A wide review of human nature and motivation by this Dutch historian and journalist, who has gained a reputation as a “young thinker”. The book contains 463 pages including notes and index. The multi-disciplined approach could be dry and obscure, but is written in an approachable and engaging way.
The book concentrates on the deconstruction of widely held assumptions about human nature and the philosophies that are based on those assumptions, which are held as broadly accepted truths. Bregman focuses on the influence of Hobbes’s selfish nature of mankind and its influence on the enlightenment and modern society, with Rousseau as an opposing voice.
He then follows how these assumptions were reinforced by brutal experiences, especially in World War Two. Following the war psychiatrists, such as Zimbardo and Milgram seemed to add scientific weight to the selfish orientation of human kind view. He then exposes some the major flaws in these (overexposed) experiments.
Contrary evidence is based on the assumption that humans as hunter gathers were not selfish and not particularly warlike. Indeed that our basic instincts are cooperative and indeed social. The idea that civilisation is only a thin veneer is disputed as a front for power structures and ideologies which require conformity, division and resignation and crowd out other philosophies, which become marginalised.
Bregman asserts that as individuals and societies we are all prey to a “faulty self-image”, which stifles our “intrinsic motivation”. Despite everything “humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable”. This means there is enormous scope for doing things in improved and better ways, examples are discussed.
This is a broad brush and possibly wide-eyed analysis, some of the realisations about human nature seem a bit egocentric in tone; this is an ancient and crowded discussion: there is a wider context to all these questions and the spectrum of answers which humans have always debated. There is also a lot of thought and practicality in the book too. Of Bregman’s target, Montaigne in his essay, “Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law” (1572-4) says, “Is there any worse kind of vices than those which attack our conscience and our understanding of one another?”
The book is a much needed counter to pessimism, negativity and resignation. After all, voices which offer a philosophy of positivism and optimism are, at a society and individual level, surely needed.
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