Social Tendencies

          Tuesday was a bad day. I woke up out of sorts. My spirits were low, my mind was dull and my actions clumsy. At the organic shop, I lacked the verve to banter with the staff and, while I was refilling our re-useable laundry-liquid container, fumbled at the tap and left a slimy puddle of overflow on the floor. “Sorry,” I said, blushing, “I’m having an off day.” We all have them, don’t we? There once was a fad for attributing them to biorhythms, a theory which proposes that one’s emotional, intellectual and physical prowess waxes and wanes in regular, calculable cycles. I now know this to be bunkum, yet still I turn to it instinctively.

          Since Tuesday, I have kept out of other people’s way (not difficult under the present circumstances) mainly reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman. His premise is that humans are inherently kind (as Rousseau proposed) not nasty (as Hobbes suggested). It’s a difficult argument to win, given the cruelties of which we are all too often capable, yet he sets about it methodically and I found myself willing him on. His main hurdle is that of our preconceptions, which he tackles first by comparing the fictional Lord of The Flies with a real life equivalent, the Ata Island marooning in 1965. The behavioural outcomes were completely opposite, yet most of us prefer to believe in the inevitability of Golding’s imagined Hobbesian dystopia. Bregman’s explanation for this is that we have been conditioned – by our prevailing culture – to believe that civilised, social behaviour is merely a thin veneer that disguises our base natural instincts. The fact that scientific behavioural studies may prove otherwise counts for nothing when weighed against contradictory myths that have become so embedded that they are accepted at face value and lies that have been repeated so often as to attain the status of truth. Occasionally there is a breakthrough – a happy concurrence between science and popular myth – as in the experiment that demonstrated something we all know to be true, that BMW drivers are the most selfish of all. But this only causes us to say, “I told you so!”

          If I’m not careful, this period of lockdown could sway me towards the Hobbesian view of things. All the world’s woes seem to be projected through the lens of sociopathic leaders who have been elected on the populist vote. Can the majority be so wrong? But then again, I might be experiencing a mild case of the lockdown blues, so I take heart from the fact that there are some good things happening as well. Like the recent outbreak of statue-toppling, a refreshing development in so far as it represents a rebellion against acceptance of history as white supremacism and the resulting skewed status quo. While some of our public statues have been erected to commemorate worthy persons or heroes, others are nothing more than selfies in stone (or bronze), yesteryear’s equivalent of social media self-promotion, in which wealth – however acquired – is passed off as merit. Better they be placed in a museum (at their owners’ expense) with a full account of their “achievements”.

          Bregman looks for the origins of human behaviour in pre-historic times with an attempt to explain how homo sapiens prevailed over the other hominid species. His conclusion is that our winning formula is a combination of sociability, trust and a GSOH, all policed by conscience and our unique propensity to blush (qualities absent in sociopaths). If he is right and we are essentially good, kind and considerate there is reason to be optimistic. Unwanted it certainly is, but the corona virus pandemic is obliging us to change our way of life and future expectations, like it or not, and I see this as an opportunity for Rousseau to prevail.