The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The Church, in the absence of any counterforce, dominated the western intellect for more than a thousand years. In that time it created an immense, static ‘order of nature’, in which thinking was regarded with distrust and suspicion. It seemed to be like one of those immense rocking stones that are found in remote places, where a weight of many tons is balanced on a single point; it can be made to sway backwards and forwards, but no amount of effort seems to be able to move it from its place. At first, it looked as if Martin Luther had done precisely that. But within a few years, the Church was as stable as ever, calling for crusades – like the one that defeated the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 – burning heretics, like Giordano Bruno (1600) and forcing scientists like Galileo to recant. Besides, Protestantism was only Catholicism under another trade name; it did not burn quite as many heretics as the Catholic Church, but it did its share. As a version of Christianity, it was certainly no improvement on Catholicism.

The real change was due to other causes: to the broadening of the mind that came with the crusades, to the increasing use of money, which created a new class, and to the opening of the seas by Henry the Navigator, Dias, Columbus, Magellan, Cabot and Drake. In the sixteenth century, the Turks continued to be the major threat in the Mediterranean – they came close to taking Vienna in 1529 – but they became slightly more amenable after their defeat at Lepanto, and the British under Queen Elizabeth were able to form a Levant Trading Company to trade with them and the East India Company (1600) which had to cross Turkish territory on its overland route to India. (The Portuguese were still guarding the sea route.) Even the Church allowed itself to be swayed by this new spirit of adventure and tolerance. Matteo Ricci, the pioneer Jesuit scholar in China, was adopted by Chinese Confucians as one of themselves; the Jesuits made Christianity more palatable for the Chinese by translating ‘God’ as ‘Heaven’ (T’ien). Unfortunately, the Church intervened and ordered that Chinese converts should be taught that the Christian God is personal, and that their ancestor worship was anti-Christian. The inevitable result was that the Christians were thrown out of China in 1723.

But meanwhile, Europe was entering a new Athenian age. Francis Bacon, born three years before Christopher Marlowe (1561) was the first great imaginative visionary of science. In his New Atlantis (1627) he envisaged the first science institute, known as Salomon’s House, with laboratories dug into the hillsides, skyscrapers half a mile high, huge marine laboratories and strange machines; twelve of its fellows travel into foreign lands and collect reports on experiments and inventions. Francis’s central thesis was the one that had landed Roger Bacon in prison three centuries earlier: that science should be based on observation and on reason, not on the writings of lazy philosophers like Aristotle who could not be bothered to test their observations. Bacon’s own doctor, William Harvey, discovered the circulation of the blood. In France, Rene Descartes was teaching that all knowledge should be founded on reason, and on the principle of doubting everything until it can be proved. (But since he lived in a Catholic country, he took care not to risk prison by doubting the dogmas of the Church.) Bacon’s secretary, Thomas Hobbes, was the first philosopher of history; it was he who remarked that human life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. His solution to this problem was not religion, but the social contract by which men agree to live together under a strong ruler. Man created society and government out of his craving for order: therefore, no king rules by divine right, but by a general agreement. In Holland, the philosopher Spinoza was expelled from his Jewish congregation for insisting that religion should be based on reason, and that all the truths of religion can be grasped through reason. John Locke, born in the same year as Spinoza (1632), taught that man is by nature good, and that again, the only principle he can finally trust is that of reason.

These men were the true heirs of Plato and the Italian humanists, and clearly, they were more dangerous to authority than Wycliffe, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all rolled into one. What made them more dangerous was that they had no intention of challenging organised religion. They were too fascinated by the immense new vistas that were being opened up by the use of reason and imagination. Descartes invented analytical geometry, Newton and Leibniz the differential calculus – mathematical instruments of immense power in uncovering the secrets of nature. Yet all three would have regarded themselves as orthodox Christians – Newton even spent years of his life working out a ‘history of the earth’ based on the chronology of the Bible. In A Short History of the World, H. G. Wells expresses the situation in one of his brilliant images: ‘The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking, but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams…’ (Chapter 52). Yet in a sense, it hardly matters that Descartes, Newton and Leibniz are sleepers. What matters is that Leibniz dreamed of a society of scholars who would investigate all branches of science and combine them into one great system of truth, and that Newton’s Principia provided all future scientists with a key to the mechanics of the universe. Anyone who has grasped the meaning of human history will realise that mankind is still far from awake.

While the scientists and philosophers dreamed of truth, the rest of the world pursued its favourite occupation of mass murder. Yet even this was gradually changing. One of the last of the old-style world-conquerors, Babur, was a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane. In the year Columbus returned from his first American voyage, Babur came to his father’s throne in Ferghana (in Genghis Khan country) and, by the time he was twenty, had twice taken and twice lost Samarkand. Driven out of Transoxania by the Tartars, he made himself master of Afghanistan, then decided that he wanted to be emperor of India. His first invasion in 1519 ended in failure, but five years later he was back again at the head of a force of twelve thousand and made himself master of Delhi. When his favourite son, Humayun fell ill, Babur prayed that his own life should be taken instead; Humayun recovered and Babur fell ill and died (1530). Humayun lost his empire for a while to an Afghan adventurer, but returned after fifteen years of exile and recaptured Delhi. He died shortly afterwards in an accident, and was succeeded by his son, Akbar the Great Mogul. Akbar went on to build a vast empire in northern India and Afghanistan. But he was no mere Tamurlane – in fact, he was altogether closer to Kubla Khan. With an empire full of Moslems and Hindus – even Christians – he insisted on treating them all alike and allowing all equal opportunities. His court was famous for its learning as well as for its magnificence. So while Europe was torn with religious wars, and the duke of Alva was burning Dutchmen by the thousand, Akbar the Great Mogul was revealing a kind of greatness that had been rare since the days of Asoka. Significantly, a representative of the East India Company arrived in Akbar’s domains in 1603, and was granted a concession five years later. Akbar died in 1605, and religious tolerance continued in northern India for more than sixty years, when the emperor Aurengzeb began a mass persecution of Hindus.

In China, the old order continued to prevail, since the Chinese, like the Japanese, were averse to change. The Mongols were thrown out in 1368, and replaced by the Ming dynasty, which gave the country three centuries of relative peace and order. This was founded by a beggar who became a rebel, Hung-Wu, a despot who made a habit of having his ministers tortured. His successors were little better, but at least maintained order, in spite of Mongol raids in the north and attacks from Japanese sea pirates. His people were so distrustful of foreigners that they massacred the first Portuguese who landed in China. Then, in 1644, Peking was captured by a brigand who called himself ‘the dashing general’, and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on a hill over the city. He was soon replaced by a new ‘barbarian horde’, the Manchus, who became masters of China and ruled until the twentieth century. Their power was gradually undermined by foreign traders – particularly the British, who introduced opium to China. We can regard China as a kind of last outpost of the ancient world, obeying the old law of history – of conquerors gradually becoming effete and lazy, and being driven out by new barbarians.