Rutger Bregman subtitles this book as a ‘Hopeful History’, and as someone who has read and feared Lord of the Flies, it served precisely as that. Some of the points raised in the book were so poignant that I had to re-read sentences several times, and review the supporting evidence over and over before even beginning to accept it.
- Over 50% of soldiers in the front lines of WWII did not shoot. On a cold wintry November morning in 1943, Colonel Samuel Marshall decides to do something groundbreaking: he decides to interview groups of servicemen in war.
…he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.
While some of Colonel Marshall’s claims have been doubted, the evidence supporting his claim that “most soldiers are not killers” has only been growing, and becoming further irrefutable. Studies from the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil war showed that most of the 27 thousand muskets retrieved from the battlefields were fully loaded. Since priming a musket takes several steps, and more importantly, takes time not spent shooting, this is truly surprising. More shocking still, is that over 12 thousand of them were double loaded, and half of those were triple loaded. Much later, historians deciphered the sentiment behind this: loading a gun was an excuse to not shoot it.
Most of the British soldiers killed in the Second WW were killed remotely, over 85% of them through grenades, mortars, aerial bombing, land mines, and booby traps. Over time, weaponry has gotten better at remote violence, in a way to overcome the issue of soldiers on the front line being unwilling to shoot at each other.
In the face of such evidence, what I was left pondering about was the cause of violence today: in cities, where a single shooter, or a car driver murders dozens. I wonder what Rutger Bregman says about that.
From the discovery and story telling about Easter Island, to how the government reacts to situations of crisis, Rutger Bregman’s hopeful history is not only compelling in rewriting how we think about humanity, but also points out the dangers of being too cynical. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, it can be argued that the government’s misconception of the state of law and order in the city caused the governor to take drastically violent measures when they were not necessary – literally taking away innocent lives in effect.
Bregman also warns us against using empathy as the solution to our problems today: firstly because it is a very narrow tool – one that takes time to build. And secondly, because empathy alone will still lead to consequences we do not want:
One thing is for certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with our victims, the more we generalize about our enemies.
From debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment, to diving into details of shipwrecks that emulated the set-up of Lord of the Flies to debunk the anarchist explanations of human-motivations, this book does it all, and serves as a powerful reminder of not only what Humankind could be, but what Humankind already is – and it’s an uplifting read.
Perplexed Potatoes 