This radical idea is that “deep down, most people are pretty decent” (p. Uplifting though its message is, I found the book to be consistently marred by oversimplifications, assumptions presented as fact, conceptual unclarity, and unwarranted inferential leaps.īregman begins by announcing that Humankind presents a “radical idea” that is “nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again” (p. I hate to say it, but once I began reading Humankind my enthusiasm rapidly waned. I was also excited because I had previously heard the widely circulated speech that Bregman made to the bigwigs at Davos, and was delighted by his confrontation with far-right pundit Tucker Carlson on Fox television. All of these books explore the tension between human sociability and our propensity for violence, selfishness and cruelty, albeit in different ways and sometimes coming to strikingly different conclusions.īecause human ultrasociality takes centre stage in my own work on dehumanization, I was excited about what new insights this volume might bring. As such, the book is part of a growing genre that includes Siep Stuurman’s The Invention of Humanity, Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox, Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’ Survival of the Friendliest, and Michael E, McCullough’s The Kindness of Strangers. This is the core insight that drives the argument in Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History.

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