Book Review: Humankind by Rutger Bregman
The aim of revision is to get the distortions to match the mood of the present times—Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think, 1986.
It is a curious thing, to reflect on one’s nature—not simply the nature of oneself, but that of their entire species—human nature. Being so close to the problem, how does a person escape their own cultural trappings and preferred values to understand the entirety of humanity, in all its different social and environmental contexts?
In Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s case, he doesn’t.
Bregman’s latest book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, is less a history of humanity than an exercise in promoting a simplistic narrative about it to suit one’s own preferred cultural values. Consciously echoing Rousseau, with an update for the 21st century, the core argument is that humans are fundamentally ‘good’ (that is, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, feminist, and opposed to violence)—unless or until their minds happened to be poisoned by property ownership or corrupt leaders, which Bregman claims were lacking for most of human history. Since, as Bregman correctly notes, humans spent the vast majority—upwards of 95%—of our history living in groups reliant on hunting and gathering to survive, let us consider in detail how accurately he characterizes these social systems.
Bergman claims that “in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased,” and that it was only with the rise of agriculture that we began to see arranged marriages and male control over female sexuality, but this is pure fiction. Among the !Kung hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, anthropologist Richard Lee—a source Bregman selectively references for his claims about hunter-gatherer’s inherent peacefulness--notes that “All first marriages are arranged by parents, and the girls have little say in the matter.” Among the Kaska nomadic foragers of British Colombia, anthropologist John Honigmann writes that, “Ideally a man feels entitled to beat his wife if he suspects that she has been untrue to him,” although “not all men avail themselves of this permitted behavior.” Arranged marriages are customary across the majority of hunter-gatherer societies, and violence, directed towards one’s wife and/or another man, is a common male response to actual or suspected infidelity.
Bregman makes much of the fact that among the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay, women tend to have numerous different husbands throughout their lifetimes, but what he leaves unmentioned—or perhaps is unaware of—is that this partially reflects the particularly challenging socioecological circumstances they live in. The Ache are heavily reliant on male hunting for their subsistence, with men contributing about 87% of the total calories. In part due to their extensive food sharing and significant reliance on male hunting, it is not uncommon for children without fathers to be killed by adult men, who don’t want to have to help provide for them. This pattern was sex-biased as well, with female infants and children significantly more likely to be killed than male children. Having at least one male partner around at all times for provisioning and social support was thus quite essential for child survival. Girls tended to marry very early as well, with 85% of them getting married before menarche (about 15 years of age).
Contrary to the available evidence, Bregman sums up his caricature, writing that, “For most of human history, then, men and women were more or less equal. Contrary to our stereotype of the caveman as a chest-beating gorilla with a club and a short fuse, our male ancestors were probably not machos. More like proto-feminists.”
Yet the Ache have literal club fights, which were utilized as a tool of social control by powerful adult men. Anthropologists Kim Hill and Ana Hurtado write that, “Before contact, middle-aged men between thirty-five and fifty-five years old were politically powerful and monopolized many fertile women in the population. Younger men were afraid of these “fully grown adult men” because of their strong alliances and the fact that they sometimes killed younger men in club fights.” Hill and Hurtado also note that, "In the first few days [after a club fight] some men might die, but most recovered, even if their skulls had been split after a direct hit. Many Ache men have multiple large dents in their skulls, evidence of past fights and their ability to recover."
Many hunter-gatherer societies had ‘men’s groups’ where initiated adult men would monopolize the best pieces of game for themselves. Among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of East Africa, men would have secret ‘epeme’ feasts, where they would consume the most desirable parts of the large game animals killed, which were forbidden to women, children and the uninitiated. Among the Mi’kmaq foragers of Canada, the missionary Father Le Clercq noted that, “The women, the children, the young boys who have not yet killed any moose, and all of those who are not in condition to go to war against the enemy, do not, as a rule, enter into the wigwams where there is feasting,” and instead must wait for the men to finish before they can have the remains.
Speaking of “war against the enemy”, Bregman claims that it was the beginnings of sedentism and property ownership that led to the origins of warfare, “Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.”
In fact, however, in every region of the world where there is evidence of different nomadic forager groups neighboring each other, there are cases of intergroup violence. This pattern is thoroughly reviewed in a 2012 paper by anthropologists Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, who write that, “External war has been described in each of the areas we reviewed based on evidence of intergroup killing, explicit fear of strangers, and/or avoidance of border zones,” and adding that the “cases of hunter-gatherers living with different societies of hunter-gatherers as neighbors show that the threat of violence was never far away.”
Among the Innu (also known as the Montagnais-Naskapi)—another society Bregman selectively references—hunting grounds were inherited through the patriline, and if someone repeatedly trespassed without permission, “the owner of the hunting-ground will be entitled to shoot him,” and that, “if during the coming winter the crime is repeated and the rightful owner kills the illegal trapper or hunter the owner will not be brought to account,” anthropologist Julius Lips writes.
Bregman claims that, “Hunter-gatherers viewed nature as a ‘giving place’ that provided for everybody’s needs, and it never occurred to them to patent an invention or a tune,” but again this is completely mistaken. Many hunter-gatherer societies in fact did have systems of ownership of inventions and songs. Among the Yolngu of Australia, “art encoded meanings in the context of a revelatory system of knowledge, in which knowledge of certain 'levels' of meaning was restricted to a few individuals, and in which knowledge of the meaning of paintings varied according to an individual’s status. As with song, men maintained the secrecy of designs by restricting sensory contact with the medium,” writes anthropologist Ian Keen.
Anthropologist Peter Jordan notes that across many Northwest Coast fisher-forager societies, “Canoe makers had personal songs that they recounted at key stages in the production sequence…The canoe maker’s supernatural connections and songs were kept secret, and others were forbidden from watching him work.” Among many California forager populations, ‘world renewal’ dances were “sponsored by wealthy men, and enabled them to show their riches off to the wider regional community,” writes Jordan, adding that “these treasures were never exchanged at the events; the wealthy men did not part with their treasures.”
What comes across most strongly in Bregman’s distortion of hunter-gatherer societies is how condescending it is. All the struggle, all the inventiveness and vitality, all the deeply human conflict and self-interest and challenges of defending oneself, one’s family, one’s possessions, and one’s community have been handwaved away to suit Bregman’s own preferred values. That he felt the need to misrepresent the past and other cultures in order to provide a ‘hopeful’ history is rather a message of despair. Bregman presents hunter-gatherer societies as being inherently peaceful, antiwar, equal, and feminist likely because these are commonly expressed social values among educated people in his own society today. This is not history but mythology.
It is also noteworthy how little actual research Bregman did on hunter-gatherer societies for his book, despite his sweeping claims purporting to describe them. Nearly all of his references to traditional societies come from secondary sources, and importantly, all of them are ones that appear uniquely amenable to his simplistic narrative, such as The Good Book of Human Nature by Carel van Shaik and Kai Mitchell, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas Christakis, Myths of Male Dominance by Eleanor Leacock, and the infamously flawed Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.
The central problem throughout the book, beyond his selective reading and the imposition of his own preferred values onto human history, is that Bregman keeps perpetuating a false dichotomy between simplistic Rousseauian and Hobbesian narratives, while neatly landing on the side of the former. In reality, human beings everywhere are neither inherently freedom loving and peaceful, nor inherently coercive and violent, but can be either or both depending on their socioecological and cultural context. From the extreme violence and warfare within Europe detailed in Lauro Martines book Furies: War in Europe, 1450–1700, to the more recent ‘long peace’ in Europe since World War 2, history is a mass of ‘change and contradiction’. The idea that we must restrict ourselves to some simple narrative about human nature to offer hope for the future is not only an unreasonably simplistic notion but a historically unjustified one.