This never happened, concludes Bregman blithely, even though the Easter Islanders themselves say it did: a vivid example of his gift for dismissing inconvenient evidence. On the other hand, a bizarre chapter about Easter Island attempts to disprove, on the basis of some inconclusive fragments of evidence, the accepted story of how deforestation led to civil war, cannibalism and population collapse. The chapter on Philip Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford prison experiment ably collects the recent discoveries that the whole thing was a hoax, with the guards being coached in their cruelty to the prisoners. Since Bregman is a priori sure that all nasty stories about human nature must be “myths”, he tries to puncture several. Signs of savagery … the 1963 film adaptation of Lord of the Flies. At length, Bregman’s wilfully Edenic view of prehistoric society prompts the reader to wonder why, if he loves the hunter-gatherer lifestyle so much, he doesn’t go and live there. And cherry-picking his evidence again: at least one modern hunter-gatherer society, the !Kung people, were found to be very violent, particularly towards strangers. “Any time we crossed paths with a stranger,” Bregman writes confidently of this prehistoric idyll, “we could stop to chat and that person was a stranger no more.” But here, unless he owns a time machine, he is simply making things up. Until then we were all happy peacenik hunter-gatherers. That brought the drudgery of work and the rise of political leaders and war. Such inconsistencies bedevil the book, particularly in its argument (again following Rousseau) that the great tragedy of human history was the invention of agriculture and cities around 10,000 years ago. In other words, they worked together too. They made clothing, musical instruments, jewellery and cave paintings”. “The more plausible theory,” Bregman writes, “is that we humans were better able to cope with the last ice age because we’d developed the ability to work together.” That sounds nice, but apparently the author has forgotten how, just a few pages earlier, he observed that Neanderthals “built fires and cooked food. Why, for example, did early humans survive while our cousins the Neanderthals did not? Veneer theorists suspect grimly that we simply killed them all. Such anecdotes are heartwarming, but perhaps you want more evolutionary meat. (Rather courageously, the author chooses this overfamiliar fable as his sentimental endpiece.) In the first world war, German and British soldiers played football on Christmas Day. When some Tongan children were shipwrecked on a Pacific island for over a year, they cooperated generously rather than re-enacting Lord of the Flies. What is his evidence? Infants and toddlers, studies suggest, have an innate bias towards fairness and cooperation. Bregman contrasts this with what he calls, following the biologist Frans de Waal, “veneer theory”: the view (attributed to Hobbes among others) that civilisation is a thin skin of decency barely concealing the savage ape underneath. Not yet erased from the annals of history, for example, is the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom the author regularly calls for his view that humans are naturally nice, and it is the institutions of civilisation that have corrupted us. But there appears to be no authorial shame over the laughably bogus claim that this idea has been “erased” from history, presumably by a dark centuries-long conspiracy of secretive misanthropes, to some bafflingly obscure end. Some measure of bathos is presumably intended when we learn that this radical new view is that “most people, deep down, are pretty decent”. The author promises to reveal “a radical idea” that has been “erased from the annals of world history”. L ike most big-idea books, this one begins by absurdly overstating the novelty of its argument.
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