Are we nicer than we think?

Kindness, cooperation, soldiers who refuse to shoot, getting horny for the Oscars, and the drawbacks of being civilized.

Feb 23, 2023

It’s a Sunday afternoon in 1995—

—and I’m sitting in front of a MacIntosh Quadra, staring at a blank WordPerfect document. I have an essay due tomorrow for my Grade 10 English class and I haven’t written a single word. In fact, I haven’t read the book it’s meant to be about.

From our discussions in class, I know a few important things about this novel, which was written by some German guy (or maybe girl?—hard to tell): the protagonist’s name is Paul, the story takes place somewhere in Germany during the First World War. This certainly isn’t enough to fill ten pages, but as the minutes tick down, I don’t reach for my frayed paperback copy of the novel and try to desperately speed-read a few chapters—I reach for a different book altogether: the 1991 edition of Roger Ebert’s Home Movie Companion.

This is how I’m going to write an essay about a book I’ve never read—and also how I’m going to get the best mark in the class.

I was recently on vacation—

—with some dear friends, and as we made conversation by the side of the pool, or at the beach, or over dinner, I found myself incessantly saying the same thing:

“IN THE BOOK I’M READING IT SAYS THAT…”

This was probably very irritating for my travel companions, but I couldn’t help myself: every topic that came up, every observation we made, every single thing that happened to us throughout the day seemed to bear some vital connection to the book I was reading. Whether we were discussing our shared parental anxieties, or Chinese spy balloons, or the latest must-watch HBO series, or the moral conundrum of how much and how often to tip the staff at an all-inclusive resort, the book I was reading seemed to offer an explanation about how and why it was all happening. I was giddy with wisdom, and wanted to share it.

What was the book I was ruining everyone’s vacation by relentlessly talking about?

Humankind, by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.

Even if you don’t recognize his name, you may have heard of the viral moments which made him semi-famous: he’s the guy who was invited to sit on a panel at the Davos Economic Forum only to flip the script by berating all the billionaires in attendance for not paying their taxes.

After that, he was invited onto FOX News, where he proceeded, in a calm and rational way — one might say, a very Dutch way — to provoke Tucker Carlson into a profanity-laced tantrum that resulted in the entire segment being scrapped.

Such behaviour will, of course, earn you a profile in the New York Times. In it, Bregman is compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, “young activists whose radical alternatives have begun to garner mainstream acceptance.”

So, what is the “radical” idea at the centre of Bregman’s new book? Simply this: that contrary to our grim view of human nature, homo sapiens are actually hardwired for kindness and cooperation—and that this instinct is our great evolutionary advantage.

It turns out we’re nicer than we think.

The drawbacks of being civilized.

It has long been argued that civilization — the complex system of shared beliefs and practices in which we have lived since the agricultural revolution — is what differentiates us from other animals. Infrastructure, regulation, social stratification—these things cured us of our violent impulses. To be civil is to be diplomatic, polite, and above all reasonable.

But what if it was the other way around? What if we were doing just fine when we were hunting and gathering, and it was civilization that made us greedy and violent? If homo sapiens evolved to be friendly and cooperative — if this behaviour is what made us the most successful species on the planet — why is the world we currently live in founded upon the antithetical premise? The checks and balances in our governmental systems are put in place because we can’t possible believe that anyone in power would not try to abuse it. Capitalism itself operates on the premise that people are exclusively motivated by personal profit: in Adam Smith’s famous example, a baker would never make a loaf of bread for another person without expectation of payment.

Throughout the book, Bregman presents abundant evidence that human beings are, in fact, inherently kind and selfless, and that many of the crises we face today — economic, social, and existential — can be tied to our fundamental misunderstanding of our own nature.

Our belief becomes what sociologists dub a “self-fulfilling prophecy”…if we believe that most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment.

A perfect example of how this assumption influences the stories we tell about ourselves happens to be one of the films nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars.

All Quiet on the Western Front—

—is a brutally violent, relentlessly immersive, deeply nihilistic film. For two-and-a-half hours mortars explode, gunshots echo, young men scream and cry and bleed, and when they’re not screaming and crying and bleeding they’re hanging dismembered from the tops of trees or filleting each other with bayonets. The camera glides — lovingly, it seems — across muddy fields strewn with mangled bodies. The musical score is an atonal chord that sounds like a malfunctioning dishwasher. The weather is perpetually grey, as are the faces of everyone who appears onscreen.

As you watch a film like this, you might think that this is a very realistic depiction of the First World War.

But is it?

Here’s a quote from the French filmmaker Francois Truffaut:

Some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.

I’ve always understood that to mean that war movies are, by their nature, inherently exciting, and can therefore never quite avoid promoting violence. And it seems like filmmakers have spent the last several decades trying to prove Truffaut wrong. When Francis Ford Coppola was asked whether Apocalypse Now was a realistic depiction of the Vietnam War, he famously boasted his film was Vietnam. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, there were reports that veterans of the D-Day landings who were in attendance had to leave the theatre because they were so traumatized by the authenticity of what they saw onscreen.

Whether you find these films exciting or not, there’s one important feature that they all possess: gunfire. There’s always lots of shooting. You might say that the clattering of a machine gun is the defining sound effect of a war movie. Watching these very realistic films, you might think: soldiers did a lot of shooting in these wars.

However, IN THE BOOK I’M READING IT SAYS THAT only 13-18 percent of soldiers in the Second World War actually fired their weapons.

And it turns out that soldiers who refuse to shoot isn’t a modern circumstance. A French Colonel in the 1860s observed that his soldiers were firing over the enemy’s head on purpose, and were constantly finding any excuse they could to not fire their weapons. 90-percent of the muskets recovered from the Battle of Gettysburg were still loaded—and many of them were loaded multiple times, which meant that soldiers were repeatedly loading their guns instead of firing them.

Samuel Marshall, a colonel and one of the most respected historians of his generation, observed this phenomenon firsthand at the Battle of Makin in the Second World War, and went on to study it for the rest of his career. He wrote:

The average and normally healthy individual…has such an inner usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility and at the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.

So, it turns out that soldiers don’t like to shoot—which is not the impression you get after watching All Quiet on the Western Front.

I have no doubt that the The First World War was horrific, and that life in the trenches was appalling. But in telling stories about these important periods of history — that is, in exercising our evolutionary superpower to share and learn — are we doing ourselves a disservice by exaggerating our brutality?

As Bregman notes of violence in war films:

The image cooked up by Hollywood has about as much to do with real violence as pornography has with real sex.

Horny for an Oscar

While All Quiet on The Western Front is the first-ever German-language film to be nominated for Best Picture, the German cultural establishment isn’t so keen on the film. In fact, they kind of despise it. There are complaints about historical inaccuracies, and claims that the source material — still much beloved in its homeland — has been vulgarized by filmmakers who are “horny for an Oscar.” As Rebecca Shuman writes in a Slate piece with the totally objective headline “Germans are Right to Hate All Quiet on the Western Front”:

Throughout the culture pages of the venerable German press, [All Quiet] has not merely been panned. It’s been—to name a few random examples—machine-gunned, gassed, grenaded, bayoneted, shelled, tank-crushed, blowtorched, suspended as a headless legless torso from a tree—and, at long last, stabbed ineptly in a forgotten crater and left to gurgle itself to a helpless demise for an interminable number of minutes.

One German pundit goes so far as to wonder whether or not the film’s director, Edward Berger, had even read the novel his film was based on. “Had the characters not borne the same names as those in the book,” he writes, “it would be difficult to find noteworthy parallels between the two works.”

If it’s true that Berger hasn’t read the book and he goes on to win an Academy Award, it won’t be the first time someone has received accolades for faking their way through an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel.

My Grade 10 essay—

—on All Quiet on the Western Front began in the exact same way as Roger Ebert’s 1986 review of Oliver Stone’s autobiographical Vietnam film Platoon: with a quote from French filmmaker Francois Truffaut about the impossibility of making an anti-war film.

From there I went on to describe (with lengthy excerpts to pad out the page count) how viscerally Remarque’s prose captured the horrific conditions of war, and how the brilliance of his writing proved Truffaut’s point: that to write beautifully about war was to make war seem beautiful. I came to a very brave and intellectually nuanced conclusion: that war was bad, and that human beings were bad for inventing it.

I clearly didn’t understand very much about the First World War in Grade 10. I apparently didn’t understand the merits of Early 20th Century German literature, either. But I did understand the language of the Literary Essay, and knew how to generate, from thin air, grandiloquent statements about theme and character and symbolism.

I't’s true, I got the best mark in the class. Which is no slight against my English teacher, who was very smart, very discerning, very encouraging. Perhaps she knew that my talent for taking scraps of information and fashioning them into something that seems on the surface to possess a compelling internal logic, would serve me well in life. As you know, I have enjoyed a somewhat successful career in the field marketing.

And I’ve still never read that book.

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