62
" Okay, judged on raw brain power, humans do no better than our hairier cousins. So, then, what are we using our great big brains for? Maybe we’re more cunning. That’s the crux of the ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ hypothesis, named after the Italian Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, author of The Prince (1513). In this handbook for rulers, Machiavelli counsels weaving a web of lies and deception to stay in power. According to adherents of this hypothesis, that’s precisely what we’ve been doing for millions of years: devising ever more inventive ways to swindle one another. And because telling lies takes more cognitive energy than being truthful, our brains grew like the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the US during the Cold War. The result of this mental arms race is the sapien superbrain. If this hypothesis were true, you’d expect humans to beat other primates handily in games that hinge on conning your opponent. But no such luck. Numerous studies show that chimps outscore us on these tests and that humans are lousy liars.9 Not only that, we’re predisposed to trust others, which explains how con artists can fool their marks.10 This brings me to another odd quirk of Homo sapiens. Machiavelli, in his classic book, advises never revealing your emotions. Work on your poker face, he urges; shame serves no purpose. The object is to win, by fair means or foul. But if only the shameless win, why are humans one of the only species in the whole animal kingdom to blush? "
― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History
74
" In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion. "
― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History
75
" Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, [and] desensitization’.22 Would we use this drug? Would our kids be allowed to try it? Would government legalise it? To all of the above: yes. Because what I’m talking about is already one of the biggest addictions of our times. A drug we use daily, that’s heavily subsidised and is distributed to our children on a massive scale. That drug is the news. "
― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History
76
" What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 per cent. But, as before, Pinker’s list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent. So how much archaeological evidence is there for early warfare, before the days of farming, riding horses and living in settled societies? How much proof is there that war is in our nature? The answer is almost none. To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our ‘natural state’.46 Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare.47 In later periods, it’s a different story. ‘War does not go forever backwards in time,’ says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. ‘It had a beginning.’48 48 "
― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History
77
" Was Jean-Jacques Rousseau right? Are humans noble by nature, and were we all doing fine until civilisation came along? I was certainly starting to get that impression. Take the following account recorded in 1492 by a traveller on coming ashore in the Bahamas. He was astonished at how peaceful the inhabitants were. ‘They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword… and [they] cut themselves out of ignorance.’ This gave him an idea. ‘They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.’1 Christopher Columbus–the traveller in question–lost no time putting his plan into action. The following year he returned with seventeen ships and fifteen hundred men, and started the transatlantic slave trade. Half a century later, less than 1 per cent of the original Carib population remained; the rest had succumbed to the horrors of disease and enslavement. It must have been quite a shock for these so-called savages to encounter such ‘civilised’ colonists. To some, the very notion that one human being might kidnap or kill another may even have seemed alien. If that sounds like a stretch, consider that there are still places today where murder is inconceivable. In the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, for example, lies a tiny atoll called Ifalik. After the Second World War, the US Navy screened a few Hollywood films on Ifalik to foster goodwill with the Ifalik people. It turned out to be the most appalling thing the islanders had ever seen. The violence on screen so distressed the unsuspecting natives that some fell ill for days. When years later an anthropologist came to do fieldwork on Ifalik, the natives repeatedly asked her: was it true? Were there really people in America who had killed another person? "
― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History
