The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Another Englishman travelling on the continent, Lord Russell, Was acclaimed for putting a native with whom he was sharing a compartment in his place. As the train drew out of the station the foreigner proceeded to open his carpet bag, take out a pair of slippers and untie the laces of his shoes.

‘If you do that, sir,’ proclaimed the great Victorian jurist, ‘I shall throw your shoes out of the window.’

The foreigner remarked that he had a right to do as he wished in his own country, so long as he did not inconvenience others. Lord Russell demurred. The man took off his shoes, and Lord Russell threw them out of the window.

What is interesting about this anecdote is the phrase ‘was acclaimed for putting a native… in his place’. There seems to be no awareness that Lord Russell was behaving with the utmost unreasonableness. As a leading citizen of the great British Empire, he felt he had every right to order a foreigner not to take off his shoes; the British had been doing the same kind of thing all over the world for centuries. We feel, as we read it, that the foreigner would have been justified in taking Lord Russell by the throat and throwing him out of the window. Such self-confident stupidity arouses murderous rage. And it is this feeling that authority deserves to be treated with violence that constitutes the essence of crime. It was the same feeling that made Cromwell decide to cut off King Charles’s head. Every crime is, in a sense, a one-man revolt against authority.

This kind of sentiment makes an appeal to the anti-authoritarian in all of us. It is the basis of all left-wing political philosophies, from Rousseau to Marcuse. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced into sympathy by the notion that crime is a healthy protest against authority, it is important to bear in mind that anti-authoritarianism is a legacy of childhood. This emerges clearly in a collection of children’s jokes made by an American sociologist, Children’s Humour by Sandra McCosh.

There’s this little lass, and her mother’s in bed poorly and she don’t want to be disturbed, and so she says to her father, Daddy, can I come to bed with you? So he says no and she says I’ll scream, so he says ok then. So they go to bed. And the daughter says, Daddy, what’s that long thing? And he says it’s a teddy bear, so she says can I play with your teddy bear? So he says no, so she says, I’ll scream, so he says ok then, but let me get to sleep, I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So in the morning he wakes up and there’s blood all over the covers, and he says, what you done? so she says your teddy bear spit at me so I bit its head off.

Johnnie Fuckerfaster, named that by his mom, was under the house with a girl, and his mom didn’t know he was there with a girl. And she calls, Johnnie, come here. And Johnnie says, I guess I’ll have to go, even though they were in the middle of it, and she yells again, Johnnie Fuckerfaster, and so he yells back: I’m fucking her as fast as I can.

In another typical joke, the mother orders her daughter not to climb lamp posts, because the boys only want to see the colour of her knickers. Next time the girl admits to climbing a lamp post, her mother says: ‘I thought I told you not to do that.’ ‘It’s all right – I took my knickers off first.’

After a few pages, these jokes begin to produce an oddly claustrophobic effect; their outlook is so uniformly negative. The adult is bothered by their illogicality; the father has an orgasm in his sleep – which is just possible – but he then sleeps on when his daughter bites off the end of his penis. The mother has named her son Johnnie Fuckerfaster, but he does not recognise his own name when she calls him, and thinks she is giving him an order. It requires a major suspension of disbelief – and all for the sake of a mildly ‘naughty’ conclusion:

A mother’s boy got married, and when he got in bed with his wife he didn’t know what to do. So she said: Get on with it, and he said: Get on with what? So she said: Well, do something dirty. So he shit the bed.

It is ‘naughty’ for a girl to let a boy see her knickers. Sex is dirty, like shitting the bed; conversely, shitting the bed is funny because it is also forbidden. There are long, elaborate stories in which children are misinformed about the meaning of words: father’s penis is a train, mother’s vagina is a tunnel: (Hey Sis, come and look; Dad’s train’s got stuck in Mom’s tunnel…) Fuck means to go and get washed, shit means food, bastard means vicar: (Hello bastard, mom’s just getting fucked before she serves the shit.) Again, the whole point of the rigmarole is that the child should innocently undermine the authority of his parents or the vicar or his schoolteacher. Other jokes make their effect simply by being nauseating; a tramp eats a dead cat, or drinks the contents of a spittoon. This, like shitting the bed, is ‘dirty’ and must therefore be funny. And the ‘dirty’ is forbidden, and must be funny too.

These jokes enable us to reconstruct the peculiar mental world of the child, which most of us have so conveniently forgotten: the world seen from a worm’s eye view. Adults have their own strange ideas about what is ‘fun’ – religion, politics and sport. But every child knows better. They know that ‘fun’ is doing those exciting things you are not supposed to do, all those things that adults call ‘naughty’. This is why most children have a streak of cruelty that makes them enjoy pulling wings off flies or throwing lighted matches at the cat; here, on a small scale, they can become an Alexander the Great, free to give way to the normally forbidden desire to cause pain. The child’s world is almost entirely defined by the authority of adults, and by their secret desire to flout that authority.

But have adults really outgrown these attitudes? A comedian only has to make a disparaging remark about a well-known politician to bring loud laughter, even applause. It need not be a particularly funny remark, provided it has a touch of malice – a sense of giving the two-finger salute to authority. Humorists who make a virtue of anarchism – the Marx Brothers, Lennie Bruce, Mort Sahl, Spike Milligan – are generally regarded as the comedians of the intellectual, for the man with a sophisticated sense of humour, more ‘daring’ and therefore funnier than the straightforward clown. (Even T. S. Eliot admired Groucho Marx.) Yet anyone who is slightly over-exposed to this type of humour – say, watching a season of Marx Brothers films on TV – soon becomes aware that its premises will not bear close scrutiny. Defiance of authority, deflation of dignity and pomposity, are really rather thin stuff after the first five minutes. Refusal to take anything seriously is only funny up to a point; then an odd taste of futility begins to creep in. When Groucho sings ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it’, we only find the sentiment amusing for as long as we fail to think about it. Chaos is refreshing only so long as we can feel that pleasant sense of law and order hovering in the background.

We have here the same fallacy that vitiates the work of de Sade. The heroes of The 120 Days of Sodom are really schoolboys who believe that something must be pleasant because it is forbidden. There is one passage in which a prostitute describes how one of her clients made her leave her feet unwashed for weeks, then ate the dirt from between her toes. While most of the libertines grimace with disgust, Curval takes the prostitute’s foot and sucks between her toes. (Significantly, Curval is a Lord Chief Justice – de Sade’s equivalent of the anti-politician joke.) But another of the libertines goes on to make the significant remark: ‘One need but be mildly jaded, and all these infamies assume a richer meaning: satiety inspires them… One grows tired of the commonplace, the imagination becomes vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the weakness of our faculties, the corruption of our souls lead us to these abominations.’ And, apparently unaware that he has just levelled the most devastating criticism at his own philosophy, de Sade proceeds to his description of the next perversion – an elderly general who likes to masturbate himself against the scars of an old woman who has often been flogged in public for theft.

This, then, is the essence of crime: unreasoning resentment of authority. The child is, in a sense, a natural criminal, since he lives in a world of authority: authority stretching as far as the eye can see, from parents and schoolteachers to policemen and prime ministers. As he grows up, he learns to share the burden of authority – perhaps over younger brothers or sisters, or over younger children at school. Eventually, he has children of his own, so that he now slips naturally into his place in the adult power structure. Yet although his reason is now convinced of the need for authority and law, his emotions continue to resent it – hence the laughter when a comedian makes a joke against authority. In most of us, the two never come into open conflict. The head remains a supporter of law and order, the heart of anti-authoritarianism. The case of de Sade is of symbolic importance because he not only tried to reconcile the two: he attempted to justify his heart with the use of his head. De Sade is anarchy incarnate; he performed the service of carrying its arguments to the point of absurdity.