Or, are we fundamentally good or evil?
Happy Sunday. Unless you’ve been living on another planet or have managed to avoid the news (good on you), then you might have heard about the assasination of a public figure in the United States.
There’ve been countless think pieces, social media hot takes, media articles and news reports, many of which qualify the assasination as either “justified” or “despicable”, with little or no room for nuance. I’m not here to contribute to the ever-growing pool of reactions and thoughts and opinions and endless commentary on the subject.
What I’d rather do, is share a post I wrote back in 2022, which feels more relevant than ever in the face of ever-increasing polarisation. Granted, the essay’s thesis centres around art and creativity, partly because that’s what I tend to think and write about, but also because I truly believe creativity is integral to a good life and art makes life worth living. That said, if there’s one thing I’d love for you to take away from this post, it’s the idea that our humanity is what we make of it. In other words, every day there’s the potential to make things a little better, and we have the will and ultimately the power to do so.
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This week I’ve been reading Humankind by Rutger Bregman. I’ve followed his work for a few years ever since I came across a TED talk he gave, titled poverty isn’t a lack of character, it’s a lack of cash. The gist of the talk is that we need to rethink the whole idea of poverty. Bregman's thesis is that people aren't poor because they have character flaws; rather, people have character flaws because they're poor. If you struggle to follow this, as I did when I first came across the talk, the idea is that we as a society think about the cause and effect of poverty in a backwards manner. In other words, the prevailing belief, as echoed by (typically right-leaning) politicians is that poor people are bereft of morals and they have flaws that cause them to mismanage money, leading them to poverty. This belief is further bolstered by those who suggest that the solution isn't to give the poor more money because they'll just mismanage this money as well.
We hear and see this all the time; recently the British news waves were filled with the debate over whether to take away the £20/week that was added to the universal credit payments during the pandemic. We heard from recipients of the payments, who pleaded with the government to not take it away because they struggled to make ends meet as it was, and hence short-changing them of £1024 a year would only worsen their economic situations. All the while, we also heard from politicians (again, usually the right-leaning ones) who argued that the £20/week was always meant to be a temporary solution and that the recipients didn't really need it anyway. A handful of those politicians went so far as to suggest that the recipients spent those payments on booze and cigarettes. We've heard this many times before and since. The conversations around the free school lunches for less privileged kids followed the same scripts. There are many examples of statements, debates and news headlines that echo the sentiment that the poor only have themselves to blame for their condition. But is this really the case?
Rutger Bregman offers an opposing view, with data and research to back it up. One study of sugar cane farmers in India looked at the IQs of farmers before and after harvest. Now, the harvest is a big event that happens once or twice a year, which means the farmers are poor right before the harvest and rich afterwards. The study showed that their IQs jumped by several points after harvest, which means that quite literally, the farmers were much smarter when they had more money from their harvest. This increased intelligence, or cognitive capacity as it manifests, translates to other aspects of their lives. When they had more money, they were unencumbered by worries of a financial nature, and thus they freed up cognitive cycles to make better decisions. In other words, those farmers, and people generally, tend to make better decisions when their basic needs are met, such that they don't have to worry about where their next meal will come from, or how to pay their children’s medical bills, or how to heat their homes. But take away this safety net, and people are left with no choice but to agonise over how to feed their kids or pay for heating, and with much of their cognitive capacity taken up by these worries, there's little left to devote to day-to-day reasoning that the fortunate and privileged take for granted.
This, by the way, is the basic tenet behind the Universal Basic Income (UBI) idea. When people are guaranteed a source of income, no questions asked, they are empowered to use their resources (their time, energy, brains etc) in productive and creative ways, and society benefits as a result. This idea isn't new; if you're well-versed in Western politics and history, you've likely come across the UBI idea before. It's been tried and tested in select regions, with studies showing its efficacy, but for reasons unclear, much of society remains unconvinced or unaware.
This post isn't about UBI or the relationship between poverty and character. I devoted the opening sections of this post to those topics merely to illustrate a sentiment that's all too prevalent in today's media – a cynical view of humanity. Enter Rutger Bregman's book – Humankind – which has been such a breath of fresh air for me this week. At its core, the central idea in the book is that humanity is good, people are kind, generous and welcoming, and when push comes to shove, people lift each other up rather than put each other down.
Now, this sounds extremely naive, the kind of thing only a child would say because they've not been exposed to the harsh 'realities' of the real world. After all, how else would you explain not one but two world wars, countless regional wars and massacres, countless terrorism acts, the Holocaust, and numerous other brutal acts humans have perpetrated since the beginning of time? How can anyone believe that humanity is good and decent at its core when there's so much evidence to the contrary?
One answer to the questions posed above is that while these heinous acts did in fact take place, the circumstances and motivations surrounding and driving their occurrence have been gravely misunderstood and misinterpreted. This isn't to downplay the unfortunate facts of these crimes against humanity, but rather to understand them because there's the potential to see people (past and present) in a whole new light when we examine the facts. For instance, people often point to the Holocaust as the prime example of humanity at its worst. For decades we've stood baffled by how seemingly everyday people (turned Nazis) could perpetrate these acts, and how everyone else (the German populace) just stood by and watched, doing nothing as their friends and neighbours were taken to slaughter, one after another.
Psychologists have even conducted experiments to attempt to understand and explain this. Perhaps you've heard of Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment, or Stanley Milgram's shock machine experiment? These are two of the prime examples that made news headlines and continue to feature in Psychology 101 classes and textbooks. These studies show that you can take everyday people and subject them to conditions that bring out the worst in them, simply by changing their environment (like simulating a prison, in Zimbardo's Stanford experiment) or affirming authority (by prompting them to follow absolute instructions given by a fellow in a lab coat, in Milgram's shock experiment). The upshot of the findings is that people like you and I may start to behave like depraved beings, and can be driven to inflict pain and suffering on our fellow humans just because we've been instructed to do so. These constitute neat explanations for decades of war and genocides, because when subjected to the trenches and front lines, we may put our humanity aside and embrace the 'kill or be killed' mentality as the prison study suggests, and similarly, when instructed to perform that most heinous crimes by superiors and authority figures, all sense of morality flies out the window.
Except, the explanations posed by these studies are too neat and too sensational. Moreover, they've been debunked and have failed replication tests many times. What this means is that those studies don't explain what we think they explain and are thus false representations of the state of humanity. Yet, for decades, they've prevailed in pop psychology circles and they remain popular as explanations for the worst humanistic tendencies. You might wonder why studies that have been debunked in academic circles continue to make the rounds in the press and pop science publications; it seems to me that they remain (unjustly) popular despite being debunked precisely because they're neat and sensational. We love things that explain complex phenomena in simplistic ways that draw straight lines between causes and effects. But the world isn't that simple.
You also wonder what this has to do with anything, or why this discussion features in a post on a creativity blog. Well, creativity, at its core, is about expression. Art is about expressing and conveying humanity in all its glory and fallibility. Art captures and communicates everything that makes us human, hence creatives are sort of custodians of humanity – our emotions, our stories, and our lives. The songs we sing, the narratives we construct, and the images we paint all capture and communicate a view of humanity that mirrors the views we hold in our hearts. If creatives believe deep down that the human condition is a paragon of evil, this belief will show forth in art. Conversely, if creatives hold a view of humanity that emblematises good nature, it'll be self-evident in artistic creations. If this follows, then we as creatives owe it to ourselves and the world to represent the breadth and depth of the human condition in all its glory.
This is particularly crucial in an age where the press and media would have us believe the worst in humanity, that our neighbours are out to get us, that they don't care about us, that at the end of the day, it’s everyone for him/herself. This media narrative isn't new, it's been around for several decades at least, and it's only now more prominent because everything, especially bad news, travels further in the social media age. How do I know this isn't new? Because way back in the 60s (at least) there were stories circulating the news waves that painted the most apathetic picture of humanity. One such story you might have heard is the story of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was stabbed multiple times in an inner city neighbourhood, ultimately leading to her demise. As the story goes, dozens of her neighbours idly looked on and failed to lift a finger while her assailant stalked, pursued, and stabbed her repeatedly. The narrative surrounding this story was one that cast this incident as a prime example of how nobody cares for each other anymore, how city people mind their business and don't even bother to call the cops when their neighbours are being attacked, and how humanity has grown increasingly distrustful and unhelpful, even in the face of tragedy.
Except, just like Milgram's and Zimbardo's experiments, the tragic story of Kitty Genovese isn't all that it's made out to be. True, she was stalked and stabbed to death. But it is untrue, blatantly false even, that her neighbours failed to intervene. They called the cops, they came to her aid upon realising what was going on (albeit not quickly enough to stop the bleeding), and their vigilance and camaraderie paid off when an unfamiliar face was suspected of burglary two days later, which led to her killer being brought to justice. In other words, the moral of the Kitty Genovese story isn't that inner city living is characterised by loneliness, individualism and apathy for fellow humans as the media would have us believe. Rather, the true story is one of togetherness and justice. What's more, is that perhaps there's a secondary, almost meta moral to the story, and it's that the press outlets have a penchant for spinning events in a negative light because bad news sells, thus leaving us to falsely believe the worst of our fellow humans.
Unfortunately, this tendency to believe the worst often manifests as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This phenomenon has been widely studied, documented, and even named the Pygmalion effect, from Greek mythology, or the Rosenthal effect, named for the psychologist Robert Rosenthal who studies and popularised the phenomenon. The gist of this phenomenon is that when we believe the worst in people, we expect the worst of them, and this colours our attitudes and behaviours towards them, causing them to act in ways that seem consistent with the negative beliefs we hold toward them, and so a vicious cycle takes hold and manifests in perpetuity. As you'd expect, the reverse also holds – believe the best in people and this will show in one's attitudes towards them, causing them to exhibit positive traits that match our positive beliefs. This has been studied and found in schools (as Rosenthal and his colleagues demonstrated), such that when teachers expect that certain students will do well, they show them more attention, leading them to perform better than their counterparts for whom such high expectations weren't exhibited, and vice versa.
All these fill me with hope for humanity. It makes me feel like I have the power to will a better world by merely believing in my fellow humans, and acting accordingly. It also makes me conscious of the tone of my art – my music, my stories, my essays – and the power at my fingertips as a creator and consumer of art. At the end of the day, I know the kind of world I'd like to live in. The good news is that I can begin to take the first steps in bringing that world to fruition, and it all begins in my mind.
My new album, Hope on the Horizon, is out everywhere now. Not a fan of streaming and want to support my music? You can download a digital version or buy a CD now here. Thank you for listening, spreading the word, and reaching out to share your thoughts. I appreciate it. Have a great week.