The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

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’s Golden 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 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 writing The 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 in History 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 of The 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 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 called The 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.