A Criminal History of Mankind (102 page)

The total number of Bundy’s murders is unknown; police suspect that it could be in excess of those committed by Dean Corll or John Gacy. But in any case, Gacy no longer holds the American murder record; by 1980, unknown men known as the Freeway Killers had murdered forty-four teenage male hitchhikers, dumping their sexually abused bodies around California’s highways. (In 1981, William Bonin confessed to twenty-one of the murders and was sentenced for ten of them; three other men were charged with him, one of whom committed suicide in prison.)

The most obvious point to emerge from this survey of crime since 1945 is that, as the figures have continued to rise, the nature of the crimes themselves has become steadily more horrific. It is as if some basic inhibition in human beings is finally beginning to break down. Like the Ik, many criminals seem to have lost all capacity for fellow feeling. But the Ik had an excuse: starvation and the disruption of their traditional life. The worst criminals of the past twenty years have been the product of a comfortable welfare society.

As the nature of the crimes becomes more brutal, they cease to produce a shock effect on society. In 1913, the murder of Mary Phagan made headlines all over America; today it is doubtful if it would achieve more than local coverage. The following three items were collected from newspapers over the New Year period of 1983. In Manchester, a youth of fifteen was sentenced to life imprisonment for a sexual attack on his music teacher and stabbing her fifteen times. In San Francisco, two men were arrested and charged with kidnapping a three-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy, and keeping them as ‘sex slaves’ in a van for almost a year; when arrested, one of the men was in bed with the girl, both naked from the waist down. In Bolton, Lancashire, a seventy-eight-year-old woman was mugged by three children, aged six, eight and nine, and left bleeding on the ground. Three weeks before that, her eighty-one-year-old brother, partially blind, was attacked by an intruder in his home and had to spend two weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries. The woman commented: ‘I feel very bitter and angry. I don’t know what is happening these days.’

After this survey of the criminal history of mankind, we are at least in a slightly better position to answer that question.

THE SENSE OF REALITY

In 1750, a traveller in Haworth, Yorkshire, was puzzled to see men jumping out of the windows of a public house and scrambling frantically over walls. The reason, he discovered, was that someone had seen the parson coming with his whip. The vicar of Haworth (where the Brontës would live a few years later) was the Rev. William Grimshaw, a man who spread terror throughout the district. When the church service had started and the congregation were singing hymns, he used to slip out to the village and use his whip to drive any truants to the church.

In this permissive age, we find it difficult to imagine just how powerful was the religious and moral code of a few centuries ago. Men like Grimshaw were by no means uncommon, for Sabbath breaking was regarded as the most shocking of sins. A prison chaplain remarked that men sentenced to death often began their confession with Sabbath breaking before they went on to robbery or murder. When Dr Johnson visited the death bed of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, he made him swear never to paint on Sunday. Even humming a merry tune on Sunday was regarded as scandalous. As Gordon Rattray Taylor has shown in
The Angel Makers
(chapter 2), many people attended church four times a day, even on weekdays. Sermons sold better than novels - Sterne said he made more money from his volumes of sermons than from
Tristram Shandy
.

If we can grasp the sheer rigidity of the religious observances of our ancestors - of their total acceptance, for example, of the idea of damnation, and that God was watching them every moment of the day - we can begin to understand why the disappearance of this outlook has caused such moral chaos. A cultural historian would probably date the decline from the rise of the novel. This was the equivalent of taking a hot bath instead of a cold shower; it was the beginning of a slide into self-indulgence. We have seen how the rise of the novel was accompanied by the rise of pornography, and how Victorian pornography laid more emphasis on the perverse and the forbidden. The Victorians were so fascinated by the ‘forbidden’ because most people still clung to the religious outlook of Parson Grimshaw and his flock. We have also seen how this ‘morality of prohibition’ gave rise to sex crime, and how this has finally become the most characteristic crime of the twentieth century. Dr Johnson would have characterised the whole process as, quite simply, the rise of self-indulgence.

What has happened is clear. Man created civilisation for his own protection. But civilisation, as Freud pointed out, involves one considerable drawback: frustration. A man who is economically deprived naturally covets his neighbour’s wealth. A man who is sexually deprived lusts after his neighbour’s daughters. To deal with these inclinations, society has had to set up a system of laws and moral prohibitions. While these remain strong, society remains healthy. When they disintegrate, civilisation begins to show signs of breakdown.

It was towards the end of the eighteenth century that political philosophers began to break down the economic prohibitions. They argued that, if most men are poor, this is because the social system is unjust. Karl Marx dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. The economically deprived have a
right
to seize their neighbour’s wealth, for the neighbour would not be wealthy if he were honest.

The sexual revolution took longer to gather momentum - largely because, while a society is economically deprived, sex remains a secondary issue. Once a society is affluent, sex becomes the major issue. Our society has a very high level of sexual stimulation. The result is that most healthy males would like to undress every girl they pass in the street. There has been no sexual equivalent of Karl Marx to argue that women have no right to withhold their bodies from sexually deprived males, and ought to be raped. Yet every rape could be regarded as ‘propaganda of the deed’ for this point of view. The sex killer Melvin Rees came close to putting it into words when he said: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong.’ So did Patrick Byrne, the YWCA killer, when he explained that he was trying to get his revenge on women for causing him sexual tension.

We can see, then, that sex crime is basically a form of ‘magical thinking’. The ‘decision to be out of control’ may be purely emotional, as in the case of Paul Knowles, who goes on a murder rampage because his girlfriend has jilted him, or it may be a ‘logical’ decision, as in the case of Ted Bundy, who decides to satisfy his sexual desires through rape and risk the consequences; in either case, the criminal feels he has a
right
to make such a decision, and that if society disagrees, then society is trying to deprive him of his rights. The same analysis applies increasingly to crime in general. The individual concentrates on his frustration and resentment, and feels that his robbery or burglary is a legitimate way of expressing his sense of social grievance. If society doesn’t like it, then it should take notice and treat him better...

If, then, we cast our minds back to the days of Parson Grimshaw, then forward to modern California, we can see precisely what has gone wrong. California has a pleasant climate, an excellent social welfare system, a tolerance of social rebels and a thriving drug traffic. Taken together, these elements combine into a powerful acid that can dissolve most of the prohibitions that society has set up for its own protection. The result is bound to be an increase in ‘magical thinking’ and in the violence that springs from it. And it is difficult to see how such a trend could be reversed, or prevented from gradually spreading across the whole of our civilisation.

If this description of the situation is correct, then the outlook certainly seems bleak. The problem seems to be man’s deep-seated assumption that he has a right to ‘freedom’, and his inability to make use of it when he has it. The philosopher T. E. Hulme expressed it when he remarked that man habitually overrates his capacity for freedom. In our muddled romanticism we believe ‘that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance, you will get Progress...’ But the truth, said Hulme, is the reverse. ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (
Speculations
, p. 116). Or, to put it another way, human beings go to pieces without discipline. And, according to Spengler’s
Decline of the West
and Toynbee’s
Study of History
, this explains the breakdown of civilisations. They become powerful as hardship drives them to self-discipline. Then they become successful, the need for discipline vanishes, and they slide into decadence. The history of crime in the past century suggests that our civilisation has now reached this stage.

There is obviously a great deal of truth in this analysis, but is it the whole truth? Hulme, for example, is obviously going too far when he says that man’s nature is ‘absolutely constant’. We know that man has, in fact, evolved faster than any other creature on earth. Spengler and Toynbee are clearly correct when they say that all civilisations go through the same cycle of rise and decline; but this does not mean that all civilisations are fundamentally alike - otherwise we would be literally repeating the history of ancient Sumeria. If man evolves, then so does civilisation. To grasp what is really happening, we need to look at the problem from an evolutionary perspective: not merely the history of civilisations, but the history of man himself.

We can begin from the observation that there have been a number of watersheds in human history: events so important that they have created a basic variation in human behaviour. These include the beginning of agriculture, the building of the cities, the invention of writing, the rise of astronomy, the founding of the great religions, the creation of the drama, the discovery of philosophy, the triumph of Christianity, the rise of science and the development of the novel. A glance at the list reveals that most of these are intellectual. Man has evolved faster and farther than any other animal because he has learned to use his mind.

We have seen that this depended on the development of a kind of mental microscope, the ability to examine problems with precise attention. But this ability, which assured man’s survival, also turned him into a criminal, for it narrowed down his consciousness so that he became a bad-tempered obsessive. Man exchanged the bird’s eye view, which is natural to all animals, for a worm’s eye view. He developed the left-brain ego, with its craving for esteem and respect. The earliest tyrants murdered out of a ruthless egoism. And civilisation is now faced with an acute crime problem because it has now reached the self-esteem level - the ego level - of Maslow’s hierarchy, and there are millions of ruthless egoists.

The worm’s eye view has introduced another complication: it has made man far more ‘hypnotisable’. We hypnotise an animal by narrowing its attention. Man’s attention is almost permanently narrowed. Hypnosis is basically a loss of the sense of reality (clinically speaking, this is known as schizophrenia). Man spends most of his life in a semi-hypnotised state. And this, as we have seen, explains a great deal of violent crime. The hypnosis makes us feel trapped in triviality. Rupert Brooke welcomed the First World War, and compared it to the experience ‘of swimmers into cleanness leaping’. Violence usually has this effect - like a thunderstorm that clears the air. Violence is the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers.

It begins to look, then, as if the development of ‘double consciousness’ was one of man’s greatest mistakes. For crime is basically an attempt to escape the narrowness of left-brain consciousness. This applies particularly to sex crime. There is a passage in
My Secret Life
in which Walter describes picking up a middle-aged woman and a ten-year-old girl. Back in her lodgings, he persuades the woman to allow him to penetrate the girl. Then he stands in front of the mirror, holding her against him, so he can actually see himself doing it. He is trying to make himself realise it is
actually happening
. Some couples have mirrors attached to the bedroom ceiling for the same reason.

Let us look more closely at the mechanism involved here. The philosopher A. N. Whitehead pointed out that we have two ‘modes’ of perception, which he called ‘presentational immediacy’ and ‘causal efficacy’. ‘Immediacy’ could be described as ‘close-up perception’, the worm’s eye view. But we have another mode of perception which corresponds to the bird’s eye view. As you read this paragraph, you take it in sentence by sentence. If the argument is too complicated, or badly presented, you will remain in this state of ‘worm’s eye’ perception. This could also happen simply because you are very tired, and fail to make the act of
connection
between the sentences. This act of connection - of linking them together in a sequence of cause and effect - allows a
leap
from the worm’s eye view to the bird’s eye view. This is what Whitehead calls ‘causal efficacy’. It would be simpler to call it ‘meaning perception’.

Sartre’s novel
Nausea
is about a man whose perception is always collapsing into the ‘worm’s eye view’. Reality suddenly seems stupid and meaningless. Sartre argues that ‘nausea’ is truer than ‘meaning perception’, because we
add
the meaning to life by a kind of act of faith - or delusion. A man falls in love with a girl, and believes that she is the most exquisite and desirable creature in the world. He marries her and they go on honeymoon. That first night is not a disappointment - in fact, it is very enjoyable. Yet it is not quite the rapture he expected; it is somehow too real. And a year after they are married, he makes love to her as a matter of routine; sometimes he even allows his mind to wander and pretend it is somebody else. If he recalls that early adoration, he smiles wryly; it seems to be based upon a lack of insight into her actuality.