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krpalmerNoticing the book Humankind: A Hopeful History mentioned alongside The Dawn of Everything was enough to pique my interest. When I searched for Rutger Bregman’s book (translated from the Dutch) in the ebook lending service of my city’s library I’d (eventually) signed The Dawn of Everything out from, it turned up too. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as consciousness-expanding as the book I’d already read had been, but I was willing to feel encouraged by it too.
Bregman states the bold case that people in general are more decent than many things have convinced us to think. The translation made his points appealing to me, and his sources did seem solid as they countered certain cases from the third quarter or so of the twentieth century long invoked to argue for “man’s inhumanity to man.” With the first connection between books in mind, I did wonder if he was a bit more conventional about “how we wound up with spoiled cases in charge applying their own mindset to everyone else” than the arguments in The Dawn of Everything had developed, but he did seem to bring up a few points from the recent study of prehistory that had been used in the other book to suggest “maybe there are more ways to be happy than to live among no more than a hundred and fifty other hunter-gatherers.” Where The Dawn of Everything might have wound up saying “things could be quite different” without going much into first steps from the here and now, however, Bregman did manage to find positive alternatives in existence here and there.
I do have to admit the book was up against recent gloomy news, and Bregman did mention at a few points “don’t let news determine your reality.” At the same time, I did get to thinking that while “false equivalences” can get you into trouble, it’s also far too easy to get to thinking “they’re misinformed to the point of being dangerous, but their fears of us come from that same misinformation.” Maybe it did help a bit to have the book to hand when I did.
Bregman states the bold case that people in general are more decent than many things have convinced us to think. The translation made his points appealing to me, and his sources did seem solid as they countered certain cases from the third quarter or so of the twentieth century long invoked to argue for “man’s inhumanity to man.” With the first connection between books in mind, I did wonder if he was a bit more conventional about “how we wound up with spoiled cases in charge applying their own mindset to everyone else” than the arguments in The Dawn of Everything had developed, but he did seem to bring up a few points from the recent study of prehistory that had been used in the other book to suggest “maybe there are more ways to be happy than to live among no more than a hundred and fifty other hunter-gatherers.” Where The Dawn of Everything might have wound up saying “things could be quite different” without going much into first steps from the here and now, however, Bregman did manage to find positive alternatives in existence here and there.
I do have to admit the book was up against recent gloomy news, and Bregman did mention at a few points “don’t let news determine your reality.” At the same time, I did get to thinking that while “false equivalences” can get you into trouble, it’s also far too easy to get to thinking “they’re misinformed to the point of being dangerous, but their fears of us come from that same misinformation.” Maybe it did help a bit to have the book to hand when I did.