Everything in the world is not evil and dark

GUEST COMMENT: Optimism has been an underlying theme in my writing in this column on Aftenbladet. The world is better than we think and the climate crisis is not as devastating as we fear, so shrug it off. Also, people are not as horrible as we would like them to be.

The latter is an old message that reminds us of hippies and anarchists, and has also been completely shot down by “realists” who rightly point out what is happening in the real world: war, murder, greed. And Auschwitz.

How can we say that man is fundamentally good, against such a bloody backdrop?

Interesting and cheerful book

To explain it, we must first point out that the so-called “realists” overlook the good – obviously, we only seek, while the good ones like me must not forget the cruel. This is because man does not have an unequivocal “real” nature. To understand the dilemma, we need some evolutionary biology. It is an advantage for us to be kind and violent, but in different situations.

So we are the most peaceful and violent animals at the same time.

To my great delight, a Norwegian editor recently published “Most People Are Good” by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. He has great faith in human goodness, and on this occasion he amusingly disguises the so-called “realistic” view of us as a fundamental evil during a veneer of culture.

It is this view that has shaped our image of ourselves since Thomas Hobbes preached it in his “Leviathan” in 1651, while Bregman sided with another old man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his belief that humans we are fundamentally good, only kings and clergy leave us alone.

Bregman’s book is full of examples of historical events that researchers have presented as grotesque tales of human evil, and which upon closer inspection have shown that they are not. Easter Island is significant. Famous author Jared Diamond mentioned it in his 2004 book “Collapse”: The indigenous people of Easter Island caused an ecological disaster, and then they massacred and ate each other.

Later, other researchers examined the original sources and found they were misrepresented. The Easter Island story is about cooperation (and still gross stupidity), writes Bregman.

Evil and evil

So how “realistic” is the notion of the beast behind the veneer? If we look at Auschwitz, it obviously looks like this: we lose all inhibitions, only someone encourages us to lose them.

But who was behind and sustained the atrocities of the Holocaust? Were the people involved just ordinary people, picked up at random from the street? No, they weren’t, they were fanatical or evil, and even they had to be prepared to do what they did. The evil was far from “banal,” says Bregman.

Fans are obviously an additional problem. We can understand the bad guys, but the fans themselves think they’re good. They just have to do these bad deeds first, then everything will be much better later. This is the mentality that we find from the torture cellars of the witch hunters, through Adolf Eichmann, to the terrorists of today.

In any case, this is one side of human duality: the evolutionary biological logic that ensures that we are kind to those closest to us (even the commander at Auschwitz was a loving family man), while we can perform the most cruel acts. against those who are a little behind us. More distance.

Here it is reassuring to find in another book from last year, the biologist from “The Human Swarm” by Mark W. Moffett. One of the questions Moffet addresses is precisely how human beings, as one of the few animal species, can live in so-called “limited companies”, in societies in which we do not know most of the individuals we do know, simply because the societies are so big. As far as Moffett knows, only ants, bees, and very few mammals and birds can do the same, that is, recognize a “friend” they have never seen before. And the catch is the aforementioned “human kindness”: We are exceptionally tolerant of strangers.

How this may have evolved is too much to discuss here, so I close with a couple of encouraging anecdotes that Bregman brings up in his book. The first is more than an anecdote: it is the fact that men in war turn out not to be very interested in war. At least not killing. This was thoroughly emphasized during the Christmas celebrations of 1914, when the Germans and the British left the trenches to celebrate Christmas together.

Subsequently, the soldiers had to be coerced and threatened back in a state of war mood.

The model and reality

The other is “the lord of the flies of reality.” William Golding’s Nobel Prize winning novel “Lord of the Flies” is just that: a novel. An invention of a type who had never studied the phenomenon it described. However, the book has had a huge impact on our worldview: civilization and friendship disappear when a group of boys end up alone on a desert island. Therefore, the good is only a varnish.

But this is wrong, writes Bregman. In the real world, six children ages 13 to 16 were stranded on a Pacific island in 1965 and survived brilliantly, thanks to cooperation and friendship, for more than a year before being found.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the Los Angeles gang Canned heat, husker kanskje også “It’s the same everywhere: nice people wherever you go”?

Prof. in. Jan Erik Karlsen: “When we look back 30 years in time, to the year 2020, we realize that the lessons learned from the corona pandemic saved humanity and our divided society from extinction.”

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