It was nice to find support for the idea that evolution can bring about friendliness, not just or mostly competitiveness and egoism. The first part where they explained the theory was interesting.

Then the authors turned to politics and contemporary social problems. They argue that our friendliness has a flip side: if somebody doesn't belong to us (ingroup) we might start dehumanizing them. Luckily, there is an antidote: friendliness. If we only loved people, we wouldn't hate and dehumanize them. To love somebody we need to know them, like really know - and like - them in our everyday life. That way we can extent our natural friendliness to groups that at first don't feel like "us".

So, the scientific theory sounded sound, but this political part - though it surely has its merits - sounds a bit childish and simplistic.

Here are the two thoughts I promised in the title:

First, it's a fact the number of people who haven't known meaningful and positive male characters in their childhood, or perhaps during their whole lives, has increased. At the same time the number of people who look down on men, even hate them, has increased, too. There certainly seems to be an unfriendly outgroup gap there. And it certainly manifests itself in, among other things, the dehumanizing language many femnist use.

But those people must be a minority among feminists. How come, then, so many feminists have this very negative, even dehumanizing picture of men? This is where the book falls short, feels childish.

It's obvious that ideologies that move people don't usually dehumanize people directly. Instead, they create more or less complicated explanations why it's OK to despise or hate certain people. They work hard to hide the dehumanizing below all kind of fancy decoration, so, you have to do some digging and thinking to find the shameful foundations. And most people don't

Here's an example: Feminists say that violence against women is a huge problem. Well, if it is, why do you keep manipulating the data? might somebody ask after some digging. But most people just think that they must be dealing with nice and righteous people here because they are concerned with the poor ladies. And these lazy non-diggers, when they accept the "huge-problem narrative", more or less accept a very negative picture of men. Without noticing it. The dehumanizing foundation gets smuggled into their brains in a feel-good ship, so to speak.

That can happen because we are not animals like the chimpanzees and bonobos are. When you start talking that's a game changer.

Thanks for reading, he said friendly.