Humankind summary

You’ve surely heard the slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On.” Nowadays, it’s emblazoned on countless T-shirts and cups, endlessly riffed on and satirized. But did you know it was originally developed by the British Ministry of Information to preserve British morale during the Second World War? Posters urging stoic endurance were printed by the million.

Today, many people believe that resilience is a quintessential part of the British character – and that Britons’ calmness during wartime was proof of this. But really, the trait is a human one. Countless other examples confirm that people don’t panic in the face of disaster, let alone regress to savage impulses. After the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers, for example, supposedly selfish New Yorkers routinely risked their own lives to save the lives of others. The crisis encouraged solidarity, not savagery.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left or the right side of the political spectrum; almost everyone has a bleak outlook on humanity. But why do we see the world so negatively? Why do we think people are fundamentally egoistic? The answer can be found where most of us get our information: the news.

An event is usually only considered newsworthy if it is extraordinary – and, in most cases, that means extraordinarily disastrous. The news is a pageant of pain and misfortune: an attack here, a natural disaster there. You’ll never see a headline announcing that war was not declared in Europe today.

Is the heartwarming case of the real Lord of the Flies an anomaly – an uplifting exception to the disheartening rule? Or is there actually something that determines whether we behave well or badly when cut off from society?

Thinkers have grappled with this question for centuries. The seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes assumed that humans in their natural state are “bad” – they behave only in their own self-interest. He believed that without a state, rules, and laws, humanity would be in a constant “war of all against all.” As we have seen, this worldview is still prevalent today.

And so the question remains: How did we really live and behave before we became civilized – that is, before we settled down and began to cultivate land about ten thousand years ago? To answer this question, why not turn to the archivists of the Stone Age – the artists who painted fact and fiction, history and myth, across that age-old canvas, the cave wall?

Cave paintings offer insight into the lives of our nomadic ancestors. But no cave paintings from the nomadic period have been discovered that depict violence or wars. Hunting scenes, however, are depicted often – so the violent deaths that skeletal remains exhibit don’t necessarily testify to human violence. They could just as easily have resulted from conflicts with animals.

So we’ve determined that the Hobbesian worldview can’t be true. How, then, did Homo puppy become violent in the first place? Because – and this is the elephant in the room – it can’t be denied that we are, despite our puppyish features and dispositions, capable of committing violent acts.

Let’s consider the history of philosophy once again. Nearly one hundred years after Hobbes concluded that human nature is base and barbarous, the French Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reached the opposite conclusion. In his view, humanity isn’t innately evil and corrupt. It’s fundamentally good, but was corrupted by civilization.

Maybe all these arguments seem pretty logical to you. Science is only substantiating what many have believed all along – that humans are essentially good and would prefer to do others no harm. But how do we square this with history’s atrocities, such as the Holocaust?

Well, the answer to this is hidden in another question – a question that Allied scientists asked themselves in 1944: How could it be that even in the face of immediate defeat, German soldiers continued to fight? In fact, research revealed that German Wehrmacht soldiers fought almost twice as effectively as Allied soldiers. Even their desertion rate was close to zero. This puzzled the Allied researchers. Just what was going on with the Nazis?

Empathy is double-edged: it cuts two ways. It ensures that we fight for our family, friends, and neighbors. But it also enables us to kill for them. When it’s a matter of life and death on the battlefield, we depart from our friendly disposition and resort to violence – or so we often assume.

But this assumption is also false. We don’t suddenly become barbarians on the battlefield. Even in extreme situations like war, when face-to-face with the enemy, humans generally find it very difficult to pull the trigger and kill another person. 

As we’ve seen, war did not occur until we became civilized. The theory that the veneer of civilization falls away as soon as we’re in crisis mode is simply wrong. We often don't even become violent when violence might make sense, like during wartime. So we’re really not as bad as we think. And if we can internalize this, we may be able to develop a new and better society.

However, if we continue to assume that people will only behave morally under threat of punishment, then there will, of course, be consequences. More and more of the population will need to be locked away – as we see in the United States, where inmates are often crammed into cage-like cells and may be let out for only one hour per week. We need to pause and ask ourselves, Does such treatment truly rehabilitate people convicted of crimes? Does it really promote moral behavior?