Next up in my reading series is HumanKind. This book is about humans natural tendencies towards kindness and helpfulness, and how these tendencies can be overwritten or pushed aside by modern life.
By modern life I mean all life since the invention of agriculture.
Our examples of hunter gatherer societies are fairly small in number but they consistently paint a portrait of cooperation, lack of hierarchies, and group decision making. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the way such groups would live. When you move around following herds or harvesting by season there is little to own. You don't stay on any particular patch of land, and owning it makes little sense. You can't have more possessions than you can carry, so hoarding wealth is nearly impossible. Having a standing military is an expense you cannot afford because they can't accomplish anything useful. This is the sort of environment that humans are mostly adapted to. The few thousand years since agriculture developed have changed a lot, but that isn't enough time for evolution to have a big effect.
Once you have agriculture the rules all change. Land ownership becomes crucial. Hoarding wealth is suddenly feasible. Increases in food production allow for specialization and pave the way for standing militaries and their accompanying rigid hierarchies. All of this leads to war and violence. However, turning highly cooperative nomadic humans into bloodthirsty pillagers requires a lot of change in our outlook, and it turns out the key to that is making us believe that humans are naturally bad, and thus in need of constant control. We also need to be convinced that other people are evil, and thus it is acceptable to murder them and take their stuff.
This is the key to being a dictator over a huge group of people. In order to impose your rules you have to make people fear each other so they will surrender their liberties for safety. There are many versions of this - religions telling people that other people are inherently wicked, for example. However, there are modern day equivalents like most economics that holds dear the idea of humans as machines that try to maximize their personal power and position.
The book addresses a lot of the ways we try to convince each other of humankind's wickedness. For example, the bystander effect, in which the death of Kitty Genovese is often cited. The story that is often told is that Kitty was attacked in an alley, and 38 people witnessed the attack. They did nothing, and the attacker returned repeatedly until finally Kitty died. The true story is that the police interviewed 38 people, most of whom were asleep or heard yelling in an alley and thought it was just a drunk person. Two of them called the police (who arrived too late to help) and one found Kitty and held her while she died. It is a tragedy, and certainly shows that some individuals are wicked and violent, but it does not teach us that human bystanders are callous brutes.
Similarly the Stanford prison experiment and the famous experiment where volunteers administered shocks that they were meant to think were fatal are often used as examples of humans being basically bad. The book talks about both cases, and shows how flawed the conclusions are.
Humans are marvellously adapted to cooperate and learn from one another. These are the things that set us apart from all other species. The great majority of us struggle to harm others at all. However, we can be indoctrinated, tricked, and pushed into hatred and violence, and we often are. We should not imagine that this is inevitable though, because it is not. The last century shows us that we can get better. We can reduce war, we can try to help others, and we can break down barriers.
We aren't perfect, and never will be, but we are slowly fumbling our way towards something better.
HumanKind is an excellent book that will teach you about the ways that we are tricked into hatred, how hierarchies and possessions create conflict and division, and how people use this story of inherent wickedness of humankind to justify atrocities. Being better is difficult, but this book provides clues as to how we can go about doing that.
