Rutger Bregmann is a historian who was born in the Netherlands in 1988. He has written an interesting book that gives us a different view of humanity. His book Humankind: A Hopful History, translated into 44 languages, could fit perfectly with the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas, whom he unfortunately does not mention in his book.
Thomas Aquinas argued that the eval has no independent existence, because it is a lack of good, and so even directed to the good, even failing horribly to approach it. So, Bregmann does not discuss the existence of human beings philosophically. But he chooses many historical facts and events as proof that man is basically good. Let’s let two quotations speak for themselves.
p. 415 of the German edition: “For a long time we have assumed that man is an egoist, an animal or worse. … This image of humanity and this view of our history have proven to be completely unrealistic.”
From page 402 he describes the following historical event, which took place in the First World War in 1914 as a spontaneous Christmas truce after more than a million deaths in the trenches:
“It wasn’t until 1981 that the BBC made a documentary, “Peace in No Man’s Land”, and it became clear that this wasn’t just a few rumors. Believe it or not, two-thirds of the British front was quiet during the holidays. In most cases, the initiative was taken by the Germans, who made friends with the British (even if this also happened on the Belgian and French fronts). In total, more than 100,000 soldiers laid down their arms.
And Christmas 1914 was not the only time that peace broke out spontaneously. It also happened during the Spanish Civil War, during the Boer War, during the American Civil War, during the Crimean War, and during the war that Napoleon waged against the rest of Europe……
We are also played off against each other by demagogues and hate preachers. Newspapers like the Daily Mail wrote about bloodthirsty Huns at the time, today they write about invasions of stealing, murdering and raping refugees who take away our jobs, are too lazy to work and meanwhile spoil Saint Nicholas and Santa Claus for us.
In this way, hatred is brought back into society. And this time not only through newspapers, but also through blogs and tweets, with lies on social media and toxic reactions to news reports. Even the best fact-checker seems powerless against the resentment and hostility that floods us on some days. But what if it worked the other way around? What if propaganda could not only incite us against each other, but bring us back together?”
A longer quote from the book published in 2019, which contains almost all the points of today’s hate preaching of the Trump/Vance campaign.
