The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The same may be said for the view put forward by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Koestler points out: ‘Homo sapiens is 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 tumour. The trouble says Koestler, is that instead of transforming 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. In The 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 [in A 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 called The 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 in The 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 adapted communities. They were essentially jostling crowds 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 the difference 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’ is not 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 Critique of Dialectical Reason, that all men are naturally enemies and rivals. If a man goes for a country walk, he resents the presence of other people; nature would be more attractive if he was alone. When he joins a bus queue, every other person in it becomes a rival – the conductor may shout ‘No more room’ as he tries to climb on board. A crowded city or supermarket is an unpleasant place because all these people want their turn. If a man could perform magic by merely thinking, he would make others dissolve into thin air – or perhaps, like Wells’s ‘man who could work miracles’, transport them all to Timbuktu.

This is a point that was made with brutal explicitness in Colin Turnbull’s study of a ‘dispossessed’ African tribe, The Mountain People. Since the Second World War, the Ik have been driven out of their traditional hunting grounds by a government decision to turn the land into a game reserve. They became farmers in a land with practically no rain. The result of this hardship is that they seemed to lose all normal human feelings. Children were fed until the age of three, then thrown out to fend for themselves. Old people were allowed to starve to death. In the Ik villages, it was every man for himself. A small girl, thrown out by her parents, kept returning home, looking for love and affection; her parents finally locked her in and left her to starve to death. A mother watched with indifference as her baby crawled towards the communal camp fire and stuck its hand in; when the men roared with laughter at the child’s screams, the mother looked pleased at providing amusement. When the government provided famine relief, those who were strong enough went to collect it, then stopped on the way home and gorged themselves sick; after vomiting, they ate the remainder of the food. One man who insisted on taking food home for his sick wife and child was mocked for his weakness.

Some writers – like Ardrey – have drawn wide conclusions from the Ik – such as that human values are superficial and that altruism is not natural to us. This is illogical. We could draw the same conclusions from the fact that most of us get bad tempered when we become hungry and tired. In the case of the Ik, the ‘culture shock’ was particularly severe; as hunters, they practised close co-operation, involving even the women and children; to be suddenly deprived of all this must have left them totally disoriented. But then, the important question about human beings is not how far we are capable of being disoriented and demoralised – losing self-control – but how far we are capable of going in the opposite direction, of using our intelligence for creativity and organisation. Negative cases, like the Ik, prove nothing except what we already know: that human beings are capable of total selfishness, particularly when it is a question of survival. In fact, many primitive peoples practise infanticide and gerontocide. In The Hunting Peoples (p. 329) Carleton S. Coon describes how, among the Caribou Indians of Hudson Bay, old people voluntarily commit suicide when the reindeer herds fail to appear and starvation threatens. When the old people are all dead, girl babies will be killed. ‘This is a heartrending business because everybody loves children.’ John Pfeiffer, the author of The Emergence of Man, describes (p. 316) how, among the aborigines of Australia, infanticide is the commonest form of birth control, and that between 15 and 50 per cent of infants are killed; it is the mother’s decision and the mother’s job, and she kills the baby about an hour after birth as we drown unwanted kittens.