy in Binghamton University in the US who agrees that people cooperate and may even cooperate more than other I mean isn't it might be more cooperative and selfish but the research that this person is familiar with suggests that particularly we cooperate more with people who are like us and to that demand that when demand increases cooperation becomes limited in scope please yeah so it's not that we are not cooperative at all but there times when we cooperate with people more than others when I feel like I have a lot it's easy to cooperate when I feel like you are like me I'm more willing to cooperate with you and so there are limits to cooperation yeah I agree you know one of the most important limits to human cooperation is that we've sort of been shaped by evolution to interact on a face-to-face basis which is also so difficult about this moment you know about this pandemic is that we've been hardwired to really touch each other and to connect one with one another in a very physical physical way I thought that was one of the most interesting things to discover is that actually physical contact it's not the you don't only do it with third of your your or your partner or your spouse what you do with it with a lot of people I discovered that you know many of my friendships are actually quite physical and and it's hard to to to keep the distance one of the really exciting things or fascinating things that I discovered during my research is that human beings have this unique ability to blush we're one of the very few species in the whole animal kingdom that actually blush we involuntarily give away our feelings to someone else to establish trust also our eyes are unique in the sense that all the other primates they have sort of dark around their eyes so you can't really follow their gazes but we have white sclera you nowise around our irises which means that it's we can look each other in the eye and we just again involuntarily giveaway what we're looking at and again it establishes trust but in a large large skill society obviously face-to-face interaction becomes more difficult and here is why I think you know again the design of our institutions is so important and why diversity is so important because we know from psychology and particularly from contact researchers is that contact like especially real physical contact with people who are different from you is the best medicine against hate and racism and and prejudices and this is what that is why segregation is so worrying because it's it's really hard to hate someone it was standing in front of you but it's it becomes more easier when the distance increases the physical distance and also the psychological distance so I'm not saying that's easy but it is I think and it has have been for a very long time the way forward is to try and build institutions that again and again and again bring people together our next question sorry I'm just going good comes from Jonathan Pizzuti who is a LSE student from the US Jonathan asks your discussion of hope for Humanity seems to integrate traditionally ideas traditionally conveyed in a spiritual or religious context he believed that these moral ideals are possible without a metaphysical grounding if so how do you think you can ground a compelling case for hope in a secular world so if you come from you know say a religious background that instills certain kinds of ideals and certain beliefs about human nature those are you know in some ways quite available and easy to kind of you know share with others do we need something like that to ground these ideas and if not what's the compelling case in a secular world oh I love that question so I have a religious background myself my father is a pastor a Christian pastor and obviously you know as anyone has to do when I was around 18 19 years old I wondered you know do I actually believe in God do I believe that Jesus died on the cross for my sins and that was the moment I I became an atheist and that was the moment you know the period in my life that I was obsessed with all these writers like Richard Dawkins and sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens you know like the new atheists who were trying to show again and again that you know religion is so silly and it doesn't even make sense and the Bible contradicts itself and bla bla bla bla bla and after a while I became bored with that and became a bit a little bit fed up with it because I started to realize that actually it's much more interesting to ask the question what's the effect of a certain dogma what's the effect in in our lives in our societies of us believing this or that I mean you can talk for a very long time about the literal truth of the Bible or this and does it contribute that I mean I don't really think you should read it in that way it's much more interesting to think well what is sort of the social effect of us believing that you know a God exists or us believing that human beings are fundamentally sinful or maybe they're actually good and then that's the great thing about theology you can reinterpret all the time right so there are a versions of and this is what the religion I know a little bit more about the versions of Christianity Orthodox Christianity that I think are quite cynical that indeed portray Humanity in a very dark light especially sort of Calvinism you know again the notion is that people are just or and evil and babies are already pretty much evil but then there are other ways of reading the Bible as well especially the New Testament and then the funny thing is that when I was writing the last chapter of my book which is I must admit it's a little bit of the self healthy part of the sorry I couldn't resist but I was thinking about what a sort of the rules for life if you really believe that most people are pretty decent and I found myself quoting the sermon of the mount quite a few times and and also this notion of turning the other cheek which is I think an incredibly powerful and rational principle that we can use in our criminal justice system that you know the Norwegians as I as I said earlier have already been doing for quite a while with great success so yes I I think we should be sort of less obsessed with the literal truth or this or that dogma and just wonder what are the effects of people believing this or that I think that's much more interesting and if then religion it can be a force for good and great right I think the question to some extent was saying that if you have no grounding at all in these kinds of religious communities and practices that they have had for a very long time you know to think back to your earlier phase of reading Christopher Hitchens made how how do we ground our sense of [Music] possibility and hopefulness if there if we don't refer to something you know larger than ourselves yeah well I've remember sort of reading and understanding evolution evolutionary theory for the first time I was you know student of a Christian school so they were like well that's not really true and that doesn't exist in a very silly theory and now then when I was 18 or 19 years old I started to understand well there's actually a lot of really good evidence for this and I remember feeling quite depressed about it because it seemed to me such a world without meaning such as senseless mechanism of you know that 99% of all species are already extinct and that were in this meaningless I don't know race or survival of the fittest but writing this book has made me has been quite a comforting experience for me because I think the message of self domestication theory for example sort of where researchers asked the question why if we conquered the globe why are we still here and the Neanderthals why are they gone well the answer is because we're so maybe there's no God maybe there's no bigger reason for all of this but at least we're not alone and I think that's that's pretty terrific that we're not alone with that I'll move to the next question which comes from Emma delaurio who is a lawyer in London and asks this I think very you know poignant question for our time how can we reconcile the need for cooperation with the increasing concentration of wealth looking at populous governments globally and particularly both the US and brexit situations with a No Deal brexit hedging those with political power appear to have a larger financial vested interest in undermining cooperation than previous political classes how might we break this in the context of failing anti-corruption legislation yeah I agree that's very worrying then at the same time I see quite a lot of progress you know one of the strange things is that the moment when people start to become more angry about something that is actually already the moment when things are improving so to give one example 10 years ago how many people were writing and thinking about the phenomenon of tax paradises well I can say I'll tell you very few people I mean very few journalists were writing about it no one had heard of people like Thomas Piketty the French economist and you know even to do research into inequality very few economists were doing it actually Robert Solow one of the Nobel Prize winners in economics in 2003 he said that it's just wrong to even study inequality because it has this I don't know corruptive effect on the discipline or something like that that has totally changed you know the top journals and economics they've got a lot of papers about inequality and we recognize now that it's a very important thing and also a tax evasion 10-15 years ago there was almost no discussion about Big Tex Tex paradise is like the Netherlands where I'm from you know which is stealing a lot of money from other governments around the globe now there's much more talk about it much more political pressure so it seems at this moment that things are worse than 10 years ago but their act to be much better because at least we're talking about it and I think something something similar applies to the black lives matter process people may think that things are much worse right now but there have been so many George Floyd's before George Floyd and they didn't get the huge protest that we see right now so I mean this is this is not meant to be comforting because there's so much work still to be done but I do see hope in this moment and and hope is all about the possibility of change and it impels you to act so yes be angry because that propels us forward so here we have a it's more of a comment but I'm gonna turn it into a question it comes and Cynthia Tannen who is a senior member of the inequalities Institute and is currently in Oxford he writes to say that Adam Smith is often misunderstood by economists as being the high priest of selfishness but in the Theory of Moral Sentiments he actually wrote about sympathy so there's a long quote and I'll read a bit of it from Smith that says however selfish man may be supposed there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render his happiness and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it right and so that's actually the opening yeah and that was actually his favorite work he liked the theory of moral sense there the way in which Adam Smith who starts who starts his exploration of what comes to be Homo economicus with this idea that we are by nature sympathetic we cannot help but care about other people yeah and that quickly gets shunted aside by the 19th century and turns into an account that says that what makes us tick Homo economicus by his that have softened gendered as a he right but is by very neat by his very nature is self-interested which has then collapsed with selfishness so both there are other lessons yeah yeah three from our moral philosophy from our religious texts that have other accounts of human nature so to return a little bit to the questions that we opened a session with why have some of those lessons being been shunted aside why are we less familiar for instance with that Adam Smith the Gordon Gecko version yeah that's a great point you know I have one discussion in the book about this where I talked about what I called the the error of the Enlightenment that sounds like a wild generalization and maybe it is but bear with me so what's interesting to me is that these philosophers Adam Smith and I think David Hume is the best example here these were smart guys obviously they understood that human beings are you know also have this extraordinary capacity for empathy for cooperation for solidarity and you name it but then there's one really interesting passage in David Humes work where he says that we need to believe in something sort of on a political level even though we know that it is false in fact right so he thinks that sort of it politically is justified to believe that most people are supposed to be made I think that's the word they used back then or jerks or whatever even though we just know rationally of course that people are not all jerks and I think this is basically what started happening and you can see it actually in if you look at the founding of the u.s. the John Adams one of the founding fathers wrote an essay with the title all men would be tyrants if they could and this was really did the first design principle of the US Constitution the idea that you have to create this balance of power between all these selfish people you know you need a Supreme Court you need Congress you need to sin eight so that there's not one big knave or jerk that can take all the power but they yeah they keep each other in check and I think that's generally true for those who are in power because power corrupts and power is incredibly dangerous drug and should be very wary of people who are in power and yeah that's why shame and humble the ability to blush is so important that's why it's so worrying that we can we just can't imagine Boris Johnson ever blushing or or blushing well maybe he becomes orange but not red and so um yeah that is that is sort of I think what's gone wrong is that we started designing so many of our institutions around this false idea that all people are selfish and that is really something that you can already find in these enlightenment acts even though obviously people like Adam Smith and David you knew that it was false in fact okay so with that I'm gonna ask them one final question which came to us quite early on in the in this session that comes from French who says since you believe humans are inherently good and cooperative do you think that authority should focus their funds on preventing selfish behavior and law-breaking rather than putting funds into punishing and policing so as you said if our idea of selfishness partly comes from the fact that we have designed our institutions and our social structures and our political structures in a certain kind of way how should we start reimagining those political structures well the American journalist Ezra Klein recently wrote an interesting essay about non-violence and usually when we talk about non-violence we think of these courageous activists or the people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and Gandhi who had this extraordinary self-control and were willing to go through the front lines and willing to let themselves be beat up by the police in the army etc etc and that's all fantastic obviously but it's also very high and maybe even impossible more a standard for most people right that's not I am saying that people are naturally friendly I'm not saying that people are naturally Nelson Mandela's he was a highly unnatural human beings in many ways it's just that this extraordinary capacity for self control and the ability to understand and wish to understand his enemies and to speak their language etc etc I mean he's a role model but I'm not saying people have evolved to be that way that's actually very very hard but then non-violence why is that not the philosophy of the state why do we not by non-violence on an institutional level I think that's what we should do when we design our schools our workplaces democracies prisons normal ensued be the standard all the time so yeah and that's also true for the police Polly sort of a good police officer should be a kind of social worker who is just good at connecting with other people and that people trust you know it's in the neighborhood and that can be so that they they can become your allies if you actually try to solve real crime so often real problems are actually created by the people or the state that it's being that's being violent instead of nonviolent so I think that would be a great way forward is that the state adopts the principles of non-violence thank you and that is both a important and a hopeful place to end and I think that the book and this conversation has given us so much to think about especially as we watch the global pandemic and how you know individuals communities nations are handling it I think your book gives us a lot of food for thought so thank you again first of all my apologies to all the questions we couldn't get to we had so many wonderful questions but thank you everybody for being here today Rocco congratulations on the book and thank you again Thanks thank you me MA and thanks all for watching

Channel: LSE

Views: 9,223

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics, University, College, Humankind: a hopeful history, humankind rutger bregman, rutger bregman, bregman, a hopeful history, humankind, lse online events, lse events

Id: 5TrqA10DHng

Length: 61min 21sec (3681 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020