A Criminal History of Mankind (105 page)

Crime is, then, a completely mistaken solution to a problem that accompanies all of us from the cradle to the grave: the problem of personal evolution. But then, as we have seen in the course of this book, most human solutions tend to be mistaken - from the paradise of the religious fanatic to the simplistic materialism of the Marxist. The criminal simply goes farther than most of us in embracing the wrong solution; and, in doing so, provides the rest of us with a flash of insight into our own stupidity - the recognition that we are making the same mistake, but - fortunately - on a smaller scale.
This
is the real justification for the human interest in crime.

We have seen that this is an evolutionary problem. All animals are trapped in physical immediacy. Man is lucky to have succeeded in achieving some degree of detachment from it. Instinctively he has concentrated on developing the power of the mind - meaning perception. His problem is that his very success has retarded his progress. Civilisation has enabled him to ‘rest on his oars’. He needs challenge or crisis to get the best out of him, but he built civilisation to protect himself from challenge and crisis.

Is there a way out of this vicious circle? Consider again this basic problem of the ‘dual self. Our inner-being may be divided, but we still have the two halves inside our heads, and they are perfectly capable of co-operation - in fact, they do it all the time. As I write these words, my right brain provides the insights, my left translates them into language. Of course, when I perform some simpler function - like eating my breakfast - the left hardly plays any part at all; I can even read a newspaper as I butter my toast.

And this explains how the problem comes about. For if I happen to be eating my breakfast in a hotel, and there is a noisy and irritating child at the next table, I cease to function quite so smoothly. What happens is that the child’s noise distracts my attention from the newspaper, and I - the left-brain self - begin to get angry. I cease to enjoy my breakfast and may even develop indigestion. My left brain has interfered with the smooth functioning of my right brain, my ‘robot’ and my digestion.

And what exactly happens when it interferes in this way? It causes
an internal leak of energy
. When I am relaxed and interested in what I am doing, my energies are ‘funnelled’ quietly and without waste into the effort I am making. The moment my left brain is distracted by some anxiety, I begin to ‘leak’. And this is civilised man’s basic problem. He ‘leaks’ all the time without even noticing it. And the leakage keeps his consciousness at a far lower pressure than it is capable of attaining.

If his anxiety increases sharply, he suddenly notices how badly he is leaking. He may experience a continual unpleasant queasiness in the pit of his stomach, and anything that reminds him of his anxiety causes a ‘sinking feeling’ - a bigger leak still. The reverse can also happen. He has a second martini, becomes interested in the conversation, and suddenly realises that he is no longer leaking. But these delightful states of mind only make us aware of how much we normally leak without even noticing it.

Anything that makes you
self-conscious
causes a ‘leak’ - for example, someone staring intently at your feet as you sit on the train and making you wonder whether you have odd socks on. But man’s whole evolution has been the evolution of self-consciousness. It is hardly surprising that ‘leaking’ has become the major characteristic of the human animal. We have only to look at a cat to see that its lack of self-consciousness protects it from ‘leaks’.

Anything that arouses our interest, that makes us
focus
intently, seals the leaks. It does this by encouraging the two halves of the brain to collaborate without fuss. This explains the disproportionate part that sex plays in human existence. We can imagine, let us say, a man who is suddenly confronted by a girl who believes she is alone, and who is hitching up her skirt to examine a ladder in her stocking. Within a split second, all his ‘leaks’ are sealed, and his attention is undivided - which is another way of saying that his brain is undivided. All kinds of physical functions can produce this state of undividedness - eating, drinking, yawning, walking, even excreting. But few of them do it as instantaneously as sex.

And it is because sex can instantly repair the leaks of divided consciousness that human beings are so prone to sexual deviation - which, as we have seen, is closely connected with crime. John Christie was too self-conscious to enjoy normal sexual intercourse - in his home town he had been known as ‘Can’t-do-it Christie’ and ‘Reggie No-dick’. But if he reduced the girl to unconsciousness, then his self-consciousness disappeared and he could enjoy sex to the full. This, in other words, was the only way in which he could unite the two beams of perception, and it turned him into a mass murderer. ‘Forbiddenness’ would add a new dimension of excitement, and therefore of
objectivity
. It is not surprising that he experienced a deep sense of peace after a murder, and told the police: ‘I had no regrets.’

The same analysis applies to a man who needs to get prostitutes to dress up as nursemaids or schoolgirls. His meaning perception is so weak in proportion to his immediacy perception that normal sex crushes his vitality. He feels feeble, inadequate, ‘contingent’. The sight of a schoolgirl uniform arouses a kind of inner demon; it rubs its hands and chuckles wickedly as it prepares to lift her skirt; he is no longer feeble and inadequate, but bold and defiant. And this, we can see at a glance, is the basic psychological mechanism of crime. This is why Knowles went on a crime rampage after being jilted; he was asserting: ‘I am not a weakling, a social reject. I have the power to
do
.’ Through criminal aggression, he was asserting self-respect. The journalist Sandy Fawkes, who became Knowles’s mistress for a few days, described him in her book
Killing Time
as an interesting and intelligent person. It was precisely because he was an intelligent person that he was racked by the ‘identity crisis’ to which the violence was a response. This explains the whole phenomenon of the ‘high IQ criminal’ which has become so characteristic of our time.

We can also see that the ‘identity crisis’ is due to the distress the left-brain ego feels at the belief that it is ‘on its own’. It is unaware that it possesses a powerful helper only a few centimetres away. This also explains why no poet, artist or composer in history has ever committed a calculated, first-degree murder. The artist may also suffer an identity crisis, a sense of ‘Who am I?’ Yet the fact that he
is
an artist means that he can never be wholly unaware of the ‘invisible helper’.

We are beginning to see our way towards a solution of the problem - not just of crime, but of the ‘bottleneck’ in human evolution.

The problem - it should now be clear - is that the left-brain ego is unaware of its powers. But then, awareness is something that can be cultivated.

Consider what happens when a hypnotist orders a man to do something that he would normally find very difficult - to stop smoking, or to lie rigid across two chairs while someone jumps up and down on his stomach. What the hypnotist has done is to immobilise the left brain - to stop it from ‘interfering’. But if we are capable of these unusual feats, why can we not order ourselves to do them? Because, as we have seen, the left-brain ego
does not believe it has the power
. It is unaware of its own capacities.

But this seems absurd. Every time we become deeply interested in something, every time we experience ‘holiday consciousness’, every time we perform some difficult action easily and unselfconsciously, the ego realises that it has a powerful ‘backer’. There are even times, when we are feeling very relaxed and optimistic, when this backer seems to be able to foretell the future, to prevent our making stupid mistakes, even to arrange interesting coincidences. It is presumably this right-brain ‘backer’ who quite gratuitously tells us to expect a letter from someone we haven’t heard from in years. In any case, most normal and healthy people have plenty of experience of the ‘invisible backer’. So it seems preposterous to say that our chief problem is that the left brain is unaware of its powers.

But then, experience is one thing, awareness another. I may be able to drive a car without knowing the first thing about internal combustion engines. I may be able to use a mathematical formula to solve a problem without knowing why it works. I may be able to solve the Rubik cube without knowing why a certain sequence of twists rearranges the sides. But in each of these cases, a certain mental effort can enable me to understand what I am doing, to see precisely why it works. Paying attention to the moments of close collaboration between the right and left brain can endow us with conscious awareness of some of the powers of the left brain.

Abraham Maslow discovered that, when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to recall peak experiences which they had had in the past, but had
not noticed at the time
, flashes of that deep sense of well-being. He also discovered that, when his students began to talk and think about peak experiences regularly, they began to have more peak experiences. The left brain was beginning to recognise the ‘invisible helper’ and its power to induce those sudden moments of supreme well-being.

And now, at last, we can see the outline of the solution to this problem of human criminality and human evolution.

Once we are aware of some fact, we can begin to absorb it into consciousness until we know it instinctively. And in the past century, we have slowly become aware of the basic facts about consciousness. Freud’s insight into the unconscious, Husserl’s into intentionality, Adler’s into the will-to-power, Maslow’s into the peak experience, Frankl’s into the law of reverse effort, Sperry’s into the double brain: all these have revolutionised our knowledge of human psychology. What has emerged is the recognition that consciousness is not a passive mirror that reflects experience. It is a hand that grasps reality. The tighter it grasps, the ‘realler’ the world becomes. And any sudden ‘clenching’ of this fist induces the flash of the peak experience. This is why, as Dr Johnson says, ‘the knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully’. It is because he is at last using consciousness for its proper purpose, to grip. It is because we so seldom use it for its proper purpose that the hand remains so feeble. When Maslow’s students began to think and talk about the peak experience, this knowledge dawned on them instinctively, and they began to induce peak experiences
by a simple clenching of the fist
.

‘Clenching’ has the effect of closing the leaks, and closing the leaks has the effect of suddenly increasing the ‘pressure’ of consciousness. This, as Hesse says, is why concentrating on small things revitalises us; it closes the leaks. And ‘clenching’ does it instantaneously, bringing a flash of insight. In the same way crisis so often brings the sense of ‘absurd good news’. It causes consciousness to ‘clench’, convulsively, making us aware that it has ‘muscles’, and that these muscles can be used to transform our lives.

Nothing is easier than to verify this statement. All that is necessary is to narrow the eyes, tense the muscles, make a sudden powerful effort of ‘clenching’ the mind. The result is an instantaneous twinge of delight. It vanishes almost instantly because the ‘muscle’ is so feeble. But we know that any muscle can be strengthened by deliberate effort.

We can also observe that as we ‘clench’ the mind, it produces a sense of ‘inwardness’, a momentary withdrawal into some inner fortress. This is clearly what Kierkegaard meant when he said ‘Truth is subjectivity’. It is, in fact, a sudden flash of contact with the ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside us.

And what relevance has all this to the problem of crime? The answer can be seen if we consider again Dan MacDougald’s cure of ‘hard core psychopaths’ in the Georgia State Penitentiary. A criminal, as Sartre pointed out, is a man who has become accustomed to thinking of himself as a criminal; he feels himself to be a
victim
- of society, of bad luck, of his own violent impulses and lack of purpose. MacDougald ‘cured’ his criminals by making them recognise that their problems lay in their own mental attitudes. When he intervened in the case of a prisoner who was planning to kill another prisoner with an iron bar - to avenge an insult - the convict invited his enemy to have a sandwich and a coffee, and the situation was resolved; MacDougald had taught him that he was not trapped in some inevitable fatality, some murderous destiny. He had taught him the secret that has transformed man from a naked tree dweller to the most highly evolved creature on earth: that man’s
controlling force
- ‘Force C’ - is the most important thing about him. As Wells’s Mr Polly discovered: If you don’t like your life, you can change it.

At the moment, society shares the assumption of the criminal: that nothing much can be done. But then, all the major transformations of society have started with the few who know better. The conclusion is inescapable. Only when society recognises that it possesses the power to control crime will crime be controlled.

Looking back over three million years of human history, we can see that it has been a slow reprogramming of the human mind, whose first major turning point was the moment when the mind became aware of itself. When man learned to recognise his own face in a pool and to say I, he became capable of greatness, and also of criminality.

But if this history of human evolution has taught us anything, it is that ‘criminal man’ has no real, independent existence. He is a kind of shadow, a Spectre of the Brocken, an illusion. He is the result of man’s misunderstanding of his own potentialities - as if a child should see his face in a distorting mirror and assume he has changed into a monster.

The criminal is, in fact, the distorted reflection of the human face, the ‘collective nightmare of mankind’. And this insight is in itself a cause for optimism. As Novalis says: ‘When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to awaken’.