The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It all sounds rather like Nineteen Eighty-Four – and even more like that giant in Wagner’s Ring who killed his brother to get the Nibelung’s treasure, then turned himself into a dragon and spent the rest of his life guarding it. The Spartans became the dragons of the Hellenic world. When their neighbours, the Athenians, looked like becoming too powerful, the Spartans felt they had to conquer Athens to maintain their own position. And after a war that dragged on for twenty-seven years, they were again victorious. Yet the one thing they were not ready for was the leadership of the Hellenic world. They had trained themselves for hardship and struggle; success demoralised them. Some of the soldiers they sent abroad to govern colonies became notorious for debauchery. And the Spartans who stayed at home remained rigid, completely fixed in their conservatism; Toynbee compares them to soldiers standing permanently on parade with arms presented. And while they stood there, the cobwebs grew all over them. The Spartans did not vanish in a spectacular holocaust, like the Assyrians; they merely became the victims of a kind of spiritual arthritis and quietly faded out of history.

Here we can see very clearly the importance of Jaynes’s insight. The Spartans were the ultimate ‘left brainers’. They fixed their minds on one thing and one thing only, and pretended that nothing else existed. Before the Messenian war, Sparta was creating its own tradition of art and music; this came to a complete halt in the middle of the sixth century B.C. It was not revived until more than five hundred years later, when the militarist system in Sparta was finally smashed in the second Macedonian war. A symbol of the sheer futility of the Spartan ideal can be seen in their later custom of inducing boys to display their toughness by allowing themselves to be flogged to death at the altar of the moon goddess.

The left cerebral hemisphere is the critical part of the brain, the part that can overrule our impulses. (This explains why even cats and dogs have two hemispheres; all creatures need the power to change their minds.) It would not be too inaccurate to say that the Spartans outlawed creativity and turned themselves into a nation of critics. The left brain directs our energies into a narrow, fast current like a mountain stream; the right allows them to spread into a broad, slow-moving river. But the right also enables us to see where we are going, to survey the surrounding landscape and decide where we want to go next. The left becomes easily trapped in its own obsessive forward movement and loses all ability to change direction. When this happens, there are two possibilities: self-destruction or slow exhaustion. The Assyrians are an example of the first alternative, the Spartans of the second.

Two thousand years or so later, Sherlock Holmes found himself confronting the same dilemma. In his earlier days, Holmes was much given to relieving his boredom with morphine or cocaine. When, in The Sign of Four, Watson asks him whether he has any work on hand at the moment, Holmes replies: ‘None. Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?’ When Doyle wrote The Sign of Four, it was not recognised that cocaine was addictive (Freud made his original reputation by administering it to cure morphine addiction); and in any case Holmes was saved from addiction by his own increasing success. But the example serves to show us that the nature of the problem has not changed in the three thousand years since Rameses III. Man has achieved his pre-eminence by showing himself to be the greatest of all survivors; he has survived droughts, ice-ages, famines and earthquakes. And at a certain point in his history, evolution subjected him to the strangest of all experiments: confining his sense of identity to his left brain. (It makes no difference whether or not we accept Jaynes’s estimate of when this happened; the important thing is that it happened.) It paid off spectacularly. With this new detachment from nature, man began to study it with a critical eye and observe its habits. In the third century B.C., a Greek philosopher named Eratosthenes, who lived in Alexandria, heard that there was a well in a town called Syene – modern Aswan – where the sun was reflected at midday on midsummer day. This meant that it was precisely overhead, and that a tower in Syene would cast no shadow. But towers in Alexandria did cast shadows at midday on midsummer day. Eratosthenes measured such a shadow, and calculated that the sun’s rays struck the tower at an angle of 7l/2°. And if the earth is a globe (a traditional piece of knowledge that seems to date back to ancient Egypt), then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be 7-1/2% of the earth’s circumference. Since this distance is five hundred miles, Eratosthenes was able to work out that the circumference of the earth must be 24,000 miles. The modern measurement is 24,860 miles at the equator, so Eratosthenes was incredibly accurate. Another Alexandrian Greek, Aristarchus, measured the angle from the earth to the sun when the moon was directly overhead and half-full, then used simple trigonometry to work out the size of the sun and moon and their distances from earth. His calculations were not quite as accurate as Eratosthenes’, because of the difficulty of judging exactly when the moon was half-full; but he worked out that the moon is fifty-six thousand miles away and the sun well over a million. The impact upon his fellow Alexandrians must have been stunning. The story of Icarus told them that if a man flew too high he would get close to the sun and melt his wings; now Aristarchus was telling them that a man could fly a thousand miles high and hardly be any closer to the sun. He added that, since the sun was far larger than the earth, it was quite possible that the earth travelled round the sun and not vice versa.

These remarkable discoveries reveal the impact of man’s newly-acquired ‘bicameralism’. The earliest farmers were undoubtedly interested in the sun and moon; but they would not have dreamed of doing anything so boring as measuring angles and calculating distances. Yet this was one of the most important consequences of bicameralism; it meant that people often did ‘boring’ things merely to escape from boredom – a paradox with which we are all familiar. The result was the discovery that calculation and measurement give us a new power over the physical world.

But it was another ‘change of mind’ that had – and continues to have – the greatest consequences for the human race. When a man is trapped in this thin and unsatisfactory left-brain awareness, he hungers for the richer consciousness of an animal, as a starving man dreams of food. He craves the sense of oneness with nature, that immediate, comfortable feeling of contact with reality. The result is the attitude we now call ‘romanticism’ – the obscure longing for distant horizons, for ‘unknown modes of being’. As W. B. Yeats put it:

What the world’s million lips are searching for Must be substantial somewhere…

In short, being stranded in left-brain consciousness turned man into a dreamer.

When a dreamer has an army at his disposal, the result can be frightening and spectacular. In about 367 B.C., a fifteen-year-old prince named Philip of Macedon was seized by the Greek general Pelopidas and sent to Thebes as a hostage to guarantee the good behaviour of his elder brother, King Alexander. In comparison with Thebes, Macedon was a provincial backwater. Philip was dazzled by the culture and sophistication of the Greeks. He was a naturally intelligent youth – his elder brother Perdikkas was in correspondence with Plato – and he threw himself into the study of literature, philosophy and the art of public speaking. When Alexander was assassinated, Philip returned to Macedon and no doubt found the place unbearably provincial. So when Perdikkas – who had succeeded Alexander – was also murdered, Philip seized the throne and set about the task of turning Macedonia into another Greece. He was a born soldier and soon converted the army from a disorganised rabble into a fighting machine comparable to the Spartans or Assyrians. He subdued the hill tribes in his own country and then, full of euphoria, went on to conquer the lands from the Danube to the Hellespont. This was not – like the empire-building of Sargon of Akkad – an attempt to win security for his own people and extinguish petty rivalries; it was fighting for purely romantic reasons, fighting for the joy of fighting, fighting for glory and renown. Above all, it was fighting to become worthy of the admiration of the Greeks. Like some medieval knight, Philip was doing battle for the honour of his lady. And when he had subdued the lands to the north and east, he marched south into Greece and conquered the lady herself. Thebes was occupied by a Macedonian army – a conquest that was to have terrible consequences for the Thebans. Athens, which had led the resistance to Philip, expected a fight to the death; but Philip behaved like a perfect gentleman. He was not out for revenge: he only wanted to be regarded as a Greek.