An initial response to Rutger Bregman's "Humankind"

I've had a look through a sample of Rutger  Bregman's "Humankind" (Bloomsbury, 2020, ISBN 978-0316418539 [I haven't bought it yet, so can't give an e-book ISBN because Amazon - arrogantly, to force others to use only their systems - refuse to use those], Amazon), and I am quite impressed. In fact, even before finishing the sample, I've moved it into my "buy when I can afford it" wishlist.

The book is helping me to crystallise some ideas I've been considering for some time now, and I'm going to further develop that consideration by writing out my current reflections. These are preliminary, and are likely to change as I think about them further - in particular, once I read Mr Bregman's book (I may have to get his earlier book - "Utopia for Realists").

So . . . there are a few problems that can happen in human rights advocacy that seem, to me, to be fairly widespread - and, to some extent, these happen elsewhere in life as well.

One is that people are on different parts of the learning curve on any particular topic.

Probably the simplest and clearest way to make that apparent is consider the topic of sex. Kids often go through a stage where they discover sex, it is new and wonderful to them, and, against all logic (how did you come into existence kids? Well, some where through medical intervention, but for many, it was their parents' experience of sex - a point which causes millions of kids to go "eww"), they think they know more about it than their parents.

The same sort of learning curve happens in human rights - especially, in my experience / from my perspective, with regard to the amount of forbearance one is prepared to give others on their misconduct.

As an example, trans (transsexual and transgender) and gender diverse (TGD) people who are transitioning are facing tremendous insecurity and threats against their livelihood, even in more progressive nations, and thus may feel compelled to accept things like misgendering (to some extent) or favour education over legislative or, in a company, disciplinary approaches, as the price for keeping their job.

I was the same - I even helped organise education of my colleagues.

However, now, three decades later, I am aware that a minority of people are just bad - no matter how much you educate them, they will misgender, deadname, and abuse any one else who is different or vulnerable.

On top of that, the bigots will use things like asking pronouns as a way to abuse TGD people. The idea that people need to be educated, or that one's gender identity needs to be made clear at first meeting , is a TOOL for the bigots to use, a device to enable people to avoid facing their personal flaws and shortcomings, and a lie.

I met people in the 80s and 90s who did NOT need education or a formal exchange of pronouns (actually, my exchange it that it is only the TGD person expected to humiliate themselves this way: I'll believe otherwise when around 80% of cisgender people exchange their pronouns - with other cisgender people - at first meeting as a matter of course, as simply and automatically as saying "hello" or exchanging names) before treating TGD people with respect, consideration, and good manners. Because of having met those people, I KNOW that   every  single  person  who  insists  on a  formal  "exchange"  of pronouns  or prior  education  is  a  liar  and  less  of  a  human  being  for  it.

When I transitioned, the bigots didn't like it that I wouldn't go to the company's end of year break up party because I refused to spend time with bigots - they failed to consider that, just as they chose to judge me, so too could I judge them - in my case, I wasn't pre-judging them for being different, I was judging them for their demonstrated shortcomings as human beings, as shown by their bigotry.

Unfortunately, those people were largely the type of psychopath that, at that time, tended to rise to leadership of companies, the sort of people who Bregman describes along the lines of rich people who, from positions of leadership in several wars, judged the likelihood of mass panic in response to bombing by the way their own selfish, flawed personalities would react - and were shown to be wrong, not only by Londoners during the blitz, but also by others, including Germans in the same war, and the Vietnamese a couple of decades later.

(Not all rich people are like this - some are genuine in their philanthropy, for example. If there is a problem, part of it, I suspect, lies with those who were born into poverty and had their characters warped by the effects of private schools etc - the sort of active social engineering "on the playing fields of Eton and Rugby" that led to the violent expansion of the English empire.)

These days, we're starting to go back to the older, pre-"greed is good" era of company leaders being stewards of their company's resources and accepting broader social obligations (see Robert  Reich's "The Common Good" for more on that topic).

We're coming out the other side of some cycles. In the case of companies, a cycle that has lasted around a half century; in the case of human rights, a cycle that has lasted for millennia.

But throughout that, there have been people of decency - people who sometimes get quite upset that others are not as caring or progressive as they are, and Bregman writes about those people, and how widespread they are. (I found the contrast between what was reported and what actually happened after Cyclone Katrina quite disturbing.)

Bregman also gives the analogy of the two wolves fighting to illustrate the competing influences within individuals. That's about as far as I've got, but that analogy also applies to society as a whole.

Where the bad wolf is winning, as happens with, for instance, misgendering, deadnaming, murder and other forms of abuse in the case of individuals, laws are needed to - to borrow from the great Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. - restrain the heartless. It doesn't matter that the heartless are probably victims themselves: they need to be restrained for the sake of their victims - violence spreads, as the Cure Violence model shows, and thus must be contained, just as with an infection.

More broadly, that also applies, to some extent, to hate, fear, and the idea of difference, all of which are currently being exacerbated by the ideological responses some people are having to the pandemic or to the lockdown. (Why? Blindly caught up in their parents' ideas? Some of those are good, some are bad, mind you. Some other reason? What is the cause of that error in each particular problem person - and the reasons will be many and varied, probably more than the number of people involved.)

That illustrates the application of the two wolves fighting analogy to society as a whole.

On that, and going back to the human rights learning curve, education is good - but as a general, preventive idea. All society needs to educated, and from an early age, to counter the active and evil  social engineering that teaches children to hate, fear, etc.

In an active situation between people where respect for human rights is needed, the people's need for their human rights to be respected (being a bigot is NOT a human right) and, if needed, enforced is more paramount than the longer term, preventive need for education.

Since our society unfairly puts a lot of pressure onto those at the centre of these situations, there is another aspect to be considered, and that is how many spoons of courage people have at a particular time. It takes a lot of spoons to get to deal with being TGD despite society's attempts at social conditioning: there may be no more spoons left to deal with the bullying of a bigot, and thus the easy, short tern way out is chosen. That is human, understandable, and flawed.

This is where those around people at the centre of targetting on human rights issues have a role to play: it is up to them to muster their spoons of courage, and be a bystander who steps in, in some way - to be human beings who fulfil the sort of promise that Rutger Bregman is writing of.