The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In China, the changes of the past thousand years are dramatic. The Great Wall reveals that this land is afraid of its northern neighbours, and the walled cities show that the Chinese are also afraid of one another. In spite of the wall, Mongol raiders have swept down from the north, armed with crossbows and riding fast ponies, and have driven immense numbers of people to the south. So this continent is at present in chaos with many refugees. Yet the Chinese, like the Japanese, are a people who love tradition, and who like to think carefully before they act. Buddism has spread from India and is now as influential as Confucianism or Taoism. This is not because the Chinese are deeply pessimistic about life – they take it calmly and philosophically, neither expecting too much nor assuming the worst – but because Buddhism is a meditative religion and the Chinese feel instinctively that meditation is as important as action. They are also a practical people: they have already invented paper and porcelain, and in a few centuries will invent printing and gunpowder.

Their neighbours in northern India are enjoying a period of relative stability, although they too have suffered greatly from the Mongol invaders. Half a century earlier, their King Skandagupta defeated the Huns and drove them out of India. Under the Gupta dynasty – which began in 320 A.D. – art and literature have flourished. These Hindus are the most profoundly spiritual people on the earth. Like the Chinese, they realise intuitively that the right brain must be allowed to express itself as fully as the left; so meditation is a part of the Hindu way of life. But this unworldliness means that life for the poor is harsh and brutal. There are times when spirituality comes dangerously close to stagnation.

As the travellers move west over Persia, it is obvious that this great country is still as powerful as it was under Darius a thousand years before. Under the Sassanid dynasty – founded by Artaxerxes (Ardashir) in 226 A.D. – the empire has remained warlike and prosperous. There have been no less than seven wars with Rome since Artaxerxes came to the throne, and there will be three more. The Persians have shown themselves a great deal more tolerant than the Christians, and allow Christians to worship within their empire. But at the moment the country is torn by religious dissension, due to a high priest named Mazdak, who has gained many converts with his puritanical and communistic doctrines, and whose followers have caused a civil war with their intolerance.

And so on once more to the Mediterranean, over the mighty city of Constantinople, with its walls and towers and its superb position looking out over the Bosphorus. In this year 500 A.D., Constantinople is being governed peacefully and well by the servant-emperor Anastasius. All these Mediterranean countries are crossed by Roman roads; the sea is still full of Roman and Byzantine ships. Yet Rome itself is ruled by a barbarian, Theodoric the Goth, who is much resented by the Italians. The last Roman emperor – the boy king Romulus – was deposed by Germans nearly a quarter of a century ago. Theodoric killed the leader of the Germans – Ordovacar – with his own hands, and ordered a massacre of his troops.

Nothing is more obvious than that this whole area has been under the sway of a mighty empire, men whose engineering works will last for more than a thousand years. (Of how many modern constructions can we say the same?) In Spain, in Greece, in North Africa, everything reveals their presence. Then where are they? They are already in the process of disappearing, like the Vandals, Huns and the Goths. Like a balloon that has exploded, their fragments now litter the Mediterranean.

The Celts have also virtually disappeared – driven into remote places such as Scotland and Wales by the barbarians – although one of their last great generals, the British Artorius (later known as king Arthur) will hold the barbarians at bay in England for another half century. In the rest of Europe, the barbarians find themselves in possession of the remains of the Roman Empire, and its sheer size and magnificence makes them feel awkward and uncomfortable.

The scientists would conclude their report:

Our earlier speculations about evolution have undoubtedly been confirmed. These highly civilised people have become so obsessed with the external world that they are unable to make proper use of their inner resources. And yet they are intuitively aware that they ought to be exploring them, and so find themselves in a permanent state of dissatisfaction and discomfort. Our investigation has shown that these Romans succumbed to the problem of the nouveau riche – that is to say that the moment they became wealthy and comfortable, the moment external challenges ceased to keep them up to the mark, they became lazy and corrupt.

Fortunately, Roman materialism has caused a powerful reaction, and the empire is now dominated by a sect called Christians who are far more aware of their wasted potentialities. We predict, however, that their rather simple-minded religion, directed towards a God outside themselves and a crude system of reward and punishment after death, will eventually provoke another powerful counter-reaction that will once again direct attention towards the inner resources…

For this was the central problem at this stage of human evolution. Man found himself stranded in the material world, like a passenger left standing on the platform when the last train has gone. Instinctively, he knew he ought to be going somewhere, for this internal compulsion to go somewhere has made man the most highly evolved creature on earth. And this has led to one of the major paradoxes of human history – a paradox explored by Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History: that men are at their very best when they are ‘up against it’ and at their worst when success has allowed them to relax. Herodotus has a story of how some Persians came to their King Cyrus and suggested that, now they had become conquerors, they should move to a more comfortable and pleasant land. Cyrus’s reply was: ‘Soft countries breed soft men.’ Toynbee devotes a whole chapter (pp. 31-73 of Vol. 1) to examining the difference between hard and soft environments, and shows that the hard environments produce greatness and the soft ones weakness. In China, conditions for civilisation were far easier on the Yangtse River than on the Yellow River, which was usually frozen, flooded or choked with swamps. Yet Chinese civilisation came to birth on the Yellow River, not the Yangtse. In South America, the civilisation of the Andes came to birth in the harsh northern desert, not in the far more pleasant part which the Spaniards called Valparaiso (‘paradise valley’). And so he goes on, with example after example, showing that ‘tough’ countries make creative human beings: Attica and

Boeotia, Rome and Capua, Byzantium and Calchedon, Brandenburg and the Rhineland, even the Black Country and the Home Counties of England.

Now this is not, of course, a specifically human phenomenon. All wine lovers know that the best wines in the world come from areas where the grapes have to put up a struggle: in Bordeaux, they have to burrow through deep gravel, in Champagne they have to fight the cold. Good soil and good weather – as in the Rhone valley or in Italy or North Africa – produces a wine that is strong but lacking in character. Plants, like animals, are largely ‘mechanical’, a mass of ingrained habits that ensure their survival, but also their stagnation. Habit causes them to make no more effort than they have to. Man is the only animal on the earth who experiences an urge to ‘go somewhere’, to move forward. But whereas most animals are limited by habit, man is limited by habit and his brain. He has developed too much of an ‘eye to business’, coping with external problems. So that whenever these problems vanish, he finds himself becalmed and bewildered.

Clearly, what he needs to develop is an inward eye – an eye not merely to business – but to purpose. It is self-evident that man is at his best when he is driven by some sense of long-term purpose, and that, conversely, he ‘goes to pieces’ when he lacks all sense of purpose – this explains why so many men die shortly after retiring. Our everyday purposes – keeping ourselves physically and emotionally satisfied – are too small, too fragmentary and piecemeal to summon the best that is in us. ‘They lived happily ever after’ is actually a formula for mediocrity. We feel instinctively that the truly satisfying life would be spanned by one great overarching bridge of purpose. This was the instinctive recognition that was slowly transforming the world at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Let us look more closely at the way this craving for ‘long term solutions’ expressed itself in the life of one of the most remarkable of all visionaries: the prophet Mahomet.