Humankind: A Hopeful History

a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30

When a seventeenth-century missionary warned a member of the Innu tribe (in what is now Canada) about the dangers of infidelity, he replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’15

the ultimate placebo? Surgery! Don a white coat, administer an anaesthetic, and then kick back and pour yourself a cup of coffee. When the patient revives tell them the operation was a success. A broad review carried out by the British Medical Journal comparing actual surgical procedures with sham surgery (for conditions like back pain and heartbur

‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’14 Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist

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

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

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

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.

As media scientist George Gerbner summed up: ‘[He] who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour.’28