Category Archives: Books for A Better World

Books with ideas to make the world a better place

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

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Humankind by Rutger BregmanMost people, deep down, are pretty decent.

Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

People are fundamentally good. It’s a difficult idea to sell at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a global pandemic with the planet teetering on the brink of climate crisis. All the evidence suggests the contrary doesn’t? Humans are the possessors of the selfish gene, acting only out of self-interest, aren’t they? You don’t have to look far to find multiple examples of people being awful. Five minutes on Twitter should do the trick.

Despite this, Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, has published a book arguing the contrary, claiming in Human Kind: A Hopeful History that not only are humans fundamentally good, but that our success as a species is a result of our willingness to trust one another and work together to achieve the common good.

Has this description given you an overwhelming attack of Whataboutism yet? Hang back on that, because Bregman has done his research, and the book is a whistlestop tour of history, psychology and philosophy examining cases such as the London Blitz, the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, and the mysterious fate of Easter Island to debunk the myth of man as a purely selfish creature and to reframe them as case studies in his new philosophy of hope. As much as I’d like to believe that all people are fundamentally good at heart, I’m not entirely sold on this, but I don’t think that Bregman is either. Rather, he makes a powerful argument that the relentless negativity of the news that reaches us every day gives us a skewed perception of how bad the majority of humanity are, and this has the opposite of a placebo effect, making us feel worse and expect the worst of out fellow humans, trapping us in a cycle of negativity and cynicism which will make us behave in the spirit of mistrust.

To Bregman, cynicism is just another word for laziness, and a cynical world view is just a self-deceptive trick which gives the cynic an excuse to opt out of working to make the world a better place, and the book is compelling in challenging our cynicism about the average person’s intentions.

It ends with ten rules to live by to readdress the balance and go someway to thinking the best of others to create a positive feedback loop, in which people connect, understand and treat one another better. And maybe it will. What’s to lose in trying?

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman

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Did anyone else see that viral video of Rutger Bregman at the 2019 Davos World Economic Forum meeting? I expect that I’m not the only person who wanted to high-five him after he told a few billionaires that they needed to pay their taxes and quite their bullshit philanthropy schemes. It didn’t go down well apparently…

The Davos elite may not have liked it, but the viral video has made Bregman this week’s folk hero and has raised the public profile of Bregman, who was already a rising star in academia. On the back of the Davos video, and articles I later read, I bought Rutger Bregman’s book Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There to see what else he had to say about the state of the world.

If, like me, you find yourself in a constant state of anxiety about the state of the world, Utopia for Realists is in some ways very reassuring. It highlights that (as long as you don’t think about rapidly impending climate catastrophe) the world is better for humans than it’s ever been before. In the West at least, we are effectively living in what your average Medieval peasant would have considered to be a utopia. But, Bregman argues, our progress has stagnated and we need to return to utopian thinking to consider the betterment of all of mankind, with the best minds applying their minds to the problem of how to make life better for all in an increasingly unequal society. He quotes Bertrand Russell saying,

“It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

For Bregman, we’re lacking a mighty dose of imagination, funneling our best minds into sectors like finance where they move money around, contributing very little to the betterment of society in pursuit of growing the GDP- a useful measurement of a nation’s power at wartime, but a poor barometer of social welfare. Social dysfunction improves under GDP, but for Bregman it’s no great coincidence that the US which has the highest GDP has the highest number of social problems. The things that we would see as social progress, such as cheaper life improving technology, causes the GDP to shrink. Nurses, teachers and social workers who actively contribute to the improvement of society don’t rate highly in terms of GDP. The yardstick our politicians use to measure a country’s wellbeing and progress is not fit for purpose.

In Utopia for Realists, Bregman sets out his vision for how we might come closer to a more equal society which would be more like a utopia for everyone: a universal basic income, shorter working week and, radically, open borders. His academic argument for this is strong, but I’d argue that he makes a strong moral argument as well. When the mortality rate for Somalian toddlers is higher than that of frontline US soldiers in the American Civil War, Second World War or the Vietnam War then there’s something seriously wrong with the world and it’s time that lots was done to fix this on a global scale.

This is one of those books that I’m going to insist that everyone should read, and I don’t do that often with non-fiction, so add it to your TBR pile now.