In Humankind, Rutger Bregman, focuses on human nature, cooperation, and social progress. He writes:
Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around. Thomas Hobbes, the old philosopher, could not have been more off the mark. He characterised the life and times of our ancestors as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but a truer description would have been friendly, peaceful and healthy. The irony is that the curse of civilisation dogged Hobbes throughout his life. Take the plague that killed his patron in 1628, and the looming civil war that forced him to flee England for Paris in 1640. The man’s take on humanity was rooted in his own experience with disease and war, calamities which were virtually unknown for the first 95 per cent of human history. Hobbes has somehow gone down in history as the ‘father of realism’, yet his view of human nature is anything but realistic (p, 93).
Bregman’s view is clearly aligned with Rousseau’s, which is that the human being is in essence a “noble savage.” Often, the difference between the Hobbesian and the Rousseauian personality seems to come down to where the person tends to direct their attention to the good or the bad when observing human behavior.
More fundamentally, there may not be a single answer to the question “are human beings fundamentally good and cooperative” that applies across all of human history. With emerging technology, will it mean the same thing to be human as it meant in the 17th century?