“In spite of everything I still believe that people are good at heart.”
It’s hard to read these beautiful words of the young Anne Frank without the shadow of Bergen-Belsen behind them. Surely, one thinks, she would have changed her mind amid the depravities of the concentration camp in which she died. The view of human nature since World War II, supported by several well-known psychological experiments, has been one of almost unremitting negativity.
But the first two words in the title of Rutger Bregman’s new book, Human Kind: A Hopeful History, have been deliberately separated. This…
