Humankind: A Hopeful History
RUTGER BREGMAN
(BLOOMSBURY, 496 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz,” Max von Sydow’s misanthrope ab-ex painter lectures his girlfriend in Hannah and her Sisters. “More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is, ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’”
What a load of old rubbish, says Rutger Bregman in Humankind. To be sure, one way of looking at history is to see it as a litany of horror stories about what people are capable of doing to one another. But even if that’s a convincing take on the past, he argues, it doesn’t follow that we are innately wicked. Terrible things happen not because human beings are intrinsically terrible creatures, but because they are creatures that can be ­corralled into being terrible. As Nazi Germany shows, all it takes is a little indoctrination and a little bullying and the most mild-mannered man can be made a monster. Back, then, to the old chestnut about whether we are the way we are because of nature or nurture.