The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Crime can be understood only as a part of the total evolutionary pattern. Man developed his ‘divided consciousness’ as a means of survival. In a sense, he was better off as an animal, for the animal’s consciousness is simpler and richer. (We can gain some inkling of it from the effects of alcohol – that sudden feeling of warmth and reality.) But this instinctive consciousness has one major disadvantage; it is too narrow. It restricts us to the present moment. So man developed the left brain to escape this narrowness. It has the power of reaching beyond the present moment: the power of abstraction. And it does this by turning reality into symbols and ideas. The left brain is fundamentally a map-maker.

Imagine a stranger who comes to a large but primitive city. His business involves travelling all over it. He can ask his way around, or hire a local man as a guide; but neither of these methods is very satisfactory. If he wishes to be independent, his best way is to acquire a map. And if maps do not exist, he will have to make one. Once he has done this, he can find his way around the city as confidently as the oldest inhabitant. Moreover, he will know it a great deal better than many inhabitants, who are familiar only with their own quarter.

Yet in another sense, he does not ‘know’ it at all; he knows only an abstraction, a map, reinforced by a few selected areas of ‘reality’.

This is man’s present position. In fact, he spends a large part of his early life at school, acquiring a ‘map’ of the world he lives in. Yet when he leaves school, his knowledge of the reality of that world is very patchy. And modern life is so complex and confusing that huge areas of the map are bound to remain unexplored and ‘unrealised’. A savage who has spent the same number of years hunting and fishing will admittedly have a narrower view of the world; but what he does know will have the genuine flavour of reality. In a sense, modern man seems to have made a very poor bargain. He has acquired a map, and not much else.

The ‘map’ concept explains the problem of crime. A man whose actual acquaintance with the real world is fairly limited looks at his map and imagines he can see a number of short-cuts. Robbery is a short-cut to wealth. Rape is a short-cut to sexual fulfilment. Violence is a short-cut to getting his own way. Of course, each of these shortcuts has major disadvantages; but he is unaware of these until he tries them out in the real world.

So crime is the outcome of man’s greatest evolutionary achievement; his ability to make ‘maps’. Fortunately, it is not a permanent drawback. For it is not really a choice between a real world and an unreal map. It is true that the oldest inhabitant knows the city a great deal better than the map-maker. But then, if the map-maker really wants to get to know the city, he can do it in far less time than it took the oldest inhabitant. Making use of his map, he can get to know it in weeks instead of years. Man’s map-making ability, his ability to use his mind, gives him a potential for mastering reality that makes the drawbacks seem unimportant.

Before we embark on the main part of this history of crime, creativity and civilisation, let us try to summarise what we have learned so far.

Since his advent so many millions of years ago, man has shown himself to be the most remarkable creature who has ever walked the earth. With none of the advantages of the big predators, he taught himself to survive by the use of intelligence. But even so, the stream of evolution from Ramapithecus, through Australopithecus and homo habilis was like a broad, meandering river. Man developed because he learned the use of weapons and tools; but his development was slow because he had not yet learned to use that most valuable of all tools, his mind.

With homo erectus, the river entered a valley and became a fast-flowing stream. A million and a half years later – which, in geological time, brings us almost to the twentieth century – came Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man, and it is as if the river entered a gorge and suddenly turned into a torrent. The pace quickened again with the beginning of agriculture. With the building of the cities, the gorge narrowed and the rapids became dangerous.

It would hardly seem possible that evolution could flow faster still, but that is what happened at some time between the founding of the cities and the civilisations of ancient Crete and Mycenae. The sheer danger of the rapids created a new level of alertness and determination. Roaring along at top speed between narrow walls, man was forced to concentrate as he had never concentrated before. Bodies struggled in the water; wrecks drifted past him; but the noise and exhilaration swallowed up the screams of the drowning. A man who steers his raft with his jaw set and all his senses strained to the utmost has no time for compassion.

As he developed determination, man also developed ruthlessness. The narrowing of the senses became a habit – so that whenever he found himself in a quieter patch of water, protected by some buttress from the torrent, he no longer knew how to relax and enjoy the relative calm.

This explains why man has ceased to be the gentle vegetarian described by Leakey and Fromm. But he has no reason to envy those other animals who are still drifting placidly down broad rivers. For he has developed a faculty that outweighs all the danger, all the misery and violence. He has learned to steer.

When he learned to use his mind, this ability to steer made him also the first truly creative and inventive creature. He has poured that narrow jet of energy into discovery and exploration. But the sheer force of the jet has meant that whenever it has been obstructed – or whenever men have lacked the self-discipline to control it – the result has been chaos and destruction. Crime is the negative aspect of creativity.

Throughout history, the ruthless – from Sennacherib to Hitler -have ended by destroying themselves, for their tendency to violence makes them bad steersmen. It is true that their crimes seem to dominate human history. But, as we shall see, it is the good steersmen who play the major part in the story of mankind.

PIRATES AND ADVENTURERS

When we complain about the rising crime rate, we speak as citizens who take the protection of the law for granted. Police patrol our streets and country lanes. Burglary and mugging may be on the increase; but at least the robbers take their freedom into their hands every time they set out to commit a crime.

If we are to understand the history of the past three thousand years we have to make an effort of imagination, and try to forget this notion of being protected by the law. In ancient Greece, the problem was not simply the brigands who haunted the roads and the pirates who infested the seas; it was the fact that the ordinary citizen became a brigand or pirate when he felt like it; and no one regarded this as abnormal. In the Odyssey, Ulysses describes with pride how, on the way home from Troy, his ship was driven near to the coast of Thrace; so they landed near an unprotected town, murdered all the men, and carried off the women and goods. Greece was not at war with Thrace; it was just that an unprotected town was fair game for anyone, and the war-weary Greeks felt like a little rape and plunder. This state of affairs persisted for most of the next three thousand years, and explains why so many Mediterranean towns and villages are built inland.

What is far more difficult to grasp is that ‘law abiding’ countries like England were in exactly the same situation. Just before the time of the Black Death (as Luke Owen Pike describes in his History of Crime in England, 1873), ‘houses were set on fire day after day; men and women were captured, ransom was exacted on pain of death… even those who paid it might think themselves fortunate if they escaped some horrible mutilation.’ And this does not relate to times of war or social upheaval; according to J. F. Nicholls and John Taylor’s Bristol Past and Present (1881) England was ‘prosperous in the highest degree; populous, wealthy and luxurious…’ (p. 174). Yet the robber bands were like small armies. They would often descend on a town when a fair was taking place and everyone felt secure; they would take over the town, plunder the houses and set them on fire (for citizens who were trying to save their houses would not organise a pursuit) and then withdraw. In 1347 and ‘48, Bristol was taken over by a brigand who robbed the ships in the harbour -including some commissioned by the king – and issued his own proclamations like a conqueror. His men roamed the streets, robbing and killing as they felt inclined – the king had to send Thomas, Lord Berkeley, to restore order. When a trader was known to have jewels belonging to Queen Philippa in his house, he was besieged by a gang led by one Adam the Leper and had to hand over the jewels when his house was set on fire. The law courts were almost powerless; when a notorious robber was tried near Winchester, the gang waited outside the court and attacked everyone who came out; so the case was dropped.