The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

There is another, and equally instinctive, element that helps us to understand human criminality: xenophobia, dislike of the foreigner. In The Social Contract, Ardrey points out that xenophobia is a basic instinct among animals, and that it probably has a genetic basis. All creatures tend to congregate in small groups or tribes and to stick to their own. Darwin even noticed that in a herd of ten thousand or so cattle on a ranch in Uruguay the animals naturally separated into sub-groups of between fifty and a hundred. When a violent storm scattered the herd, it re-grouped after twenty-four hours, the animals all finding their former group-members. And this instinctive tendency to form ‘tribes’ is probably a device to protect the species. If some favourable gene appears, then it will be confined to the members of the group and not diluted by the herd. A study by Edward Hall of the black ghetto area of Chicago revealed that it was virtually a series of independent villages. And even in more ‘mobile’ social groups the average person tends to have a certain number of acquaintances who form his ‘tribe’ – Desmond Morris suggested in The Human Zoo the number of between fifty and one hundred, figures that happen to agree with Darwin’s observation about cattle. The group may adopt his own modes of dress, catch-phrases, tricks of speech. (Frank Sinatra’s ‘in-group’ was significantly known as ‘the rat pack’.) They enjoy and emphasise the privilege of belonging, and adopt an attitude of hostility to outsiders. Hall’s study of Chicago showed that there was often gang warfare between the ghetto communities.

This helps to explain how the Nazis could herd Jews into concentration camps. Hitler’s racist ideology would not have taken root so easily were it not for the natural ‘animal xenophobia’ that is part of our instinctive heritage. In his book on the psychology of genocide The Holocaust and the German Elite, Professor Rainer C. Baum remarks on the indifference of the German bureaucrats who were responsible for the concentration camps and the banality of the whole process. They were not frenzied anti-semites, lusting for blood; what was frightening about them was that they had no feeling about the women and children they herded into cattle trucks. And if we assume that this was due to the evil Nazi ideology, we shall be oversimplifying. Human beings do not need an evil ideology to make them behave inhumanly; it comes easily to us because most of us exist in a state of self-preoccupation that makes our neighbour unreal. The point is reinforced by the massacre of Palestinians that took place in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, in September 1982. Palestinian fighters had agreed to be evacuated from Beirut – after a siege – on the understanding that their women and children would be safe. On Saturday, 18 September the world became aware that Christian phalangists had massacred hundreds of women and children – as well as a few male non-combatants – in the camps, and that the phalangists had been sent into the camps by the Israelis. While the slaughter was going on, the US envoy sent Israel’s General Sharon a message: ‘You must stop this horrible massacre… You have absolute control of the area and are therefore responsible…’

What shocked the world – including thousands of Israelis, who demonstrated in Tel Aviv – was that it should be Jews, the victims of the Nazi holocaust, who apparently countenanced the massacre. But Baum’s analysis applies here as well as to Belsen and Buchenwald; it was not a matter of ‘evil’ but of indifference. Most of the mass-murderers in history have simply placed their victims in a different category from their own wives and children, just as the average meat eater feels no fellowship for cows and sheep.

In our humanitarian age, these horrors stand out, and we draw the lesson: that to be truly human demands a real effort of will rather than our usual vague assumption of ‘mutual concern’. Five thousand years ago, no one made that assumption; they were governed by the law of xenophobia and recognised that mutual concern only exists between relatives and immediate neighbours.

As we shall see, there is evidence of a slowly increasing criminality from about 2000 B.C. The old religious sanctions began breaking down at this period; the force that made men come together into cities in the first place was unable to withstand the new stresses created by these ‘jostling crowds’. In his book on Animal Nature and Human Nature, Professor W. H. Thorpe comments on the rarity of inter-group aggression between chimpanzees and gorillas, and speculates on why human beings are so different. But he then answers his own question by pointing out that, while there is very little violence between groups of animals in the wild, this alters as soon as they are kept in captivity and subjected to unnatural conditions such as shortage of food and space; then, suddenly, they become capable of killing one another. This is what happened to man when he became a city dweller. The need to defend food-growing ‘territory’ from neighbours in nearby cities made man into a warlike animal. Moreover, cities had to be defended by walls, and this eventually introduced an entirely new factor: overcrowding. And this, it now seems fairly certain, was the factor that finally turned man into a habitual criminal.

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’s On 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 in The 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.