A Historical Analysis of Crime and Criminal Behavior: From Early Man to Modern Times, Appunti di Psicologia Generale

Scarica A Historical Analysis of Crime and Criminal Behavior: From Early Man to Modern Times e più Appunti in PDF di Psicologia Generale solo su Docsity! A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND by Colin Wilson GRANADA London Toronto Sydney New York Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Granada Publishing Limited 8 Grafton Street London W1X 3LA Published by Granada Publishing 1984 Copyright © Colin Wilson 1984 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wilson, Colin A criminal history of mankind, 1. crime and criminals — History I. Title 364.09 - HV6O25 ISBN 0-246-11636-6 Printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html stifling, dreamlike world of our subjective desires and feelings. The great tyrants of history, the men who have been able to indulge their feelings without regard to other people, have usually ended up half insane; for over-indulged feelings are the greatest tyrants of all. Crime is renewed in every generation because human beingsare children; very few of us achieve anything like adulthood. But at least it is not self-perpetuating, as human creativity is. Shakespeare learns from Marlowe, and in turn inspires Goethe. Beethoven learns from Haydn and in turn inspires Wagner. Newton learns from Kepler and in turn inspires Einstein. But Vlad the Impaler, Jack the Ripper and Al Capone leave no progeny. Their ‘achievement’ is negative, and dies with them. The criminal also tends to be the victim of natural selection - of his own lack of self-control. Man has achieved his present level of civilisation because creativity ‘snowballs’ while crime, fortunately, remains static. We may feel that Wells must have been a singularly naive historian to believe that war was about to come to an end. But this can be partly explained by his ignorance of what we now call sociobiology. When Tinbergen and Lorenz made us aware that animal aggression is largely a matter of ‘territory’, it suddenly became obvious that all wars in history have been fought about territory. Even the murderous behaviour of tyrants has its parallels in the animal world. Recent studies have made us aware that many dominant males, from lions and baboons to gerbils and hamsters, often kill the progeny of their defeated rivals. Hens allow their chicks to peck smaller chicks to death. A nesting seagull will kill a baby seagull that wanders on to its territory from next door. It seems that Prince Kropotkin was quite mistaken to believe that all animals practise mutual aid and that only human beings murder one another. Zoology has taught us that crime is a part of our animal inheritance. And human history could be used as an illustrative textbook of sociobiology. Does this new view of history suggest that humankind is likely to be destroyed by its own violence? No one can deny the possibility; but the pessimists leave out of account the part of us that Wells understood so well - man’s capacity to evolve through intelligence. It is true that human history has been fundamentally a history of crime; but it has also been the history of creativity. It is true that mankind could be destroyed in some atomic accident; but no one who has studied history can believe that this is more than a remote possibility. To understand the nature of crime is to understand why it will always be outweighed by creativity and intelligence. This book is an attempt to tell the story of the human race in terms of that counterpoint between crime and creativity, and to use the insights it brings to try to discern the next stage in human evolution. HIDDEN PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE During the summer of 1959, my study was piled with books on violent crime and with copies ofTrue Detective magazine. The aim was to compile an Encyclopaedia of Murder that might be of use to crime writers. But I was also moved by an obscure but urgent conviction that underneath these piles of unrelated facts about violence there must be undiscovered patterns, certain basic laws, and that uncovering these might provide clues to the steadily rising crime rate. I had noted, for example, that types of murder vary from country to country. The French and Italians are inclined tocrime passionel , the Germans to sadistic murder, the English to the carefully-planned murder - often of a spouse or lover - the Americans to the rather casual and unpremeditated murder. Types of crime change from century to century, even from decade to decade. In England and America, the most typical crimes of the 1940s and ‘50s had been for gain or for sex: in England, the sadist Neville Heath, the ‘acid bath murderer’ Haigh; in America, the red-light bandit Caryl Chessman, (he multiple sex-killer Harvey Glatman. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html As I leafed my way throughTrue Detective , I became aware of the emergence of a disturbing new trend: the completely pointless or ‘motiveless’ murder. As long ago as 1912, André Gide had coined the term ‘gratuitous act’ to describe this type of crime; the hero of his novelLes Caves du Vatican (which was translated asLafcadio’s Adventure } suddenly has the impulse to kill a total stranger on a train. ‘Who would know? A crime without a motive - what a puzzle for the police.’ So he opens the door and pushes the man to his death. Gide’s novel was a black comedy; the ‘motiveless murder’ was intended as a joke in the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s essay about the loiter who murdered his sister-in-law because she had thick ankles. Neither philosophers nor policemen seriously believed that such things were possible. Yet by 1959 it was happening. In 1952, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Herbert Mills sat next to a forty-eight-year-old housewife in a Nottingham cinema and decided she would make a suitable victim for an attempt at the ‘perfect murder’; he met her by arrangement the next day, took her for a walk, and strangled her under a tree. It was only because he felt the compulsion to boast about his ‘perfect crime’ that he was caught and hanged. In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico, raised his hunting rifle and shot dead two Mexican children; pursued and arrested, he said he was trying to do something about the population explosion. In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland accepted a lift from a married man in California and, without provocation, killed him with a dozen shots. After her arrest she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill ‘and not worry about it afterwards’. Psychiatrists found her sane. In April 1959, a man named Norman Smith took a pistol and shot a woman (who was watching television) through an open window. He did not know her; the impulse had simply come over him as he watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’. TheEncyclopaedia of Murder appeared in 1961, with a section on ‘motiveless murder’; by 1970 it was clear that this was, in fact, a steadily increasing trend. In many cases, oddly enough, it seemed to be linked to a slightly higher-than-average IQ. Herbert Mills wrote poetry, and read some of it above the body of his victim. The ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady justified himself by quoting de Sade, and took pains in court - by the use of long words - to show that he was an ‘intellectual’. Charles Manson evolved an elaborate racialist sociology to justify the crimes of his ‘family’. San Francisco’s ‘Zodiac’ killer wrote his letters in cipher and signed them with signs of the zodiac. John Frazier, a drop-out who slaughtered the family of an eye surgeon, Victor Ohta, left a letter signed with suits from the Tarot pack. In November 1966, Robert Smith, an eighteen-year-old student, walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, made five women and two children lie on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head. Smith was in no way a ‘problem youngster’; his relations with his parents were good and he was described as an excellent student. He told the police: ‘I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.’ A woman who walked into a California hotel room and killed a baseball player who was asleep there - and who was totally unknown to her - explained to the police: ‘He was famous, and I knew that killing him would make me famous too.’ It is phrases like this that seem to provide a clue. There is a basic desire in all human beings, even the most modest, to ‘become known’. Montaigne tells us that he is an ordinary man, yet that he feels his thoughts are worthy of attention; is there anyone who can claim not to recognise the feeling? In fact, is there anyone in the world who does not secretly feel that he is worthy of a biography? In a book called The Denial of Death , Ernest Becker states that one of the most basic urges in man is the urge to heroism. ‘We are all,’ he says, ‘hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.’ In children, we can see the urge to self-esteem in its least disguised form. The child shouts his needs at the top of his voice. He does not disguise his feeling that he is the centre of the world. He strenuously objects if his brother gets a larger piece of cake. ‘He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that hecounts more than anyone else.’ So he indulges endless daydreams of heroism. Then he grows up and has to learn to be a realist, to recognise that, on a world-scale, he is a nobody. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Apparently he comes to terms with this recognition; but deep down inside, the feeling of uniqueness remains. Becker says that if everyone honestly admitted his desire to be a hero, and demanded some kind of satisfaction, it would shake society to its foundations. Only very simple primitive societies can give their members this sense of uniqueness, of being known to all. ‘The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism ...’. Becker’s words certainly bring a flash of insight into all kinds of phenomena, from industrial unrest to political terrorism. They are an expression of this half-buried need tobe somebody, and of a revolt against a society that denies it. When Herbert Mills decided to commit a ‘perfect murder’, he was trying to provide himself with a reason for that sense of uniqueness. In an increasing number of criminal cases, we have to learn to see beyond the stated motivation -social injustice or whatever - to this primary need. There was a weird, surrealistic air about Charles Manson’s self-justifications in court; he seemed to be saying that he was not responsible for the death of eight people because society was guilty of far worse things than that. Closer examination of the evidence reveals that Manson felt that he had as much right to be famous as the Beatles or Bob Dylan (he had tried hard to interest record companies in tapes he had recorded); in planning Helter Skelter, the revolution that would transform American society, he was asserting his primacy, his uniqueness. I was struck by the difference between these typical crimes of the late sixties - Manson, the Moors murders, Frazier, Zodiac - and the typical crimes of ten or twenty years earlier - Haigh, Heath, Christie, Chessman, Glatman. John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes - he seems to have been impotent if the woman was conscious - and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a symbol of this type of crime - the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear normal and respectable. Manson’s ‘family’ sat around the television, gloating over the news bulletin that announced the killings in Sharon Tate’s home. The last thing they wanted was for their crimes to be hidden. Clearly, there is some sort of pattern here. But what are the underlying laws that govern it? In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow sent me his bookMotivation and Personality (1954), and it was in the fourth chapter, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, that I thought I saw the outline of some kind of general solution to the changing pattern. The chapter had originally been published in 1943 in thePsychological Review , and had achieved the status of a classic among professional psychologists; but for some reason it had never percolated through to the general public. What Maslow proposed in this paper was that human motivation can be described in terms of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ or values. These fall roughly into four categories: physiological needs (basically food), security needs (basically a roof over one’s head), belongingness and love needs (desire for roots, the need to be wanted), and esteem needs (to be liked and respected). And beyond these four levels, Maslow suggested the existence of a fifth category: self-actualisation: the need to know and understand, to create, to solve problems for the fun of it. When a man is permanently hungry, he can think of nothing else, and his idea of paradise is a place with plenty of food. In fact, if he solves the food problem, he becomes preoccupied with the question of security, a home, ‘territory’. (Every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage with roses round the door.) If he solves this problem, the sexual needs become urgent - not simply physical satisfaction, but the need for warmth, security and ‘belonging’. And if this level is satisfied, the next emerges: the need to be liked and admired, the need for self-esteem and the esteem of one’s neighbours. If all these needs are satisfied, the ‘self-actualising’ needs are free to develop (although they do not always do so - Maslow recognised that many people never get beyond level four.) Now, as I worked on a second study in criminology,A Casebook of Murder , it struck me that Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html sexual interest in a woman of a lower dominance group, but it would not survive the act of seduction. A medium dominance woman might be superficially attracted by a high dominance male; but on closer acquaintance she would find him brutal and unromantic. A high dominance male might find a medium dominance female ‘beddable’, but closer acquaintance would reveal her as rather uninteresting, like an unseasoned meal. To achieve a personal relationship, the two would need to be in the same dominance group. Maslow even devised psychological tests to discover whether the ‘dominance gap’ between a man and a woman was of the right size to form the basis of a permanent relationship. It was some time after writing a book about Maslow (New Pathways in Psychology, published in 1972) that it dawned on me that this matter of the ‘dominance gap’ threw an interesting light on many cases of partnership in crime. The first case of the sort to arouse my curiosity was that of Albert T. Patrick, a scoundrelly New York lawyer who, in 1900, persuaded a manservant named Charles Jones to kill his employer with chloroform. Jones had been picked out of the gutter by his employer, a rich old man named William Rice, and had every reason to be grateful to him. Yet he quickly came under Patrick’s spell and took part in the plot to murder and defraud. The plot misfired; both were arrested. The police placed them in adjoining cells. Patrick handed Jones a knife saying ‘You cut your throat first and I’ll follow ...’ Jones was so completely under Patrick’s domination that he did not even pause to wonder how Patrick would get the knife back. A gurgling noise alerted the police, who were able to foil the attempted suicide. Patrick was sentenced to death but was eventually pardoned and released. How did Patrick achieve such domination? There was no sexual link between them, and he was not blackmailing Jones. But what becomes very clear from detailed accounts of the case is that Patrick was a man of extremely high dominance, while Jones was quite definitely of medium dominance. It was Patrick’s combination of charm and dominance that exerted such a spell. It struck me that in many cases of double-murder (that is, partnership in murder), one of the partners is high dominance and the other medium. Moreover, it seems that this odd and unusual combination of high and medium dominance actually triggers the violence. In 1947, Raymond Fernandez, a petty crook who specialised in swindling women, met Martha Beck, a fat nurse who had been married three times. Fernandez picked up his victims through ‘lonely hearts club’ advertisements, got his hands on their cash, and vanished. When Martha Beck advertised for a soul-mate, Fernandez picked out her name because she was only twenty-six. His first sight of her was a shock: she weighed fourteen and a half stones and had a treble chin and a ruthless mouth. She also proved to have no money. But when Fernandez succumbed to the temptation to sleep with her, he was caught. She adored him; in spite of his toupee and gold teeth, he was the handsome Latin lover she had always dreamed about. Their sex life was a non-stop orgy. When Fernandez attempted to leave her, she tried to gas herself. And when he finally explained that he had to get back to the business of making a living, and that his business involved seducing rich women, her enthusiasm was unchecked. She offered to become a partner in the enterprise. But she suggested one refinement: that instead of merely abandoning the women, Fernandez should kill them. During the next two years, the couple murdered at least twenty women. Their final victims were Mrs Delphine Dowling of Grand Rapids, Michigan and her two-year-old daughter Rainelle; the police became curious about Mrs Dowling’s disappearance, searched the house, and found a spot of damp cement in the cellar floor. Under arrest, Fernandez and his ‘sister’ admitted shooting Mrs Dowling and drowning the child in a bathtub two days later when she would not stop crying. Further investigation slowly uncovered a two-year murder spree. Both were executed. The evidence makes it clear that the sexually insatiable Martha was an altogether more dominant character than Ray Fernandez, who, at the time of their meeting, was only a rather unsuccessful petty crook. Almost certainly, he qualifies as medium dominance; certainly, Martha was high dominance. Then why were they drawn together? From Martha’s point of view, because Fernandez was a fairly personable male with a high sex drive. From his point of view, because the frenzied adoration of this Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html rather frightening woman was flattering. A revealing glimpse into their relationship was afforded by an episode in court; Martha came into court wearing a silk dress, green shoes and bright red lipstick; she rushed across the court, cupped Fernandez’s face in her hands, and kissed him hungrily again and again. Sexually speaking, she was the one who took the lead. It seems evident that Fernandez would have never committed murder without Martha’s encouragement. It was the combination of the high dominance female and medium dominance male that led to violence. Again and again, in cases of ‘double murder’, the same pattern emerges. It explains one of the most puzzling crimes of the century - the murder by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb of fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks in May 1924. Both came from wealthy German-Jewish homes; both were university graduates. They became lovers when Loeb was thirteen and Leopold fourteen. Loeb was handsome, athletic and dominant; Leopold was round shouldered, short-sighted and shy. Loeb was a daredevil, and in exchange for submitting to Leopold’s desires, made him sign a contract to become his partner in crime. They committed a number of successful petty thefts and finally decided that the supreme challenge was to commit the perfect murder. Bobbie Franks – a friend of Loeb’s younger brother - was chosen almost at random as the victim. Franks was picked up when he came out of school and murdered in the back of the car by Loeb, while Leopold drove; then his body was stuffed into a culvert. Then they tried to collect ransom money from the boy’s family, but the body was discovered by a railway worker. So were Nathan Leopold’s spectacles, lying near the culvert. These were traced to Leopold through the optician. The trial was a sensation; it seemed to be a case of ‘murder for fun’ committed by two spoilt rich boys. Leopold admitted to being influenced by Nietzsche’s idea of the superman. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Yet the key to the case lies in their admission that Leopold called Loeb ‘Master’ and referred to himself as ‘Devoted Slave’. Loeb derived his pleasure from his total dominance of Leopold. Leopold might be far cleverer than he was, but he was obedient to Loeb’s will. It was Loeb who made Leopold sign a contract to join him in a career of crime, in exchange for permitting sodomy. Loeb was the one who got his ‘kicks’ out of crime; Leopold preferred bird-watching. Left to himself, Loeb would never have committed murder. But his deepest pleasure came from his dominance of Nathan Leopold, and to enjoy that dominance to the full he had to keep pushing Leopold deeper and deeper into crime. One of the clearest examples of the dominance syndrome is the Moors murder case. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were arrested in October 1965, as a result of a tip-off to the police that they were concealing a body in their house. A cloakroom ticket concealed in a prayer book led to the discovery of two suitcases in the railway left luggage office at Manchester, and to photographs and tapes that connected Brady and Hindley to the disappearance of a ten-year-old girl, Lesley Ann Downey, who had vanished on Boxing Bay 1964. A police search on the moors revealed the body of Lesley Ann, and also that of a twelve-year-old boy, John Kilbride. The body found in their house was that of a seventeen-year-old youth, Edward Evans, who had been killed with an axe. Charged with the three murders, both were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. It was the actor-playwright Emlyn Williams who revealed the curious psychological pattern behind the murders. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley first set eyes on each other on 16 January 1960, when she became a typist at Millwards, a chemical firm in the Gorton district of Manchester. Myra was a typical working-class girl, a Catholic convert who loved animals and children. Brady was a tough kid from the Clydeside district of Glasgow. Born in 1938 - four years before Myra - he had been in trouble with the police since he was thirteen and had spent a year in Borstal. He read gangster novels and books about the Nazis, whom he admired. He also read de Sade’sJustine and was impressed by de Sade’s philosophy of ‘immoralism’ and crime. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Brady ignored Myra; she was just another working-class typist. As the months passed, she became increasingly intrigued. He looked like a slightly delinquent Elvis Presley, and rode a motor bike dressed in leather gear; but underneath this he wore his well-pressed business suit. By 23 July she was confiding to her diary: ‘Wonder if Ian is courting. Still feel the same.’ Four days later she records that she spoke to him, and that he smiled as though embarrassed. A few days later: ‘Ian isn’t interested in girls.’ On 8 August she records: ‘Gone off Ian a bit.’ No reason is mentioned, but it may have been his bad language, which shocked her; she mentions later: ‘Ian swearing. He is uncouth’ - the typical reaction of the romantic, medium-dominance female to a high-dominance male. And her romanticism emerges obviously in the diary, which Emlyn Williams quotes: ‘I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.’ But he seems to ignore her: ‘He hasn’t spoken to me today.’ For months the entries swing between hope and misery: ‘He goes out of his way to annoy me, he insults me ...’/’I hate Ian, he has killed all the love I had for him.’/’I’m in love with Ian all over again.’/’Out with Ian!’ Williams is almost certainly right when he suggests that Brady revelled in his feeling of power over Myra, his ability to make her happy or miserable. On New Year’s Eve 1961, Brady took her to the cinema, then back to her parent’s home to see in the New Year with a bottle of whisky. Myra was living round the corner in the home of her grandmother; Brady took her back there at midnight and, on the divan bed in the front room, deflowered her. And in her diary the next day she recorded: ‘I have been at Millwards for twelve months and only just gone out with him. I hope Ian and I will love each other all our lives and get married and be happy ever after ...’ However, it is not marriage that interests Brady but the power game. He has asserted his dominance by taking her virginity on their first date; what now? The process of conversion begins. Myra is persuaded to share his admiration for the Nazis - he had a large collection of books about them - and de Sade. Most people who buy de Sade read him for sex; Brady read him for the ideas. Society is utterly corrupt. Human life is utterly unimportant; nature gives and takes with total indifference. We live in a meaningless universe, created by chance. Morality is a delusion invented by the rulers to keep the poor in check. Pleasure is the only real good. A man who inflicts his sexual desires by force is only seizing the natural privilege of the strong ... And Myra, who regards him as a brilliant intellectual (he is learning German to be able to readMein Kampf in the original), swallows it all - without enthusiasm, but with the patience of the devoted slave who knows that her master is seldom wrong. How can he push her further, savour his dominance? He tells her he is planning a bank robbery, a big job. She is shocked - at first - then, as usual, she accepts it as further evidence of his resourcefulness and self-reliance. He persuades her to join a rifle club and buy a gun. He begins to take a popular photography magazine and buys a camera with a timing attachment. He persuades her to dress in black panties without a crotch and pose for photographs. Then the timing attachment allows him to take photographs of the two of them together, navel to navel, engaged in sexual intercourse - with white bags over their heads. In others, she has whip marks on her buttocks. Brady apparently hoped to sell the photographs (for these were the days before pornography could be bought in most newsagents) but was apparently unsuccessful. At this stage, there is only one possible way in which Brady can push her further into total acquiescence: by finally putting the daydreams of crime into practice and ordering her to be his partner. But bank robbery is a little too dangerous. In fact, most crime carries the risk of being caught. Perhaps the crime that carries least risk is the kind committed by Leopold and Loeb: luring a child into a car... Myra Hindley bought a small car - a second-hand green Morris - in May 1963, having taken driving lessons. (Brady had given up his motor cycle after an accident.) Two months later, on 12 July 1963, a sixteen-year-old girl named Pauline Reade, who lived around the corner from Myra and knew her by Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html guards. He begins to enjoy the game, like an angler playing a salmon; he wants it to go on as long as possible. She speaks to him in July and he looks embarrassed. In August she notices that ‘Ian is taking sly looks at me.’ And from then on, it is all ups and downs; one day he has got a cold and she wants to mother him, the next he has been rude to her and she hates him. Bur although it is sweeter to travel than to arrive, these preliminaries cannot go on for ever, and five months later, he takes her out. And, like Martha Beck, she has suddenly found the lover of her daydreams. The next stage is the difficult one to understand. How does he turn her into a murderess? The earlier trauma about the death of Michael Higgins must have played its part. It remains a psychological scar; but Brady’s tough-minded attitude towards death acts as a catharsis. The books about concentration camps, the Nazi marching music, the records of Hitler making speeches, all seem to launch her on to a level of vitality where the tragedy ceases to depress her. If she had been a quiet, efficient girl who enjoyed office work, all this would have been impossible. But it bored her silly; she had lost job after job through absenteeism. Brady had been through the same stage. He had also lost job after job; but these had all been hard manual jobs, and the position as a stock clerk must have seemed a pleasant change. Now the only sign of his earlier instability was his constant unpunctuality, and his tendency to slip out of the office to place bets. There were always books about the Nazis in the office drawer. He seldom spoke to the other employees. He spent his lunch breaks reading his books on war crimes. He had successfully withdrawn into his own fantasy world. In due course, he found no difficulty in fitting Myra into the fantasy. He called her ‘Hessie’, not just because her name was Myra, but because he admired Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. All this helps to explain how Myra became his devoted slave. But none of these factors was crucial. The fundamental explanation lies in the recognition that she was medium dominance and Brady was high. She, in spite of her hard-headedness, was a typical romantic typist longing to be embraced by a masterful but gentle male. But for Brady, she was the catalyst that turned him from a fantasist into a killer. For him it was not a love game but a power game. No doubt this is a simplification: all male sexuality contains an element of the ‘power game’. But when the male belongs to a higher dominance group, then the sense of power provides the chief pleasure in the relationship. These observations afford important insights into crime on Maslow’s fourth level, the level of ‘self-esteem’. But there is still a question that remains unexplained: the psychology of the ‘submissive’ partner. In the case of Leopold and Loeb, or Brady and Hindley, the question is blurred by the sexual relationship between the partners, which suggests a kind of equality of responsibility. But in the Albert T. Patrick case, there was no such relationship and the question becomes insistent. When Patrick first called on Charles Jones, he was looking for information that he could use against Jones’s employer, William Rice. Jones indignantly refused: yet for some reason, he did not tell Rice. Already, Patrick had established some subtle dominance. He called again; Jones weakened, and allowed Patrick to persuade him to forge his employer’s signature to a letter to be used against Rice in a law suit. Six months later, Jones was administering poison to his employer, the man to whom he owed everything. We may object that perhaps Jones had reason to dislike his employer; perhaps the old man was a bully. But this would still not explain the ascendancy that made Jones agree to cut his throat in prison. This brings to mind another curious criminal case of the mid-1930s. A woman on a train to Heidelberg - where she intended to consult a doctor about stomach pains - fell into conversation with a fellow passenger who claimed to be a nature healer. This man, whose name was Franz Walter, said he could cure her illness, and when the train stopped at a station, invited her to join him for coffee. She was unwilling, but allowed herself to be persuaded. As they walked along the platform he took hold of her hand ‘and it seemed to me as if I no Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html longer had a will of my own. I felt so strange and giddy.’ He took her to a room in Heidelberg, placed her in a trance by touching her forehead, and raped her. She tried to push him away, but she was unable to move. ‘I strained myself more and more but it didn’t help. He stroked me and said: “You sleep quite deeply, you can’t call out, and you can’t do anything else.” Then he pressed my hands and arms behind me and said: “You can’t move any more. When you wake up you will not know anything of what happened.”’ Later, Walter made her prostitute herself to various men, telling her clients the hypnotic word of command that would make her unable to move. And when she married, he made her attempt to kill her husband by various means. The latter became suspicious after her sixth attempt at murder - when his motor cycle brake cable snapped, causing a crash - and when he learned that she had parted with three thousand marks to some unknown doctor. The police came to suspect that she had been hypnotised, and a psychiatrist, Dr Ludwig Mayer, succeeded in releasing the suppressed memories of the hypnotic sessions. In due course, Walter received ten years in prison. How did Walter bring her under his control so quickly and easily? Clearly, she was a woman of low vitality, highly ‘suggestible’. Yet holding her hand hardly seems to be a normal means of inducing hypnosis. In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that hypnosis can be induced through a purely mental force. In 1885, the French psychologist Pierre Janet was invited to Le Havre by a doctor named Gibert to observe his experiments with a patient called Léonie. Léonie was an exceptionally good hypnotic subject, and would obey Gibert’s mental suggestionsat a distance . Gibert usually induced a trance bytouching Léonie’s hand , but Janet confirmed that he could induce a trance by merely thinking about it. On another occasion he ‘summoned’ Léonie from a distance by a mental command. Gibert discovered that he had to concentrate hard to do these things; if his mind was partly on something else, it failed in work - which suggests that he was directing some kind of mental ‘beam’ at her. In the 1920s, the Russian scientist L. L. Vasiliev carried out similar experiments with a patient suffering from hysterical paralysis of the left side. She was placed under hypnosis and then mentally ordered by Vasiliev to make various movements, including movements of the paralysed arm; she obeyed all these orders. (In the 1890s, Dr Paul Joire had conducted similar experiments in which the patients were not hypnotised but only blindfolded, and again he discovered that the mental ‘orders’ would only be obeyed if he concentrated very hard.) J. B. Priestley has described how, at a literary dinner, he told his neighbour that he proposed to make someone wink at him; he then chose a sombre-looking woman and concentrated on her until suddenly she winked at him. Later she explained to him that she had experienced a ‘sudden silly impulse’ to wink. Whether or not we accept the notion that hypnosis is, to some degree, ‘telepathic’, there can be no doubt about the baffling nature of the phenomenon. Animals are particularly easy to hypnotise, a fact that first seems to have been recorded by a mathematician named Daniel Schwenter in 1636. Schwenter noted that if a small bent piece of wood is fastened on a hen’s beak, the hen fixes its eyes on it and goes into a trance. Similarly, if the hen’s beak is held against the ground and a chalk line is drawn away from the point of its beak, it lies immobilised. Ten years later, a Jesuit priest, Fr Athanasius Kircher, described similar experiments on hens. All that is necessary is to tuck the hen’s head under its wing and then give it a few gentle swings through the air; it will then lie still. (French peasants still use this method when they buy live hens in the market.) A doctor named Golsch discovered that frogs can be hypnotised by turning them on their backs and lightly tapping the stomach with the finger. Snapping the fingers above the frog is just as effective. Crabs can be hypnotised by gently stroking the shell from head to tail and un-hypnotised by reversing the motion. InHypnosis of Men and Animals (published in 1963), Ferenc Andrä Völgyesi describes how Africans hypnotise wild elephants. The elephant is chained to a tree, where it thrashes about savagely. The natives then wave leafy boughs to and fro in front of it and chant monotonously; eventually, its eyes blink, close, and the elephant becomes docile. It can then be teamed with a trained elephant and worked into various tasks. If it becomes unmanageable, the treatment is repeated, and Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html usually works almost immediately. Völgyesi also discusses the way that snakes ‘fascinate’ their victims. Far from being an old wives’ tale, this has been observed by many scientists. Toads, frogs, rabbits and other creatures can be ‘transfixed’ by the snake’s gaze - which involves expansion of its pupils - and by its hiss. But Völgyesi observed - and photographed - a large toad winning a ‘battle of hypnosis’ with a snake. Völgyesi observed two lizards confronting each other for about ten minutes, both quite quite rigid; then one slowly and deliberately ate the other, starting at the head. It was again, apparently, a battle of hypnosis. What seems to happen in such cases is that one creature subdues the will of the other. Völgyesi observed that hypnosis can also be effected by a sudden shock - by grabbing a bird violently, or making a loud noise. He observes penetratingly that hypnosis seems to have something in common with stage fright - that is, so much adrenalin is released into the bloodstream that, instead of stimulating the creature, it virtually paralyses it. (We have all had the experience of feeling weakened by fear.) How can hypnosis be explained? We know that we are, to a large extent, machines; but the will drives the machine. In hypnosis, the machine is taken over by the will of another. When I am determined and full of purpose, I raise my vitality andfocus it. In hypnosis, the reverse happens; the vitality is suddenly reduced, and the attention is ‘unfocused’. The ‘machine’ obeys the will of the hypnotist just as a car will obey the will of another driver. There is another part of the mechanism that should be mentioned here. If I am concentrating on some important task, I direct my full a attention towards it like a fireman pointing his hosepipe at the blaze. I permit no self-doubt, no relaxation, no retreat into my inner world; these would only weaken the force of the ‘jet’. If we imagine the snake confronted by the toad, or the two lizards, we can see that they are like two firemen directing their jets at each other. The first to experience doubt, to retreat into his inner world, is the victim. Another authority on hypnosis, Bernard Hollander, remarks in his hookHypnosis and Self-Hypnosis (published in London in 1928), that ‘the hypnotic state ... is largely a condition of more or less profoundabstraction .’ So when a bored schoolboy stares blankly out of the window, thinking of nothing in particular, he is in a mildly hypnotic state, and the schoolmaster is quite correct to shout: ‘Wake up, Jones!’ The boy has retreated into his subjective world, yet withoutfocusing his attention, as he would if he were trying to remember something. Hypnosis seems to be a state when the mind is ‘elsewhere’, and yet nowhere in particular. Völgyesi’s book brings out with great clarity that there is something very strange about the mind. A wild elephant trumpeting and rearing - that seems natural. The same elephant becoming completely docile after branches have been waved in front of its eyes seems highly unnatural. And the notion that lizards - or even crocodiles - can be reduced to immobility by a gentle pressure on the neck seems somehow all wrong. What on earth is nature doing, making them so vulnerable? The answer would seem to be that the vulnerability is not ‘intentional’. Like crime itself, it is a mistake, a disadvantage that has emerged in the process of developing other advantages. In order to build up a certain complexity - which seems to be its basic aim - life had to create certain mechanisms. The more complex the ‘works’, the easier it is to throw a spanner in them. A big car uses a lot of fuel; a big biological mechanism uses a lot of vitality. If this vitality can suddenly be checked or diminished, the creature ceases to have free will. Human beings, as Völgyesi points out, are far more complex than birds and animals. Yet the same principles apply. He noticed that the easiest people to hypnotise were those of a ‘nervous constitution’. Clever,sensitive people are far more easily hypnotised than stupid, insensitive ones. He noticed that these highly sensitive people usually had damp hands, so that he could tell by shaking hands whether a person would be a good hypnotic subject. He refers to such people as ‘psycho-passive’. People with Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html there is another sense in which it is an attempt to break out of this state. The sex murderer John Christie remarked that after strangling and raping one of his victims, ‘once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.’ The killing had removed the tension that kept him trapped in the vicious circle of his own emotions and desires; he was awake again. We can discern the same factor in the petty crimes committed by Leopold and Loeb before they killed Bobby Franks. Loeb was the one who ‘got a thrill’ from crimes; it was like a game of Russian roulette in which he experienced relaxation and relief every time he ‘won’. (After all, to be caught in a burglary would mean social disgrace.) Crime was Loeb’s way of discharging tension, of waking himself up. This is also quite plainly the key to the Moors case. When he murdered Edward Evans, Brady was trying to involve David Smith, with the intention of making him a part of a criminal gang; his aim was to commit bank robberies. We may assume that, since he had been planning bank robberies from the beginning, he regarded his murders as some form of training for the ‘bigger’ crime. It was Brady’s intention to become a kind of all-round enemy of society, the English equivalent of Public Enemy Number One - with the difference that, like Charlie Peace, he hoped to remain undiscovered and live happily ever after on his gains. Crime would become a way of life involving continual stimulation and excitement. And in this we can note another interesting aspect of the ‘pattern’. At any given level, crime contains an element that reaches towards the next level of the hierarchy. Charlie Peace’s crimes are crimes of ‘subsistence’ (to make a living), but he shows a powerful urge towards security and domesticity. Many ‘domestic’ crimes - Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Adelaide Bartlett - contain a strong element of sadism, reaching towards the sexual level. Jack the Ripper’s sex crimes contain a strong element of exhibitionism - in the lay-out of the corpses, the letters to the police - reaching towards the self-esteem level. And the crimes of Manson and Brady contain a distorted element of self-actualisation, reaching towards the creative level. (In myOrder of Assassins I have labelled such killers ‘assassins’ – those who kill as a violent form of self-expression; we can see a clear relationship between such crimes and the ‘violent’ art of painters such as Munch, Ensor, Soutine or Pollock.) The case that, above all others, embodies this notion of crime as a ‘Creative act’ is scarcely known outside the country in which it took place, Sweden, and may serve as a demonstration of the main threads of the preceding argument. It concerned a real-life Professor Moriarty, Dr Sigvard Thurneman, who came rather closer than Charles Manson to the dream of one-man Revolution. In the early 1930s, the small town of Sala, near Stockholm, was struck by a minor crime wave. It began on 16 November 1930, when the body of a dairy worker, Sven Eriksson, was discovered in a half-frozen lake near Sala; Eriksson had vanished two days before, on his way home from work. He had been shot in the chest - apparently alter a fierce struggle, for his clothes were torn and his face bruised. He had been alive when thrown into the lake. The motive was clearly not robbery, since he was still carrying his week’s wages in his wallet. Mrs Eriksson said her husband had been suffering from a certain amount of nervous stress - he had even seen a doctor about it - but she could think of no reason why anyone should wish him dead. The police could not find a single clue to the murder. During the next two years there was an unusual number of crimes in the Sala area, including three burglaries and two car thefts. Either the criminal was incredibly careful or he had incredible luck, for again the police could find no leads. In the early hours of the morning of 15 September 1933, firemen were called to a house near the centre of Sala. It belonged to a wealthy mining official, Axel Kjellberg. The flames were already too fierce for Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html any attempt at rescue. Two charred bodies - that of Kjellberg and his housekeeper - were recovered. Both had been shot in the head. The motive was robbery. Kjellberg had collected the wages for his mine on the previous day and had kept them in his safe overnight. Evidently the intruder, or intruders, had forced him to open the safe. A forced strongbox was found in the ruins. During the next year there were a few more burglaries, but no serious crimes. Citizens formed vigilante groups to patrol the town at night. And on 12 October 1934, such a group observed that the house of Mrs Tilda Blomqvist was on fire. The vigilantes raised the alarm, as a result of which Mrs Blomqvist’s chauffeur and his wife escaped from the burning house. This time, it was possible to enter the house before it was seriously damaged. Mrs Blomqvist’s body was in her bedroom. She was dead, but there were no marks of violence. Medical examination failed to reveal cause of death. She had not inhaled smoke so it seemed conceivable that she had been suffocated before the fire began. Again, the motive was robbery. Mrs Blomqvist was a rich widow of sixty, and her cash and jewellery had vanished. Friends of the dead woman said she had been in poor health, and had been interested mainly in spiritualism and yoga. Once again, the police found themselves facing a blank wall. Their luck began to change on 19 June 1936, when a quarry-worker named Elon Petterson was shot on the outskirts of Sala. He was bicycling back to the quarry with the week’s payroll. This time, there had been a witness. An elderly man was sunning himself on his lawn as Petterson rode past, and a few moments later, he heard the sound of shots. He walked to the road and saw two men dragging Petterson towards the ditch. They then climbed into a black American car and drove away. The man noted down the car’s number. A few hours later, Petterson died without recovering consciousness; he had been shot in the chest and stomach. It soon became clear that the car’s number was not going to provide an easy solution. The car of that number was not American, and it had been in a garage all day; the owner had an unshakable alibi. But an American sedan with a very similar number had been stolen recently from another town. It was conceivable its licence plate had been altered. The police decided to attempt to alarm the thieves. They told the newspapers that they were looking for a black Chevrolet whose licence plate had recently been altered - giving the number - and announced that they intended to search all garages. The next day, the missing car was found parked by the roadside near Sala. The licence platehad been skilfully changed, obviously by a man who knew his job. That seemed to argue that he was not a professional criminal, since few criminals spend years becoming expert metal workers. The police began a slow, thorough check of all garages and metal-working shops. Finally, they discovered what they were looking for. A young worker admitted that it was he who had altered the plate. At the time, he had been working for a garage owner named Erik Hedstrom, who had a business in the nearby town of Köping. According to this witness, he had only been working for Hedstrom for a few days when he was asked to alter the plate. He did it without question. But shortly after that Hedstrom had asked him whether he was willing to take part in the robbery of a bank messenger. The man asked for time to think it over, and rang back the next day to say that he had found another job. Questioned about all this, Hedstrom - a good-looking young man of excellent reputation - flatly denied everything. But the moment the police left his home, Hedstrom picked up the telephone and asked the operator for a Stockholm number. The police checked with the operator and discovered that it was the number of Dr Sigvard Thurneman, a doctor specialising in nervous disorders. The Sala constable who had investigated the first murder - of Sven Eriksson - recalled thathe had been consulting a doctor about nervous tension shortly before his death. A call to Eriksson’s wife revealed that the doctor was Sigvard Thurneman. A Stockholm detective called on Thurneman the next day, claiming that he was involved in a routine investigation about neurosis and crime. Thurneman proved to be a small, pale man with a thin, firm Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html mouth, a receding chin and a receding hairline that made his high forehead seem immense. He was in his late twenties. With considerable reluctance, Thurneman allowed the detective to glance into his files, standing at his elbow. But the detective was able to confirm that Sven Eriksson had been a patient. So had Mrs Blomqvist. Hedstrom was brought in for questioning, while police searched his house. He insisted that he only knew Thurneman slightly. They had been at college together, and he had occasionally consulted him since then. But while he was being questioned, a phone call revealed that the police had found a gun in his garage - of the calibre that had shot Eriksson. Hedstrom suddenly decided to confess. Thurneman, he said, was the man behind all the crimes. They had become acquainted at the University of Uppsala, when both had been interested in hypnotism. He had found Thurneman a fascinating and dominant character, a student of occultism, theosophy and philosophy. This had been in the mid-1920s. Thurneman was also fascinated by crime. One of his favourite pastimes was to devise ‘perfect crimes’. Hedstrom had joined in the game. Then, in 1929, Thurneman had proposed that it was time to try out one of the crimes they had planned so thoroughly in imagination. It was to be a robbery at the dairy where Eriksson worked. Eriksson was a patient of Thurneman’s, and Thurneman had been treating him through hypnosis. Erikson had agreed to be the ‘inside man’ in the robbery. Then, at the last minute, he had changed his mind. Thurneman was afraid he might go to the police, or at least tell his wife. So Hedstrom, together with two other men, was delegated to kill him. From then on, said Hedstrom, Thurneman had made them continue to commit crimes that he had planned in detail. Thurneman actually took part in the robbery and murder of Axel Kjellberg - he and Hedstrom wore policemen’s uniforms (which Thurneman had had made by a theatrical costumier) to persuade the old man to open his door in the early hours of the morning. Then Kjellberg and his wife were murdered in cold blood, and the house set on fire. Tilda Blomqvist had been chosen because she had told Thurneman where she kept her jewels while under hypnosis. Her murder had been a masterpiece of planning. They had bored a hole in the wall of her bedroom (the house was made of wood, like so many in Scandinavia), inserted a rubber hose attached to the car’s exhaust and gassed her in her sleep. Then they had stolen the jewels and set fire to the house. Faced with Hedstrom’s signed confession, Thurneman decided to tell everything. In fact, he wrote an autobiography while in prison. As a child, Thurneman had had an inferiority complex because of his small build and poor health. He was a solitary, deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. At thirteen - in 1921 - he had begun to experiment in hypnotism and thought-transference with schoolmates. He also read avidly about mysticism and occult lore. Then, at sixteen, he had met a mysterious Dane who was skilled in yoga. In 1929, he claimed, he had been to Copenhagen and joined an occult group run by the Dane. On his return to Stockholm he had started his own magic circle, gathering together all kinds of people and making them swear an oath of obedience and secrecy. The position of cult-leader seems to have given Thurneman a taste of the kind of power he had always wanted. He used hypnosis to seduce under-age girls, and then - according to his confession - disposed of them through the white slave trade. Other gang members were also subjected to hypnosis and ‘occult training’ (whatever that meant). Thurneman was bisexual, and became closely involved with another gang member who was a lover as well as a close friend. When this man got into financial difficulties, Thurneman became worried in case he divulged their relationship - which, in 1930, was still a criminal offence. He claimed that, by means of hypnotic suggestion over the course of a week, he induced the man to commit suicide. In 1934, he placed another member of the gang in a deep trance and injected a dose of fatal poison. Thurneman’s aim was to make himself a millionaire and then leave for South America. The two Sala murders - of Axel Kjellberg and Tilda Blomqvist - brought in large sums of money. But the ‘big job’ he was planning was the robbery of a bank housed in the same building as the Stockholm Central Post Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html dowsed with petrol, and set alight; hundreds who were still alive died in the flames. Because they were indistinguishable from the soldiers, male civilians were also massacred. Women were herded into pens which became virtually brothels for the Japanese soldiers; more than twenty thousand women between the ages of eleven and eighty were raped, and many disembowelled. Many who were left alive committed ritual suicide, the traditional response of Chinese women to violation. Boys of school age were suspended by their hands for days, and then used for bayonet practice. Rhodes Farmer, a journalist who worked in Shanghai came into possession of photographs of mass executions of boys by beheading, of rapes of women by Japanese soldiers, and of ‘slaughter pits’ in which soldiers were encouraged to develop their killer-instinct by bayoneting tied prisoners. When published in the American magazineLook , they caused worldwide condemnation, and the Japanese commander was recalled to Tokyo. The odd thing was that these photographs were taken by the Japanese themselves; for they regarded the atrocities as simply acts of revenge. In two months, more than fifty thousand people died in Nanking, and towards two hundred thousand in the surrounding countryside. (In 1982 - when the Chinese were quarrelling with the Japanese about their ‘rewriting’ of history - the official Chinese figure was three hundred and forty thousand.) Some six hundred miles to the north-west of Nanking, the city of Peking was already in Japanese hands. But the village of Chou-kou-tien, thirty miles to the south-west, was still held by Chinese Nationalists, and there a team of international scientists were collaborating on a project that had created immense excitement in archaeological circles. In 1929, a young palaeontologist named Pie Wen-Chung had discovered in the caves near Chou-kou-tien the petrified skull of one of man’s earliest ancestors. It looked more like a chimpanzee than a human being, and the Catholic scientist Teilhard de Chardin thought the teeth were those of a beast of prey. It had a sloping forehead, enormous brow-ridges and a receding chin. But the brain was twice as big as that of a chimpanzee. And as more skulls, limbs and teeth were discovered, it became clear that this beast of prey had walked upright. At first, it looked as if this was a cross between ape and man - what earlier anthropologists such as Haeckel had called ‘the missing link’. Nearly half a century earlier the missing link theory had apparently been confirmed when the bones of an ‘ape-man’ had been discovered in Java. The ape-man of Peking clearly belonged to the same species. But the caves of the Chou-kou-tien hills yielded evidence that this was no missing link. Peking man had constructed hearths and used fire to roast his food - his favourite meal seems to have been venison. He was therefore more culturally advanced than had been supposed. This creature, who lived more than half a million years ago, was a true human being. He was also, it seemed, a cannibal. All the forty skulls discovered at Chou-kou-tien were mutilated at the base, creating a gap into which a hand could be inserted to scoop out the brains. Franz Weidenreich, the scientist in charge of the investigation, declared that these creatures had been slaughtered in a body, dragged into the caves and there roasted and eaten. By whom? Presumably by other Peking men. In other caves in the area, bones of Cro-Magnon man were discovered, and here too there was evidence of cannibalism; but Cro-Magnon man came on the scene more than four hundred thousand years later; he could not have been the culprit. The evidence of the Chou-kou-tien caves revealed that Peking man had fought against the wild beasts who occupied the caves and had wiped them out; after that, he had fought against his fellow men and eaten them. While editorials around the world were asking how civilised men could massacre the population of a large city, the Peking excavations were suggesting an unpalatable answer: that man has always been a killer of his own species. Nowadays, that view seems uncontroversial enough; the threat of atomic annihilation has accustomed us to take a pessimistic view of the human race. But in 1937, the ‘killer ape’ idea met with strong resistance among scientists. According to the theory that had been current since the 1890s,homo sapiens had evolved because of his intelligence. He started life as a gentle, vegetarian creature, like his brother the ape, then slowly learned such skills as hunting and agriculture and created civilisation. In his book on Peking Man, Dr Harry L. Shapiro, one of the scientists at Chou-kou-tien, does not even mention the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html mutilations in the base of the skulls; he prefers to believe they were damaged by falling rock and layers of debris. But new evidence continued to erode the older view. As early as 1924, the palaeontologist Raymond Dart had discovered an even older species of ‘ape-man’, which he called Australopithecus (or southern ape-man). In the late 1940s, examining an Australopithecus site near Sterkfontein, Dart found many shattered baboon skulls. Looking at a club-like antelope thighbone, he was struck by a sudden thought. He lifted the bone and brought it down heavily on the back of one of the baboon skulls. The two holes made by the protuberances of the leg joint were identical with similar holes on the other skulls. Dart had discovered the weapon with which the ‘first man’ had killed baboons. It seemed to verify that similar thighbones found in the caves of Peking man had also been weapons.. In 1949, Dart published a paper containing his claim that Australopithecus - who lived about two million years ago - had discovered the use of weapons. Fellow scientists declined to take the idea seriously. In 1953, he repeated the offence with a paper calledThe Predatory Transition from Ape to Man , which so worried the editor of theInternational Anthropological and Linguistic Review that he prefaced it with a note disclaiming responsibility for its opinions. For in this paper Dart advanced the revolutionary thesis that ‘southern ape-man’ had emerged from among the apes for one reason only: because he had learned to commit murder with weapons. Our remote ancestors, he said, learned to stand and walk upright because they needed their hands to carry their bone clubs. Hands replaced teeth for tearing chunks of meat from animal carcases, so our teeth became smaller and our claws disappeared to be replaced by nails. Hitting an animal with a club - or hurling a club or stone at it from a distance - meant a new kind of co-ordination between the hand and eye; and so the brain began to develop. At the time Dart was writing his paper, there was one remarkable piece of evidence for the older view that ‘intelligence came first’. This was the famous Piltdown skull, discovered in a gravel pit in 1913. It had a jaw like an ape but its brain was the same size as that of modern man. Then, forty years later, tests at the British Museum revealed that the Piltdown skull was a hoax - the skull of a modern man and the jawbone of an ape, both stained by chemicals to look alike. The revelation of the hoax came in the same year that Dart’s paper was published, and it went a long way towards supporting Dart’s views. The brain of Australopithecus was larger than that of an ape, but it was far smaller than that of modern man. In the early 1960s, two remarkable books popularised this disturbing thesis about man’s killer instincts: African Genesis by Robert Ardrey andOn Aggression by Konrad Lorenz. Both argued, in effect, that man became man because of his aggressiveness, and that we should not be surprised by war, crime and violent behaviour because they are part of our very essence. Ardrey’s final chapter was grimly entitled: ‘Cain’s Children’. Yet both Ardrey and Lorenz were guardedly optimistic, Lorenz pointing out that man’s aggressions can be channelled into less dangerous pursuits - such as sport and exploration - while Ardrey declared, with more hope than conviction, that man’s instinct for order and civilisation is just as powerful as his destructiveness. Ardrey even ends with a semi-mystical passage about a mysterious presence called ‘the keeper of the kinds’, a force behind life that makes for order. Yet the overall effect of both books is distinctly pessimistic. The same may be said for the view put forward by Arthur Koestler inThe Ghost in the Machine (1967). Koestler points out: ‘Homo sapiensis virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of instinctive safeguards against the killing of conspecifics - members of his own species.’ (He might have added that he is also one of the few creatures who has no instinctive revulsion against cannibalism -dogs, for example, cannot be persuaded to eat dog meat.) Koestler’s explanation is that the human brain is an evolutionary blunder. It consists of three brains, one on top of the other: the reptile brain, the mammalian brain and, on top of these, the human neo-cortex. The result, as the physiologist P. D. Maclean remarked, is that when a psychiatrist asks the patient to lie down on the couch he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. The human brain has developed at such an incredible pace in the past half million years that physiologists talk about a ‘brain explosion’ and compare its growth to that of a Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html tumour. The trouble says Koestler, is that instead oftransforming the old brain into the new - as the forelimb of the earliest reptiles became a bird’s wing and a man’s hand - evolution has merely superimposed a new structure on top of the old one and their powers overlap. We are a ‘mentally unbalanced species’, whose logic is always being undermined by emotion. ‘To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the neo-cortex and the hypothalamus’, and the result is that man has a dangerous ‘paranoid streak’ which explains his self-destructiveness. Inevitably, there was a reaction against the pessimism. InThe Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1974), the veteran Freudian Erich Fromm flatly contradicts Dart, Ardrey and Lorenz, and argues that there is no evidence that our remote ancestors were basically warlike and aggressive. ‘Almost everyone reasons: if civilised man is so warlike, how much more warlike must primitive man have been! But [Quincy] Wright’s results [inA Study of War ] confirm the thesis that the most primitive men are the least warlike and that war likeness grows in proportion to civilisation.’ And in a television series calledThe Making of Mankind (broadcast in 1981), Richard Leakey, son of the anthropologist Louis Leakey (whose investigations into ‘southern ape-man’ had been widely cited by Ardrey to support his thesis) left no doubt about his opposition to the killer ape theory. Everything we know about primitive man, he said, suggests that he lived at peace with the world and his neighbours; it was only after man came to live in cities that he became cruel and destructive. This is also the view taken by Fromm inThe Anatomy of Human Destructiveness . Yet even the title of Fromm’s book suggests that Ardrey, Lorenz and Koestler were not all that far from the truth. ‘Man differs from the animal by the fact that he is a killer,’ says Fromm, ‘the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason...’ And the book is devoted to the question:why is man the only creature who kills and tortures members of his own kind? Fromm’s answer leans heavily upon the views of Freud. In (Civilisation and its Discontents(1931), Freud had argued that man was not made for civilisation or civilisation for man. It frustrates and thwarts him at every turn and drives him to neurosis and self-destruction. But Freud’s view of our remote ancestors implied that they spent their time dragging their mates around by the hair and hitting their rivals with clubs, and that it is modern man’s inhibitions about doing the same thing that make him neurotic. Fromm, in fact, is altogether closer to the views that had been expressed thirty years earlier by H. G. Wells. In one of his most interesting - and most neglected - books,‘42 to ‘44 , written in the midst of the Second World War, Wells tried to answer the question of why men are so cruel and so destructive. ‘We now know that the hunters of the great plains of Europe in the milder interglacial periods had the character of sociable, gregarious creatures without much violence.’ Like Fromm and Leakey, Wells believed that the trouble began when men moved into cities, and were ‘brought into a closeness of contact for which their past had not prepared them. The early civilisations were not slowly evolved and adaptedcommunities . They were essentially jostlingcrowds in which quite unprecedented reactions were possible’. Ruthless men seized the power and wealth and the masses had to live in slums. This is Wells’s explanation of how man became a killer. What puzzles Wells is the question of human cruelty. He makes the important observation that when we hear about some appalling piece of cruelty our reaction is to become angry and say, ‘Do you know what I should like to do to that brute?’ - a revelation ‘that vindictive reaction is the reality of the human animal.’ When we hear of cruelty, we instantly feel a sense of thedifference between ourselves and the ‘brute’ who is responsible. And it is precisely this lack of fellow-feeling that made the cruelty possible in the first place. It has to be acknowledged that ‘fellow-feeling’ isnot the natural response of one human being to another. We feel it for those who are close to us; but it requires a real effort of imagination to feel it for people on the other side of the world - or even the other side of the street. Sartre has even argued, in his Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html It is only in recent years that we have become aware of the role of overcrowding in producing stress and violence. In 1958, a scientist named John Christian was studying the deer population on James Island, in Chesapeake Bay, when the deer began to die in large numbers. There were about three hundred on the island; by the following year, two hundred and twenty of these had died for no apparent cause. Post mortems revealed that the deer had enlarged adrenal glands - the gland that floods the bloodstream with the hormone called adrenalin, the stress hormone. James Island is half a square mile in size, so each deer had more than five thousand square yards of territory to itself. This, apparently, was not enough. The deer needed about twenty thousand square yards each. So when numbers exceeded eighty, they developed stress symptoms, and the population automatically reduced itself. A psychologist named John B. Calhoun has made a similar observation when breeding wild Norwegian rats in a pen. The pen was a quarter of an acre and could have held five thousand rats. With a normal birthrate, this could have swelled tenfold in two years. Yet the rat population remained constant at a mere two hundred. Calhoun was later to perform a classic experiment with his Norwegian rats. He placed a number of rats into four interconnecting cages. The two end pens, which had only one entrance, were the most ‘desirable residences’ - since they could be most easily defended - and these were quickly taken over by two highly dominant rats with their retinue of females. All the other rats were forced to move into the two centre cages, so that these soon became grossly overcrowded. There were also dominant males in these two centre cages (it was Calhoun who observed that the number of dominant rats was one in twenty - five per cent), but because of the overcrowding, they could not establish their own territory. And as the overcrowding became more acute, the dominant rats became criminals. They formed gangs and indulged in rape, homosexuality and cannibalism. In their natural state, rats have an elaborate courting ritual. The criminal rats would force their way into the female’s burrow, rape her and eat her young. The middle cages became, in Calhoun’s words, a ‘behavioural sink’. Ever since Lorenz’sOn Aggression , ethologists have warned about the dangers of drawing conclusions about human behaviour from animal behaviour; but in this case, it is impossible to see how it can be avoided. We have always known that our overcrowded slums are breeding grounds of crime. Calhoun’s experiment - performed at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland - shows us why: the dominant minority are deprived of normal outlets for their dominance; it turns into indiscriminate aggression. Desmond Morris remarks inThe Human Zoo : ‘Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder. Among human city dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur.’ Animals in captivity also develop various ‘perversions’ - which leads Morris to remark that the city is a human zoo. And the reason that a ‘zoo’ breeds crime is that dominance is deprived of its normal outlets and turns to violence. As William Blake says: ‘When thought is closed in caves, then love shall show its root in deepest hell.’ Yet the warning about extrapolating from animal to human behaviour deserves serious consideration. Why is not every large city in the world a ‘sink’ of violence and perversion? It is true that many of them are; yet others, such as Hong Kong, where you would expect to find the ‘dominant rat syndrome’, have a reasonably low crime rate. Ardrey provides one interesting clue in the chapter on ‘personal space’ inThe Social Contract . He describes an experiment carried out by the psychiatrist Augustus Kinzel in 1969. Prisoners in a Federal prison were placed in the centre of a bare room, and Kinzel then advanced on them slowly, step by step. The prisoner was told to call ‘Stop!’ when he felt that Kinzel was uncomfortably close. Non-violent prisoners seemed to need a ‘personal space’ of about ten square feet. But prisoners with a long record of violence reacted with clenched fists long before Kinzel was that close; these prisoners seemed to need Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html a ‘personal space’ of about forty square feet. This seems to support the ‘personal space’ theory. But it still leaves unanswered the question: why do some criminals need more than others? And the answer, in this case, requires only a little common-sense. When I am feeling tense and irritable, I tend to be more ‘explosive’ than when I am relaxed; so much is obvious. My tension may be due to a variety of causes - hunger, overwork, a hangover, general frustration and dissatisfaction. The effect, as John Christian discovered with his Sika deer, is to cause the adrenal glands to overwork; the result of long-term stress in animals is fatty degeneration of the liver and haemorrhages of the adrenals, thyroid, brain and kidneys. The tension causes fear-hormones to flood into the bloodstream. InThe Biological Time Bomb (p. 228) Gordon Rattray Taylor mentions that this is what causes the mass-suicide of lemmings, who are also reacting to over-population. He also describes how American prisoners in Korea sometimes died from convulsive seizures or became totally lethargic; the disease was named ‘give-up-itis’. But then, we are all aware that our attitudes determine our level of tension. Iallow some annoyance to make me angry or impatient. When the telephone has dragged me away from my typewriter for the fifth time in one morning, I may say: ‘Oh dammit, NO!’ and experience rising tension. Or I may take the view that these interruptions are tiresome but unavoidable, and deliberately ‘cool it’. It is my decision. It seems, then, that my energy mechanisms operate through a force and counter-force, like garage doors on a counterweight system. Let us, for convenience, refer to these as Force T - the T standing for tension - and Force C, the C for control. Force T makes for destabilisation of our inner being. Force C makes for stabilisation and inhibition. I experience Force T in its simplest form if I want to urinate badly; there is a force inside me, making me uncomfortable. And if I am uncomfortable for too long, the experience ceases to be confined to my bladder; my heartbeat increases, my cheeks feel hot. Myenergies seem to be expanding, trying to escape. Consider, on the other hand, what happens when I become deeply interested in some problem. I deliberately ‘damp down’ my energies, I soothe my impatience, I focus my attention. I actively apply a counter-forceto the force of destabilisation. And if, for example, I am listening to music, I may apply the counter-force until I am in a condition of deep ‘appreciation’, of hair-trigger perception. When we look at it in this way, we can see that the two ‘forces’ are the great governing forces of human existence. From the moment I get up in the morning, I am subjecting myself to various stimuli that cause tensions, and I am continually monitoring these tensions and applying ‘Force C’ to control them and - if possible - to canalise them for constructive purposes. Biologists are inclined to deny the existence of free will; yet it is hard to describe this situation except in terms of a continuous act of choice. The weak people, those who make little effort of control, spend their lives in a permanent state of mild discomfort, like a man who wants to rush to the lavatory. Blake says inThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell : ‘Those who restrain their desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained’, and this is one of the few statements of that remarkable mystic that is downright wrong-headed. (Admittedly, he is putting it into the mouth of the devil.) Beethoven was notoriously explosive and irascible; but his ‘inhibitory force’ was also great enough to canalise the destabilising force into musical creation. It is obvious that Sika deer, Norwegian rats, lemmings, snow-shoe hares and other creatures that have been observed to die of stress, lack control of the inhibitory force. Certainly all creatures must possess some control of this force, or they would be totally unable to focus their energies or direct their activities. But in animals, this control is completely bound up with external stimuli. A cat watching a mouse hole, a dog lying outside the house of a bitch on heat, will show astonishing self-control, maintaining a high level of attention (that is, focused consciousness) for hours or even days. But without external stimuli, the animal will show signs of boredom or fall asleep. Man is the only animal whose way of life demands Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html almost constant use of the inhibitory faculty. We can see the problem of the Ik: they had no reason to develop the inhibitory faculty where personal feelings were concerned. As hunter-gatherers, their lives had been very nearly as uncomplicated as those of the animals with whom they shared their hunting grounds. Placed in a situation that required a completely different set of controls, they became victims of their own destabilising forces. All of which suggests that, in the case of Kinzel’s prisoners, ‘personal space’ was not the real issue. This can be grasped by repeating his experiment. The co-operation of a child will make the point even clearer. Ask the child to stand in the centre of the room, then go on all fours and advance towards him, making growling noises. The child’s first reaction is amusement and pleasurable excitement. As you get nearer, the laughter develops a note of hysteria and, at a certain distance, the child will turn and run. (It may be an idea to conduct the experiment with the child’s mother sitting right behind him, so that he can take refuge in her arms.) More confident children may run at you - a way of telling themselves that this is really only daddy. Now reverse the situation, and take his place in the centre of the room, while some other adult crawls towards you and makes threatening noises. You will observe with interest that although you have set up the experiment, you still feel an impulse of alarm, and a release of adrenalin. To a large extent, the destabilising mechanism is automatic. You will also have the opportunity to note the extent to which you can apply the control mechanism. The imagined threat triggers a flight impulse and raises your inner tension. One way of releasing this tension is to give way to it. If you refuse to do this, you will be able to observe the attempts of your stabilising mechanism - the C Force - to control the destabilising force. You will observe that you still have a number of alternatives, depending onhow far you choose to exert control. You can allow yourself to feel a rush of alarm, but refuse to react to it. You can actively suppress the rush of alarm. You may even be able, with a little practice, to prevent it from happening at all. I had a recent opportunity to observe the mechanism at an amusement park, where a small cinema shows films designed to induce vertigo. The audience has to stand, and the screen is enormous and curved. Carriages surge down switchbacks; toboggans hurtle across the ice and down ski-slopes; the watchers soon begin to feel that the floor is moving underneath their feet. After twenty minutes or so I began to feel that I’d got the hang of it, and could resist the impulse to sway. Even so, the end of the film took me unaware; a car hurtles off a motorway at a tremendous speed and down the exit lane, ramming into a vehicle waiting to pull out into the traffic. My foot went automatically on the brake, and I staggered and fell into the arms of the unfortunate lady standing behind me. What had happened is that the suddenness of the final crash pushed me beyond the point at which I had established control. Yet for the previous twenty minutes I had been establishing a higher-than-usual degree of control. Under circumstances like this – and something similar happens to city dwellers every day - we are inclined to feel that all control is ‘relative’ and perhaps therefore futile. And this mistake - which is so easy to make - is the essence of the criminal mentality. The criminal makes thedecision to abandon control. He can see no sound reason why he should waste his time establishing a higher level of self-control. Let other people worry about that. The result is bad for society, but far more disastrous for himself. After all, society can absorb a little violence, but for the destabilised individual it means ultimate self-destruction. When we observe this continual balancing operation between Force T and Force C, we can grasp its place in the evolution of our species. When deer and lemmings are overcrowded, the result is a rise in the destabilising force which causes the adrenal glands to overwork; beyond a certain point of tension, this Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Wells, oddly enough, failed to grasp this curiously impersonal element in human cruelty. Having seized upon the notion that slum conditions produce frustration, he continues with a lengthy analysis of human cruelty and sadism, citing as typical the case of Marshal Gilles de Rais, who killed over two hundred children in sexual orgies in the fifteenth century. In fact, de Rais’s perversions throw very little light on the nature of ordinary human beings, whose sexual tastes are more straightforward. The Japanese who burnt Nanking, the Germans who destroyed Oradour, were not sexual perverts; they had probably never done anything of the sort before, and would never do anything of the sort again. They were simply releasing their aggression in obedience to authority. Fromm is inclined to make the same mistake. He recognises ‘conformist aggression’ - aggression under orders - but feels that human destructiveness is better explained by what he calls ‘malignant aggression’ - that is, by sadism. Sadism he defines as the desire to have absolute power over a living being, to have a god-like control. He cites both Himmler and Stalin as examples of sadism, pointing out that both could, at times, show great kindness and consideration. They became ruthlessonly when their absolute authority was questioned . But this hardly explains the human tendency to destroy their fellows in war. So Fromm is forced to postulate another kind of ‘malignant aggression’, which he calls ‘necrophilia’. By this, he meant roughly what Freud meant by ‘thanatos’ or the death-urge - the human urge to self-destruction. Freud had invented the ‘death wish’ at the time of the First World War in an attempt to explain the slaughter. It was not one of his most convincing ideas, and many of his disciples received it with reservations - after all, anyone can see that most suicides are committed in a state of muddle and confusion, in which a person feels that life is not worth living; so the underlying instinct is for more life, not less. Even a romantic like Keats, who feels he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, is in truth confusing the idea of extinction with that of sleep and rest. If human beings really have an urge to self-destruction, they manage to conceal it very well. Fromm nevertheless adopts the Freudian death-wish. He cites a Spanish Civil War general, one of whose favourite slogans was ‘Long live death!’ The same man once shouted at a liberal intellectual: ‘Down with intelligence!’ From this, Fromm argues that militarism has an anti-life element that might be termed necrophilia. But he demolishes his own case by citing two genuine examples of necrophilia from a medical textbook on sexual perversion: both morgue attendants who enjoyed violating female corpses. One of them described how, from the time of adolescence, he masturbated while caressing the bodies of attractive females, then graduated to having intercourse with them. Which raises the question: is this genuinely a case of necrophilia, which means sexual desiredirected towards death ? Many highly-sexed teenage boys might do the same, given the opportunity. It is not an interest in death as such, but in sex. A genuine necrophile would be one who preferred corpsesbecause they were dead. One of the best known cases of necrophilia, Sergeant Bertrand (whom I discussed in Chapter 6 of myOrigins of the Sexual Impulse } was not, in this sense, a true necrophile; for although he dug up and violated newly buried corpses, he also had mistresses who testified to his sexual potency. He is simply an example of a virile man who needed more sex than he could get. So Fromm’s whole argument about ‘necrophilia’, and his lengthy demonstration that Hitler was a necrophiliac, collapses under closer analysis. The Spanish general was certainly not a necrophile by any common definition: he was using death in a rather special sense, meaning idealistic self-sacrifice for the good of one’s country. He certainly has nothing whatever in common with a morgue attendant violating female corpses. Hitler was undoubtedly destructive, but there is no evidence that he was self-destructive or had a secret death wish. On the contrary, he was a romantic dreamer who believed that his thousand-year Reich was an expression of health, vitality and sanity. Fromm’s ‘necrophilia’, like Wells’s notion of cruelty, fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of human cruelty; it is not universal enough. The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong. Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length, and in this connection I am indebted to Van Vogt for providing me with a series of five talks broadcast on KPFK radio in 1965. Like his earlier pamphletA Report on the Violent Male , these have never been printed in book form. In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel calledThe Violent Man , which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar? Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. Newspaper headlines tell their own story: HUSBAND INVADES CHRISTMAS PARTY AND SHOOTS WIFE Grief stricken when she refuses to return to him, he claims. ENTERTAINER STABS WIFE TO DEATH - UNFAITHFUL HE SAYS Amazed friends say he was unfaithful, not she. WIFE RUN OVER IN STREET Accident says divorced husband held on suspicion of murder. WIFE BADLY BEATEN BY FORMER HUSBAND ‘Unfit mother,’ he accuses. Neighbours refute charge, call him a troublemaker. HUSBAND FOILED IN ATTEMPT TO PUSH WIFE OVER CLIFF Wife reconciles, convinced husband loves her. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation. He brought up the question with a psychologist friend and asked him whether he could offer any examples. The psychologist told him of an interesting case of a husband who had brought his wife along for psychotherapy. He had set her up in a suburban house, and supported her on condition that she had no male friends. Her role, as he saw it, was simply to be a good mother to their son. The story of their marriage was as follows. She had been a nurse, and when her future husband proposed to her she had felt she ought to admit to previous affairs with two doctors. The man went almost insane with jealousy, and she was convinced that was the end of it. But the next day he appeared with a legal document, which he insisted she should sign if the marriage was to go ahead. He would not allow her to read it. Van Vogt speculates that it contained a ‘confession’ that she was an immoral woman, and that as he was virtually raising her from the gutter by marrying her, she had no legal rights... They married, and she soon became aware of her mistake. Her husband’s business involved travelling, so she never knew where he was. He visited women employees in their apartments for hours and spent an unconscionable amount of time driving secretaries home. If she tried to question him about this he would fly into a rage and often knock her about. In fact, he was likely to respond to questions he regarded as ‘impertinent’ by knocking her down. The following day he might call her long distance and beg her forgiveness, promising never to do it again. His wife became frigid. They divorced, yet he continued to do his best to treat her as his personal property, determined to restrict her freedom. When this caused anger and stress, he told her she ought to see a psychiatrist - which is how they came to Van Vogt’s friend. The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’. He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem - to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong. This man’s attempt to convince his wife that she was insane is typical. Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on ouramour propre . But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder. Van Vogt points out that the Right Man is an ‘idealist’ - that is, he lives in his own mental world and does his best to ignore aspects of reality that conflict with it. Like the Communists’ rewriting of history, reality can always be ‘adjusted’ later to fit his glorified picture of himself. In his mental world, women are delightful, adoring, faithful creatures who wait patiently for the right man - in both senses of the word - before they surrender their virginity. He is living in a world of adolescent fantasy. No doubt there was something gentle and submissive about the nurse that made her seem the ideal person to bolster his self-esteem, the permanent wife and mother who is waiting in a clean apron when he gets back from a weekend with a mistress... Perhaps Van Vogt’s most intriguing insight into the Right Man was his discovery that he can be destroyed if ‘the worm turns’ - that is, if his wife or some dependant leaveshim . Under such circumstances, he may beg and plead, promising to behave better in the future. If that fails, there may be alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide. She has kicked away the foundations of his sandcastle. For when a Right Man finds a woman who seems submissive and admiring, it deepens his self-confidence, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The word ‘magic’ was first used in this sense - meaning a form of self-deception - by Jean-Paul Sartre in an early book,A Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions . In later work Sartre preferred to speak of ‘mauvaise foi ’ or self-deception; but there are some ways in which the notion of ‘magical thinking’ is more precise. Malcolm Muggeridge has an anecdote that illustrates the concept perfectly. He quotes a newspaper item about birth control in Asian countries, which said that the World Health Organisation had issued strings containing twenty-eight beads to illiterate peasant women. There were seven amber beads, seven red ones, seven more amber beads, and seven green ones; the women were told to move a bead every day. ‘Many women thought that merit resided in the beads, and moved them around to suit themselves,’ said the newspaper. This is ‘magical thinking’ - allowing a desire or emotion to convince you of something your reason tells you to be untrue. In 1960, a labourer named Patrick Byrne entered a women’s hostel in Birmingham and attacked several women, decapitating one of them; he explained later that he wanted to ‘get his revenge on women for causing him sexual tension’. This again is magical thinking. So was Charles Manson’s assertion that he was not guilty because ‘society’ was guilty of bombing Vietnam. And Sartre offers the example of a girl who is about to be attacked by a man and who faints - a ‘magical’ attempt to make him go away. This is a good example because it reminds us that ‘magic’ can be a purelyphysical reaction. Magical thinking provides a key to the Right Man. What causes ‘right mannishness’? Van Vogt suggests that it is because the world has always been dominated by males. In Italy in 1961, two women were sentenced to prison for adultery. Their defence was that their husbands had mistresses, and that so do many Italian men. The court overruled their appeal. In China in 1950, laws were passed to give women more freedom; in 1954, there were ten thousand murders of wives in one district alone by husbands who objected to their attempts to take advantage of these laws. But then, this explanation implies that there is no such thing as a Right Woman - in fact, Van Vogt says as much. This is untrue. There may be fewer Right Women than Right Men, but they still exist. The mother of the novelist Turgenev had many of her serfs flogged to death - a clear example of the ‘magical transfer’ of rage. Elizabeth Duncan, a Californian divorcee, was so outraged when her son married a nurse, Olga Kupczyk, against her wishes, that she hired two young thugs to kill her; moreover, when the killers tried to persuade her to hand over the promised fee, she went to the police and reported them for blackmail - the action that led to the death of all three in the San Quentin gas chamber. Again, this is a clear case of ‘magical’ - that is to say, totally unrealistic - thinking. And it shows that the central characteristic of the Right Woman is the same as that of the Right Man: that she is convinced that having her own way is a law of nature, and that anyone who opposes this deserves the harshest possible treatment. It is the god (or goddess) syndrome. Van Vogt also believes that Adler’s ‘organ inferiority’ theory may throw some light on right mannishness. Adler suggests that if some organ - the heart, liver, kidneys - is damaged early in life, it may send messages of inferiority to the brain, causing an inferiority complex. This in turn, says Van Vogt, could lead to the over-compensatory behaviour of the Right Man. He could well be right. Yet this explanation seems to imply that being a Right Man is rather like being colour blind or asthmatic - that it can be explained in purely medical terms. And the one thing that becomes obvious in all case histories of Right Men is that their attacks are not somehow ‘inevitable’; some of their worst misdemeanours are carefully planned and calculated, and determinedly carried out. The Right Man does these things because he thinks they will help him to achieve his own way, which is what interests him. And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem ofhighly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals - or human beings - seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: ‘One in twenty.’ ‘Is that exact or approximate?’ asked Shaw. ‘Exact.’ And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent - one in twenty - of any animal group are dominant - have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in a separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape. This is something that must obviously be taken into account in considering Becker’s argument that all human beings have a craving for ‘heroism’, for ‘primacy’, which seems difficult to reconcile with our fairly stable society, in which most people seem to accept their lack of primacy. This could be, as Becker suggests, because we lose the feeling of primacy as we grow up; but anyone who has ever spent ten minutes waiting for his children in a nursery school will know that the majority of children also seem to accept their lack of ‘primacy’. The ‘dominant five per cent’ applies to children as well as adults. Now in terms of society, five per cent is an enormous number; for example, in England in the 1980s it amounts to more than three million people. And society has no room for three million ‘leaders’. This means, inevitably, that a huge proportion of the dominant five per cent are never going to achieve any kind of ‘uniqueness’. They are going to spend their lives in positions that are indistinguishable from those of the non-dominant remainder. In a society with a strong class-structure - peasants and aristocrats, rich and poor - this is not particularly important. The dominant farm-labourer will be content as the village blacksmith or leader of the church choir; he does not expect to become lord of the manor, and he doesn’t resent it if the lord of the manor is far less dominant than he is. But in a society like ours, where working-class boys become pop-idols and where we see our leaders on television every day, the situation is altogether less stable. The ‘average’ member of the dominant five per cent sees no reason why he should not be rich and famous too. He experiences anger and frustration at his lack of ‘primacy’, and is willing to consider unorthodox methods of elbowing his way to the fore. This clearly explains a great deal about the rising levels of crime and violence in our society. We can also see how large numbers of these dominant individuals develop into ‘Right Men’. In every school with five hundred pupils, there are about twenty-five dominant ones struggling for primacy. Some of these have natural advantages: they are good athletes, good scholars, good debaters. (And there are, of course, plenty of non-dominant pupils who are gifted enough to carry away some of the prizes.) Inevitably, a percentage of the dominant pupils have no particular talent or gift; some may be downright stupid. How is such a person to satisfy his urge to primacy? He will, inevitably, choose to express his dominance in any ways that are possible. If he has good looks or charm, he may be satisfied with the admiration of female pupils. If he has some specific talent which is not regarded as important by his schoolmasters - a good ear for music, a natural gift of observation, a vivid imagination - he may become a lonely ‘outsider’, living in his own private world. (Such individuals may develop into Schuberts, Darwins, Balzacs.) But it is just as likely that he will try to take short-cuts to prominence and become a bully, a cheat or a delinquent. The main problem of these ungifted ‘outsiders’ is that they are bound to feel that the world has treated them unfairly. And the normal human reaction to a sense of unfairness is an upsurge of self-pity. Self-pity and the sense of injustice make them vulnerable and unstable. And we have only to observe such people to see that they are usually their own worst enemies. Their moods alternate between aggressiveness and sulkiness, both of which alienate those who might otherwise be glad to help them. If they possess some degree of charm or intelligence, they may succeed in making themselves acceptable to other people; but sooner or later the resentment and self-pity break through, and lead to mistrust and rejection. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The very essence of their problem is the question of self-discipline. Dominant human beings are more impatient than others, because they have more vital energy. Impatience leads them to look for short-cuts. When Peter Sellers booked into the RAG Club, he could just as easily have phoned his wife, told her to give the nanny two months wages and sack her, and then got a good night’s sleep. Instead, he behaved in a way that could have caused serious problems for everybody. It is easy to see that if Sellers’s life, from the age of five, consisted of similar short-cuts, by the time he was an adult he would lack the basic equipment to become a normal member of society. Civilisation, as Freud pointed out, demands self-discipline on the part of its members. No one can be licensed to threaten people with carving knives. All this places us in a better position to answer Fromm’s question: why is man the only creature who kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason? The answer does not lie in his genetic inheritance, nor in some hypothetical death-wish, but in the human need for self-assertion, the craving for ‘primacy’. The behaviour of the Right Man enables us to see how this comes about. His feeling that he ‘counts’ more than anyone else leads him to acts of violent self-assertion. But this violence, by its very nature, cannot achieve any long-term objective. Beethoven once flung a dish of lung soup in the face of a waiter who annoyed him - typical Right Man behaviour. But Beethoven did not rely upon violence to assert his ‘primacy’; he realised that his long-term objective could only be achieved by patience and self-discipline: that is to say, bycanalising his energy (another name for impatience) and directing it in a jet, like a fireman’s hose, into his music. Long discipline deepened the canal banks until, in the final works, not a drop of energy was wasted. When the Right Man explodes into violence,all the energy is wasted. Worse still, it destroys the banks of the canal. So in permitting himself free expression of his negative emotions he is indulging in a process of slow but sure self-erosion - the emotional counterpart of physical incontinence. Without proper ‘drainage’, his inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage farm. This is why most of the violent men of history, from Alexander the Great to Stalin, have ended up as psychotics. Without the power to control their negative emotions, they become incapable of any state of sustained well-being. If we are to achieve a true understanding of the nature of criminality, this is the problem that must be plumbed to its depths: the problem of the psychology of self-destruction. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DESTRUCTION In March 1981, Norman Mailer wrote an introduction to a volume of letters by a convicted killer, Jack Henry Abbott,In the Belly of the Beast . Abbott had written to Mailer from prison, and his letters convinced Mailer that this was a man with something important to say about violence. At thirty-seven, Abbott had spent a quarter of a century behind bars - for cheque offences, bank robbery, and murder. In solitary confinement he had read history and literature, and become converted to Communism. Mailer convinced the prison authorities that Abbott had ‘the makings of a powerful and important American writer’ and that he could make a living from his pen. Abbott was paroled. The book was published and became a best seller. A few weeks later, in a New York restaurant, he became involved in an argument with a waiter - an out-of-work actor named Richard Adan - when Adan told him he was not allowed to use the staff toilet. Abbott quietly asked Adan if they could go outside to resolve the incident; there he produced a knife and stabbed him in the heart. After several months on the run, he was caught, and returned to prison - where, presumably, he will now spend the rest of his life. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html to reports, he was ‘the meanest and most cowardly degenerate that they had ever seen.’ When Panzram agreed, Murphy astonished him by telling him that he would let him walk out of the jail if he would swear to return in time for supper. Panzram agreed - with no intention of keeping his word; but when supper time came, something made him go back. Gradually, Murphy increased his freedom, and that of the other prisoners. But one night, Panzram got drunk with a pretty nurse and decided to abscond. Recaptured after a gun battle, he was thrown into the punishment cell, and Murphy’s humanitarian regime carne to an abrupt end. This experience seems to have been something of a turning point. So far, Panzram had been against the world, but not against himself. His betrayal of Murphy’s trust seems to have set up a reaction of self-hatred. He escaped from prison again, stole a yacht, and began his career of murder. He would offer sailors a job and take them to the stolen yacht; there he would rob them, commit sodomy, and throw their bodies into the sea. ‘They are there yet, ten of ‘em.’ Then he went to West Africa to work for an oil company, where he soon lost his job for committing sodomy on the table waiter. The US Consul declined to help him and he sat down in a park ‘to think things over’. ‘While I was sitting there, a little nigger boy about eleven or twelve years came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it too. I took him out to a gravel pit a quarter of a mile from the main camp... I left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader...’ ‘Then I went to town, bought a ticket on the Belgian steamer to Lobito Bay down the coast. There I hired a canoe and six niggers and went out hunting in the bay and backwaters. I was looking for crocodiles. I found them, plenty. They were all hungry. I fed them. I shot all six of those niggers and dumped ‘em in. The crocks done the rest. I stole their canoe and went back to town, tied the canoe to a dock, and that night someone stole the canoe from me.’ Back in America he raped and killed three more boys, bringing his murders up to twenty. After five years of rape, robbery and arson, Panzram was caught as he robbed the express office in Larchmont, New York and sent to one of America’s toughest prisons, Dannemora. ‘I hated everybody I saw.’ And again more defiance, more beatings. Like a stubborn child, he had decided to turn his life into a competition to see whether he could take more beatings than society could hand out. In Dannemora he leapt from a high gallery, fracturing a leg, and walked for the rest of his life with a limp. He spent his days brooding on schemes of revenge against the whole human race: how to blow up a railway tunnel with a train in it, how to poison a whole city by putting arsenic into the water supply, even how to cause a war between England and America by blowing up a British battleship in American waters. It was during this period in jail that Panzram met a young Jewish guard named Henry Lesser. Lesser was a shy man who enjoyed prison work because it conferred automatic status, which eased his inferiority complex. Lesser was struck by Panzram’s curious immobility, a quality of cold detachment. When he asked him: ‘What’s your racket?’ Panzram replied with a curious smile: ‘What I do is reform people.’ After brooding on this, Lesser went back to ask him how he did it; Panzram replied that the only way to reform people is to kill them. He described himself as ‘the man who goes around doing good’. He meant that life is so vile that to kill someone is to do him a favour. When a loosened bar was discovered in his cell, Panzram received yet another brutal beating - perhaps the hundredth of his life. In the basement of the jail he was subjected to a torture that in medieval times was known as the strappado. His hands were tied behind his back; then a rope was passed over a beam and he was heaved up by the wrists so that his shoulder sockets bore the full weight of his body. Twelve hours later, when the doctor checked his heart, Panzram shrieked and blasphemed, cursing his mother for bringing him into the world and declaring that he would kill every human being. He was allowed to lie on the floor of his cell all day, but when he cursed a guard, four guards knocked him unconscious with a Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html blackjack and again suspended him from a beam. Lesser was so shocked by this treatment that he sent Panzram a dollar by a ‘trusty’. At first, Panzram thought it was a joke. When he realised that it was a gesture of sympathy, his eyes filled with tears. He told Lesser that if he could get him paper and a pencil, he would write him his life story. This is how Panzram’s autobiography came to be written. When Lesser read the opening pages, he was struck by the remarkable literacy and keen intelligence. Panzram made no excuses for himself: If any man was a habitual criminal, I am one. In my life time I have broken every law that was ever made by both God and man. If either had made any more, I should very cheerfully have broken them also. The mere fact that I have done these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few people even consider it worthwhile to wonder why I am what I am and do what I do. All that they think is necessary to do is to catch me, try me, convict me and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in prison and turn me loose again ... If someone had a young tiger cub in a cage and then mistreated it until it got savage and bloodthirsty and then turned it loose to prey on the rest of the world... there would be a hell of a roar... But if some people do the same thing to other people, then the world is surprised, shocked and offended because they get robbed, raped and killed. They done it to me and then don’t like it when I give them the same dose they gave me. (FromKiller, a Journal of Murder , edited by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, Macmillan, 1970.) Panzram’s confession is an attempt to justify himself to one other human being. Where others were concerned, he remained as savagely intractable as ever. At his trial he told the jury: ‘While you were trying me here, I was trying all of you too. I’ve found you guilty. Some of you, I’ve already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you. I hate the whole human race.’ The judge sentenced him to twenty-five years. Transferred to Leavenworth penitentiary, Panzram murdered the foreman of the working party with an iron bar and was sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Lesser had been showing the autobiography to various literary men, including H. L. Mencken, who were impressed. But when Panzram heard there was a movement to get him reprieved, he protested violently: ‘I would not reform if the front gate was opened right now and I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have no desire to do good or become good.’ And in a letter to Henry Lesser he showed a wry self-knowledge: ‘I could not reform if I wanted to. It has taken me all my life so far, thirty-eight years of it, to reach my present state of mind. In that time I have acquired some habits. It took me a lifetime to form these habits, and I believe it would take more than another lifetime to break myself of these same habits even if I wanted to...’ ‘... what gets me is how in the heck any man of your intelligence and ability, knowing as much about me as you do, can still be friendly towards a thing like me when I even despise and detest my own self.’ When he stepped onto the scaffold on the morning of 11 September 1930, the hangman asked him if he had anything to say. ‘Yes, hurry it up, you hoosier bastard. I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.’ Here we can see clearly the peculiar nature of the logic that drove Panzram to a form of suicide. To begin with, he committed the usual error of the violent criminal, ‘personalising’ society and swearing revenge on it. The address to the jury shows that he saw them as symbolic representatives of society. ‘Some of you, I’ve already executed. If I live, I’ll execute some more of you...’ In his early days, his crimes were a ‘magical’ attempt to get his revenge on ‘society’ - magical because there is no such thing as society, only individuals. The seven-year sentence turned a petty crook into a man with a mission - to ‘teach society a lesson’. But the Warden Murphy episode seems to have been a turning point. After his escape, Panzram fought a gun battle because he was too ashamed to return to the prison and look the warden in the face. The savage punishment that followed seems to have been something of a relief. At Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html this point, Murphy might have completed the work of reformation by looking Panzram in the face and asking how he could have done it. But Murphy’s patience was exhausted, and now Panzram despised and hated himself as much as society. The robbery and murder of sailors seems to have been an attempt to somehow convince himself that he was ‘damned’. What Murphy had done was to make Panzram realise that his logic - that ‘society’ was against him - was based on a fallacy. When Murphy treated him with sympathy, it must have begun to dawn on Panzram that his ‘society’ was an abstraction - that the world was made up of real individuals like himself. But when Murphy’s regime collapsed because of Panzram’s betrayal, Panzram went back to his false logic with redoubled persistence. ‘They’ - other people - were the enemy. However, no one can live out such a philosophy; everyone must have at least one close relationship with another person to remain human. The twenty murders Panzram committed after his escape could be regarded as a form of self-punishment. In 1912 he had broken back into jail to try and rescue Cal Jordan; by 1920, he had turned his back on personal feelings and committed murder as a kind of reflex. By the time he was in jail again - this time for good - Panzram had achieved complete self-alienation. He had convinced himself that the world was vile, that human beings all deserve to be exterminated, and that therefore he had nothing to live for. Emotionally, he was in a vacuum. Yet this is clearly an unnatural state for any human being, particularly for one like Panzram. The autobiography reveals that he has the makings of a ‘self-actualiser’. Lesser was surprised to find that he had read most of the major works on prison reform - no doubt stimulated by Warden Murphy; Panzram also read philosophy in jail, including Schopenhauer and Kant. (He seems to have borrowed his pessimism from Schopenhauer.) Yet this man, whose self-esteem was so high that he would allow himself to be tortured for days without giving way, had never achieved the most basic levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - for ‘security’ and for ‘belongingness’. “In a sense, therefore, Lesser’s present of the dollar was the cruellest thing he could have done. It testified that there was decency and kindness in the world. And this in turn meant that Panzram might, if he had made the effort, have achieved some kind of fulfilment in life. The mechanics of conversion demand that the sinner should make a full confession; and this is what Panzram immediately proceeded to do. Yet with twenty murders on his conscience, many of them children, he knew there could be no absolution. It was too late, far too late. He had thrown away his chances. The implication of Abbott’s book is that people like himself and Panzram never had a chance from the beginning. But is this true? Panzram had at least one chance, under Warden Murphy. Abbott had at least one chance, when his book was accepted. Both threw them away. The real problem seems to date from their original assumption that life had no intention of treating them fairly. According to Panzram, he was cuffed and kicked as a child and came to hate his mother. ‘Before I left [home] I looked around and figured that one of our neighbours who was rich and had a nice home full of nice things, he had too much and I had too little.’ So he burgled the house and landed in reform school. There again, he claims, ‘everything I seemed to do was wrong’, so he was punished and struck back viciously. ‘Then I began to think that I would have my revenge... If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ This weird logic of revenge was already fully formed by the age of thirteen. And it was clearly based on self-pity, on the notion that ‘the world’ had treated him badly. So instead of using his considerable intelligence and willpower to achieve success - and in that age he might have become anything from a circus stunt man to a movie star - he wasted himself in crimes of petty resentment. Panzram also implies that he was in some way not to blame for his crimes - that if the tiger cub is badly treated it can be expected to turn savage. There is an obvious element of truth in this; but it manages to leave out of account the whole question of free choice: thedecision ‘to be out of control’ that seems common to violent criminals. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html At this point, it is necessary to look more closely into this paradox of human self-destruction: the paradox of ‘the divided self. The ‘two selves’ of the criminal are present in every human being. When a baby is born, it is little more than a bundle of desires and appetites; it screams for food, for warmth, for attention. These are all immediate needs, ‘short-term’ needs. The child ceases to be a baby from the moment his imagination is touched by some story. From that moment on, he has begun to develop another kind of need: for experience, for adventure, for distant horizons. These might be labelled ‘long-term’ needs, and most of us find ourselves involved in a continual tug of war between our short-term and long-term needs. The child experiences the conflict when he feels he ought to save his pocket money towards a bicycle - to satisfy that longing for distant horizons - while the ‘short-term self wants to spend it on a visit to the cinema and a box of chocolates. The adult is, if anything, even worse off. With the need to worry about mortgages, television licences and the children’s clothes, he almost forgets that distant horizons ever existed. In effect, we walk about with a microscope attached to one eye and a telescope to the other. But we hardly ever look through the telescope - that eye tends to remain permanently closed. And now it becomes possible to see why criminality is related to hypnosis. The criminal is, of course, a man who is dominated by short-term needs; like a spoilt child, his motto is ‘I want it now’. But it is one of the peculiarities of consciousness that short-term perception - as seen through the microscope - slips easily into sleep or hypnosis. This is why animals - who wear a microscope on both eyes - are so easy to hypnotise. We need thesense of reality - the telescope - to keep us alert. The chicken’s sense of reality is restricted to scratching for food and sitting on eggs - which is why a mere chalk line can push its consciousness into total vacuity. And the criminal’s sense of reality, limited to short-term objectives, also tends to drift into a state akin to hypnosis. To the rest of us, there is something rather insane about the conduct of a Haigh, putting people into baths of acid just for the sake of a few thousand pounds. The means seem out of all proportion to the end. He has lost all ‘sense of reality’. With their combination of ‘microscope’ and ‘telescope’, human beings were intended by evolution to be far harder to hypnotise than chickens and rabbits. And indeed, we would be, if we made proper use of the ‘telescope’ to maintain a sense of reality, of proportion. It is this absurd habit of keeping one eye almost permanently closed that makes us almost as vulnerable as chickens. Then why do we do it? Again, we have to look closely at the peculiar workings of the human mind. When a child is born, he finds himself in a bewildering, frightening world of strange sights and sounds, none of which he understands. Little by little, he begins to recognise regular patterns, which he stores inside his head; and in the course of a few years he has collected enough patterns to create a whole world behind his eyes. So now, when he confronts some new situation, he does not have to study it in detail; the patterns inside his head enable him to master it in half the time. But this useful mechanism - like all mechanisms - has a serious disadvantage. As the adult becomes more skilled at coping with new situations, he scarcely bothers to study them in detail, or to look for new points of interest. Sitting comfortably in the control room inside his head, he deals with them byhabit . Gradually life and consciousness fall into a mechanical routine.Human beings are the only creatures who spend ninety-nine per cent of their time inside their own heads . Which means, of course, that we are only keeping our sense of reality alert for one per cent of the time. It is hardly surprising that we are so easy to hypnotise. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html There is something very odd about the mechanism of hypnosis. It seems to be a method of utilising the mind’s powersagainst itself . Students of self-defence are taught how to immobilise an enemy by placing his legs around a lamp post in a certain position then forcing him to sit on his heels; it ‘locks’ him so that he cannot escape. The hypnotist seems to be able to ‘lock’ the mind in the same way. And the two ‘legs’ that obstruct each other to their mutual disadvantage arehabit andself-consciousness . We have all had the experience of trying to do something under the gaze of another person and doing it badly because we have become self-conscious. This is because when some function - like driving a car - has been handed over to habit, then we do it best when we are not thinking about it. Asking someone to pay attention to a task he normally does mechanically is an infallible way of throwing a spanner in the works. This is exactly what the snake does when it fixes the rabbit with its gaze. But people can become hypnotised without staring into the eyes of a hypnotist (or listening to his voice). If I go into a room to fetch something and then forget why I went there, I have slipped into one of the commonest forms of ‘hypnosis’. The journey to the room has distracted my attention from my purpose, causing my mind to ‘go blank’. There is a story of an absent-minded professor who went up to his bedroom to change his tie before guests arrived; when he failed to return, his wife went upstairs and found him fast asleep in bed. Removing his tie had made him automatically proceed to get undressed and into bed. We can see here how close absent-mindedness is to hypnosis: the professor behaved as if he had been given a hypnotic command to go to bed. And this came about because, as he went up to change his tie, he was living ‘inside his own head’, connected to reality by a mere thread. The unconscious suggestion that it was time to sleep snapped the thread, just as it might have been snapped by the command of a hypnotist. It is important to recognise that most of us spend a large proportion of our lives in this state of near-hypnosis. And the chief disadvantage of this state is that it makes us highly susceptible to negative suggestion. Our moods change from minute to minute. The sun comes out; we feel cheerful. It goes behind a cloud; we experience depression. In a modern city, most of the sights and sounds are depressing: the screeching of brakes, the smell of exhaust fumes, the roar of engines, the people jostling for space, the newspaper placards announcing the latest disaster. To a man with a strong sense of purpose, these things would be a matter of indifference, for purpose connects us to reality. But the ‘purposes’ of the modern city dweller are almost entirely a matter of habit. So he spends most of his time bombarded by negative suggestions - often sinking into that state of permanent, undefined anxiety that Kierkegaard calledAngst and that a modern doctor would simply call nervous depression. The Hindu scripture says: ‘The mind is the slayer of the real’ - meaning that our mental attitudes cut us off from reality. Thomas Mann has a short story called ‘Disillusionment’ that might have been conceived as an illustration of that text. The central character explains that his whole life has been spoilt by boredom, by a ‘great and general disappointment’ with all his experience. Literature and art had led him to expect marvels and prodigies, and everything has been a let-down. ‘Is that all?’ Death, he believes, will be the final anti-climax, the greatest disappointment of all... We can see that his problem is not that life is a disappointment, but that he neverexperiences life. His ‘life’ is lived inside his own head. He is in a more or less permanent state of hypnosis. And, by its very nature, this state tends to be self-propagating. Lack of expectation - or negative expectation - induces ‘hypnosis’, and a man in a condition of hypnosis is susceptible to negative suggestion, which prolongs the hypnosis. It is a vicious circle. As soon as we become aware of this mechanism, it becomes easy to observe it in ourselves. If, for example, I am feeling ill, trying not to be physically sick, I can observe how almost any thought can push me in one direction or another. The mere mention of food is enough to make me wonder what I ever saw in it. Yet it is equally easy for me to ‘snap out’ of it. I hear a pattering noise on the windowpane and think: ‘Can it be raining?’ And when my attention comes back to my stomach, I am no longer feeling Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html sick. The rain has rescued me from my claustrophobic mental world, re-established my connection with reality. And now it becomes possible to see how a Panzram or Merkhouloff becomes locked into an attitude of self-destruction. His negative mental attitudes cut him off from reality like a leaden shutter. There would be no point in telling Merkhouloff that his fear of killing someone by accident is absurd; his anxiety has made him ‘unreachable’, like the girl Pauline, encountered in the first chapter, who was told to go and embrace the Abbé and could not be made to abandon the idea, even by the man who had implanted the suggestion. Panzram’s tragedy was not that he was a social reject who was inevitably driven to violence and crime; it was that he was trapped in a state of ‘negative suggestibility’ so that he was totally unable to utilise his potential as a human being. But is this necessarily so? For the criminologist, this is obviously the most important question of all. The answer, quite clearly, should be no. If the mind is the slayer of reality, it should also be the creator - or, at least, the amplifier - of reality. If the problem of criminality is due to negative attitudes, then it should be possible to solve it through positive attitudes. Panzram may have been resentful and vicious; but he was also highly intelligent. This in itself should have enabled him to break out of the vicious circle. The revolutionary idea of ‘curing’ criminals by a change of attitude was not only suggested but demonstrated and proved by an American penologist named Dan MacDougald. His involvement in rehabilitation came about by accident. In the mid-1950s, MacDougald, who is a lawyer, was approached by farmers who wanted to complain about the Federal authorities. The authorities were overloading the Buford Dam in Georgia so that the overflow often ruined crops and drowned cattle. Their case seemed so reasonable and logical that MacDougald had no doubt it should be easily settled. To his surprise, it seemed practically impossible to persuade the authorities to listen. The engineers in charge of the dam told him you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and it took three years of arguing, and a cost of $46,000, to get things changed. What baffled MacDougald was that it seemed so difficult toget through to the authorities; it was just as if they had put their hands over their ears. And he began to see the outline of an explanation when he heard about an experiment performed at Harvard by Dr Jerome Bruner. Bruner was trying to determine the way stimuli are conveyed to the brain. It was known that they travel along nerve fibres by means of electrical impulses, and the experimenters had put electrodes in the nervous system - they were using a cat for their experiments - so that they could see exactly what nervous impulses were passing at any given moment. They discovered that if a cat was placed in a quiet room and a sharp click was sounded in its ear, this click could be traced as it moved along the nerves all the way to the cortex. They then tried placing a bell jar containing two lively white mice in front of the cat. The click was again sounded. And, oddly enough, their apparatus recorded no electrical impulse in the nerve. That seemed absurd. They could believe that the cat was ignoring the impulse as it gazed intently at the mice. But if the eardrum vibrated, then the impulse should have been carried along the nerve and registered on their oscilloscope. It looked as if the cat was somehow turning off the soundat the eardrum . What was actually happening, other experimenters discovered later, was that the cat sends counter-impulses to inhibit the sound - to block the nerve fibre, so to speak. MacDougald also came across the astonishing piece of information that the five senses pick up about ten thousand ‘units of information’ per second and that all this information is forwarded to a processing system in the brain. But the mind can only use about seven out of the ten thousand. The other 9,993 units of information have to be ignored.This is why the mind has such an efficient ‘filter’ system. As I sit here, Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html nothing less will enable him to achieve his goals. In fact, he is failing to achieve his goals because he proceeds on the negative assumption that they cannot be achieved. And negative assumptions, as we have seen, produce ‘hypnosis’. The moment he substitutes a positive assumption, his ‘controlling ego’ wakes up and takes command. And the sense of a controlling ego is also the sense of self, ofnaphsha . Maslow and other psychologists have demonstrated that alcoholics can be cured by inducing a similar recognition with the help of the psychedelic drug LSD. When the notion of using LSD as a cure for alcoholism first occurred to two doctors, Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, their idea was to try and frighten the patient by an experience similar to DT’s. It has been established that many alcoholics begin to recover after ‘hitting rock bottom’, often the experience of delirium tremens, and the doctors soon discovered that a positive LSD trip could be even more effective. LSD, like mescalin, causes a ‘transformation of reality’; sights, sounds, smells, may become more intense. Hoffer and Osmond discovered that if their patients had religious or spiritual experiences under LSD, they were far more likely to be cured than if they had a bad trip, and Maslow made use of the same principle in some of his own experiments. He knew that alcoholics are often more sensitive and intelligent than the average person, and are consequently more likely to be depressed by difficulties and obstructions, and so take refuge in heavy drinking. At first, the drinking produces ‘peak experiences’ which relieve the tension; but very frequently it only produces depression, which leads to still heavier drinking. The whole negative cycle is further complicated by feelings of guilt and helplessness. Maslow questioned his patients about the kind of aesthetic experiences that had given them pleasure before they became alcoholics - music, poetry, painting. Then, under mescalin or LSD, he induced ‘peak experiences’ - feelings of intense happiness and well-being - by means of music, poetry, colours blending on a screen. This method produced many startling cures. And the reason, apparently, was that when the patient experienced a sense of deep relaxation and happiness, it awakened all his hopes, his positive expectations of life. He would also see clearly that these could be best fulfilled if he stayed healthy and determined. He would recognise that to drink heavily to achieve the ‘peak experience’ is counter-productive. The ‘self’ would regain control, and the patient cease to be an alcoholic. In effect, Maslow was doing what MacDougald and Reynolds did: awakening the controlling ego. But perhaps the most important point to emerge from these considerations is that they apply to everybody , not simply to criminals or alcoholics. All of us spend a large amount of our time in a state akin to hypnosis. All of us spend a large amount of our lives in a state of boredom or ‘directionlessness’. And the insights of MacDougald, Reynolds and Maslow are just as applicable to company directors as to criminals. This has been recognised by Werner Erhard, the founder of the psychotherapeutic method known as est. As described in a biography of Erhard by W. W. Bartley, the essence of est is the recognition of ‘true identity’. The key to Erhard’s thought is the notion of the Self, and the recognition that this Self is able to take charge of the individual’s life and personality. We are not ‘creatures of circumstance’. We only believe we are when we are in a ‘fallen’ or untransformed state. And the essence of this state is the delusion that we are mere products of our mental and emotional activities, as heat is a product of a fire. An important American physician, Howard Miller - of whom we shall speak later - has made the same observation. The ‘essential you’ fails to grasp its own nature; it sits around passively in a corner of the brain, observing the body’s physical and emotional states as if they were as uncontrollable as the weather. The moment any kind of crisis occurs, the ego awakens with a shock and hurls itself into its proper role as thedirector of consciousness. The situation could be compared to the captain of a ship who has suffered a bout of amnesia, and who sits gloomily in his cabin, staring out of the porthole and wondering why the ship seems to be going in circles. The reason, of course, is that there is nobody on the bridge. * * * Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Let us try to summarise these insights. Crime is the outcome of negative attitudes. Negative attitudes are due to the selectivity of our perceptive mechanisms. A man who had just been reprieved from a firing squad would fling open his senses like windows; he would notice everything, and everything would strike him as beautiful and interesting. As the American gangster and multiple murderer Charlie Birger stood on the scaffold in 1927, he looked wistfully at the sky and said: ‘It is a beautiful world, isn’t it?’ But he had noticed it too late. He should have noticed it earlier; then a number of people would have remained alive. Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data - like the blueness of the sky - he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread - the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with ‘maps of reality’ -ideas of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience - the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds ‘appropriately’. The photographs he chooses are those thatremind him of the present situation. For example, if he is being introduced to a moonfaced stranger with a grey suit and a foreign accent, his memory will throw up photographs of various strangers, and various men with moon faces, grey suits and foreign accents. If he found most of these fairly likeable, then he will feel predisposed to like this new acquaintance - while firmly believing that he is forming a judgement solely on the basis of his present observations. Perhaps, as he is shaking the man’s hand, the stranger smiles and shows a gold tooth which recalls a neighbour who once caught him stealing apples; immediately, he feels an inexplicable twinge of dislike. All these complex mechanisms have been developed over millions of years of evolution. And it is easy to see that most of us are quite simply overweighted with habit mechanisms. We are like the dinosaurs, whose bodies were so gigantic that it cost them an immense effort to move, Bui with human beings, it is the ‘robot’, the ‘habit-body’ that has become so gigantic and complex that it does most of our living for us. The average human being lives in his habit-body like a mouse in a windmill. As we get older, the mechanism grows more rusty and cumbersome, and we experience less and less of those flashes of freedom - of sheer delight - that make life worth living. This is why, as Gurdjieff says, many people die long before their physical death. They continue to respond to external stimuli, immense, creaking windmills, tenanted only by a dead mouse. In the light of this assessment, it may seem that the long-term future of the human race looks unpromising. But the comparison with the dinosaur may be misleading. This is not a problem of man’s long-term evolution but of what happens during an individual’s lifetime. As Wordsworth points out, children often see things ‘apparelled in celestial light’; it is with the approach of adulthood that the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’. And we have seen that this is not as inevitable as Wordsworth thought. It is largely due to ‘faulty blocking’. What is necessary, at this point in evolution, is for man to recognise thathe is in charge of his consciousness, that if we can unconsciously close our minds to interesting data, then we can use conscious intelligence to open them again. What prevents this recognition? The answer can be seen in the following paragraph, which is from a Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html book calledCurious Facts : Mrs Marva Drew, a fifty-one-year-old housewife from Waterloo, Iowa, typed out every number from one to a million after her son’s teacher told him it was impossible to count up to a million. It took her five years and 2,473 sheets of typing paper. The sheer waste of time takes the breath away. Could anything more dreary, more pointless, more repetitious, be imagined? What could motivate any human being to do anything so futile? Yet the answer is plain enough. A schoolteacher - a figure of authority - told her son it was impossible. She decided that, in this single instance, she would prove she knew better than authority. So she wasted five years of her life. We can see that the attitude of mind is identical to Panzram’s - the defiance of authority - and that the act has the baffling illlogicality that is characteristic of crime. And, like the professor who went to bed instead of attending to his guests, there is also an element that savours of hypnosis. If the lady had had the common sense to say: ‘But schoolteachers are not infallible’, she would have saved herself five years - the equivalent of a prison sentence. But in order toknow that, she would have had to change her whole attitude - not merely towards authority, but towards herself. Society had conditioned her to a certain view of authority and, therefore, of herself. Man has achieved his present position as the ‘lord of creation’ because he is the most social animal on earth. But because he is a social animal, he keeps looking to other people for his cues to action. The key to crime, therefore, lies in man’s history as a social being. HOW MAN EVOLVED The following two extracts are examples of sadism, one real, one fictional: We slept, having given the prize of the night to a tale of Enver Pasha, after the Turks re-took Sharkeui. He went to see it, in a penny steamer, with Prince Jamil and a gorgeous staff. The Bulgars, when they came, had massacred the Turks; as they retired, the Bulgar peasants went too. So the Turks found hardly anyone to kill. A greybeard was led on board for the Commander-in-Chief to bait. At last Enver tired of this. He signed to two of his bravo aides, and throwing open the furnace door, said, ‘Push him in.’ The old man screamed, but the officers were stronger and the door was slammed-to on his jerking body. We turned, feeling sick, to go away, but Enver, his head on one side, listening, halted us. So we listened till there came a crash within the furnace. He smiled and nodded, saying: ‘Their heads always pop like that.’ That night, after a quick round of buggery with Saint-Fond, I withdrew to my apartment. But I couldn’t sleep: so stirred up was I by Clairwil’s violent words and actions, I had to commit a crime of my own. My heart beating wildly at the evil thoughts racing through my brain, I leapt out of bed and dashed to the servants’ quarters. There I stole a butler’s clothes and a guard’s pistol. Then, looking very much like a gentleman of fashion [the narrator is a woman], I slipped into the night. At the first street corner to which I came, I stationed myself inside a doorway and waited for someone to pass. The prospect of the crime which I was about to commit thrilled me like nothing I had ever experienced. My body glistened with sweat. My insides churned with the turmoil which precedes sexual congress - a fundamental excitement which honed all my senses to a fine cutting edge. I was aflame, ablaze now, for a victim. Suddenly, in response to my devil’s prayer, I heard groans - a woman’s voice, soft, low-pitched and Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html bed, and here the owner, his family and his animals lived and died. There was no sewage for the houses, no drainage, except surface drainage for the streets, no water supply beyond that provided by the town pump, and no knowledge of the simplest forms of sanitation... From I. E. Parmalee Prentice:Hunger and History , quoted by Hazlitt. And again and again there were appalling famines. In Rome in 436 B.C. it was so bad that thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber; in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a famine approximately every fourteen years, in one of which 20,000 people died in London alone. In our comfortable twentieth century, we have forgotten the way our ancestors lived for thousands upon thousands of years. Of course there must have been crime in these ages of hardship and poverty; but it was nearly all crime of want. The kind of crime discussed by Yochelson and Samenow is essentially that of a luxury society. The peasant of the Middle Ages had almost nochoice ; he could not even leave his village without the permission of the local lord. By comparison, modern man - even the poorest tramp - has a thousand choices. And the essence of criminality is that it is the choice of the ‘soft option’. Yochelson and Samenow observed that one of the central characteristics of the criminal is ‘the quest to be an overnight success’. They cite the case of a soldier who had won medals in Korea and who was arrested for robbing a petrol station when he came out of the army. The newspapers treated this as the story of a war hero who found civilian life too harsh and difficult. The truth is that the man had become accustomed to admiration and success and found civilian life an anti-climax; he decided he might as well use his army training in a career of robbery. It seemed to be ‘the soft option’. The decision was typical of the criminal’s short-sightedness, and consequent poor judgement. Yochelson and Samenow make us aware that the patterns of criminality change from age to age, and that it is rash to make generalisations about ‘human nature’ without specifying which period of history we are talking about. The statement ‘You can’t change human nature’ is based on a fallacy. Human nature began to change about half a million years ago, when man’s brain - for some unknown reason - began to expand far beyond his needs. It has been changing ever since. Even the statement ‘War is as old as humanity’ has been challenged by the historian Louis Mumford. In The City in History , he argued that it was when men came to live together in cities - in about 5000 B.C. - that they began to make war. When primitive man formed a raiding party, it was not to kill people and burn villages but to take a few captives for sacrifice to the gods and for ritual cannibalism. Mumford’s own view of the fall of man into warfare and crime runs like this. When ancient man became a farmer - about 12,000 years ago - he recognised more than ever before his dependence on the earth and its bounty. Even as a stone age hunter, he had his gods and nature spirits, and his shamans worked their magic rituals before the hunting party set out. Now that he harvested crops, he became aware of the earth as a living being, a great mother. The shamans became a priestly caste; primitive temples and sacred groves became the focus of village life. The king was chosen, not as a leader, but as an intermediary between man and the gods - rather as the pope is chosen nowadays. And if the harvest failed, the king would be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. (This part of Mumford’s argument is based on Frazer’sGolden Bough .} Now, a mud village with its domestic shrines and its witch doctor is one thing; an enlarged village with its temple and god-king quite another. It is already, in fact, a small city. And this, Mumford believes, is how cities first came about. It was also the beginning of the ‘fall’. ‘Once the city came into existence with its collective increase in power in every department, this whole situation underwent a change. Instead of raids and sallies for single victims, mass extermination and mass destruction came to prevail. What had once been a magic sacrifice to ensure fertility and abundant crops, an irrational act to promote a rational Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html purpose, was turned into the exhibition of the power of one community, under its wrathful god and priest-king, to control, subdue or totally wipe out another community...’ What Mumford has omitted to mention is that these early wars were not fought to collect victims for sacrifice, but for territory. When Mumford was writingThe City in History (which was published in 1961), the importance of ‘territory’ was not understood. It was Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey who first made the general public aware that one of the most basic impulses in all animals is the urge to establish an area that belongs to the family or the tribe, and from which all invaders are repelled. The first written records at Sumer - in Mesopotamia - show that the earliest wars were boundary disputes. A city needed farmland to supply it with food; when another city crossed the boundaries, there was war. Birds and animals seldom actually fight for territory; if a bird tries to invade a tree held by another bird, the incumbent will advance with a great show of rage, and this is usually enough to drive off the invader. The same kind of thing probably happened among the earliest farmers. But once a city’s ‘territory’ became hundreds of square miles, invaders could slip over the borders, and there was nothing for it but to try to hurl them back by force of arms. The birth of the city made warfare inevitable because boundary disputes could no longer be solved by sabre-rattling. But it would be a mistake to imagine that, because he marched against his neighbour, man suddenly became ruthless and cruel. In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence that cruelty was a fairly late development. We have a comprehensive record of the everyday life of these early civilisations - in Egypt and Mesopotamia: first in wall paintings, later in writing (which was invented in Sumer about 3500 B.C.). There are no scenes of brutality and harshness in Egyptian wall paintings, and the ancient Egyptians are known to have treated their defeated enemies with gallantry and consideration. The Hittites were among the most formidable warriors in the Middle East; yet the archaeological record shows that they were singularly humane. Sargon of Akkad, the first great empire builder - who lived about 2300 B.C. - has left the usual boastful records of his conquests and achievements; but they are free of the sadistic brutality of later conquerors. As Samuel Noah Kramer demonstrates inHistory Begins at Sumer (New York, 1959) the early Sumerian writings show that they were a people of high moral ideals. The first recorded murder trial took place in Sumer about 1850 B.C. - when three men were sentenced for killing a temple servant named Lu-Inanna - and the text states: ‘They who have killed a man are not worthy of life.’ For what we must understand about the men of these early civilisations is that they regarded themselves as the servants of the gods. And the king himself was still nothing more than a servant. In the first chapter ofThe Martyrdom of Man Winwood Reade says about the early pharaohs: He was forbidden to commit any kind of excess: he was restricted to a plain diet of veal and goose, and to a measured quantity of wine. The laws hung over him day and night; they governed his public and private actions: they followed him even to the recesses of his chamber, and appointed a set time for the embraces of his queen. This is why those early civilisations were merciful to their vanquished enemies: they were ruled by the gods, and the gods taught the sanctity of human life. Besides, cruelty requires a certain degree of egoism, and a man who believes he is a servant of the gods keeps his individuality suppressed like the medieval craftsmen who built the cathedrals. In the second millennium B.C., things began to change. The king ceased to be a mere figurehead and began to exercise real power. As other cities were conquered, a degree of ruthlessness became necessary. Sargon of Akkad was not particularly ruthless, and this may be why his empire lasted such a short time; in his last years, many cities rose up against him. Later kings recognised the importance of sternness and terror. The legal code of Hammurabi - who lived about 1800 B.C. - is famous for its balanced sense of justice; but it is far harsher than the earlier fragments of legal codes that have come Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html down to us. An official of king Zimri-lin of Mari - a friend of Hammurabi - wrote to the king protesting about nomads who refused to be conscripted into the army, and suggesting that they should behead a criminal and send his head around to various encampments ‘that the troops may fear and quickly assemble’. Later still, the kings would have sent their soldiers to behead dissenters in public squares. According to this theory, then, man’s development into criminality was inevitable. First he became a social animal, then a religious animal; then he became a villager, then a city dweller; then his territorial instinct pushed him into slaughtering his own kind in war... But this account still leaves unanswered the question raised by Erich Fromm:Why is man the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind without reason? Most animals feel a specific prohibition about killing their own kind. If two animals are fighting, and one of them wishes to surrender, it only has to roll on its back and show its stomach; the other animal then becomes incapable of continuing to attack. Man is the only creature who lacks this built-in mechanism. One of the odder attempts to explain this anomaly was made by a Hungarian anthropologist Oscar Kiss Maerth, in a book calledThe Beginning Was the End (1971). Maerth’s theory takes as its starting point the evidence for widespread cannibalism among our ancestors - which is again something rarely found among animals. Basing his theory on his study of modern head-hunters in Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea, Maerth argues that the eating of human brains stimulates intelligence and increases sexual excitability. He points out that in parts of Asia, fresh ape brain is still regarded as a delicacy, and can be bought in restaurants. The animal is killed immediately before the meal, and its brains are eaten raw. ‘According to my own experience, about twenty hours after such a repast there is a feeling of warmth in the brain, like a gentle pressure. After about twenty-eight hours the body is flooded by vitality, with increased sexual impulses.’ Early man ate the brains of his enemies - perhaps believing he could absorb his courage and other virtues - and discovered that it made him more intelligent. It also caused him to become obsessed by sex, and removed the animal inhibition against having sex when the female was not in season. At the moment, Maerth’s theory can be neither proved nor disproved, since there is no evidence that the eating of brains produces the effects he alleges. But it is worth mentioning here because it is at least an attempt to explain how man developed into a killer of his own kind. Konrad Lorenz’s theory is far less heterodox, but it is open to equally strong objections. He suggests that harmless species, such as doves, hares and roebucks, have no appeasement signals to stop aggression, because in normal circumstances they cannot do one another a great deal of damage. To support this assertion, Lorenz describes how he placed two doves together in a cage and one of them almost pecked the other to death. Man, he says, being basically a harmless creature, without tusks or claws, also lacks appeasement signals. This explanation has been challenged by Elaine Morgan in a book calledThe Descent of Woman ; she points out that man still has strong canine teeth, which must at one time have been far bigger. Baboons have similar teeth, and they have appeasement signals. She goes on to propound her own theory of how man came to lose his inhibition about killing defeated enemies. At one time, she suggests, our remote ancestors returned to the water when droughts reduced the food on land. (This theory was first put forward by the zoologist Sir Alister Hardy.) This is how man came to walk upright on his hind legs - because it is easier to walk upright in water; it also explains how he came to lose his body hair, since hair would impede his swimming. (Water animals, like otters, have short hair.) A point came when the upright, hairless male tried having sex in the frontal position, instead of from the rear. The reaction of most females to this, Elaine Morgan argues, would be to fight for their lives. But the females who succumbed to frontal ‘attack’ would have babies; the others wouldn’t. Moreover, the ruthless males who ignored the females’ cries for mercy would become fathers; the more scrupulous or timid males would die without issue. And so, eventually, the ruthless male who could ignore pleas for mercy would replace those who responded to appeasement signals. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html over the Indian Ocean about 700,000 years ago. Its fragments - known as tektites - can still be found scattered over more than twenty million square miles. At the same time, the earth’s poles reversed, so that south became north and vice versa. No geologist can yet explain why this happened - or why it has happened on a number of previous occasions in the earth’s history. At all events, Ardrey suggests that the explosion, or the reversal of the earth’s polarity, or both, somehow triggered the ‘brain explosion’. During the reversal period, the planet would be temporarily without a magnetic field, and the result could be that earth experienced a sudden heavy bombardment of cosmic rays and other high-speed particles of the kind that are at present diverted by the Van Allen belts around us. There would also be a sudden rise in the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Both these factors could cause genetic mutations which might be responsible for the ‘brain explosion’. On the other hand, this ‘catastrophe theory’ may be unnecessary. If man’s brain had already doubled in size between Australopithecus and the firsthomo erectus about a million years later, then there is nothing very startling in a further increase of about a third in another half million years. There is, however, one outstanding mystery. Peking man already had a brain that was far bigger than that of Australopithecus; in fact, some of the larger-brained Peking men had brains as big as some smaller-brained modern men. What did he do with it? He certainly learned to build himself crude shelters made of branches, and developed more elaborate hunting techniques - he had even learned to kill elephants. Yet his tools made practically no advance. A mere 300,000 years ago,homo erectus was still using the crude flint choppers thathomo habilis had been using two million years ago. And so things continued down to the time of Neanderthal man, who appeared on the scene only about a hundred thousand years ago. He was still a thoroughly ape-like creature with a receding chin and receding forehead, and his cave-dwellings indicate that he was also a cannibal. And he vanished from the face of the earth between thirty and twenty-five thousand years ago, when Cro-Magnon man - direct ancestor of modern man - appeared on the scene. Ardrey has no doubt whatever that Neanderthal was exterminated by Cro-Magnon man, and it seems a reasonable hypothesis even though most experts prefer to leave the question open. And Cro-Magnon man was the first creature to make obvious use of the enlarged brain. He made paintings on the walls of his caves; he even invented some crude form of notation on reindeer bones, probably to indicate the phases of the moon. In due course, he invented agriculture and built cities. He advanced more in twenty-five thousand years than his ancestors had in two million. As usual, Ardrey has a striking theory to explain what happened. He points out that the ‘tanged’ arrowhead - a head that could be fastened to a shaft - was invented by a species of Neanderthal man - Aterian - who lived in the Sahara (in the days when it was a green paradise) about forty thousand years ago. That argues that they also invented the bow. And the bow and arrow, Ardrey believes, were as crucial to the ancient world as the atomic bomb is to the modern. It was the first ‘long distance’ weapon. It meant that a hunter was no longer tied to his tribe; he could go off on his own and stalk small game. And once man had become used to hunting alone - to being anindividual - he probably began to develop the habit of thinking for himself. It is an exciting theory, and open to the single objection that, for some odd reason, the bow and arrow failed to spread beyond the Sahara culture that invented it. But then, as Ardrey points out, Cro-Magnon man knew about the sling, another long-distance weapon... This hypothesis may prove to be as unnecessary as the ‘big bang’ theory of the brain. To begin with, Neanderthal man seems to have been far less ape-like than we used to assume. He buried his dead with some form of ritual. The seeds of brightly coloured flowers have been discovered in Neanderthal graves - they were probably woven into some sort of screen to cover the body. Chunks of manganese dioxide - a colouring material later used by Cro-Magnon man - have been found in his caves, some of them worn down on one side as if used as crayons. Smaller quantities of other colouring materials - like red ochre - have also been found. So it seems conceivable that he used them for colouring animal skins. Neanderthal woman may have been a slut - the caves seem to be knee deep in animal bones - but that is no reason why she may not have enjoyed wearing brightly coloured clothes. Another puzzling feature of Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Neanderthal man is that he manufactured stone spheres, as did his ancestors a million years earlier. A large white disc of flint, twenty centimetres wide, was discovered in a cave at La Quina, in France. Every student of mythology knows that such discs usually represent the sun; these stone spheres may also be sun or moon images. All this strongly suggests that Neanderthal man, in spite of his bestial appearance, had some form of religion. And religion is undoubtedly the outcome of man’s thinking - and feeling - about the universe. It sounds very much as if Neanderthal man was already an individual before he invented the bow and arrow. The real objection to most of these theories - from Maerth’s brain-eating to Ardrey’s bow and arrow - is that they all seem to assume that man is a basically passive creature who needed to stumble upon the discoveries that accidentally triggered his evolution. Ardrey and Lorenz suggest that man’s discovery of weapons led to a better co-ordination of hand and eye, and so developed the brain. Ardrey suggests that long-distance weapons created ‘individuality’. Speaking about the mystery of the enlarged brain, he says that it is rather as if someone had invented the Rolls-Royce before the discovery of petrol. And that in itself suggests that he may simply be holding his facts upside down. Suppose it happened the other way round, and man made his discoveries as a result of seeking the answers to problems? Let us look carefully at this alternative view. We can begin with the known fact that at some remote point in prehistory, between twenty-five and fifteen million years ago, our remote simian ancestors descended from the trees because they found it more profitable to live on the ground. They dug for roots (as modern apes do), and ate small animals (again, as modern apes do). At times, they came upon larger animals - like deer - that had been trapped in thickets or swamps, and a point came when it struck them that big-game hunting made more sense than catching rodents and monkeys. The upright posture may have developed because these hunters had to carry their game back to their living sites. An animal drags its prey in its teeth; these three-foot man-apes were too small for that. They learned the trick of carrying their prey on their shoulders as they tottered forwards on their unsteady legs. The upright posture brought another advantage: they could see farther, an immense advantage for a hunter. Besides, there is something rather satisfying about seeing into the distance. Why do we all enjoy panoramic views, and feel stifled if we have to spend too long in a small room? Distant prospects are what animal ethologists call a ‘releaser’; they arouse in us a definite response, like food or sex. The reason may be that for millions of years our ancestors experienced a surge of interest and anticipation when they climbed a tree and looked over a distant plain; now we still feel the same when we look down from a mountain top, even though we are no longer looking for game. We call it the sense of beauty but its origin may lie in the stomach. And now we come to the heart of the mystery. The first men hunted in packs, like wolves - Ardrey even refers to Australopithecus as a ‘wolf-ape’. Then why has man evolved to become the ‘lord of the earth’ when the wolf has remained more-or-less unchanged? (The ancestor of wolves and dogs, Tomarchus, was on earth at the same time as Ramapithecus.) Moreover, both men and apes descended from the same tiny creature, a kind of tree shrew. So why have our cousins remained much as they were fifteen million years ago? In fact, preciselywhy did we evolve? For evolution is not ‘normal’. The shark has not changed in a hundred and fifty million years; it is such an efficient predator that it has never needed to change its methods. Evolution takes place only when creatures have to adapt, and therefore to strive. The Pliocene and the Pleistocene were certainly difficult periods, but they were equally difficult for all creatures. So why did man outstrip all the others? Oddly enough, most evolutionists seem to have overlooked the most obvious possibility: sex. Desmond Morris devotes some interesting pages to the development of female anatomy, and Elaine Morgan suggests that woman’s breasts may have enlarged to make them more accessible to the baby (which no Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html longer had hair to cling to during the feeding periods). But neither seems to have recognised that woman’s sexual transformation could have been the single most important factor in human evolution. The female ape is receptive to the male for only one week in the month. At some point in her history, the human female ceased to be seasonal and became receptive to the male at all times. The likeliest explanation is surely that when the males of the tribe were away hunting for days or weeks at a time, they expected to receive their sexual reward whether the female was in season or not. So in due course, the women who had no strong objection to all-the-year-round lovemaking bred more of their kind, while the others were gradually eliminated by natural selection. Since Leakey’s discovery that Ramapithecus was already a hunter, it is conceivable that the change took place at a very early point in the history of our species. In the lives of most animals, sex is an occasional indulgence; what really interests them is food. But once woman became permanently receptive, and began to develop characteristics that males found exciting - large breasts, full lips, rounded buttocks - then the males in turn had a strong motive for trying to show off their bravery and skill. The presence of unattached females in the group must have introduced an element of competition and excitement found in no other animal pack. Suddenly there was a reason for trying to become a mighty hunter. The psychology of theMorte d’Arthur and theChanson de Roland may have emerged in our ancestors long before they developed other human characteristics. In which case, Goethe put his finger on the central truth about human evolution when he wrote that ‘the eternal womanly draws us upward and on’. And why should this kind of ‘romantic’ sexual selection have produced a larger brain? Because the great hunter requires intelligence as well as bravery. This is why the brain increased in size - at first very slowly, so that it took ten million years for the brain of Ramapithecus to enlarge from 400 cc to the 600 cc of Australopithecus; then with increasing tempo, so that the brain ofhomo erectus had increased to 1,000 cc in less than two million years. (Robert Ardrey mentions that the brain of Anatole France was only 1,000 cc, demonstrating that Peking Man was already potentially the intellectual equal of a college professor.) Then came the ‘brain explosion’, when the average human brain enlarged by another third in a mere half million years. Now if the ‘romantic’ theory of evolution is correct, we no longer need to ask why the human brain developed at such a speed. It developed because sex had provided man with a motivation for using his intelligence. It is true that this theory arouses immediate misgivings in anyone who thinks in terms of twentieth-century sexuality; when the male sex symbol is the pop singer wearing a leather jacket and thrusting out his pelvis in time to the music, intelligence seems superfluous. But the pop singer can survive without intelligence, and the hunter cannot. We acknowledge this when we say that someone’s hand ‘has not lost its cunning’, recognising cunning as one of the basic attributes of the man who pits his intelligence against the animal’s instinct for survival: the trapper, the patient watcher, the stalker of game. And what, asks Robert Ardrey, did mando with his increased brain? It may or may not be a coincidence, but the ‘brain explosion’ began at about the same time as the last great ice age, half a million years ago. From then until about ten thousand years ago, the ice periodically advanced and retreated. In an ice age, hunting becomes more difficult, and the need for intelligence and skill therefore increases. On the other hand, such increased skill would not be obviously reflected in man’s artifacts; his chief weapon, the spear, would remain unchanged. As far ashomo erectus was concerned, the greatest of his discoveries was the hand axe, which first appears about a million and a half years ago. And there are no remarkable changes in this simple tool for well over a million years. Why should there be? Its purpose was the skinning of animals and the trimming of branches - and possibly the opening of skulls to extract the brain - and these also remained unchanged. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Scientists who have investigated dowsing - such as Professor Y. Rocard of the Sorbonne - have concluded that underground water causes slight changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and that these changes can be detected by the dowser. This explanation seems logical enough, since it now seems well established that birds migrate with the aid of the earth’s magnetic field. Experiments conducted at Manchester University by Dr Robin Baker showed that human beings are also sensitive to earth magnetism; blindfolded students were driven long distances - as much as forty miles - by a circuitous route, and then asked to point in the direction of ‘home’; sixty-nine per cent were accurate within an arc of 45 degrees, almost a third of them within 10 degrees. It is easy enough to see that the ability to find water and to ‘point’ in the direction of home must have been essential for our ancestors for millions of years, and that this explains why their descendants still possess these abilities. This, in turn, suggests answers to certain questions raised by Marshack’s analyses. He argues convincingly that the series of ‘snakey’ dots on a piece of bone are a code indicating the times of the rising of the moon. But why should our ancestors have been interested in what time it rose? They did their hunting by day, not by night. And if their aim was simply to work out when herds of reindeer or bison would begin their annual migration, then small vertical notches - such as are found on other pieces of bone - would serve just as well for a ‘tally’. We know that the moon has a powerful influence on the earth’s magnetic field - just as on the tides; it is probably this magnetic influence that causes disturbances in mental patients at the time of the full moon (and which leads us to speak of ‘lunacy’). Researches carried out by Dr Leonard Ravitz of the Virginia Department of Health showed that there is a difference in electrical potential between the head and chest, and that in mental patients there are far greater fluctuations in this difference than in normal people; the greatest fluctuations occur at the times of the new and full moon. A Japanese doctor, Maki Takata, showed in the 1940s that the rate at which blood curdles - the ‘flocculation index’ - is affected by sunspot activity. Experiments on the electrical field of trees - carried out by Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop in the 1930s - showed that this was also affected by sunspots. But the most significant deduction from their experiments was that living matter is somehow held together,shaped , by electrical fields, just as iron filings are held together and shaped by a magnet. This is the reason why if half a sea urchin’s egg is killed with a hot needle, the remaining half develops into a perfect but half-sized embryo (an experiment performed early in this century by Hans Driesch); each half contains a complete electrical ‘blueprint’ of the whole. But the astonishing thing is that the electric field should have a shape, like the jelly-mould that turns a blancmange into a miniature castle. (It is this same mould that allows certain creatures to re-grow lost limbs.) It is as if the force of life controlled matter by means of electric fields. So there is nothing surprising in the discovery that animals are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field; it would be astonishing if they were not. And since this field is altered by the movements of our neighbours in space - the planets as well as the sun and moon - it would also be surprising if our remote ancestors did not feel instinctively the connection between the earth beneath his feet and the heavens above his head. The sensitivity to underground water - and its electrical fields - must have been developed by our ancestors millions of years ago, perhaps in the great droughts of the Pliocene. All of which suggests that there was no need for ancient man to ‘ask questions’ about the forces of nature; he felt them around him, as a fish can feel every change in the pressure of the water through nerves in its sides. The result must have been a curious sense of unity with the earth and heavens that homo sapiens lost a long time ago. Ancient man’s religion was not an attempt to ‘explain’ the universe; it was a natural response to its forces, like the response of the skin to sunlight. This still leaves unexplained how the Pishauko witch-doctor was able to sense the approach of enemies. Modern psychical research would probably explain it in terms of telepathy. But it is important to bear in mind that the witch-doctor himself would not accept such an explanation for a moment. Throughout Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html history,all shamans, witch-doctors, ‘magicians’ and witches have claimed that they derived their powers from ‘spirits’, usually those of the dead. The power to respond to earth forces - to find water or ensure an abundant harvest - is regarded as part and parcel of the shaman’s ability to establish contact with the world of spirits. We may dismiss this as primitive superstition; but again, we shall be missing the point if we think of it as an attempt to ‘explain’ the problem of what happens after death. Shamans do not ‘believe’ in spirits; they experience them - or at least, experience something that they accept as the spirit world. So it is unlikely that Neanderthal man performed burial rituals because he had decided there must be life after death. He performed them because he took it totally for granted that he was surrounded by spirits, and that these included the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature - ‘elementals’. The same argument applies tohomo erectus . If he made bone carvings (and possibly rock paintings, since the two seem to go together) it was because they were part of his religious rituals. And if he possessed religious ideas, then they were certainly connected with the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature. Moreover, there is no need to assume that such ideas were a late development. If religion is a sensitivity to natural forces, then its origins probably lie in the dawn of prehistory; Ramapithecus probably had his own equivalent of ‘hunting magic’. And what of the human - or animal - sacrifice that always seems to be a part of primitive religion? Why did primitive man feel the need to make offerings to the spirits? Here we can only point to a well-established fact: that throughout the history of magic, at all times and in all cultures, man has believed that magic is carried out with the aid of spirits. And from ancient Babylonia to modern Brazil, he has also believed that the spirits must be paid with certain ‘offerings’, which must be accompanied by an extremely strict ritual. As I have described in my bookPoltergeist , the modern Brazilian ‘spiritist’ believes that the spirits wish to continue tasting the pleasures of this world: food, alcohol, sex, a good cigar, and will perform certain services - such as poltergeist hauntings - in return. The western mentality finds such beliefs absurd; but if we are to understand primitive religion, we must recognise that they can be found in every culture at all periods of history. Ifhomo erectus performed human sacrifice in the Chou-kou-tien caves, then we should at least give consideration to the notion that magic is far older than homo sapiens. All this, then, would explain why Cro-Magnon man was preoccupied with the phases of the moon, and why the earliest science in Sumeria was astronomy. It was not the result of intellectual curiosity about the stars, or an attempt to create a seasonal calendar for agricultural purposes. (In Egypt the Nile itself was the best of all calendars.) It was a development of religion - of man’s sense of involvement with the forces of the earth and the powers of the heavens. Cro-Magnon man also seems to have continued the practice of human sacrifice - at least, signs of cannibalism have been found at Cro-Magnon sites near Chou-kou-tien. This should not be regarded as evidence that our immediate ancestors were prone to cruelty or aggressive violence - any more than Jewish ritual slaughter is evidence of sadism, or the Christian eucharist of cannibalism. Religious sacrifice is performed in a spirit of self-effacement, in the service of the gods. It stands at the opposite extreme from criminality, which is an expression of individual self-assertion. At a certain point in history, man began to lose this sense of involvement with the gods. According to Wells, this was when he first became a city dweller; but we have seen that this is not entirely accurate. Three thousand years after the foundation of the first cities, the king of Sumer still regarded himself as no more than a servant of the gods. So did his people. InHistory Begins at Sumer , Samuel Noah Kramer writes: ‘Sumerian thinkers... were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink and shelter.’ It was a long time before the inhabitants of these temple-cities turned into Wells’s ‘jostling crowds’, and crime ceased to be the exception and became the rule. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html How this came about deserves to be considered in a separate chapter. THE DISADVANTAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS One day in 1960, at precisely ninety seconds before midday, a young student named Klaus Gosmann walked into a block of flats on the Tuchergarten Strasse in Hersbruch, near Nuremberg. He was a quiet, serious young man, known to his few acquaintances for his deep interest in mystical theology: his daydream was to find a job as pastor at some quiet little country village, where he could lead a life of dedicated service. He chose a flat at random and knocked on the door. A young man opened it. It was thirty seconds to midday. Gosmann said: ‘Sir, I wish to ask you a question and I shall not repeat it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your money or your lives?’ At that moment, the bells of the local churches began to chime midday, making a deafening noise. Gosmann drew a revolver from his pocket and carefully shot the young man in the heart. The man’s fiancée, who was looking curiously over his shoulder, began to scream. Gosmann shot her through the head. Then, before the bells had finished chiming, he turned and walked home. There he wrote up the story of the murder in his diary. He was pleased that he had timed it to a second - so that the bells would drown the shots - and that he had remained perfectly calm and controlled. Gosmann committed four more murders during the next seven years. One was of a bank director - again at precisely midday - from whose desk Gosmann snatched a few thousand marks. Another was of a doorman in a bank he had just robbed - the man was reaching to his pocket for his glasses when Gosmann fired. And to obtain more weapons, Gosmann shot the widow who ran a gun-shop in Nuremberg and her twenty-nine-year-old son. His next crime was his undoing. In July 1967, he snatched the handbag of a woman in a department store; when she screamed he fired at her but missed. He also fired at a store official who chased him and hit his briefcase. Beaten to the ground, he was thinking; ‘How ridiculous - it can’t be happening.’ He fired one more shot, killing the man who had chased him. Then he was arrested. Why did Gosmann kill? No doubt a psychiatrist would be able to uncover the roots of the obsessions and emotional disorders that turned his thoughts towards crime. (He revered the memory of his father, an army captain, who had been shot by the Americans at the end of the war.) But the central motivation was undoubtedly the need to bolster his self-esteem. Gosmann felt himself to be weak and inadequate - a thinker who was incapable of action. His crimes were a deliberate attempt tostrengthen his identity . And just as some couples enjoy sex more if they can see themselves in a mirror, so Gosmann tried to add a dimension of reality to his crimes by describing them in his diary. In prison he wrote in his journal: ‘I would say there is a great difference between me and Raskolnikov [inCrime and Punishment ]. Just as long as I don’t get it in the neck from the judge, I don’t have to consider myself as the perpetrator. Raskolnikov always thought of himself as the perpetrator...’ It is an interesting comment that reveals that even his present situation had not succeeded in rescuing him from his sense of unreality: ‘How ridiculous - it can’t be happening.’ Gosmanndid ‘get it in the neck’ from the judge; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of release. In the case of Klaus Gosmann we can see clearly the connection between crime and the sense of identity. If Gosmann had possessed the simple consciousness of an animal, he would have been incapable of crime. Most young people understand that need to deepen the sense of identity, and the feeling of envy and admiration for people of strong personality who seem to ‘know who they are’. (No doubt this was the basis of Gosmann’s admiration of his own father.) A great many of the activities of the young - from wearing strange garments to driving at ninety miles an hour - are attempts to establish the sense of identity. A dog has no such problems. It is entirely lacking in reflective self-consciousness. Consequently, it would be incapable of ‘crime’ in our human sense of the word. Crime is basically the assertion of the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html would hear it as a voice - probably speaking from the air above the left side of his head. Jaynes suggests that this happened some time after the advent of the earliest agriculture, about 10,000 B.C. This was the time when men began living in larger groups - no longer a small band of hunters living in a cave, but anything up to two hundred people living in a settlement of fifty or so houses. A group that large would need a leader - a king. But when the king died, his subjects would continue to hear his voice; hence they would assume that he was still alive - a god. This, says Jaynes, is how man came to believe in the gods. The gods were an inevitable consequence of the development of the ‘bicameral mind’. So, according to Jaynes, those early civilisations were ‘bicameral’. Men were not responsible for their actions; they obeyed the voice of the gods. And then, very slowly, consciousness (i.e. self-awareness) began to develop. This was due to a number of causes, but the main one was the invention of writing, some time before 3000 B.C. Writing - whose purpose is the storage of information - drove man into a new kind of complexity. For as soon as I begin to store information, I am forced to become more complex, whether I like it or not. An obvious example of the process is a library. I may collect books because I enjoy escaping from the real world. But as my collection expands, I must keep it in some sort of order. I must make bookshelves and adopt some kind of system of classification. This may strike me as tiresome; but unless I want to keep falling over books on the floor, or unless I keep giving them away, then I must teach myself the elementary principles of librarianship. Whether I like it or not, I have to ‘get organised’. So the development of writing created a new kind of complexity that undermined the bicameral mind. (In the first chapter of my bookStarseekers I reviewed the evidence that the Great Pyramid - dating from about 2500 B.C. - and megalithic monuments like Stonehenge were built as ‘computers’ whose purpose was to enable the priests to create astronomical tables.) Moreover, the second millennium B.C. was a time of unprecedented catastrophes and stresses. ‘Civilisations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunches itself into its dark and bloody close.’ The tremendous volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini - about 1500 B.C. - devastated the whole Mediterranean area. Then, between 1250 and 1150, the same area became a prey to hordes of invaders known as ‘the Sea Peoples’, who attacked the bleeding civilisation like sharks. Under all this stress, the old, child-like mentality could no longer cope. The men who rebuilt civilisation needed new qualities of ruthlessness and efficiency. Besides, all this violence demanded a more subtle response. ‘Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbour his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive.’ The first sign of this ‘change of mind’, says Jaynes, can be found in Mesopotamia. Around 1230 B.C. the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I had a stone altar built, and it shows the king kneeling before the empty throne of the god. In earlier carvings, the king is shown standing and talking to the god. Now the king is alone; the god has vanished. A cuneiform text of the same period contains the lines: One who has no god, as he walks along the street Headache envelops him like a garment. Headache is the result of nervous tension, of losing contact with the intuitive self. And when man suffers from stress, he reacts to problems by losing his temper. And it is at this point, according to Jaynes, that cruelty first becomes a commonplace of history. It is in the Assyrian carvings of about this period that we first see illustrations of men and women impaled, children beheaded. This, then, is Jaynes’s fascinating if highly controversial account of the coming of self-awareness and of crime. And it is open to one very obvious objection; that it is practically impossible to imagine complex Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html human beings - such as Sargon of Akkad or Hammurabi -without self-awareness. Jaynes points out that consciousness is not nearly so important - or so necessary - as we seem to think; a man playing the piano performs an extremely complex set of operations while his mind is elsewhere, enjoying the music. If he becomes conscious of his fingers, he plays badly. But this example is deceptive. The man had to learn to play the piano slowly and consciously; only then could he do it ‘automatically’. If he had never possessed self-consciousness, he would have been incapable of learning to play, since playing - like any other complex operation - demands self-criticism. There are other strong objections to this aspect of Jaynes’s theory. Professor Gordon Gallup of New York State University, has conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to determine whether animals possess self-awareness. Various animals - seventeen species in all - were placed in a cage with mirrors. Then the animal was anaesthetised and its face painted with a red, odourless dye. When the animal woke up, it was easy to see whether it recognised - through its mirror-image - that its face had been dyed. Two species - chimpanzees and orang-outangs - inspected their faces in exactly the same way that a human being would under similar circumstances; none of the others showed the least interest in their reflections. Most other species behaved in various ways that showed they regarded their mirror-images as other members of the same species - making friendly overtures or even attacking the image. Some of them continued to behave in this way even after years of acquaintance with mirrors, revealing total inability to recognise themselves. Significantly, gorillas were among those unable to recognise themselves - significantly because gorillas are closely related to chimpanzees and orang-outangs. There is one basic difference: the gorilla brain is far less ‘lateralised’ than those of the chimpanzee and orang-outang; it has not yet split into ‘identical twins’ - which in turn may explain why the gorilla lacks self-awareness. Gallup goes on to argue that, once an animal can become the subject of its own attention, it can contemplate its own existence; and if you can contemplate your existence, you can also contemplate your non-existence. We have seen in the last chapter that Neanderthal man buried his dead with elaborate ceremonies, which certainly indicate that he was aware of his mortality. Ergo, Neanderthal man possessed self-awareness. Again, Jaynes argues that man invented the gods some time after 10,000 B.C. when he began to ‘hear voices’. But the discs and spheres carved by Neanderthal man suggest that he worshipped the sun and moon. In fact, if the skulls in the Chou-kou-tien caves are evidence of ritual sacrifice, then man’s religious sense probably dates back half a million years. All this might seem to leave very little of Jaynes’s theory still standing. But on closer examination, this proves to be untrue. From Jaynes’s point of view, it is a pity that he regards ‘the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind’ as the essence of his theory. For this may, in fact, be its most dispensable aspect. Jaynes’s real achievement lies in pointing out that man probably developed his present form of ‘alienated’ consciousness at a fairly late stage in his history. And once this has been pointed out, we can see that it is not only consistent with the findings of split-brain research but that it has many other interesting implications. If a man is concentrating on a practical task - like driving in the rush-hour - an electro-encephalograph machine shows that his brain is ‘desynchronised’ - that most of the activity is going on in the left. When a yogi goes into meditation, the pattern becomes synchronised as the two sides work in harmony. And we can recognise this in ourselves. When we are deeply relaxed, we have a clearer sense of reality; we feel more ‘in touch’ with the world around us. The more we experience stress, the more we lose that sense of reality; in some odd sense, we no longer believe in the existence of external reality - it has become a kind of dream. In spite of this unpleasant side-effect, ‘desynchronisation’ is a considerable evolutionary achievement. A gorilla cannot (presumably) become desynchronised; it has no ability to detach a part of its attention from the total act of living. Human beings have a similar problem when under the influence of alcohol; they Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html have difficulty in reading a piece of abstract prose, or following a mathematical argument. Our ability to desynchronise consciousness brings an enormous gain in intellectual power. Wagner once remarked that art ‘makes life appear like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate’. In fact, all intellectual activity has this power to withdraw us from life, to enable the mind to hover like an eagle above the world of matter. There must have been a time in human history when we had no power to desynchronise - when, in effect, we were permanently drunk. This must have had the same advantage as being intoxicated - that feeling of relaxation, of ‘belonging’, of feeling at home in the world. But it also meant that we had no power to detach ourselves from the present moment, or to disobey the immediate promptings of instinct. It might seem common sense to assume that the human brain began to ‘desynchronise’ as we developed the power to use language. But then, we know that children with left-brain damage can use the right brain for learning language - but only up to the age of about seven, when the two halves of the brain begin to specialise. If our remote ancestors were like children under seven, then the emergence of speech need not necessarily lead to desynchronisation. It is easy enough to imagine the first agriculturalists, even the first city-builders, as simple, ‘unicameral beings’ - after all, a city is not so different from an ant hill or a wasps’ nest. But the city seems to have made war inevitable. Robert Ardrey tells the story of the zoologist C. R. Carpenter, who transported a colony of 350 rhesus monkeys from India to an island off Puerto Rico, to study them in a restricted environment. On land, monkeys choose ‘territory’ - a tree or groups of trees - and live in peace with one another. On board ship, this was impossible. The monkeys also had to be kept hungry, to accustom them to new types of food. And the result was that mother monkeys tore food from their babies, and male monkeys ceased to defend their mates from attacks by other males. The infant mortality rate soared. Once on the island, the monkeys established themselves in various ‘territories’, and once again the males defended their mates and the mothers defended their babies. The lesson seems to be that without proper territory, the monkey instinct for preservation of the species becomes eroded. A similar discovery was made about human beings when city planners began to build high-rise flats with communal corridors. The rate of vandalism and mugging soared and some showpiece developments had to be demolished. Some planners tried applying what we have learned about territory, replacing the high-rise flats with small houses with individual front gardens; instantly, the crime rate fell dramatically. In the first towns and cities, men still had their individual territory. But when cities built walls, and the population grew, overcrowding was inevitable. The result was the same as among Carpenter’s monkeys and among high-rise flat dwellers: crime, vandalism, unchannelled aggression. At first, this would be held in check by strong religious prohibitions. We know these began to break down after about 3000 B.C. - which, by coincidence, is also the date of the development of writing. Man became the kind of creature we know today - warlike, and inclined to individual violence against his own kind. Now according to the Jaynes argument, there was a difference between the purely territorial disputes of the early city dwellers and the murderous savagery that began to develop towards the end of the second millennium B.C. The well-known palette of King Narmer -an early king of Egypt, possibly identical with the legendary Menes - dates from some time before 3000 B.C. and shows the king strutting towards a double row of decapitated enemy corpses; the inscription seems to mention a total of 120,000 prisoners. Another picture shows Narmer holding a prisoner by the hair, while he holds some kind of club aloft, apparently about to dash the man’s brains out. Closer examination suggests that he is brandishing his sceptre above his head in symbol of triumph - like a boxer shaking his hands above his head - and merely holding the prisoner in a position of ritual abasement. The beheaded enemies have not necessarily been executed. They may be merely symbols of enemies killed in battle and beheaded - like the skulls in the Chou-kou-tien caves - as part of some ritual. There is no evidence here of deliberate cruelty. By the time of Hammurabi, more than twelve hundred years later, the empire of Sargon of Akkad had Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html It is appropriate that the scene of the realisation should have been above the plain of Sparta. For the Spartans, like the Assyrians, are an example of the futility of sheer ruthlessness. In the eighth century B.C., the Lacedemonians (Sparta is the capital of Lacedemon) found their own land too small for the growing population, so they invaded the territory of their neighbours, the Messenians. For sixteen years the Messenians fought like tigers, but the Spartans finally conquered. However the Messenians detested the invaders, and a century later they made a desperate and tremendous attempt to throw off the foreign yoke. This war was even bloodier, and it lasted twenty years. At the end of it, both sides were exhausted; but the Spartans were the winners, and they took murderous reprisals. And now they took the step that would eventually turn Sparta into a living fossil. The sheer agony of that long battle made the Spartans determined never to allow it to happen again. So they turned Lacedemon into one vast army camp. They thought and ate and drank nothing but military discipline. Messenia had to be held in an iron grip, so they set out to transform themselves into iron men. The land of Messenia was divided into equal allotments, each of which was handed over to a Spartan ‘peer’; the natives became slaves - helots - whose business was to support him. If any child of a helot showed the least sign of talent or brilliance, he was promptly murdered; the Spartans were determined to save themselves trouble in the next generation. All their own children - girls as well as boys - were destined for military training from birth. (Weak children were condemned to die of exposure.) At the age of seven, Spartan children left their homes and went into training camps. Girls received the same military training as boys; in athletics, they competed with them on equal terms, even wrestling naked with them in front of a male audience. The highest virtue in Spartan life was sheer toughness, ability to endure pain and hardship. In due course, the males entered the army. There was no family life for them; they lived in a barracks and ate in the mess. On a girl’s wedding night, she surrendered her virginity, then her husband left her and went back to barracks. To show she was a soldier’s wife she cut her hair short and wore male clothes. If her husband seemed unable to produce healthy children, he was expected to find a better man to occupy his bed; if he was unwilling, then his wife had to arrange it. A man who ate poorly at mess was likely to be penalised; it was evidence that he had been indulging himself in the debilitating pleasantness of family life. It all sounds rather likeNineteen Eighty-Four - and even more like that giant in Wagner’sRing who killed his brother to get the Nibelung’s treasure, then turned himself into a dragon and spent the rest of his life guarding it. The Spartans became the dragons of the Hellenic world. When their neighbours, the Athenians, looked like becoming too powerful, the Spartans felt they had to conquer Athens to maintain their own position. And after a war that dragged on for twenty-seven years, they were again victorious. Yet the one thing they werenot ready for was the leadership of the Hellenic world. They had trained themselves for hardship and struggle; success demoralised them. Some of the soldiers they sent abroad to govern colonies became notorious for debauchery. And the Spartans who stayed at home remained rigid, completely fixed in their conservatism; Toynbee compares them to soldiers standing permanently on parade with arms presented. And while they stood there, the cobwebs grew all over them. The Spartans did not vanish in a spectacular holocaust, like the Assyrians; they merely became the victims of a kind of spiritual arthritis and quietly faded out of history. Here we can see very clearly the importance of Jaynes’s insight. The Spartans were the ultimate ‘left brainers’. They fixed their minds on one thing and one thing only, and pretended that nothing else existed. Before the Messenian war, Sparta was creating its own tradition of art and music; this came to a complete halt in the middle of the sixth century B.C. It was not revived until more than five hundred years later, when the militarist system in Sparta was finally smashed in the second Macedonian war. A symbol of the sheer futility of the Spartan ideal can be seen in their later custom of inducing boys to display their toughness by allowing themselves to be flogged to death at the altar of the moon goddess. The left cerebral hemisphere is the critical part of the brain, the part that can overrule our impulses. (This Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html explains why even cats and dogs have two hemispheres; all creatures need the power to change their minds.) It would not be too inaccurate to say that the Spartans outlawed creativity and turned themselves into a nation of critics. The left brain directs our energies into a narrow, fast current like a mountain stream; the right allows them to spread into a broad, slow-moving river. But the right also enables us to see where we are going, to survey the surrounding landscape and decide where we want to go next. The left becomes easily trapped in its own obsessive forward movement and loses all ability to change direction. When this happens, there are two possibilities: self-destruction or slow exhaustion. The Assyrians are an example of the first alternative, the Spartans of the second. Two thousand years or so later, Sherlock Holmes found himself confronting the same dilemma. In his earlier days, Holmes was much given to relieving his boredom with morphine or cocaine. When, inThe Sign of Four , Watson asks him whether he has any work on hand at the moment, Holmes replies: ‘None. Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?’ When Doyle wroteThe Sign of Four , it was not recognised that cocaine was addictive (Freud made his original reputation by administering it to cure morphine addiction); and in any case Holmes was saved from addiction by his own increasing success. But the example serves to show us that the nature of the problem has not changed in the three thousand years since Rameses III. Man has achieved his pre-eminence by showing himself to be the greatest of all survivors; he has survived droughts, ice-ages, famines and earthquakes. And at a certain point in his history, evolution subjected him to the strangest of all experiments: confining his sense of identity to his left brain. (It makes no difference whether or not we accept Jaynes’s estimate ofwhen this happened; the important thing is that it happened.) It paid off spectacularly. With this new detachment from nature, man began to study it with a critical eye and observe its habits. In the third century B.C., a Greek philosopher named Eratosthenes, who lived in Alexandria, heard that there was a well in a town called Syene - modern Aswan - where the sun was reflected at midday on midsummer day. This meant that it was precisely overhead, and that a tower in Syene would cast no shadow. But towers in Alexandriadid cast shadows at midday on midsummer day. Eratosthenes measured such a shadow, and calculated that the sun’s rays struck the tower at an angle of 7l/2°. And if the earth is a globe (a traditional piece of knowledge that seems to date back to ancient Egypt), then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be 7-1/2% of the earth’s circumference. Since this distance is five hundred miles, Eratosthenes was able to work out that the circumference of the earth must be 24,000 miles. The modern measurement is 24,860 miles at the equator, so Eratosthenes was incredibly accurate. Another Alexandrian Greek, Aristarchus, measured the angle from the earth to the sun when the moon was directly overhead and half-full, then used simple trigonometry to work out the size of the sun and moon and their distances from earth. His calculations were not quite as accurate as Eratosthenes’, because of the difficulty of judging exactly when the moon was half-full; but he worked out that the moon is fifty-six thousand miles away and the sun well over a million. The impact upon his fellow Alexandrians must have been stunning. The story of Icarus told them that if a man flew too high he would get close to the sun and melt his wings; now Aristarchus was telling them that a man could fly a thousand miles high and hardly be any closer to the sun. He added that, since the sun was far larger than the earth, it was quite possible that the earth travelled round the sun and not vice versa. These remarkable discoveries reveal the impact of man’s newly-acquired ‘bicameralism’. The earliest farmers were undoubtedly interested in the sun and moon; but they would not have dreamed of doing anything so boring as measuring angles and calculating distances. Yet this was one of the most important consequences of bicameralism; it meant that people often did ‘boring’ things merely to escape from boredom - a paradox with which we are all familiar. The result was the discovery that calculation and measurement give us a new power over the physical world. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html But it was another ‘change of mind’ that had - and continues to have - the greatest consequences for the human race. When a man is trapped in this thin and unsatisfactory left-brain awareness, he hungers for the richer consciousness of an animal, as a starving man dreams of food. He craves the sense of oneness with nature, that immediate, comfortable feeling of contact with reality. The result is the attitude we now call ‘romanticism’ - the obscure longing for distant horizons, for ‘unknown modes of being’. As W. B. Yeats put it: What the world’s million lips are searching for Must be substantial somewhere... In short, being stranded in left-brain consciousness turned man into a dreamer. When a dreamer has an army at his disposal, the result can be frightening and spectacular. In about 367 B.C., a fifteen-year-old prince named Philip of Macedon was seized by the Greek general Pelopidas and sent to Thebes as a hostage to guarantee the good behaviour of his elder brother, King Alexander. In comparison with Thebes, Macedon was a provincial backwater. Philip was dazzled by the culture and sophistication of the Greeks. He was a naturally intelligent youth - his elder brother Perdikkas was in correspondence with Plato - and he threw himself into the study of literature, philosophy and the art of public speaking. When Alexander was assassinated, Philip returned to Macedon and no doubt found the place unbearably provincial. So when Perdikkas - who had succeeded Alexander - was also murdered, Philip seized the throne and set about the task of turning Macedonia into another Greece. He was a born soldier and soon converted the army from a disorganised rabble into a fighting machine comparable to the Spartans or Assyrians. He subdued the hill tribes in his own country and then, full of euphoria, went on to conquer the lands from the Danube to the Hellespont. This was not - like the empire-building of Sargon of Akkad - an attempt to win security for his own people and extinguish petty rivalries; it was fighting for purely romantic reasons, fighting for the joy of fighting, fighting for glory and renown. Above all, it was fighting to become worthy of the admiration of the Greeks. Like some medieval knight, Philip was doing battle for the honour of his lady. And when he had subdued the lands to the north and east, he marched south into Greece and conquered the lady herself. Thebes was occupied by a Macedonian army - a conquest that was to have terrible consequences for the Thebans. Athens, which had led the resistance to Philip, expected a fight to the death; but Philip behaved like a perfect gentleman. He was not out for revenge: he only wanted to be regarded as a Greek. Two years later, at the age of forty-six, Philip was murdered and his twenty-year-old son Alexander became king. Greece heaved a sigh of relief, convinced they had nothing to fear from this boy. In the following year, rumours of Alexander’s death led to a revolt in Thebes. Alexander descended like a thunderbolt; when the Thebans shouted defiance from their walls, he took the town by storm and massacred all the inhabitants. Unlike his father, Alexander had no sentimental attachment to Thebes. But he resembled his father in one important respect: he was a romantic who dreamed of far horizons. He crossed the Hellespont and defeated a Persian army - by attacking them without delay, instead of spending two days preparing for the battle as they expected. King Darius of Persia raised another army; Alexander defeated that as easily. The chronicle tells how, after this victory at Issus, Alexander moved into the king’s tent, bathed himself in the royal bath, then stretched out on a silken couch and raised his goblet of wine. ‘So this is what it’s like to be royalty...’ He pressed on into Syria, then into Egypt, where he founded the city of Alexandria. Then he went back and defeated Darius yet again and moved into Babylon. Typically, he treated Darius’s womenfolk with the greatest courtesy, and married one of them. After this, he spent five years wandering around his newly won empire. His men finally begged him to take them home and Alexander marched reluctantly back to Babylon. He was still searching for the city of his dreams. He was planning the invasion of Africa when, at the age of thirty-two, he caught a fever and died. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html read it, that the foreigner would have been justified in taking Lord Russell by the throat and throwing him out of the window. Such self-confident stupidity arouses murderous rage. And it is this feeling that authority deserves to be treated with violence that constitutes the essence of crime. It was the same feeling that made Cromwell decide to cut off King Charles’s head. Every crime is, in a sense, a one-man revolt against authority. This kind of sentiment makes an appeal to the anti-authoritarian in all of us. It is the basis of all left-wing political philosophies, from Rousseau to Marcuse. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced into sympathy by the notion that crime is a healthy protest against authority, it is important to bear in mind that anti-authoritarianism is a legacy of childhood. This emerges clearly in a collection of children’s jokes made by an American sociologist,Children’s Humour by Sandra McCosh. There’s this little lass, and her mother’s in bed poorly and she don’t want to be disturbed, and so she says to her father, Daddy, can I come to bed with you? So he says no and she says I’ll scream, so he says ok then. So they go to bed. And the daughter says, Daddy, what’s that long thing? And he says it’s a teddy bear, so she says can I play with your teddy bear? So he says no, so she says, I’ll scream, so he says ok then, but let me get to sleep, I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So in the morning he wakes up and there’s blood all over the covers, and he says, what you done? so she says your teddy bear spit at me so I bit its head off. Johnnie Fuckerfaster, named that by his mom, was under the house with a girl, and his mom didn’t know he was there with a girl. And she calls, Johnnie, come here. And Johnnie says, I guess I’ll have to go, even though they were in the middle of it, and she yells again, Johnnie Fuckerfaster, and so he yells back: I’m fucking her as fast as I can. In another typical joke, the mother orders her daughter not to climb lamp posts, because the boys only want to see the colour of her knickers. Next time the girl admits to climbing a lamp post, her mother says: ‘I thought I told you not to do that.’ ‘It’s all right - I took my knickers off first.’ After a few pages, these jokes begin to produce an oddly claustrophobic effect; their outlook is so uniformly negative. The adult is bothered by their illogicality; the father has an orgasm in his sleep - which is just possible - but he then sleeps on when his daughter bites off the end of his penis. The mother has named her son Johnnie Fuckerfaster, but he does not recognise his own name when she calls him, and thinks she is giving him an order. It requires a major suspension of disbelief - and all for the sake of a mildly ‘naughty’ conclusion: A mother’s boy got married, and when he got in bed with his wife he didn’t know what to do. So she said: Get on with it, and he said: Get on with what? So she said: Well, do something dirty. So he shit the bed. It is ‘naughty’ for a girl to let a boy see her knickers. Sex is dirty, like shitting the bed; conversely, shitting the bed is funny because it is also forbidden. There are long, elaborate stories in which children are misinformed about the meaning of words: father’s penis is a train, mother’s vagina is a tunnel: (Hey Sis, come and look; Dad’s train’s got stuck in Mom’s tunnel...) Fuck means to go and get washed, shit means food, bastard means vicar: (Hello bastard, mom’s just getting fucked before she serves the shit.) Again, the whole point of the rigmarole is that the child should innocently undermine the authority of his parents or the vicar or his schoolteacher. Other jokes make their effect simply by being nauseating; a tramp eats a dead cat, or drinks the contents of a spittoon. This, like shitting the bed, is ‘dirty’ and must therefore be funny. And the ‘dirty’ is forbidden, and must be funny too. These jokes enable us to reconstruct the peculiar mental world of the child, which most of us have so Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html conveniently forgotten: the world seen from a worm’s eye view. Adults have their own strange ideas about what is ‘fun’ - religion, politics and sport. But every child knows better. They know that ‘fun’ is doing those exciting things you are not supposed to do, all those things that adults call ‘naughty’. This is why most children have a streak of cruelty that makes them enjoy pulling wings off flies or throwing lighted matches at the cat; here, on a small scale, they can become an Alexander the Great, free to give way to the normally forbidden desire to cause pain. The child’s world is almost entirely defined by the authority of adults, and by their secret desire to flout that authority. But have adults really outgrown these attitudes? A comedian only has to make a disparaging remark about a well-known politician to bring loud laughter, even applause. It need not be a particularly funny remark, provided it has a touch of malice - a sense of giving the two-finger salute to authority. Humorists who make a virtue of anarchism - the Marx Brothers, Lennie Bruce, Mort Sahl, Spike Milligan - are generally regarded as the comedians of the intellectual, for the man with a sophisticated sense of humour, more ‘daring’ and therefore funnier than the straightforward clown. (Even T. S. Eliot admired Groucho Marx.) Yet anyone who is slightly over-exposed to this type of humour - say, watching a season of Marx Brothers films on TV - soon becomes aware that its premises will not bear close scrutiny. Defiance of authority, deflation of dignity and pomposity, are really rather thin stuff after the first five minutes. Refusal to take anything seriously is only funny up to a point; then an odd taste of futility begins to creep in. When Groucho sings ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it’, we only find the sentiment amusing for as long as we fail to think about it. Chaos is refreshing only so long as we can feel that pleasant sense of law and order hovering in the background. We have here the same fallacy that vitiates the work of de Sade. The heroes ofThe 120 Days of Sodom are really schoolboys who believe that something must be pleasant because it is forbidden. There is one passage in which a prostitute describes how one of her clients made her leave her feet unwashed for weeks, then ate the dirt from between her toes. While most of the libertines grimace with disgust, Curval takes the prostitute’s foot and sucks between her toes. (Significantly, Curval is a Lord Chief Justice - de Sade’s equivalent of the anti-politician joke.) But another of the libertines goes on to make the significant remark: ‘One need but be mildly jaded, and all these infamies assume a richer meaning: satiety inspires them... One grows tired of the commonplace, the imagination becomes vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the weakness of our faculties, the corruption of our souls lead us to these abominations.’ And, apparently unaware that he has just levelled the most devastating criticism at his own philosophy, de Sade proceeds to his description of the next perversion - an elderly general who likes to masturbate himself against the scars of an old woman who has often been flogged in public for theft. This, then, is the essence of crime: unreasoning resentment of authority. The child is, in a sense, a natural criminal, since he lives in a world of authority: authority stretching as far as the eye can see, from parents and schoolteachers to policemen and prime ministers. As he grows up, he learns to share the burden of authority - perhaps over younger brothers or sisters, or over younger children at school. Eventually, he has children of his own, so that he now slips naturally into his place in the adult power structure. Yet although his reason is now convinced of the need for authority and law, his emotions continue to resent it - hence the laughter when a comedian makes a joke against authority. In most of us, the two never come into open conflict. The head remains a supporter of law and order, the heart of anti-authoritarianism. The case of de Sade is of symbolic importance because he not only tried to reconcile the two: he attempted to justify his heart with the use of his head. De Sade is anarchy incarnate; he performed the service of carrying its arguments to the point of absurdity. Yet it is de Sade who can provide us with the deepest insight into the question: why is man the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind? This is because de Sade is, in himself, a kind of one-man Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html textbook of criminology. His view of human beings is determinedly materialistic and pessimistic. If he were alive to see the rising crime figures of the late twentieth century, he would laugh sarcastically and say: I told you so. For, according to de Sade, man is a being who was created accidentally by Nature, and who has only two basic urges: survival and satisfaction of his desires. This situation is bound to produce a conflict of interests. The hungry tiger needs food; the antelope often has no choice about becoming its dinner. Human society has its own equivalent of tigers and antelopes: the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. The haves not only use their superior strength (or wealth) to satisfy their desires; they also use their cunning to convince the have-nots that there are moral laws that forbid robbery and murder. Sooner or later, says de Sade, the have-nots are bound to discover that moral laws are an invention of the rich; then they will try and take what they want, and the crime rate will soar... According to de Sade, man’s basic desire is to become a god. And if any man could become a god, he would experiment with every kind of pleasure: eat things he had always wanted to eat, do things he had always wanted to do, take revenge on old enemies, torment people he loathed. Above all, he would satisfy his sexual desires with everyone who aroused them, probably a hundred times a day. Can any human being honestly declare that he would behave differently? If not, then the point is proved. Man is naturally a criminal, but fear of punishment forces him to restrain his desires... If we accept de Sade’s materialistic premises - which, after all, are the same as those of many modern scientists and philosophers - then his arguments are difficult to refute. Yet there is one obvious point at which they are open to objection. The satisfaction of every casual desire does not seem to guarantee happiness. Desires seem to be subject to the ‘law of diminishing returns’. A man who could satisfy every desire the moment it arose would probably end by committing suicide out of boredom. This was de Sade’s own problem. As a wealthy and reasonably good-looking young man, he had tried all the ‘normal’ sexual pleasures before he was in his mid-teens. He spent the rest of his life in pursuit of ‘the forbidden’, the ultimate sexual pleasure. And the harder he tried, the more it seemed to recede from him. The perversions became so extreme that they became wild and grotesque - almost funny. When we examine this ‘infinite regress’, we can pin it down to what might be called ‘the fallacy of simple experience’ - de Sade’s conviction that experience satisfies the senses in the same straightforward way that food satisfies the stomach. When I am empty, food is bound to have the effect of filling my stomach - this is a physical law. Yet even so, I might find it appetising, or boring, or even nauseating, depending on my state of mind. We all know that good digestion is fifty per cent ‘mental’. And sex is a great deal more than fifty per cent. In the wrong mood, sexual fulfilment is a will o’ the wisp, flickering in the distance and then vanishing. De Sade’s conviction that there is an ‘ultimately satisfying’ sexual experience -if only we had the moral courage to try and find it - is an illusion. The answer to de Sade is contained in a passage in Kierkegaard’sEither/Or : The history of [boredom] can be traced to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were boreden famille ; then the population of the world increased and the people were boreden masse . To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand... The fallacy here lies in the notion that the answer to boredom lies in distraction, in looking for something ‘interesting’ to do. De Sade’s work is a kind of sexual tower of Babel. The true answer to boredom, says Kierkegaard, lies in the ‘rotation method’, the method by which a farmer changes his crops from year to year so that theground itself never becomes exhausted. ‘Here we have... the principle of Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html himself to survive by the use of intelligence. But even so, the stream of evolution from Ramapithecus, through Australopithecus andhomo habilis was like a broad, meandering river. Man developed because he learned the use of weapons and tools; but his development was slow because he had not yet learned to use that most valuable of all tools, his mind. Withhomo erectus , the river entered a valley and became a fast-flowing stream. A million and a half years later - which, in geological time, brings us almost to the twentieth century - came Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man, and it is as if the river entered a gorge and suddenly turned into a torrent. The pace quickened again with the beginning of agriculture. With the building of the cities, the gorge narrowed and the rapids became dangerous. It would hardly seem possible that evolution could flow faster still, but that is what happened at some time between the founding of the cities and the civilisations of ancient Crete and Mycenae. The sheer danger of the rapids created a new level of alertness and determination. Roaring along at top speed between narrow walls, man was forced to concentrate as he had never concentrated before. Bodies struggled in the water; wrecks drifted past him; but the noise and exhilaration swallowed up the screams of the drowning. A man who steers his raft with his jaw set and all his senses strained to the utmost has no time for compassion. As he developed determination, man also developed ruthlessness. The narrowing of the senses became a habit - so that whenever he found himself in a quieter patch of water, protected by some buttress from the torrent, he no longer knew how to relax and enjoy the relative calm. This explains why man has ceased to be the gentle vegetarian described by Leakey and Fromm. But he has no reason to envy those other animals who are still drifting placidly down broad rivers. For he has developed a faculty that outweighs all the danger, all the misery and violence. He has learned to steer. When he learned to use his mind, this ability to steer made him also the first truly creative and inventive creature. He has poured that narrow jet of energy into discovery and exploration. But the sheer force of the jet has meant that whenever it has been obstructed - or whenever men have lacked the self-discipline to control it - the result has been chaos and destruction. Crime is the negative aspect of creativity. Throughout history, the ruthless - from Sennacherib to Hitler -have ended by destroying themselves, for their tendency to violence makes them bad steersmen. It is true that their crimes seem to dominate human history. But, as we shall see, it is the good steersmen who play the major part in the story of mankind. PIRATES AND ADVENTURERS When we complain about the rising crime rate, we speak as citizens who take the protection of the law for granted. Police patrol our streets and country lanes. Burglary and mugging may be on the increase; but at least the robbers take their freedom into their hands every time they set out to commit a crime. If we are to understand the history of the past three thousand years we have to make an effort of imagination, and try to forget this notion of being protected by the law. In ancient Greece, the problem was not simply the brigands who haunted the roads and the pirates who infested the seas; it was the fact that the ordinary citizen became a brigand or pirate when he felt like it; and no one regarded this as abnormal. In theOdyssey , Ulysses describes with pride how, on the way home from Troy, his ship was driven near to the coast of Thrace; so they landed near an unprotected town, murdered all the men, and carried off the women and goods. Greece was not at war with Thrace; it was just that an unprotected town was fair game for anyone, and the war-weary Greeks felt like a little rape and plunder. This state of affairs persisted for most of the next three thousand years, and explains why so many Mediterranean Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html towns and villages are built inland. What is far more difficult to grasp is that ‘law abiding’ countries like England were in exactly the same situation. Just before the time of the Black Death (as Luke Owen Pike describes in hisHistory of Crime in England , 1873), ‘houses were set on fire day after day; men and women were captured, ransom was exacted on pain of death... even those who paid it might think themselves fortunate if they escaped some horrible mutilation.’ And this does not relate to times of war or social upheaval; according to J. F. Nicholls and John Taylor’sBristol Past and Present (1881) England was ‘prosperous in the highest degree; populous, wealthy and luxurious...’ (p. 174). Yet the robber bands were like small armies. They would often descend on a town when a fair was taking place and everyone felt secure; they would take over the town, plunder the houses and set them on fire (for citizens who were trying to save their houses would not organise a pursuit) and then withdraw. In 1347 and ‘48, Bristol was taken over by a brigand who robbed the ships in the harbour -including some commissioned by the king - and issued his own proclamations like a conqueror. His men roamed the streets, robbing and killing as they felt inclined - the king had to send Thomas, Lord Berkeley, to restore order. When a trader was known to have jewels belonging to Queen Philippa in his house, he was besieged by a gang led by one Adam the Leper and had to hand over the jewels when his house was set on fire. The law courts were almost powerless; when a notorious robber was tried near Winchester, the gang waited outside the court and attacked everyone who came out; so the case was dropped. Things were still almost as bad four centuries later, in the time of Dr Johnson; gangs of robbers attacked houses in the country at night and sometimes burned them down. Bands of footpads armed with knives attacked parties of prosperous-looking people in London’s Covent Garden, and Horace Walpole was shot by a highwayman in Hyde Park. ‘The farmers’ fields were constantly plundered of their crops, fruit and vegetables were carried off, even the ears of wheat were cut from their stalks in the open day. The thieves boldly took their plunder to the millers to be ground, and the millers, although aware that fields and barns had been recently robbed, did not dare to object, lest their mills should be burnt down over their heads.’ This is described by Major Arthur Griffiths in hisMysteries of the Police and Crime (Vol. 1, p. 66). In Queen Victoria’s London, according to works such as Mayhew’sLondon Labour and the London Poor andThe Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney, footpads could operate by day, sometimes in upper-class residential districts: Even children were not safe; ‘child strippers’, mostly women, would lure children into doorways and steal their clothes. What is so hard for us to grasp is that the whole of society, from top to bottom, operated upon principles that would seem ferociously cruel to a modern citizen of the western world. Our present concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Dr Johnson would simply have condemned it as dangerous sentimentality. Boswell tells in hisLife of Johnson (Everyman edition, Vol. 2, p. 447) that when, in the 1780s, there was talk of doing away with Tyburn, where executions were turned into public holidays and children were often hanged for stealing, Johnson said indignantly that ‘executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose...’ Writing about this period, an English historian of crime and punishment says: Children were starved by drunken parents and parish nurses, they were sent out to pick pockets, they were forced to become prostitutes and many not more than twelve years old were ‘half eaten up with the foul distemper’ of venereal disease, they were made to beg and sometimes scarred or crippled so they might be more successful in exciting pity. They seldom did excite it. Pity was still a strange and valuable emotion. Unwanted babies were left in the streets to die or were thrown into dung heaps or open drains; the torture of animals was a popular sport. Cat-dropping, bear-baiting and bull-baiting were... universally enjoyed. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Christopher Hibbert:The Roots of Evil , p. 44. And it was not only animals who were at risk. England had no love of foreigners, and they were likely to be jeered at and pelted with mud as they walked through the streets of London. One Portuguese visitor who got into a fight with an English sailor had his ear nailed to the wall, and when he broke away he was battered and stabbed by the mob until he died. Offenders who were sentenced to be exposed in the stocks were often stoned to death. But such brutality was not confined to the lower classes. The Mohocks, a society whose members were dedicated to the ambition of ‘doing all possible hurt to their fellow creatures’ were mostly gentlemen. They employed their ample leisure in forcing prostitutes and old women to stand on their heads in tar barrels so that they could prick their legs with their swords; or in making them jump up and down to avoid the swinging blades; in disfiguring their victims by boring out their eyes or flattening their noses; in waylaying servants and, as in the case of Lady Winchelsea’s maid, beating them and slashing their faces. To work themselves up to the necessary pitch of enthusiasm for their ferocious games, they first drank so much that they were quite ‘beyond the possibility of attending to any notions of reason or humanity’. Some of the Mohocks also seem to have been members of the Bold Bucks who, apparently, had formally to deny the existence of God and eat every Sunday a dish known as Holy Ghost Pie. The ravages of the Bold Bucks were more specifically sexual than those of the Mohocks and consequently, as it was practically impossible to obtain a conviction for rape and as the age of consent was twelve, they were more openly conducted. The Roots of Evil, p. 45 In the anonymous Victorian autobiographyMy Secret Life , the writer describes how he picked up a middle-aged bawd and a ten-year-old-girl at Vauxhall Gardens and possessed the girl several times. ‘Oh, he ain’t going to do it like that other man - you said no one should again.’ ‘Be quiet you little fool, it won’t hurt you. Open your legs.’ And the writer admits cheerfully (Vol. 2, chapter 9): ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry out with the pain my tool caused her, to make her bleed if I could.’ In judging the author ofMy Secret Life we should bear in mind that, had the girl been two years older, she could have legally consented to her own seduction; it was not until 1875 that the age of consent was raised to thirteen. Fifty years earlier, as Arthur Koestler and C. H. Rolph relate inHanged by the Neck (1961), children were still being hanged or transported to the colonies in ‘hulks’. (There was even a special prison ship for children, which was in use until 1844.) In 1801 a boy had been hanged for stealing a spoon; in 1808, two sisters, aged eight and twelve, were hanged at Lynn; in 1831, a boy of thirteen was hanged at Chelmsford for setting fire to a house; in 1833, a boy of nine was sentenced to death - but reprieved - for pushing a stick through a cracked shop window and stealing two pennyworth of printer’s colours. Homeless children walked the streets and could be charged with vagrancy and sent to prisons which had a part set aside for their accommodation. InNineteenth Century Crime J. J. Tobias mentions a Report by the Inspector of Prisons for 1836 which describes the children’s section of Newgate and mentions that, out of twenty-four, ‘seven had been committed for robbing their masters, one for purloining from his father, and another from his aunt’ (p. 152). By the mid-nineteenth century, the public conscience had begun to wake up, largely as the result of the work of humanitarian novelists such as Dickens and Victor Hugo. It is interesting that all that was needed to bring about the change was to touch people’s imagination. On the page before he quotes Dr Johnson on the abolition of public executions, Boswell says ‘Such was his sensibility, and so much was he affected by pathetick poetry, that when he was reading Dr Beattie’s “Hermit” in my presence, it brought tears into his eyes.’ A ‘pathetick poem’ about public executions would probably have changed Johnson’s mind about Tyburn. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html with a bull and produced the minotaur. Since Minos is supposed to be the son of the god Zeus and the maiden Europa - another lady who admired the bull’s sexual equipment - historians of the nineteenth century assumed him to be purely mythical. But in 1900 an Englishman named Arthur Evans began digging at Knossos, in Crete, and soon started to uncover the walls of an enormous palace. The size of its walls and the richness of its decorations made it clear that it was a remnant of a mighty civilisation, but the astonishing thing was that, although it was fairly close to the sea, it appeared to have no defending walls; clearly its inhabitants were not afraid of pirates. The remains of a mighty fleet solved this puzzle: Crete had no need to fear pirates. The palace’s rooms and corridors were so confusing that Evans suspected he had found the origin of the legend of the labyrinth. The Cretans - or Minoans, as Evans called them - certainly seemed to be obsessed by bulls. Wall paintings showed youths and maidens vaulting over the backs of bulls, and on the roof of the palace there are two carved stones that look like horns. In short, there is much evidence that King Minos really existed and that the legends are based on fact. A later Greek historian, Plutarch, has more to tell us about King Minos - how Minos’s son was murdered by the Greeks, and how, after a bitter war, Minos agreed to receive a tribute of seven youths and seven virgins every nine years. These were sacrificed to the Minotaur, who lived in the labyrinth. The hero Theseus, son of the king of Athens, went to Crete and slew the Minotaur. Evans argues that the Greek hostages probably were sacrificed to the bull-god, or made to take part in gladiatorial contests with bulls. This same hero Theseus, according to Plutarch, had spent his early years clearing the roads around Athens of criminals. ‘For it was at that time very dangerous to go by land on the road to Athens, no part being free of robbers and murderers.’ One of these robbers was a woman named Phaea, ‘full of cruelty and lust... and had the name of the Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners’ - the first female criminal in history. Theseus also killed a bandit named Sciron who used to order strangers to wash his feet and then, as they bent over, kick them from the rock - named after him - into the sea. Plutarch mentions that Jason, another legendary hero who lived at the time of Minos, was given the task of clearing the seas of pirates. So although we have no way of drawing the line between fact and fiction, it seems clear that a king called Minos really existed around 1600 B.C. and that by that time piracy and brigandage were common in the Mediterranean. Knossos itself was finally destroyed around 1380 B.C., by pirates and other raiders. These were dangerous times to live in. The people who survived had to be fierce and brutal. It is important to remember that these early pirates were not the ‘criminal rats’ who came to overrun the Mediterranean in later years. They regarded themselves as warriors. What they were after was easy pickings. Civilisation was expanding; the Mediterranean was becoming more and more prosperous, and the pirates could see no reason why they should not help themselves to other people’s riches. The fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. were a ‘boom time’ in the Mediterranean. After the fall of Knossos, a people called the Achaeans began to build themselves a stronghold at Mycenae; they had come from somewhere in the north and hacked their way into Greece. Mycenae’s defensive walls were built of blocks of stone so immense that later Greeks believed they could only have been moved by giants and so called them ‘cyclopean’. Mycenae became as prosperous as Knossos had been. Agamemnon, the king who led the Greeks to Troy, was king of Mycenae. Troy fell about 1184 B.C. and Agamemnon returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, according to legend. In any case, the kingdom of Agamemnon did not long survive its greatest king; invaders called the Dorians poured down from the Danube basin and another great civilisation collapsed. The next three hundred years were the period known as the Dark Ages - not because it was a time of new barbarian invasions, as in the Dark Ages of Europe after the collapse of Rome, but because there is so little written evidence from the period. There were no more vast kingdoms such as the Minoans and Achaeans - only dozens of small countries with dozens of small towns surrounded by walls. Even the farmers moved close to the towns. The seas were still full of pirates - even though the pickings had long ago ceased to be rich Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html - and these were not warrior chieftains like Achilles and Ulysses, but small-time operators who probably had long periods with empty bellies. Small towns and villages do not have much opportunity to get rich. Most people were half starved; there was meat only on holidays, and for the rest of the year it was fruit, olives and barley porridge. But then, for the pirates, there was always the possibility of a good haul - if only the food that had been stored up for the winter by poor villagers. Another important motive was rape. As N. K. Sandars remarks of an earlier period: ‘The whole purpose of the hero’s activity is spoil.’ ‘Silver, gold, bronze, horses, cattle and sheep, women, above all, treasure and women.’ (The Sea Peoplesp. 186.) And when treasure became scarce, there was still rape. People who live in small communities usually have strong views on immorality; they want their daughters to remain virgins until after marriage. The male, on the other hand, is naturally promiscuous. So rape no doubt continued to be one of the pleasanter rewards of piracy. When the women had been possessed, they could be sold as slaves - for at this period, and for many centuries to come, all civilised life was based on the institution of slavery. The post-Homeric age is, of course, the age of Jaynes’s ‘breakdown of the bicameral mind’. And whether or not we accept his theory about the ‘coming of consciousness’ there can be no doubt that this was an age of increasing individualism. The usual explanation is that people living in small towns and villages grew tired of kings (or chieftains), preferring to be ruled by councils of leading citizens - the oligarchies. But a council still amounted to a ‘privileged few’, and the citizens found these irritating, which provided an ideal opportunity for rabble-rousers to preach against the aristocracy, gather a few followers with knives and cudgels and set themselves up as tyrants or despots. But the Greeks, having acquired a taste for individualism, finally got rid of these tyrants, and the result was, eventually, the world’s first democracy. According to this view, individualism was the outcome of the disappearance of big cities - like Knossos and Mycenae - and their replacement by small towns and villages. But there had been towns and villages since 6000 B.C. and they had peacefully accepted the rule of kings and priests. The new individualism in Greece was the rise of a new kind of consciousness - the same consciousness that soon created science and philosophy. Endless hardships and dangers had created a race of survivors, of claustrophobic little communities who regarded the rest of the world with a certain mistrust. Vigilance and determination had turned them into ‘left brainers’. What is certainly true is that the rule of tyrants gave the Greeks a taste for freedom. ‘Tyrant’ meant simply a ruler or king, with no implication of cruelty; but, as Herodotus remarks: Even the best of men, were he granted such power, would alter the train of his thoughts. Insolence will be engendered in him by the advantages of his position, and envy... With these two in his soul he is filled with every wickedness, for insolence will cause him to break into many acts of wantonness, and envy into many more. Book 3, para 80 We have already encountered the tyrant Alexander of Pherae, who buried men alive and hunted them with his dogs. The tyrant Phalaris of Acragas in Sicily is famous for his unpleasant habit of roasting people he disliked in a bronze bull, his first victim being the craftsman who made it; he was overthrown and met the same fate himself. Herodotus’s mistrust of tyrants emerges in a gruesome story he tells about the Median ruler Astyages (about 600 B.C.). Convinced by a dream that his grandson would supplant him on the throne, Astyages handed him over to a servant named Harpagus with orders to kill the baby (whose name was Cyrus). Shocked at the idea, Harpagus handed over the child to a herdsman whose own baby had just died - the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html corpse of the baby was shown to the guards of Astyages to convince him that his orders had been carried out. When the child was ten, his identity was discovered. His playmates had made him king in one of their games, and he beat the son of a nobleman who refused to obey him. The affair came to the ears of Astyages, who sent for Cyrus and observed his resemblance to himself. The herdsman was questioned, and the truth came out. Harpagus was then invited to supper and asked to send his only son - a boy of thirteen - to the palace. The boy was killed, then cut up and roasted. When Harpagus sat down to supper, he ate his own son. After the meal, he was handed a basket containing the boy’s hands, feet and head. The point is further underlined by Harpagus’s reaction; he bows his head and says that whatever the king does must be right. Harpagus is so accustomed to absolute submission that he has no difficulty in concealing his feelings on learning that he has eaten his son. And Astyages is so used to absolute obedience that he assumes Harpagus bears him no ill-will. Suddenly, we become aware of the immense distance that separates this Persian monarch from the Egyptian and Sumerian kings of two thousand years earlier – kings who regarded themselves as servants of the gods and who were as much subject to the rule of law as any of their people. Astyages is not even necessarily a cruel man. It is his ego that is offended by disobedience, and he coldly calculates a ‘suitable’ punishment. And once again, we must bear in mind that this kind of cruelty is the outcome of ‘divided consciousness’, of the man who stands alone and no longer hears the voice of the gods. But this same divided consciousness soon led to the achievements of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes. Divided consciousness produced democracy - the political system of men who stand alone, no longer united by the will of the god. But this same democracy revealed its shortcomings in the execution of Socrates for impiety against the gods - emphasising that the sum of a thousand small egos is one small ego. Left-brain consciousness makes men obsessive. Obsession gives birth to blindness and narrowness, to cruelty and stupidity - but also to science and philosophy. And so the pendulum of history continues to swing between these extremes, and the story of civilisation is the story of creativity and of crime. This book is centrally concerned with crime; but if we ignore the creativity, we shall not only fail to understand the crime: we shall miss the whole point of human history. Those Greeks who invaded Crete and built Mycenae were driven by this unique human craving for adventure, by the feeling that life without conquest is a bore. In this spirit they cheerfully killed their enemies, raped their female captives and plundered undefended cities. It was not innate wickedness so much as the spirit that makes boys play at pirates. But four centuries later, when a blind singer named Homer recited these episodes, his audience was able to enjoy the excitement of the adventure without stirring from their firesides. In a sense, they were enjoying the adventure more than those ancient heroes did, for it is always easier to appreciate life in retrospect than when coping with its everyday details. This love of song and recitation developed to such a point that by the reign of Pisistratus, the first great tyrant of Athens (561-528 B.C.), the festival of the god Dionysus had turned into a kind of song contest. One day, the audience was startled and puzzled when the chorus leader began to declaim his lines as if he himself were the legendary hero he was singing about; but they soon found this new method of presentation more dramatic and absorbing than a mere narration. It made them participants in the fall of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon, and the tragedy of Oedipus or Philoctetes. The author of this new method, Thespis, had invented the drama. And a century later an enormous theatre, capable of holding twelve thousand people, was built at the foot of the Acropolis. The actors, walking on shoes that made them artificially tall, and speaking through wooden masks that amplified their voices, brought to life again these great dramas of the past, and the silence was so total that no one missed a word. No wonder this golden age saw the sudden flowering of science and philosophy, as well as of poetry. Man had at last stumbled upon his most unique and incredible Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html