The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It is this sense of reality that makes the difference between suicide or non-suicide. Durkheim was therefore mistaken. The ‘social currents’ certainly exist; but they are only the secondary cause of crime or suicide. The primary cause must be sought in the psychology of the individual.

Does this mean that Durkheim’s opponents were right? No, for they argued that suicide can only be understood in psychological terms, and Durkheim proved them wrong. It must be understood in social and psychological terms. And if we are to understand the basic patterns of criminal behaviour – and therefore how to combat it – the search for patterns must be continued on both levels.

A REPORT ON THE VIOLENT MAN

On 13 December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Nanking, in Central China, and began what has been described as ‘one of the most savage acts of mass terror in modern times’ – a campaign of murder, rape and torture that lasted for two months. Chinese soldiers had divested themselves of their uniforms and mixed with the civilian population, in the belief that the Japanese would spare them if they were unarmed. The Japanese began rounding them up and shooting them in huge numbers, using machine-guns. The bodies – some twenty thousand of them – were thrown into heaps, 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 magazine Look, 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 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 called The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, which so worried the editor of the International 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 and On 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.