Humankind: A Hopeful History

Crisis brought out not the worst, but the best in people.

the war ended, many British would yearn for the days of the Blitz, when everybody helped each other out and no one cared about your politics, or whether you were rich or poor.11

Farmers, by contrast, had to toil in the fields and working the soil left little time for leisure. No pain, no grain.

How did it come to this? Scholars think there were at least two causes. One, we now had belongings to fight over, starting with land. And two, settled life made us more distrustful of strangers. Foraging nomads had a fairly laid-back membership policy: you crossed paths with new people all the time and could easily join up with another group.25 Vil

Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.

When the conquistadors marched into the city in 1519 and entered its largest temple they were stunned to see huge racks and towers piled high with thousands of human skulls.

Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.21

I’m often reminded of what a Chinese politician said in the 1970s when asked about the effects of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s a little too soon to say,’ he allegedly responded.62

Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it’s not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that’s uniquely human. Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social – it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.