“Humankind: A Hopeful History”

Rutger Bregman

This feels like the antidote to having too much of the news in your life. It is, throughout, mostly just cheerful.

It somewhat feels like the author’s journal while they were writing another book on the topic; I seldom think of “history” as a genre told in first person, but this contains a lot of that. In many places, the ‘history’ feels more like “the history of how the author learned these facts” than it is the proper history of said facts. But, for the most part, that works—it’s how Bregman goes through the repeated structure of “here’s this bad thing we all know about… but it turns out…”

I liked what was roughly the middle of the book the most; he goes through some of the well-known psychology experiments/phenomena. You know the ones—the Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram’s “just following orders” experiment, and Kitty Genovese’s murder. And for all three, he absolutely tears apart the common knowledge version of events, points out the massive flaws in the experimental methodology, tells the much-less-“newsworthy” version of the story. Aside from the psychology, having that same treatment applied to Easter Island was also quite enjoyable.

The book is, overall, hopeful. I very much enjoyed it, and heartily recommend it; check it out.1

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