in the united states — that's more than the combined total of fatalities from the korean, vietnam and iraq wars. the uk prime minister, borisjohnson has continued to back his chief advisor under questioning from senior mps. he was also questioned about britain's coronavirus response which has seen the highest number of deaths in europe as protests rumble on in hong kong — the us secretary of state mike pompeo says the territory no longer merits special status under american law, because china is stripping it of autonomy. and the first private sector mission to the international space station—— and the first crewed launch from us soil in nine years — has been postponed due to bad weather. it's now thought that the spacex rocket will be launched on saturday.

that is it from me and the team for now. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm 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 the 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? theme music plays.

rutger bregman, in the netherlands, welcome to hardtalk. thanks for having me. we are all living in this time of covid—i9. 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 that most people are actually pretty decent and that, especially in the midst of a crisis, people — most people at least — show their better selves, you know, and you see this explosion of cooperation and altruism. i think that is one of the most important lesson. "an explosion of altruism" — i'm just wondering how you process some of the other scenes we have seen of people at times literally fighting to get essential supplies from the shops, we have seen people blaming each other,

scapegoating outsiders for spreading the virus. we have seen lots of very difficult things too. yeah, absolutely and i am not denying any of that. i am just saying that, for every toilet paper hoarder, there are a thousand nurses doing their best to save as many lives as possible, and there are 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 actually have a lot of evidence from sociology, going back all the way to the 1960s, hundreds and hundreds of case studies, that show that, especially during times of crises, most people start to co—operate together, whether they are left—wing or right—wing, rich, poor, young, old. that's what we see. and i've just been looking at social

media before coming on air with you and i have been noticing the incredibly vitriolic debate there is in the united states now, 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. well, you know, twitter and social media is not real life. i think 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 basically to be friendly to each other. so biologists literally talk about this process of survival of the friendliest, which means that, for thousands of years, it was actually the friendliest among us who had the most kids and so had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation, and you can see this in our bodies still today. so 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 just

involuntarily give away our feelings to someone else to show that we care about what they think about us. i think that is a very fascinating thing and itjust 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, again, 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 — because it really nods to all of human history, the evolution of civilization over millennia — what it seems to me to be doing really going 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, within the very 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 very old idea in western culture, as we talked about, that civilization is only a thin veneer — scientists call it veneer theory — and it goes back to the ancient greeks. if you read the greek historian, thucydides, he talks about the plague in athens, for example, or the civil war in corcyra, in his history of the peloponnesian war, and he had this observation that deep down people are just selfish and animals and monsters, and indeed, if you read the early christian church fathers, saint augustine, same idea, the idea tat we are born as sinners. and you read the enlightenment philosophers, thomas hobbes, david hume, even adam smith, also often emphasise that in the end people are selfish or at least that politically we have to assume that, when we build a society. and i think that idea is just wrong.

it is really fundamentally wrong. in the past couple of decades, we have seen scientists from diverse disciplines — psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, archaeologists — all moving from a quite cynical view of human nature to a much more hopeful view of human nature, and what i am trying doing in this book is just to connect the dots and to show that something bigger is going on there. are you saying far from that — that people are basically selfish and bad — are you saying that, fundamentally, deep down, people are good? i just want to get that clear. no, absolutely not. we are not angels, we are not fundamentally good. i'm saying that most people in the end are pretty decent, which i think is a little bit different, and i'm also saying that, what you assume in other people is what you get out of them. so if you assume that most people are selfish and that they just want to get as much for themselves as possible, then you will design your society in such a way, you'll 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 have designed schools and marketplaces and organizations in our democracies in a ways that have not brought out the best in us. i think we can turn that around. our view of human nature can be a self—fulfilling prophecy. but we did not design everything from shopping malls to political governance on a whim. we were also listening to behavioural scientists. i am thinking of stanley milgram and others operating out of the 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 concluded that actually, worryingly, yes, they could be persuaded quite easily. are you debunking and dismissing all of that evidence? well, many of it. you know, i used to believe in all of these experiments. i have written earlier books, that luckily have not been translated into english, about the stanford prison experiment, for example. it is only recently that

i discovered, based on the work of an important french sociologist, thibault le texier, that it is actually a hoax. we all know this experiment about 2a students who were selected to participate in an experiment with a sort of fake prison. 12 were made into guards, i2 prisoners, and philip zimbardo, the researchers, sort of said i willjust sit back and just see what happens. and the story that he told later is that these students, on their own, started behaving in a very horrible way, and the message was obviously there is a monster in each and every one of us, just below the surface, there is a nazi in each and everyone of us. it is only recently that we have learned that actually, philip zimbardo specifically instructed the guards to be as sadistic as possible, that many of those guards said, i do not want to do that, that is not who i am. then he said, look, you are these 60s hippies, liberals, right? you want to reform the prison system in america as well,

come on, i need these results, i need you to behave in a horrible way, then we can go to the press and say, look, this is what prisons do to people. and so some of them went along this became a huge story and it is still in the textbooks of millions students, while in reality it's pretty much a hoax. and i do find that fascinating and you have done a lot of work to debunk some of those theories but your big problem, it seems to me, is that, while you might be able to debunk the 60s work which sort of attempted to say there is a quasi nazi mentality within all of us, what you can't debunk, because it is just factual, is nazism, genocide, and the holocaust itself, and not even just the german holocaust, but the genocides we have seen in more recent times, from rwanda 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 obviously be hubristic to sort of pretend that i can give a sort of short explanation for things that we need libraries of books to understand and maybe we still don't understand it, but i can say this, i believe 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 comradeship and of friendship. and i think this is sort of the paradox of my book. 0n the one hand i am arguing that people have evolved to be friendly and to 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 they start doing these horrible things. but are you not... but that is just one part of the explanation, obviously there are many other

mechanisms at play here. but with what you have just said, are you not coming dangerously close to being an apologist for the mass ranks of hitler's armed forces who committed atrocities? and you might say, oh, well, we have to understand them because, frankly, most of them were simply motivated by comradeship and wanting to defend their brothers and look after themselves — that is not good enough, is it? i think it is certainly a danger. i think you are right about that. i think we have to be really careful and make a difference between sort of 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, why they blow themselves up. and here again you have the same dynamic that often they do it in the name of comradeship and of friendship, and that, especially the foot soldiers, are not that ideologically motivated, they often know very little actually about the ideology. we have had reports

from people going to syria with books in their bags like the quran for dummies. but still they do these horrible things. again, you know, it is absolutely not about condoning, but it is about 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 that we have seen in recent human history but actually getting you to explain why you think one of your anecdotes in the book, humankind, is so very important and that is the anecdote about what happened to half a dozen tongan teenagers, living in a remote island on the south pacific, when they decided one night to escape from a school that they did not like. they climbed into a boat, took off into the pacific ocean. found themselves in a storm, 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 ripped themselves apart, you say all the evidence suggests they lived cooperatively, they 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? well, maybe not. it is obviously not a scientific experiment and that would be very hard, to drop lots of kids on islands and have control groups, etc, and then to judge and study how they behave. i am just saying that, 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 mean, 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, they cooperated really well, and they became the best of friends. actually, the captain who rescued them, an australian captain named peter warner, is still soulmates with one of the boys, who is now 70 years old, mano totau. i mean, if it would be movie, a hollywood movie, people would say, oh, this is so sentimental, this is not how people would really behave, this is worse than love actually but it is what really happened. 0n hardtalk we talked to a lot of sort of public intellectuals, big thinkers with big ideas about the way we human beings organise our societies today and i'm thinking of the recent past where we have interviewed yuval noah harari and steven pinker, and these are thinkers who fundamentally i think believe in a notion of human progress. steven pinker, in particular, will make a point of saying you might think things are bad today, we focus on the wars,

we focus on the bad stuff, but actually human beings are living in the best of times. there is more security, better education, more relief from poverty than there has ever been in human history before. and he would say that is because we are evolving better ways of running our societies. your message, although you are an optimist about the human condition, seems to be that we are actually not discovering better ways to run our societies, and you seem in some ways anti—progress. well, i'm absolutely not. we have made extraordinary progress in the last couple of decades, moral progress, technological progress. if you would chose any time to live, it would be now. what i am just saying is that we got the history of civilization all wrong. steven pinker paints a picture of our history in which supposedly everything was worse, when we were nomadic hunter gatherers, which we were for 95% of our history, we were raging these tribal wars — that is sort of the pessimistic view. what i am trying to show in the book is that actually

civilization was, for most of our history, a big disaster. it started the age of warfare, of patriarchy, of hierarchy, of infection disease like we are dealing with right now. and actually the lives of nomadic hunter gatherers were much healthier and happier and more relaxed than the lives of the city dwellers and the farmers who came after it... but how on earth... ..and why do we remember this because obviously we have made a lot of progress in the last couple of decades. how can you posit that the cave dwellers and the hunter gatherers were a happy people living in a state of sort of pure innocence. you have no idea! they had not left written record and you are just sort of imposing some sort of quasi religious world view upon this sort of age of innocence, aren't you? no, i'm not. it is obviously hard to know how our ancestors lived 30,000 years ago. but we do have two important sources. so we have what anthropologists

have studied. you know, tribes who lived in the 19th or the 20th century and who still lived as nomadic hunter gatherers, and you can look if there are similarities in the way they live, and you'll discover, for example, that they have these really egalitarian societies, a relaxed lifestyle, a work week of around 20—30 hours, they are healthier than farmers as well, for example. and you can obviously also study the archaeological records. now, you are absolutely right, nomadic hunter gatherers did not leave much behind but, if there was really some kind of war against all going on in our deep past, then you would be expected that at some point some artists in the stone age would have said, "you know what? i am making a cave painting out of that." but we have not found any — there is nothing like that. we have a lot of cave paintings but not about war between people. then we settled down, we became sedentary about 12,000 years ago, we started doing agriculture, and you find a lot of these cave paintings that are very suggestive and that there is also the evidence we have from excavation,

skeletal remains — you can study that. most experts in the field, most archaeologists and anthropologists believe that war has not been with us forever. and has really been an invention. it's just that 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 all of this means for rutger bregman‘s analysis of where we are today? you paint this picture of a sort of idyllic prehistory, where hunter gatherers lived in a more pure sort of human condition — what does that lead you to conclude about the state of capitalism, for example, today? you have written a lot about what you believe to be the inadequacy of capitalist systems, the failure to deliver any sort of equality orjustice

to ordinary people. so what are you suggesting, that we all find our inner caveman? if you look at the model that we have had for the last a0 years, neo liberal capitalism, i think the central dogma has been that most people are selfish and so we designed our institutions around that. and i think the results have not been good. we have had an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety and burn—outs, and it is also not a great way to deal with the pandemic we are in right now. so what i hope, and i am not predicting this, it is just what i hope but it is a possibility, is 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 to have this kind of solidarity, that is what i hope. you are a sort of latter—day marxist, an idealist who...? no, actually, really the opposite. marx was convinced that history was driven by material forces and that ideas were just, well,

who cares about the ideas — that was just the superstructure. i believe in the power of ideas. i really think that ideas that are often dismissed as unreasonable or unrealistic, "that will never happen", can over time move from the margin to the mainstream. and that is what i think 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 really willing to invest in our future. that is moving into the mainstream. if you've seen the financial times editorial, for example, the beginning of april, even there, really changing their mind right now. so i am not a marxist at all, i believe in ideas. itjust seems there are some internal contradictions that we are teasing out even in this conversation because, a minutes ago or 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, yet you're also telling me that for the last a0 years you think human beings and their developed capitalist societies have taken a series of wrong turns — can both be true at the same time? yeah, i think so. historically speaking, this is one of the best times to be alive but we can do so much better. i don't see any contradiction here. and then obviously, also the big question we have with our current model is, is it sustainable? we have got the massive extinction of species around the globe, we've got global warming. 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 just looking at, for example, the words of sir angus deaton, one of britain's most respected economists, saying, "i am still a great believer in what capitalism has done, not only for the off sited billions who have been pulled out of poverty," as we've discussed, "but to all the rest of us who've also escaped poverty and deprivation over the last two and a half centuries."

this is progressive and it is real. i would agree with that as well. i am a little bit bored with all those old debates from the cold war in the 80s about capitalism versus socialism, and the market versus the state. i just think that capitalism has been underperforming quite a bit in the last couple of decades and it could do so much better. it is all about saving capitalism, it's about reforming capitalism. if you look at the 50s, for example, and 60s, we had much higher growth, much higher rates of innovation, and also much higher taxes on the wealthy. i think that often, taxes on the wealthy, for example, often let our societies function better so there can be more fundamental research and innovation etc. it is a year and a half pretty much since you went to davos and rather famously lectured a whole bunch of billionaires that philanthropy really was not the answer to any of the world's problems, it was all about taxation and the rich paying much more in terms of tax to genuinely redistribute wealth in society.

not much has really changed since then. perhaps you think that the crisis and the emergency that surrounds us with coronavirus may be the trigger for some fundamental change that was not on cards before. is that the way you see things? yes, absolutely and i think that actually quite a bit has changed. the window of political possibility has really been moving. people could say, oh, but corbyn lost the election, and sanders lost the election — yes — or the primaries — that is absolutely true and it would be nice if progressives sometime get their act together and win an election for once, i mean, that would be nice. but then, if you look at the kind of ideas that are increasing in power — look atjoe biden‘s tax plan, for example. it is twice as radical as hillary clinton's tax plan of 2016. if you look at his climate plan, it is actually more radical than bernie sanders‘ climate plan of 2016.

things are really shifting but you can only see that if you zoom out a little bit. rutger bregman, we have to end there, we have to zoom out completely, but it has been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. thanks for having me. hello again. wednesday brought us more sunshine across the country. the highest temperature was again around the greater london area, this time in heathrow, 26 celsius. and a bit further north in suffolk, that's how we ended the day. now over recent days, the warmth that has mainly been concentrated across southeast england has been spreading into wales,

southwest england, and for thursday the heat is more widespread across the uk. so most areas will have warmer weather, one exception really, east anglia and south east england where it is going to get a little bit fresher with temperatures coming down just a few degrees, but still warm. we'll take a look at why. 0n the satellite picture, we have this cloud working into northern scotland and bring a bit of rain. and a very weak cold front diving southwards across the north sea, that is introducing fresher air to east anglia and southeast england and ultimately will knock the temperatures down by a few degrees. this is how the weather looks at the moment, though. cloudy for northern scotland, still got some rain around at the moment but it will tend to ease over the coming hours. elsewhere it's a largely dry picture, a little bit of low cloud, a lot of mist and fog patch towards coastal areas of lincolnshire. but otherwise clear spells for at most and a fresher feel to the weather across some of these eastern areas of scotland and eastern areas of england, as the cooler air works in. for thursday, most of us will have sunshine from dawn till dusk, any low cloud and mist clearing away very quickly, and the rain also clearing from northern scotland and should brighten up in the northern isles

later in the day. a warmer day for most then. 23 degrees or so in edinburgh, probably about 23 or 2a for western counts of northern ireland. but cooler in london, instead of around 26 or 27 it has been over recent days, it will be about 22. still warm in the sunshine and more of the same to come on friday. most of us will have sunshine from dawn till dusk again with little in the way of cloud. highest temperatures always likely across more northern and western areas of the uk, 25 or so in the glasgow area. how is the weekend shaking up? the area of high pressure is still in charge, still keeping these atlantic weather fronts at bay, that means we have more of the same. that said, it will turn breezy for some of us but nevertheless, we do have more of that warm sunshine to come. temperatures in glasgow peeking around 2a celsius and it's going 23, 2a through the weekend and further south, we will see temperatures in the mid—20s. some of the warmest weather in cardiff, 27 on saturday. that is your weather.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. the death toll in the united states due to the coronavirus pandemic has now passed 100,000. minority groups have been worse affected. we have a special report from the east end of london, which its large south asian community. as protests continue in hong kong, the us secretary of state says the territory no longer merits special status because china is stripping it of autonomy. and no luck with the weather for the launch of the first privately—owned spacecraft to the international space