four police officers in the american city of minneapolis have been sacked, following the death of a black man, who was arrested and pinned down by his neck in the street. video of the incident shows the man, george floyd, groaning and repeatedly telling officers that he can't breathe. twitter has, for the first time, prompted readers to check the facts relating to a tweet by president trump. the social network has placed a notification under a posting in which mr trump criticises plans to expand postal ballots, which he says will lead to voterfraud. doctors at one of the hospitals hit hardest by coronavirus in the uk have spoken of their fears of a second wave of infections, as the country's lockdown restrictions loosen. clinicians at the royal london hospital said they were better prepared than four months ago but still concerned. now on bbc news, hardtalk.

welcome to hardtalk, i am stephen sackur. in times of crisis we learn plenty about who we really are. so it is that this global coronavirus pandemic is revealing truths about humankind. how we balance self protection against the collective interest. my guest today is that dutch writer and historian, rutger bregman, whose book, humankind a hopeful history, is making waves across the world. do we humans underestimate our capacity for doing good?

rutger bregman in the netherlands, welcome to hardtalk. thanks for having me. we are all living in this time of covid—19. it is a global health emergency and, in times of emergency, perhaps we learn more than usual about the nature of human beings, what do you think this pandemic right now is showing us about humanity? i think it is showing us most people are actually pretty decent and that, especially in the next of a crisis, most people at least show their better selves, and this explosion of cooperation and altruism. an explosion of altruism.

i'm wondering how you process the other scenes we have seen of people at times literally fighting to get essential supplies from the shops and we have seen people blaming each other and scapegoating outsiders for spreading the virus. we have seen lots of very difficult things as well. and i am not denying any of that. i am just saying that for every toilet paper hoarder there are a thousand nurses and 10,000 people doing their best to stop this virus from spreading further. i think we really have to get away from this old idea that civilization is only a thin veneer and that as soon as something happens, an earthquake or a disaster or a pandemic, that we reveal our true selfish self. we have a lot of evidence from sociology going all the way back to the 1960s, hundreds of case studies that show especially during times of crises, most people start to co—operate together, whether they are left—wing or right—wing, rich, poor young or old. i was looking at social media before coming on air

with you and i was noticing the vitriolic debate in the united states between those citizens who want to see society opened up, the economy motoring again and others who believe that that represents a capitalist instinct to put money before people. regular citizens on both sides of the argument are knocking lumps out of each other and we see that all the time on social media. you know twitter and social media is not real life. we have to remember that human beings have evolved over thousands of years to communicate with each other on a face—to—face basis. we have been designed by evolution to be friendly to each other. so biologists literally talk about this process of survival of the friendliest, which means for thousands of years it was actually the friendliest that the most kids and the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation and you can see this in our body still today. one very fascinating and peculiar fact about human beings is that we are the only species

in the animal kingdom apart from some parrots that blush. we have this ability to involuntarily give away our feelings to show that we care what they think about us. that is a very fascinating thing and shows us that we have been designed by evolution to co—operate and work together. obviously if you go on twitter and see all the vitriol there, you may get a different impression but that is not real life. this book of yours which is causing quite a stir around the world, humankind: a hopeful history, it seems to me in its ambition and its span, it really nods to all of human history, that the evolution of civilization and for millennia, what it seems to be doing really goes back to the age old philosophical meditation as to whether human beings are intrinsically good are sort of born innocent and pure,

or whether within them and within human nature there is something that takes us toward sin and bad things. is that the fundamental argument that you are wrestling with? i think so yes. there is this old idea in western culture that civilization is a thin veneer and scientists call it veneer theory and it goes back to the ancient greeks and if you read in ancient greek, he talks about the plague in athens or civil war and yet this observation that people are just selfish and animals and if you read the early christian church father, saint augustine, same idea. that we are born as sinners and you read the enlightenment philosophers, also often emphasise that in the end people are selfish or at least politically we have to assume that when we build a society. and i think that idea is just wrong.

it is fundamentally wrong. and in the past couple of decades we have seen scientists from diverse disciplines, sociologists, and archaeologists moving from a cynical view of human nature to a more hopeful view of human nature and what i am trying doing in this book is to connect the dots and show that something bigger is going on there. are you saying far from that, that people are selfish and bad, that fundamentally people are good? no, absolutely not. we are not angels and we are not fundamentally good. i would say most people in the end are pretty decent which is different and what you assume from other people is what you get out of them so if you assume most people are selfish and just want to get as much for themselves as possible then they will design your society in such a way and create institutions that will bring out the worst in each and every one of us and i think we have been doing

that for the past a0 years. we designed schools and marketplaces and markplaces and democracies in ways that have not brought out the best and asked. in ways that have not brought out the best in us. our view of human nature can be a self—fulfilling prophecy. but we did not design everything from shopping malls and political governance on a whim. we were also listening to behavioural scientists. i am thinking of stanley milgram and others operating out of top universities in california who set up experiments trying to figure out whether ordinary people could be persuaded to do bad things, including torture of the other ordinary citizens and worryingly yes, they could be persuaded quite easily. are you debunking any of that evidence? you know i used to believe in all of these experiments and i wrote other books which luckily have not been

translated into english about the stanford prison experiment, for example and it is only recently that i discovered based on the work of an important sociologist that it is actually a hoax. we all know this experiment about 2k students who were selected to participate in an experiment with fake prison, 12 were made into guards and i2 and two prisoners and the researchers said i will sit back and see what happens in the story that he told leader —— later is that the students on their own started behaving in a very horrible way and the message is obviously there is a monster in each and every one of us below the surface, there is a nazi in each one of us. and it is only recently that we have learned that he specifically instructed the guards to be as sadistic as possible and many of the guards said i do not want to do that, that is not who i am and then

he said, you are these 60s hippies liberals, right, you want to reform the prison system in america, i need these results and i need you to behave in a horrible way and then we can go to the press and say look this is what prisons do to people. and it became a huge story and still in the textbooks of students and in reality... and you have done work to debunk those theories but the big problem that seems to me is that while you may be able to debunk the 60s work that says there is a part of a nazi in all of us, but you have been unable to debunk nazi—ism, genocide, and the holocaust itself, and it is notjust the german holocaust but the genocides we had seen in more recent times, from rawanda to the ethnic cleansing in the balkans and elsewhere. these are realities, ordinary people conducted themselves in the most terrible ways and i do not see how that fits with your fundamental worldview.

it would be hubristic to pretend that i could have a short explanation for these things we need libraries of books but i can say this, there is a connection between our capacity for friendliness and our behaviour that sometimes can be so cruel because so often within history we do the most horrible things in the name of friendship. and i think this is the paradox of my book and on the one hand i am arguing that people have evolved to be friendly and work together but then on the other hand sometimes it is exactly the problem because friendly behaviour can morph into tribal behaviour and groupish behaviour. and then people find it hard to go against a group

and against the status quo and start doing these horrible things. but that is just one part of the explanation, obviously there are many other mechanisms at play here. but are you not coming dangerously close to being a apologist for the mass ranks of hitler's armed forces an apologist for the mass ranks of hitler's armed forces who committed atrocities and you might say we have to understand them because most of them were motivated by comradeship and wanting to defend their brothers and look after themselves, that is not good enough is it? i think it is a danger and you are right about that and we have to be really careful and make a difference between trying to understand certain behaviour and condoning it. it is the same with the debate about terrorism. we have a genuine responsibility to understand what drives terrorists and why they blow themselves up. and again we have the same dynamic where often they do it in the name of comradeship and friendship and especially the foot soldiers are not that ideologically motivated and they usually know very little about the ideology and the have heard people going to syria

with books like the quaran for dummies and they still do these horrible things so it is not about condoning but understanding what is going on here because that is the only way to prevent it, i think. i want to spend a little bit of time on the flip side of your argument not challengingly you with all of the evils we have seen in recent human history by getting you to explain why you think one of your anecdotes in the book, humankind is a very important and that is the anecdote about what happen to half a dozen tongan teenagers when they decided one night to escape from a school they did not like and climbed into a boat and went off into the pacific ocean and found themselves shipwrecked and then on a deserted, very tiny island where they proceeded to live for the next year and more, on their own with no contact

with the outside world and, far from any sort of lord of the flies scenario where they rip themselves apart and you say all the evidence suggests that they lived cooperatively and cared for each other and when they were eventually discovered they were in very good shape. it is a fascinating story but does it really tell us anything about the human condition? maybe not. it is obviously not a scientific experiment and that would be very hard, having control groups, etc, had to study how they behave. i am just saying if millions of people around the globe still have to read lord of the flies in school and they often become quite pessimistic and cynical after reading it, i remember reading it when i was 16 and i was depressed for a week afterwards. i am just saying that let's also tell them about the one time that we know of in world history that real kids, shipwrecked on a real island and it is the most

happy story you can imagine. they lived there for 15 months, cooperated really well and became the best of friends. the captain who rescued them, he is still soulmates with one of the boys who is now 70 years old. if it would be a hollywood movie people would say it is so sentimental and not how people would really behave, it's worse than love actually but it is what really happened. 0n hardtalk we talked to a lot of public intellectuals, big thinkers with big ideas about the way we human beings organise our societies today and i think of the recent past we have interviewed thinkers who fundamentally i think believe any notion of human progress. one in particular would make a point of saying you might think things are bad today, we focus on the bad stuff that actually human beings are living

in the best of times. there is more security, better education and he would say that is because we are evolving better ways of our society. that you are an optimist about the human condition, we are not actually discovering better ways and you seem in some ways anti—progress. i would say absolutely not, we have made extraordinary progress moral and technological, and if you which is any time to live it would be now. what i am saying is that we got the history of civilization all wrong. stephen pinker paints the picture of our history in which supposedly everything was worse, when we were a hunter and gatherer is for 90% of our history,

we were reaching these tribal warriors but that is sort of the pessimistic view and what i am trying to show in the book is that actually civilization for most of our history it was a big disaster. it started at the age of warfare, patriarchy, hierarchy, infection disease is likely or dealing with right now. but actually the lives of nomadic hunter gatherers was much happier, healthier and more relaxed than the lives of the city dwellers and the farmers came after it. how can you posit that the hunter gatherers are a happy people. you have no idea! they had not left written record and opposing a because i really enjoy this worldview on this age of innocence?

no, i'm not. it is obviously how our ancestors lived 30 thousand years ago. we have anthropologists who studied and still lived as nomadic hunter gatherers and there are similarities in the way they live and you discover they have the israeli relaxed lifestyle or domicile and work week of 20—30 hours and healthier than farmers as well for example. and obviously you can study the archaeological records, they did not leave much behind but if there was really some kind of war against all going on in our deep past, you would be expected at some point some artists in the stone age would say "i am making a cave painting" but we have not found any of that andn there is nothing like that.

nothing about war between people and then we settled down and became sedentary about 12,000 years ago and you find a lot of cave paintings that are suggestive and you have skeletal remains that can be studied. most experts in the field, archaeologists and anthropologists believe that war has not been with us forever. and has really been an invention. these people did not get a lot of attention in the press because they are not telling us this dark story. i think it's often seen as more boring. i am just now wondering what this all means for the analysis of where we are today? you painted this picture of this idyllic prehistory where hunter gatherers lived in a more pure sort of condition, what does that lead you to conclude about the state of capitalism today?

you have written a lot about what you believe is the inadequacy and injustice for ordinary people. do you suggest we all find our inner caveman? if you look at the model we have had for the last a0 years, neo liberal capitalism, the central dogma has been that most people are selfish and so we designed our institutions around that. i think the results have not been good. we have had an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety and burn—outs and also not a great way to deal with the pandemic we are in right now. when i hope and i am not predicting this, it is just what i hope that it is a possibility that we could now move to a new age with different values and a more realistic view of human nature, where we rely more on our ability to co—operate and have this kind of solidarity, that is what i hope. you are a sort of latter—day marxist and idealistic?

really the opposite. marx was convinced that history it was driven by material force. i believe in the power of ideas, i really think that ideas are often dismissed as unreasonable or unrealistic that will never happen can over time move from the margin into the mainstream. i think it has been happening actually, since the financial crash of 2008. now we are discussing ideas like universal basic income, higher taxes on the wealthy, a more powerful state that is willing to invest in our future. that is moving into the mainstream and if you see the financial times editorial, even there they are really changing your mind right now. so i am not a marxist at all and i believe in ideas. there seems to be internal contradictions we are teasing out

because a few minutes ago you said that like steven pinker you think this is the best time ever for human beings to be alive and in so many different ways but you're also telling me for the last a0 years you think human beings and their developed capitalist societies have taken a series of wrong turns, can both feature at the same time? ——be true. i think so. historically speaking, this is one of the best times to be alive but it can be better and i see no contradiction here. and with our current model, is it sustainable? we have massive extinction of the species around the globe and global warming and even if we are having a relatively good time right now, that is an important question to ask, is it sustainable? yeah, and i am looking at the words of sir angus deeton. he says, "i am still a great

believer in what capitalism has done not only for the offset in billions of them pulled out of poverty as we discuss but to all the rest of us who also escaped deprivation over the last two and a half centuries." this is real. i would agree with that as well. i am bored from the debates from the cold war in the 80s about market versus state. i think capitalism has been underperforming quite a bit in the last couple of decades and it could be so much better. it is all about saving capitalism and reforming capitalism. if you look at the 50s and 60s for example, we had much higher growth and innovation and higher taxes on the wealthy and taxes on the wealthy for example let our societies function better so there can be more fundamental research and innovation. it is a year and a half since you famously lectured a bunch of billionaires at davos that philanthropy was not the answer to any of the world's problems but all about taxation and the rich paying much more in terms of tax

to genuinely redistribute wealth and society. not much has really changed since then. perhaps you think that the crisis in the emergency that surrounds us with coronavirus may be the trigger for some fundamental change which was not on cards before. is that the way you see things? yes, absolutely and i think quite a bit has changed. the window of political possibility has been moving. bernie sanders lost the election are the primaries, and jeremy corbyn lost the election and it would be nice for them to get their act together and win an election for once, but if you look at the ideas that are increasing in power and look atjoe biden‘s tax plan, it is twice as radical as hillary clinton's of 2016. looking at his climate plan,

it is actually more radical than bernie sanders‘ of 2016. things are really shifting that you can only see that if you zoom out a little bit. we have to end there and zoom out completely but it has been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. thanks for having me. hello there. there is plenty of dry and very warm weather in the forecast for the next few days. now, during tuesday, the very highest temperatures were found across eastern and southern parts of the uk, 27 degrees to the west of london. it was a bit cooler further north and west — not an awful lot cooler — but actually as we go

through the next few days, we're going to see this area of high pressure, which is really dominating the scene, shifting a little further eastwards. now, the winds around the high pressure flow in a clockwise direction. so as the high shift eastwards, that will allow us to waft warm air northwards across just about all parts of the uk. but we start wednesday morning with the very mildest conditions across the south — 13, 1a degrees in cardiff and in london. not quite as mild further north. but as we go through the day ahead, we're expecting lots of fine weather, some spells of sunshine, a bit of patchy cloud towards the south and east of england, and certainly more cloud into northern ireland and scotland. and that cloud mayjust start to fringe some patchy rain in across the far west. those temperatures getting up to around 17 degrees there in glasgow. once again, 2a or 25 across parts of south wales, central and southern parts of england. now, as we go through wednesday night into thursday, we will see some outbreaks of rain pushing across the northern half of scotland, a weak frontal system pushing through. further south, it's dry with some clear spells on what will be a mild

night for most — lows of six to 12 degrees. any early rain across scotland or north—east england will clear very quickly on thursday. and then, as you can see, increasing amounts of sunshine. bit of patchy cloud here and there, yes, but largely sunny skies. and at this stage, i think the highest temperatures will be found across western areas. so liverpool, cardiff, 25 degrees, but glasgow up to 22. a bit coolerfor some north sea coasts. now, as we get into friday, remember, when you look at our maps and you don't see cloud, that means we're expecting sunshine. a lot of blue sky overhead on friday. again, those temperatures, 2a, 25, 26 degrees. parts of south—west scotland getting into the middle 20s. still a bit cooler for some of those north sea coasts with a flow of air off the sea, but as we head into the weekend, high pressure does remain dominant. it should fend off this frontal system. yes, we mightjust see a little bit of rain fringing into the far north—west of scotland at times, but generally speaking, it's a dry weekend. and widely, it will be very warm, with those temperatures into the 20s.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm maryam moshiri. four minneapolis police officers are sacked, over the death of an african—american man pinned down in the street by his neck. for the first time, twitter labels one of donald trump's tweets as misleading. reports of many coronavirus deaths in care homes in russia, and fears the numbers could become even worse. and america's first manned rocket launch for nine years is scheduled for today, but this time it's the private sector blasting off.