A MODERATE IN AN AGE OF EXTREMES:
RUTGER BREGMAN
PDF here:
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History translated by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
Rutger Bregman, Moral Ambition: How to Find Your Purpose translated from the Dutch by Erica Moore (London Bloomsbury, 2025)
The most interesting and appealing introduction to Rutger Bregman is probably his non-interview by Tucker Carlson of Fox News in February 2019.
Carlson had hoped to assert his own anti-globalist credentials by highlighting Bregman’s criticisms of Davos hypocrisy. It didn’t work. Bregman refused to allow Carlson to package and re-interpret his ideas, and called Carlson a millionaire at the service of billionaires. Carlson lost his temper with Bregman, swore at him, and—not surprisingly—Fox never broadcast the interview, although over four and a half million viewers have seen a partial version of the encounter on YouTube. Bregman remained courteous throughout, gently smiling, before commenting (accurately) that Carlson just couldn’t take the criticism.
Bregman is an ambitious and skilful author, his writing is breezy, upbeat and well-focused. His recent works are largely works of synthesis, taking existing strands of research and knitting them into something new. Most of his works are translated from Dutch, but they’ve none of that awkwardness and stiffness that often hampers translations. Bregman determinedly avoids brow-beating the reader with the weight of his knowledge and instead tries to approach major intellectual issues with something of the joy of a child approaching a really cool playground. Only 50 pages of the 450-page Humankind are filled with Bregman’s footnotes: that’s pretty moderate for a modern academic. Mostly, this kinda works, although sometimes Bregman’s folksy tone gets irritating. Professional academics predictably complain that the resulting works aren’t coherent. Maybe not, but this criticism ignores Bregman’s success in sketching out persuasive cases concerning complex, multi-faceted issues in a clear, readable manner. How many academics can make that claim?
Humankind returns to a profoundly political question: what is human nature? There’s the old, dark, Old Testament belief that we’re all sinners and our wickedness must be thrashed out of us. There’s a newer, technocratic Fabian-Stalinist approach that human nature is essentially plastic, and can be shaped, developed and improved by the modernizing forces of science. Bregman backs a third interpretation: basically, deep down, we’re pretty decent. He acknowledges that this must seem a strange interpretation in a world where the mass media bombard us everyday with pictures of atrocities. Bregman then turns this point on its head by discussing how these negative structures of interpretation shape the way we interact with the world around us.
Humankind is an exhilarating read. Elements of his arguments have already been circulated by David Graeber (particularly Bullshit Jobs), by Kropotkin (Mutual Aid) and, more distantly, by Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness). But that doesn’t take away from the simple, reader-friendly chattiness of Humankind. Colourful, interesting examples just keep coming. Were you impressed and depressed by Lord of the Flies? Bregman cites a real-life counter-example of schoolboys marooned on a desert island, where they learnt to work together. Doesn’t the savagery of wars reveal the reality of human nature? Bregman cites research about the extremely bloody Battle of Gettysburg: of 25,574 muskets recovered from the battle, astonishingly only 10% had been fired. More significantly still, many of these weapons had been loaded and re-loaded with shot several times, effectively rendering the weapon useless. Bregman’s explanation is that ordinary soldiers were unwilling to fire to kill, and used the performance of loading as an excuse not to fire. Humankind includes a fascinating mini-essay on the ambiguous history of Easter Island, moving it away from a tragic history of eco-disaster and turning it into a more mundane tale of the banal heroism of ordinary people facing challenges. There’s a hard-hitting critique of the damage done by ‘zero-tolerance’ approaches to crime, which is based on a suspicion and mistrust of all arrested. Towards the end of the work there’s a wonderful celebration of the educational potential of open-ended play. Anyone reading this book will come away with a sense that they’d learnt something, and maybe they’d be more willing to accept Bregman’s central lesson that we should trust each other a bit more.
In the last analysis, Bregman’s main point isn’t so much a naïve assertion that, deep down, we’re all good. It’s something more subtle, maybe along the lines of: look at what harm we do by assuming that everyone else is amoral scum.
Moral Ambition isn’t so successful. Bregman ends Humankind by stating his dislike of self-help literature, but in Moral Ambition he draws very close to writing a self-help book. The key principle seems to be drawn from an observation by the celebrated American anthropologist Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.’ Bregman echoes this in a more assertive tone: ‘The world is shaped by stubborn, obstinate, headstrong, hell-bent, wilful, relentless advocates.’ The observation is then twisted into an outright moral elitism: 80% of the world is, apparently, inactive and just waiting to follow leadership from the active elite. This seems to conflict with the evidence cited in the accompanying case study, concerning Dutch resistance to Nazism, where research suggests that sometimes firm religious convictions or strong political beliefs could be a factor in motivating resistance but, in general, Dutch resisters were pretty ordinary people. The situation shaped the resisters, not the other way round.
The bulk of Moral Ambition is formed by reasonably well-written sketches of prominent moral leaders: Ralph Nader, an American environmentalist, Thomas Clarkson, a British abolitionist, Rosa Parks, the initiator of the Montgomery bus boycott, and so on. There are some interesting observations on the sometimes limited nature of British abolitionism: was this clever tactical targeting or strategic moral blindness? Each of these strands is admirable in some way, but Bregman doesn’t succeed in drawing them together. We’re left with some prominent activists, some sensible (but limited) advice about social media and modern communications, some six-step frameworks for decision-making and some disappointingly shallow moral rhetoric.
At this point, Bregman’s careful refusal to declare his hand politically also grows frustrating. He rages against growing inequality, but doesn’t mention class. He criticizes bullshit jobs, but doesn’t consider the structures and hierarchies of late capitalism. He applauds abolitionism, but says little about structural racism or colonialism. He appeals to the conscience of CEOs and executives, without considering that greater pressure may be needed to make them change their policies. At times the constant optimism grates: ‘The climate movement is one giant jobs fair, with work for millions of moral ambitious people. It’s all hands on deck, because we have a mission to accomplish in the coming decades that knows no precedent.’ While the question-posing and paradigm-shifting of Humankind generally works well, Bregman is markedly less convincing in Moral Ambition.
In his 2025 Reith Lectures, Bregman described himself as an old-fashioned social democrat. The problem with this self-description is that leaves open what constitutes social democracy in today’s world: is it a full-blown capitulation to the forces of global capitalism, as proposed by Tony Blair and Keir Starmer? Or an independent and critical political tradition? If the second, where and how is it represented? Bregman’s articulate and interesting texts fail to provide an answer.
Sharif Gemie
