Humankind neither nasty nor brutish | Hacker News Reader

Humankind neither nasty nor brutish

thelancet.com

95 pointswell_i_never102 comments

I think this article is rather unfairly quoting poor Hobbes out of context. Hobbes didn't say humankind was nasty and brutish, he said the life of man would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" in the absence of a community... Which is not contradicted by the examples in the article!

I'm working from the article and not Bregman's work (though it's been added to my reading list) but the article does setup Bregman to respond to a strawman instead of Hobbe's actual argument.

One of the differentiators here is that difference between intent and reality. Most everyone, even very bad people, typically believe they are behaving ethically and "doing good". It's just that sometimes one persons good is another's evil. That's one of the issues the Leviathan fixes - it prevents these kind of oversteps by keeping externally enforced standards on behavior.

What Hobbes actually said:

> To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe. The first is true, if we compare Citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare Cities.

In other words, within a group we often see niceness, and between groups we often see nastiness - both are parts of human nature.

It's a pretty succinct description of the two sides of tribalism.

To have a We, you need a They.

An alien threat would be the best thing ever for human cooperation. I'm not sure whether the aliens need to be real, as long as they feel real.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is real, but apparently insufficiently alien?

Or maybe too alien to suffice as a subanthropomorphisable They?

Yeah, I think it has to be something that can be considered an enemy, not something that'll do us harm because that's how things are but has no mind of its own. A virus, diabetes or global warming aren't going to work as good (my intuition is that men need it to be an actual enemy more than women, but I have no idea).

I do believe that e.g. Americans would be much more compliant in corona-mitigation-things like wearing masks if the narrative was "China has sent us a Virus to destroy us". But that would obviously also create serious issues because they'd demand revenge.

A secretive alien enemy has sent us a Virus, and they're also trying to cook us alive by heating up our planet. Are you going to just let them do it to us, or will you stand up and fight for our way of life, against the intergalactic threat? Now that's a They that can provide a We for Team Humanity, Leaders Of The Free Universe.

Would you like to know more? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTz9nIUkGc

Not nearly alien enough.

Plague has co-evolved with human civilization, for reasons adequately explained in Guns, Germs and Steel, among other places.

The ability to understand it, and take rational steps to mitigate it, is rather more new. SARS2 is arguably the first major pestilence to strike a human civilization which was coddled into the illusion that no such thing can happen to it.

Our spectrum of responses to that are fairly predictable to a student of history, but mixed with the peculiar impotence of a people who thought they had the power to stop this sort of thing, and have discovered they do not.

Possibly actually alien, but people need something to look at or at least sense. so yea subanthropomorphisable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24392814

The actual nasty, brutish, and short quotation:

> In such condition [the state of nature] there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

As a reply to a post saying that the quote was taken out of context, providing a second quote not related to the first quote is at best unhelpful.

Or did I miss something obvious?

You are misrepresenting Hobbes here to say that he was referring to the absence of a community... Sapiens have always lived in communities. He was referring specifically to humans in the condition in the absence of state power:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.

The "nasty brutish, and short" bit follows in an elaboration of this condition in the next paragraph.

and THIS is contradicted, if not by the article, then by the book it is reviewing. In particular:

To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our 'natural state'. Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare. 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'

Yes, good point. I agree community wasn't a perfect word to represent what Hobbes meant. I considered using "society" and "the leviathan", maybe they would work better.

It is interesting to consider that part of the book, it does seem to disagree with Hobbes at first glance. Hobbes did say that the state of nature was violent. However I think he also thought that a fear of violence would spontaneously cause humankind to organise into societies. So I'm not sure he'd necessarily be that surprised to find a lack of evidence for prehistoric warfare.

Your summary of what the book says is directly at odds with data that I've seen in books like Enlightenment Now.

https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-... does a good job of summarizing the data. Every archeological site on record and every primitive society we have been able to study records a rate of death by human violence that exceeds by orders of magnitude what is seen in modern civilized societies. In fact they all exceed what happened in the USA+Europe from 1900-1960, and usually by a large multiple. Even with 2 world wars, Western civilization killed fewer per capita in violence than any previous period in history that we have data for.

In short, Hobbes was right. Every attempt that I have seen at taking a quantitative approach has backed that up.

I’d encourage you to read R. Brian Ferguson’s work, especially Pinker’s List. It goes into Pinker’s methodological errors (basically, he double counts much of his data, and even without that, is over confident of the explanatory power of that data).

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273371719_Pinker's_...

Two paragraphs above the part I quoted:

What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. 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.

Further info:

The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'

> Hobbes didn't say humankind was nasty and brutish, he said the life of man would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" in the absence of a communit

I think you are misrepresenting Hobbes here. The essential idea of Hobbes' Leviathan was that men are selfish brutes/savages that require an overwhelming authority to pacify and tame. Hobbes' goal was to provide a justification for royalty. In other words, "community" cannot exist without a king because mankind is nasty and brutish.

While reading this, I can't help but to hear Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator final speech in the background of my mind:

"... We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…"

https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-the-final-spee...

It's like the best speech ever. And IMHO the idea to add Inception soundtrack to it makes it even so much better.

The whole point of that Great Dictator's Speech is the beginning, the "I'm sorry, I don't want to be a dictator" part. We need fewer wannabe-great-dictators in the world, and more successful tribal leaders striving to unite people via voluntary consensus, tolerance and moderation. That's just as true today as it was in the bad old 1930s.

> tribal leaders striving to unite people via voluntary consensus, tolerance and moderation

'Citizen 99234832, we have received reports that suggest you are insufficiently consensual, tolerant and moderate. Please report to camp X101 for voluntary reeducation, or face the consequences.'

Yes, you have noticed that authoritarians sometimes use the veneer of freedom and cooperation to force obedience. Sometimes they just use strongman tactics. It doesn't change the fact that voluntary consensus and tolerance are, in fact good.

Bregman's point in his book is that the belief that everyone is greedy is more harmful than the greed itself.

that doesn't jive with my initial take, although admittedly, i've only read the first few chapters so far and have yet to get back to it. i got the initial sense that the greed is harmful, and the beliefs around greed make it worse, so a little greed leads to a lot of bad feelings. it's not minimizing/forgiving of the actual greed in existence though.

i'm in general agreement of the book's overarching thesis that people are mostly good. we wouldn't have a functioning society if that weren't true. it's just that our spidey senses are horribly tuned to the modern world of very few actual dangers, which are mostly hidden away in institutions (centers of power) rather than our neighbors to whom we tend to cast the suspicious eye.

Sidenote, I added a score to this speech in my college days. I think it's pretty good. https://youtu.be/zT5p1N9AoQA

"And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. ….." .. so mixed on hearing that. On one hand, this gives so much hope under the direst of circumstances. On the other, it says a lot about human nature too .. which can steadfastly hold on to destructive beliefs and act on them till the last breath.

It could also simply mean that every reign has a natural end. Power inheritance tends not to go well in non-free societies, even if it does sometime manage to last a few lifetimes.

Whenever I read something like this, I wonder if the author ever had children, or even knows anyone with children. I have two. Children ages 2 and 3 are a strong counter-example to this "inmate human goodness" hypothesis and Rousseau's thinking in general. My kids at that age would often be about to trip over the last nerve with some sort of interruption only to say, "Mommy and daddy, I love you." In some ways, I think the goodness that kids these ages show must be some sort of evolutionary mechanism to remain "cute" and keep the parents from harming them (i.e. self-interested). Thomas Sowell (whose work I submit is likely far superior to either Bregman's or the Lancet reviewer Marmot's) has a wonderful quote illustrating it: "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

Bergman appears to be arguing against a straw man. I don't think anyone would say that human beings are completely, innately and irredeemably evil. I doubt even John Calvin would have argued such a thing. People want to be loved and they want to feel they are doing good. But we are good at lying to ourselves about our motivations, letting our emotions lead us into bad decisions and generally reacting in ways that preserve our own interests, status and livelihoods regardless of the cost (which we are adept at rationalizing away).

Rousseau's "unconstrained vision"[1] has a fundamental error: if humans are good, then human-created institutions should by and large also be good; if humans are good and human-created institutions are for whatever reason corrupting, then humans should be resilient to the corruption. I'd argue that neither seems to be true, but the latter seems particularly false and fatal for the unconstrained vision. The existence of even a few unchecked malevolent attributes is sufficient to create mass suffering. This is doubly true if the person believes herself to be innately good in all ways.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Thomas-Sowell/dp/068...

Humans innately have object persistence too, but you wouldn't be able to tell from interacting with a baby as it takes them a few years to get there. Saying kids don't behave as nice as adults doesn't really mean anything in a similar way.

I think it really depends on the child whether inherently good or bad from the start. Basically genetics allowing either outcome.

> Children ages 2 and 3 are a strong counter-example to this "inmate human goodness" hypothesis and Rousseau's thinking in general.

Children younger than that are strong counter-examples to claims that humans are bipedal and have sophisticated verbal skills. I think there is a more, useful understanding of "innate" that doesn't literally mean "from the moment of birth" but more means "absent other sufficiently strong influences, a fully developed human will evidence this trait".

I agree that toddlers are miniature terrorists. It's a good thing their little bodies develop as slowly as their brains and moral compass, to mitigate the damage they can cause.

The trick isn’t in the meaning of the word “innate”, but in your definition of child and human. Children are not fully human at birth, their brains are entirely undeveloped; so it’s perfectly valid to say humans have innate goodness, and children do not, because they are not yet entirely human.

sorry, but no. children are 100% human.

There is no contradiction. We can all be altruistic or nasty depending on the context. We are messy and complicated animals, and we cooperate or defect depending on many signals. For those interested in this topic in depth (not just anecdotes like in the article) I recommend Behave by Robert Sapolsky.

It seems pretty straightforward: we are capable of great benevolence to people we view as our "tribe", and great cruelty to "others". It makes sense biologically and has played itself out that way in history and among our closest animal relatives.

That being said you only get one life, and most of your views will go unchallenged throughout it. Why spend that brief time always assuming and preparing for the worst?

> Rather than see humankind's inherent nastiness, Bregman is keen to show our inherent goodness.

Everything I've ever observed about human behavior leads me to believe it's more complicated than this dichotomy. I'd hope that the book is less naive than the review makes it seem to be.

> As a rhetorical device, Bregman takes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's more hopeful account of humanity in a state of nature. For Rousseau the problem is not what is hidden by the veneer—human nature is fine—it is civilisation itself.

Hmmm, without the veneer of civilisation, we would be basically apes with oversized brains. Apes cooperate just fine within their own group, they are social animals after all, but between different groups it can get very nasty very fast. Which is of course what we can see all around the world at a larger or smaller scale (wars, social networks, election campaigns, racial tensions etc.) but I doubt getting rid of civilisation is a solution for these problems...

I haven't read the book, but I suspect you're disagreeing with Rousseau and not Bregman here. I don't think Bregman recommends removing the civilization, but rather augmenting it based on the moral principles that we already accept as humans.

Last time I checked, it was agreed that there are no universally accepted moral principles. In fact, counting purely by headcount (India and China do exist!), quite a number of things you consider to be universally or widely accepted may actually be accepted by the minority of the people. Is it "eye for an eye" or "turn another cheek"? More than half of the world would take the first options as morally correct.

Maybe I am reading too much into this argument, but I think this is moving the goalposts. So Bregman comes and proves, presumably mostly based on history of Western civilization, that humans are (at least in some ways and on average) better than they think they are. Your response to that is, well, those darn Indians and Chinese, they are not part of Western civilization, therefore, Bregman's proof does not hold.

Not to mention that it has a little bit of a scent of white man's burden.

And BTW, I do believe in universality of human rights, I don't care what the consensus is. While I agree with Bregman, I think it is kind of a moot point (as any argument from nature), because the values we have (or rather decisions we make) are much more a function of the environment we live in.

> "universality of human rights" That's a somewhat overcompressed term. Does it mean "the human rights, as they're generally perceived in the beginning of the XXI century in <your country>, are applicable to all humans in the past, the present, and the future, at any place on (or in, or outside of) the Earth"? Or does it allow for some human rights that will be discovered one day in the future to also cover everyone, including you and me today?

And I certainly did not intend "the white man's burden", on the contrary, "the white man's nosiness". The Western people, objectively judged by their own standards, turn out to be better than they generally tend to judge themselves by those standards? Good for them! Now could they please allow other people to judge themselves by their own, maybe different, standards?

One thing I found very interesting from the book (which is worth a read):

The notion humans might have rose to supremacy among the apes, not by brainpower alone, but by a combination of brainpower and mirroring, i.e. our almost magical ability/tendency to copy others.

This then, goes the hypothesis, allowed a thicker channel of intellectual transmission, and faster development of species technology, even though Neanderthals had 20% larger brain mass and appear to have made many of the hallmark human discoveries first.

I just finished reading this book a few weeks ago. I can't recommend it enough. There is so much to learn here, and it's not just a shot of positivity--it's that we're fundamentally wrong about human nature, and much of the research we've long relied on to justify our beliefs is flawed (or often faked or just plain wrong).

All it takes is one narcissist to ruin things for everybody else.

I do believe that most people are basically decent. However, we are also gullible and prone to conforming to dominance hierarchies.

About 40% of humans are predisposed, either through biology or upbringing, to blindly follow socially dominant people.

This is why authoritarianism happens.

A disproportionate percentage of socially dominant people are sociopaths who are unfit to lead. This does not matter to authoritarian followers, however, and this is why things like Naziism happen.

Do you have a citation for such a figure, or is it something that appeared self-evident, like sticky electoral support for historical, authoritarian leaders?

The Milgram experiment or its variations might come up with such a figure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

NB I don't know enough about the area to discuss the validity of the experiment, just that it might be a source of such a figure

I'm not the original poster, but there have been studies on the authoritarian personality type[1] in psychology going back nearly seven decades years or so. A certain subset of the population is inclined towards displaying authoritarian traits, and those traits are about 50 percent heritable[2].

Regarding contemporary Americans, about 40 percent of Americans are in favor of non-democratic forms of government and about 52 percent support a strong leader without checks and balances from Congress or elections[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality

[2] https://psmag.com/news/authoritarianism-the-terrifying-trait...

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/03/13/is-public-s...

In addition to the links provided by heavyset_go, the go-to popular source on authoritarian followers is[0], or the updated TLDR[1].

[0] https://theauthoritarians.org/Downloads/TheAuthoritarians.pd...

[1] https://www.theauthoritarians.org/

> I do believe that most people are basically decent.

If most people were basically decent, the natives and aborigines would still have their land. Entire continents of people were brutally exterminated and entire continents were stolen not so long ago really. Everybody was more than happy to participate in the genocide and theft.

People are selfish and behave in a system according to their selfish interests.

Seems to focus way too much on the bystander effect as a straw man example of "human evil". A much better picture of human evil would come from studying war rape, especially that of a victorious army. Any victorious army. Think Soviets in Berlin, Japanese in China, during WWII. The English civil wars were full of it as observed by Hobbes. Furthermore, it is ubiquitous throughout history. Any human convinced of their impunity, such as a conquering army, will absolutely be brutish and nasty to their enemies.

Americans in Japan raping Japanese would be an easy example to look at as it still happens, but I doubt anyone would be allowed to.

Look at the US conquest and occupation of Germany vs. the Russian. There was a massive difference.

The article uses the infamous Kew Gardens story, which has been thoroughly debunked my Malcolm Gladwell as being inaccurate. You could read the book Tipping Point for details. Here is some quick info: https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3265

> Bregman is horrified by the Holocaust, as anyone who believes in the goodness of humankind must be. He suggests that people will indeed do nasty things on a mass scale if they are convinced that it is for the greater good. It was not inherent nastiness that led to the Holocaust, Bregman suggests, but years of indoctrination.

How about all the mega-killers in history - Genghis Khan, Timur, Alexander, Napoleon? It seems to me that will-to-power is innate, it doesn't require indoctrination or appeal to greater good.

Geghis Khan and Alexander would both make the case that they were helping the world by uniting it and ending micro-conflicts - the people they killed along the way were necessary sacrifices who had the option to instead surrender to something greater. There's also an element of "divine right" at play - they believed they were fulfilling a religious entitlement.

Napoleon would make a similar argument, likely one more based on a worldview about exporting French culture and values.

There are very few cases, perhaps the destruction of Babylon, where someone basically says "yeah, I did it because I was angry and didn't care".

Would they? It's my understanding that premodern conquerors were quite open about the fact that their primary goal was acquiring wealth and glory rather than optimizing the world.

I mention the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrians because it's an exception, and because the king goes on in great detail about how much he wanted to remove even the idea of Babylon.

Most conquerers obviously felt they were the best person to do the job, but they were not in it for like, direct personal gain. At some point you conquer enough to drown in wine and gold long before you conquer as much as they did - and being in war is not pleasant even as the king. They felt there were doing something for their people by unifying disparate factions.

"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no lands left to conquer."

Skyler: "If I have to hear one more time that you did this for the family..." Walter: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. I was really alive."

The way I see it, conquerors aren't driven by greed or morality. They conquer because they enjoy it, are good at it, and want to be the best and greatest.

I read Rutger's book, I also read Ayn's books, I don't even think that there is a contradiction, if you assume that humankind is kind and has a natural tendency for kindness. Both books changed me in a way, I love them, both highly recommended if you ask me.

We humans are short though.

Wouldn't load. Get "This site requires Cookies to be enabled to function". The good news is that that almost never happens.

We help our own, and destroy and torture with great pleasure and no remorse everything else, including animals, whole ecosystems, and other human beings we decide, for some reason or another, are "aliens".

The moment we give another human community a special name is the first step towards abomination.

Being territorial and aggressive towards others is a trait we share with other species, but we are also superpredators and conquerors and will not rest until there is no more "others".

> We help our own, and destroy and torture with great pleasure and no remorse everything else...

When you say "we" do you mean you personally partake in all these activities, or do you count yourself as an exception to the rule?

We includes the person talking, of course. I don't see how I could say this and not include myself. I'm human (for better and worse).

I hear you. While I may not have committed major atrocities personally, I believe the potential for all those things lies within me due to my human nature. Had I been born in a different time and place, I may well have participated in some of that stuff. I shudder to think about it and believe we should nurture the better aspects of our nature as much as we can, both individually and collectively.

I like to eat chicken, beefs, and porks for no other reason than it's tasty food.

Does that make me a bad person?

Are you aware of the impact it has, consider that impact to be negative in a moral sense, but make no changes to your behaviour?

I don't decide who's good or bad, and I'm not your mother. You should form your own opinion about yourself.

According to the chicken, cow, and pig, yes. It's up to you to determine how much their opinion informs your own.

Another way to reframe this is to ask if this is a free action, rather than a good or bad one. Free as in free from animal passions that compel one to act in a pseudo-deterministic way ("I am hungry so I eat", "I am scared so I run"), and instead according to higher-order reason and principle only humans (so far) have access to.

So, if we choose meat for a meal in an automatic way because our tongue asks for it, it might be an unfree choice. But if we do so after some consideration, including factors beyond our bodily impulses, it could be seen as a choice made by a free person.

This my take/interpretation of Immanuel Kant's transcendental freedom[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Freedom...

Humans (sapiens) are very altruistic to their in-group and downright brutal to their out-group. The easiest trick may just be to adjust these boundaries over time. If sentient aliens showed up to wage war, I'm sure the different human nations on earth would suddenly find themselves to have a lot more in common.

Yes, agreed.

> A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

—Einstein

The deepest separation of labor is female and male. The female energy is associated with empathy for the child. Male energy is protecting territory.

Some combination of both these energies exist in all of us.

You can say humans have the capacity for love, and also acknowledge there are people out there who gain pleasure from power over others.

You cant say one is natural and the other is learned.

Even the people who gain pleasure in causing pain, are useful in the right situations. Hence the trope in fiction of the jailed entity being released to combat an even greater foe in a dire situation.

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