Good-Natured: On the Roots of Human Kindness

Originally published in 21 March 2025 on Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-159540266

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in his beautiful work Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020), turns our collective gaze toward the innate goodness of humanity. In this Substack series, I have and will explore themes inspired by Bregman’s argument—that human nature is, at its core, good—and bring in reflections from my own research among hunter-gatherer communities. Bregman revisits and reinterprets famous stories and examples that argue for the inherent evil of human beings, revealing how these cases have often been misunderstood or misrepresented. Stories that highlight the darker side of humanity tend to align with public opinion and thus sell better, he notes, but that doesn’t make them accurate.

Bregman begins his exploration with a powerful account of the London Blitz—and later the strategic bombings in Germany—during World War II. The military commanders responsible believed that sustained bombing would crush civilian morale and plunge society into chaos, ultimately giving them a strategic edge. They were wrong. Civilians regarded the bombings as a necessary evil, and in the face of destruction, human kindness blossomed. Despite the deaths and destroyed homes, people helped one another in a calm and polite manner. Many have even remembered the London Blitz with a strange fondness—a time when people were kind to each other.

Another striking story in Bregman’s book is that of a real-life Lord of the Flies scenario. William Golding’s 1954 novel depicts English schoolboys stranded on a deserted island, descending into savagery. Bregman went to great lengths to find a real-life equivalent and discovered a 1965 case where six teenage boys were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island near Australia (see Tongan Schoolboys). They survived for 15 months, and when they were finally found by chance, all were in good health—one had broken his leg, but the others cared for him, and by the time they returned, his leg had fully healed. The boys had grown food, built a gym, and kept a fire burning the entire time by rubbing sticks together.

Throughout Bregman’s work, there’s a deep faith in human kindness, supported by concrete evidence. Ancient hunter-gatherers were not primarily violent, and this also holds true for the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups today. Bregman suggests that humans have self-domesticated through sexual selection, gradually favouring traits that make us more cooperative and less violent. One telling example is from the Battle of Gettysburg, where numerous muskets were found loaded 20 times or more, as reloading provided a perfect excuse not to fire again. Bregman discusses other examples of extreme lengths soldiers have gone to avoid killing another human being.

For many Indigenous societies, violence toward others is an alien and even repulsive concept. Bregman recounts how the U.S. Navy showed Hollywood movies to the inhabitants of the small Ifalik atoll in the Pacific, hoping to foster goodwill. But the movies horrified the islanders. The on-screen violence was so distressing that they felt physically ill for days. Years later, when an anthropologist arrived, the locals still asked, “Was it true? Are there really people in America who kill other people?” There is a deep mystery at the heart of human history: if we have an innate aversion to violence, where did things go wrong?

I’ve been fortunate to spend time in the Kalahari Desert with local Ju/’hoan hunter-gatherers. This experience showed me just how different we Westerners are. Despite decades of exposure to Western culture and every imaginable injustice from our side, they remain open, happy, curious, cheerful, and helpful.

The people I met call themselves Ju/’hoansi, meaning “real people.” Many Indigenous groups refer to themselves, and others with similar lifestyles, simply as “people.” Today, the descendants of southern Africa’s hunter-gatherers, who still speak their ancestral languages, have accepted the general term San, which I have also used when referring broadly to southern African hunter-gatherers. The name likely derives from a derogatory Khoekhoe term meaning “those who live in the bush and eat from the ground,” or possibly from sonqua, meaning “thief.” Other names—Bushman, Boesman, Basarawa, Bakalahari—are colonial impositions. The Kalahari San are gradually moving away from traditional hunting: many now raise chickens and goats and supplement their diets with milk, grains, tea, and sugar. Thus, calling them hunter-gatherers is somewhat misleading.

During my first research expedition, I had three primary goals: 1) find examples of persistence hunting; 2) understand the link between persistence hunting and trance ceremonies; 3) document a persistence hunt. On my first day, it became clear that no one in the camp remembered anyone chasing down and catching a large antelope. Ultimately, however, I uncovered valuable insights into the relationship between hunting and ceremony, crucial for completing my doctoral dissertation Fragments of the Hunt: Persistence Hunting, Tracking and Prehistoric Art (2017).

Bregman’s book reignited a question that has long troubled me: if ancient and modern hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, nonviolent, and friendly, why do modern societies periodically elect authoritarian despots? The San of the Kalahari go to great lengths to avoid envy; anyone behaving selfishly or possessively is swiftly admonished.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006) writes that necklaces and other ornaments were common gifts among the San when researchers first visited in the early 1950s. This gift economy was called xaro (or hxaro). Valuable or desirable items and clothing were quickly given away as xaro gifts to prevent envy, preserving the delicate structure of small communities. Xaro partnerships could last a lifetime. The gift giver waited patiently for reciprocation, which would always eventually come. These gifts were carefully considered—metal knives or ostrich shell jewelry, for example—and the relationships they forged reduced jealousy, ensuring reciprocity and generosity. Trance dances were another key method of relieving social tension.

As seen with xaro, people invent ways to strengthen social bonds. In the San people’s case, avoiding envy was paramount. If someone produced something special and desirable, the person was eager to gift it away as xaro, preventing envy and securing her place in a chain of social esteem.

In the 1960s, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted obedience experiments to measure how far people would go in obeying authority, even when it involved immoral or inhumane actions. Participants were instructed to administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to others (who were actually actors). The study concluded that under authority, humans could commit extreme cruelty.

Milgram (1974) described this as obedience or “agentic state”—the individual sees themselves as an instrument for another’s wishes, not responsible for their own actions. This mentality was apparent after WWII, as the Nazi regime’s capacity for cruelty was examined. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), describes how destruction operated through a bureaucratic machine, where hierarchical actors worked together to solve the mundane and ”banal” problem of genocide.

Bregman argues that Milgram’s experiments are often cited as evidence of human cruelty, but they actually show that people commit harmful acts only under persuasion, believing they are doing good—like helping researchers get results. Milgram found that direct orders led to defiance; harsh commands didn’t work.

Psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher (2012) replicated the experiment and noted that participants wanted to collaborate with the persuading researcher. They were even grateful to be part of the study. Participants retrospectively appreciated the chance to contribute to human understanding.

The Myth of Progress

According to Rutger Bregman, good intentions were also behind the infamous Stanford prison experiment in 1971 (Zimbardo 1972). The same applied to David Jaffe, who originally came up with the idea and inspired Professor Philip Zimbardo to carry it out. When Jaffe persuaded the prison experiment guards to be more aggressive, he referred to the noble goals of the study. In other words, violent behaviour was encouraged, and the participants genuinely wanted to help. We are, by nature, good natured, as the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal (1996) has persuasively shown through his research on primate behaviour.

In the Kalahari, a small group of people still live a life that vaguely resembles the lifestyle of their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Many traditional skills remain well remembered, such as where to find edible plants and how to track animals. However, this is increasingly coloured by a shift toward a more Western way of life. They now drink black tea sweetened with sugar, and eat cornmeal with milk. All of this supplement a diet that was, until recently, sourced almost entirely from the natural environment.

A young hunter named Kxao introduced us to local plants. He showed us how a delicate leaf growing next to a bush belonged to a tuber plant rich in water. After digging it up, Kxao carefully refilled the hole and replanted the leaf so the tuber could continue living. He also cleaned up the mess left by a porcupine, which had rummaged through the ground in search of wild onion roots. Kxao tidied the area and replanted the fragile onion stems, explaining that the tubers are toxic to humans, but the young shoots are very nice and taste like spring onions. He also showed us plants that only kudu antelopes and other animals consume.

Humans have lived in the Kalahari continuously for about 100,000 years—perhaps even 200,000. It might seem like their way of life hasn’t changed, but this can be deceptive. They have coexisted with pastoralist neighbours since at least the 1950s and have interacted with other settlers for thousands of years. It would be wrong to say that their culture represents something ancient. The truth is that their lifestyle is just as susceptible to cultural changes—new ways of doing and thinking—as ours. What might appear ancient to us is actually their unique version of modern life style.

My research visit to the Kalahari called into me to question the legitimacy of modern industrialised civilisation and Western notions of “progress.” The San peoples once inhabited all of southern Africa, from Victoria Falls down to the Cape of Good Hope. Around 2,000 years ago, Khoekhoe pastoralists arrived from what is now northern Botswana and spread all the way to the southern tip of Africa. The Khoekhoe were quite similar to the San, but the main difference lay in their nomadic lifestyle and domesticated animals.

A few hundred years later, the first Bantu peoples arrived in the region. Compared to the smaller-framed San and Khoekhoe, the Bantus were giants. They originated from the Gulf of Guinea, in what is now Nigeria and Cameroon, where their migration began 3,500 years ago. However, it took thousands of years for their culture to reach southern Africa.

The Bantus had the advantage of technology. They were among the first farmers south of the Sahara, making pottery, keeping livestock, and crafting tools and weapons from iron. They also drank cow’s milk and had the genetic ability to digest lactose—unlike the hunter-gatherers of the south. These cultural adaptations and innovations enabled the Bantus to conquer much of sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Bantu languages are the most widely spoken on the African continent, with similar words found in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

The Bantu expansion dealt a heavy blow to the San, who had managed to coexist with Khoekhoe settlers. Now, the San were forced to vacate areas suitable for farming and grazing. Conflict ensued between the San, Khoekhoe, and Bantu. The San were branded as cattle thieves for killing livestock that intruded their lands. However, the real death knell for the San came in the late 1600s when the first European settlers began to seriously colonise southern Africa. Europeans allied with both the Khoekhoe and the Bantus and dehumanised the San, hunting them for sport.

Europeans devised derogatory terms for their new neighbours, like the infamous “Hottentots”—a Dutch slur meaning stutterer, used for both San and Khoekhoe. Due to physical and linguistic similarities, settlers lumped them into a single group, Khoisan.

Initially, the San lived alongside European settlers, who sometimes attempted to teach them new ways. Farmers even gave them livestock, but the San, accustomed to sharing everything equally, slaughtered the animals and distributed the meat evenly. The concept of owning animals was foreign to them because ownership defied sharing. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) began a full-scale war in the early 1700s against the indigenous peoples of northern South Africa, who were resisting settler expansion.

The VOC was the biggest megacorporation of its time—the founder of the world’s first stock exchange—and held near-sovereign powers: it could wage war, imprison and execute suspects, mint money, and establish colonies. By the end of the 18th century, the VOC authorized privately formed commando units to evict and, at times, kill any Khoisan they found. In 1792, they began paying bounties for captured Khoisan.

By the early 1800s, the Khoisan genocide in what is now the Cape Province and southern Namibia was nearly complete. In northeastern South Africa and present-day Lesotho, the Khoisan sought refuge. But in 1830, Dutch settlers reached these regions, kidnapped Khoisan children, and killed their parents. The seasonal animals that had sustained them for hundreds of thousands of years were hunted to extinction in the Drakensberg mountains, leaving the San starving.

Those who remained resorted to cattle theft, which was often punished by death. Between 1845 and 1872, colonial police forces ruthlessly hunted and killed all San they could find. The last San chief, Soai, was brutally murdered by members of the Sotho, a Bantu-speaking group, who disemboweled him on the banks of the Orange River in 1872. All San men were killed; women and children were marched to Leribe, where their descendants lived into the 20th century. The Khoisan who survived were forced to assimilate.

As late as 1870, only ten percent of Africa was under European control. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885, bringing together leaders from Europe, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States. Fourteen non-African nations were represented. A small group of white men determined the future of Africa and its people.

The Berlin Conference is often regarded as the formalisation of Africa’s colonisation. Its general act stated that any nation that claimed a portion of the African coast also gained the interior lands beyond it—without needing consent from local populations. King Leopold II of Belgium was granted control over what he dubbed the Congo Free State, initiating one of the bloodiest resource extractions in history. Over the next decade, around four million Congolese were brutally killed. The actual death toll might be higher; the Congolese population fell from 20–30 million to just eight million.

The partitioning of Africa spurred by the conference paved the way for Western incursion into the continent’s interior, ignoring tribal and ethnic boundaries. Territories were politely divided over a cup of hot tea or a glass of chilled gin. In 1884, only a tenth of Africa was under European control. By 1914, only a tenth remained under African rule. Only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.

Belgium was not the only nation to violently subjugate its new territories. The 20th century’s first ethnic cleansing took place in German-controlled Namibia, in an event referred as the Herero and Nama Genocide. The Herero (Bantu) and Nama (Khoekhoe) rebelled against their German overlords. With determination, organisation, and modern weapons, the Germans systematically exterminated around 100,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama by driving them into the Kalahari desert, away from drinkable water. By 1905, the remaining locals were imprisoned in the first German concentration camp on Haifischinsel (Shark Island), a peninsula off Lüderitz, Namibia. The camp was closed in 1907 after 1,000–3,000 people had died. By then, the last Southern African hunter-gatherers lived only in the Kalahari Desert.

Shark Island may have hosted the first German concentration camp—but it was not the last. Just over a decade later, in the summer of 1918, the Germans built their next concentration camps in Finland.

Originally published in 21 March 2025 on Substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-159540266

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Resources:

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press. LINK

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A Hopeful History. Bloomsbury. LINK

de Waal, F. B. M. (1996). Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Harvard University Press. LINK

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012). Contesting the nature of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies really show. PLoS Biology, 10(11), e1001426. LINK

Ijäs, M. (2017). Fragments of the Hunt: Persistence Hunting, Tracking and Prehistoric Art. Helsinki: Aalto University. LINK

Marshall Thomas, E. (2006). The Old Way: A Story of the First People. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. LINK

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Tavistock, London. LINK

Zimbardo, P. G. (1972). Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment. LINK