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oldbee 's review for:
Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Easy to read and easy to believe, and in most parts, also supported by facts. I started this book a bit sceptical - not of the premise but of the implicit assumption that the big question of human nature (are we selfish or are we kind, by default, as a species?) could be answered at all; the concept of "human nature" as such is ill-defined at best. There were much better, more specific questions in my mind, to focus our efforts (in which circumstances do we do good rather than bad? how and who defines what is good?); it seemed senseless to try so hard to establish something that would be at best just another philosophical viewpoint.
However, after reading the book, I have adjusted my position, for two reasons. First, trying to answer the "big" question does lead one to the myriad of more specific questions that we really need to answer in order to change, so perhaps it's not in vain, and it can serve as an umbrella term of sorts. Second, and more importantly, enough people believe in the validity of the question, and in the existence of a negative answer, that to convince people of the need for change one must tackle and dismantle that belief before anything else.
And tackle and dismantle Bregman certainly does. A large portion of the book could be described as a series of detective chases, enjoyable to follow even as they repeatedly bait-and-switch the reader ("Here's something you thought you knew! Oh, but that's not what happened..."). I had been aware of the dubiousness of some of the case studies, but not all, and some of them cast a rather bad light on psychology as a science as well as the journalists that report on it. Sometimes, the arguments can get a bit muddled, and here I did wonder whether the preoccupation with making a strong argument for the "big" question may have led Bregman astray, wanting to present a concise story rather than reveal the complexity of the underlying truth (exactly where many of the case studies presented strayed); however, for the most part, he seems willing to go wherever evidence points.
It's good that the book doesn't stop there, and goes on to offer if not solutions, then at least a hint of some, though it gets necessarily a bit weaker. It's one thing to debunk experiments that were wrong, another to then offer other experiments as positive evidence - one must tread cautiously, after priming the reader to be very suspicious of such claims. Here, I sometimes wished Bregman spent a bit more time digging into the subject matter, just like he did in the previous chapters. Books have been written on some of the topics that have a mere chapter here - for example, Bregman seems to be an immediate convert to the "unstructured" approach, though it's already a misnomer of sorts (and also recalling The Tyranny of Structurelessness to mind), and the treatment of non-violence in social movements lacks any nuance.
Despite its faults, it is a very hopeful book at its heart, and I wish more people follow Bregman's call for kindness.
However, after reading the book, I have adjusted my position, for two reasons. First, trying to answer the "big" question does lead one to the myriad of more specific questions that we really need to answer in order to change, so perhaps it's not in vain, and it can serve as an umbrella term of sorts. Second, and more importantly, enough people believe in the validity of the question, and in the existence of a negative answer, that to convince people of the need for change one must tackle and dismantle that belief before anything else.
And tackle and dismantle Bregman certainly does. A large portion of the book could be described as a series of detective chases, enjoyable to follow even as they repeatedly bait-and-switch the reader ("Here's something you thought you knew! Oh, but that's not what happened..."). I had been aware of the dubiousness of some of the case studies, but not all, and some of them cast a rather bad light on psychology as a science as well as the journalists that report on it. Sometimes, the arguments can get a bit muddled, and here I did wonder whether the preoccupation with making a strong argument for the "big" question may have led Bregman astray, wanting to present a concise story rather than reveal the complexity of the underlying truth (exactly where many of the case studies presented strayed); however, for the most part, he seems willing to go wherever evidence points.
It's good that the book doesn't stop there, and goes on to offer if not solutions, then at least a hint of some, though it gets necessarily a bit weaker. It's one thing to debunk experiments that were wrong, another to then offer other experiments as positive evidence - one must tread cautiously, after priming the reader to be very suspicious of such claims. Here, I sometimes wished Bregman spent a bit more time digging into the subject matter, just like he did in the previous chapters. Books have been written on some of the topics that have a mere chapter here - for example, Bregman seems to be an immediate convert to the "unstructured" approach, though it's already a misnomer of sorts (and also recalling The Tyranny of Structurelessness to mind), and the treatment of non-violence in social movements lacks any nuance.
Despite its faults, it is a very hopeful book at its heart, and I wish more people follow Bregman's call for kindness.