A Criminal History of Mankind (17 page)

Another striking insight relates to sexuality. ‘Almost without exception, the participants in our study were either involved in sexual activity very early or [indulged in] a great deal of sexual thinking...’ The criminal ‘peeks through cracks in doors and peers through keyholes to catch glimpses of mother, sister or a friend’s mother or sister as she dresses, bathes or uses the toilet’. One habitual criminal began engaging in sex games at the age of four, with the daughter of a neighbour who took him to school. Later, he was part of a gang who used to grab girls in alleyways and commit rape - although if the girls showed no objection, they were allowed to go; it was essential that they should cry and struggle.

Most children experience curiosity about sex; in the criminal, it seems to be an obsession that narrows down the focus of his consciousness to the idea of exploring the forbidden, of committing stealthy violations of privacy. His sexuality becomes tinged with violence and his criminality with sex. One of the most puzzling things about many cases of rape is the damage inflicted on the victim, even when she makes no resistance. This is because, in the criminal mind, sex is a form of crime, and crime a form of sex. The passage from de Sade is a remarkable illustration of this connection - Juliette’s intense sexual excitement as she waits to commit a crime. What Yochelson’s observation shows is that there is a sexual component in all crime; the criminal is committing indecent assault on society.

This, then, brings us close to the essence of criminality. It is a combination of egoism, infantilism and sex. No animal is capable of ‘crime’ because for animals sex is as natural as eating and defecating. Moreover, animals become mature as soon as they are fully grown. And, as far as human beings can judge, they seem to lack all sense of ego. With the possible exception of greed, animals lack all the basic qualifications for crime.

But it is important to get all this into perspective. We are speaking as if criminality had always been the same at all times, and this is untrue. Yochelson and Samenow conducted their research in the second half of the twentieth century, and we must bear in mind - as H. G. Wells once pointed out - that the world has changed more in the past century than in the previous five thousand years. Until fairly recently, life was incredibly hard for all but about one per cent of the population. It was an endless battle against starvation, cold and ill-health. As Henry Hazlitt put it in
The Conquest of Poverty
(New York, 1973):

The ancient world of Greece and Rome... was a world where houses had no chimneys, and rooms, heated in cold weather by a fire on a hearth or a fire-pan in the centre of the room, were filled with smoke whenever a fire was started, and consequently walls, ceiling and furniture were blackened and more or less covered by soot at all times; where light was supplied by smoky oil lamps which, like the houses in which they were used, had no chimneys; and where eye trouble, as a result of all this smoke, was general. Greek dwellings had no heat in winter, no adequate sanitary arrangements, and no washing facilities.

And two thousand years later, things were just as bad:

The dwellings of medieval labourers were hovels - the walls were made of a few boards cemented with wood and leaves. Rushes and leaves or heather made the thatch for the roof. Inside the house there was a single room, or in some cases two rooms, not plastered and without floor, ceiling, chimney, fireplace or bed, and here the owner, his family and his animals lived and died. There was no sewage for the houses, no drainage, except surface drainage for the streets, no water supply beyond that provided by the town pump, and no knowledge of the simplest forms of sanitation...

From I. E. Parmalee Prentice:
Hunger and History
, quoted by Hazlitt.

And again and again there were appalling famines. In Rome in 436 B.C. it was so bad that thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber; in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a famine approximately every fourteen years, in one of which 20,000 people died in London alone.

In our comfortable twentieth century, we have forgotten the way our ancestors lived for thousands upon thousands of years. Of course there must have been crime in these ages of hardship and poverty; but it was nearly all crime of want. The kind of crime discussed by Yochelson and Samenow is essentially that of a luxury society. The peasant of the Middle Ages had almost no
choice
; he could not even leave his village without the permission of the local lord. By comparison, modern man - even the poorest tramp - has a thousand choices. And the essence of criminality is that it is the choice of the ‘soft option’. Yochelson and Samenow observed that one of the central characteristics of the criminal is ‘the quest to be an overnight success’. They cite the case of a soldier who had won medals in Korea and who was arrested for robbing a petrol station when he came out of the army. The newspapers treated this as the story of a war hero who found civilian life too harsh and difficult. The truth is that the man had become accustomed to admiration and success and found civilian life an anti-climax; he decided he might as well use his army training in a career of robbery. It seemed to be ‘the soft option’. The decision was typical of the criminal’s short-sightedness, and consequent poor judgement.

Yochelson and Samenow make us aware that the patterns of criminality change from age to age, and that it is rash to make generalisations about ‘human nature’ without specifying which period of history we are talking about. The statement ‘You can’t change human nature’ is based on a fallacy. Human nature began to change about half a million years ago, when man’s brain - for some unknown reason - began to expand far beyond his needs. It has been changing ever since.

Even the statement ‘War is as old as humanity’ has been challenged by the historian Louis Mumford. In
The City in History
, he argued that it was when men came to live together in cities - in about 5000 B.C. - that they began to make war. When primitive man formed a raiding party, it was not to kill people and burn villages but to take a few captives for sacrifice to the gods and for ritual cannibalism.

Mumford’s own view of the fall of man into warfare and crime runs like this. When ancient man became a farmer - about 12,000 years ago - he recognised more than ever before his dependence on the earth and its bounty. Even as a stone age hunter, he had his gods and nature spirits, and his shamans worked their magic rituals before the hunting party set out. Now that he harvested crops, he became aware of the earth as a living being, a great mother. The shamans became a priestly caste; primitive temples and sacred groves became the focus of village life. The king was chosen, not as a leader, but as an intermediary between man and the gods - rather as the pope is chosen nowadays. And if the harvest failed, the king would be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. (This part of Mumford’s argument is based on Frazer’s
Golden Bough
.}

Now, a mud village with its domestic shrines and its witch doctor is one thing; an enlarged village with its temple and god-king quite another. It is already, in fact, a small city. And this, Mumford believes, is how cities first came about. It was also the beginning of the ‘fall’. ‘Once the city came into existence with its collective increase in power in every department, this whole situation underwent a change. Instead of raids and sallies for single victims, mass extermination and mass destruction came to prevail. What had once been a magic sacrifice to ensure fertility and abundant crops, an irrational act to promote a rational purpose, was turned into the exhibition of the power of one community, under its wrathful god and priest-king, to control, subdue or totally wipe out another community...’

What Mumford has omitted to mention is that these early wars were not fought to collect victims for sacrifice, but for territory. When Mumford was writing
The City in History
(which was published in 1961), the importance of ‘territory’ was not understood. It was Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey who first made the general public aware that one of the most basic impulses in all animals is the urge to establish an area that belongs to the family or the tribe, and from which all invaders are repelled. The first written records at Sumer - in Mesopotamia - show that the earliest wars were boundary disputes. A city needed farmland to supply it with food; when another city crossed the boundaries, there was war. Birds and animals seldom actually fight for territory; if a bird tries to invade a tree held by another bird, the incumbent will advance with a great show of rage, and this is usually enough to drive off the invader. The same kind of thing probably happened among the earliest farmers. But once a city’s ‘territory’ became hundreds of square miles, invaders could slip over the borders, and there was nothing for it but to try to hurl them back by force of arms. The birth of the city made warfare inevitable because boundary disputes could no longer be solved by sabre-rattling.

But it would be a mistake to imagine that, because he marched against his neighbour, man suddenly became ruthless and cruel. In fact, there is a certain amount of evidence that cruelty was a fairly late development. We have a comprehensive record of the everyday life of these early civilisations - in Egypt and Mesopotamia: first in wall paintings, later in writing (which was invented in Sumer about 3500 B.C.). There are no scenes of brutality and harshness in Egyptian wall paintings, and the ancient Egyptians are known to have treated their defeated enemies with gallantry and consideration. The Hittites were among the most formidable warriors in the Middle East; yet the archaeological record shows that they were singularly humane. Sargon of Akkad, the first great empire builder - who lived about 2300 B.C. - has left the usual boastful records of his conquests and achievements; but they are free of the sadistic brutality of later conquerors. As Samuel Noah Kramer demonstrates in
History Begins at Sumer
(New York, 1959) the early Sumerian writings show that they were a people of high moral ideals. The first recorded murder trial took place in Sumer about 1850 B.C. - when three men were sentenced for killing a temple servant named Lu-Inanna - and the text states: ‘They who have killed a man are not worthy of life.’

For what we must understand about the men of these early civilisations is that they regarded themselves as the servants of the gods. And the king himself was still nothing more than a servant. In the first chapter of
The Martyrdom of Man
Winwood Reade says about the early pharaohs:

He was forbidden to commit any kind of excess: he was restricted to a plain diet of veal and goose, and to a measured quantity of wine. The laws hung over him day and night; they governed his public and private actions: they followed him even to the recesses of his chamber, and appointed a set time for the embraces of his queen.

This is why those early civilisations were merciful to their vanquished enemies: they were ruled by the gods, and the gods taught the sanctity of human life. Besides, cruelty requires a certain degree of egoism, and a man who believes he is a servant of the gods keeps his individuality suppressed like the medieval craftsmen who built the cathedrals.

In the second millennium B.C., things began to change. The king ceased to be a mere figurehead and began to exercise real power. As other cities were conquered, a degree of ruthlessness became necessary. Sargon of Akkad was not particularly ruthless, and this may be why his empire lasted such a short time; in his last years, many cities rose up against him. Later kings recognised the importance of sternness and terror. The legal code of Hammurabi - who lived about 1800 B.C. - is famous for its balanced sense of justice; but it is far harsher than the earlier fragments of legal codes that have come down to us. An official of king Zimri-lin of Mari - a friend of Hammurabi - wrote to the king protesting about nomads who refused to be conscripted into the army, and suggesting that they should behead a criminal and send his head around to various encampments ‘that the troops may fear and quickly assemble’. Later still, the kings would have sent their soldiers to behead dissenters in public squares.

According to this theory, then, man’s development into criminality was inevitable. First he became a social animal, then a religious animal; then he became a villager, then a city dweller; then his territorial instinct pushed him into slaughtering his own kind in war... But this account still leaves unanswered the question raised by Erich Fromm:
Why
is man the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind without reason? Most animals feel a specific prohibition about killing their own kind. If two animals are fighting, and one of them wishes to surrender, it only has to roll on its back and show its stomach; the other animal then becomes incapable of continuing to attack. Man is the only creature who lacks this built-in mechanism.

One of the odder attempts to explain this anomaly was made by a Hungarian anthropologist Oscar Kiss Maerth, in a book called
The Beginning Was the End
(1971). Maerth’s theory takes as its starting point the evidence for widespread cannibalism among our ancestors - which is again something rarely found among animals. Basing his theory on his study of modern head-hunters in Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea, Maerth argues that the eating of human brains stimulates intelligence and increases sexual excitability. He points out that in parts of Asia, fresh ape brain is still regarded as a delicacy, and can be bought in restaurants. The animal is killed immediately before the meal, and its brains are eaten raw. ‘According to my own experience, about twenty hours after such a repast there is a feeling of warmth in the brain, like a gentle pressure. After about twenty-eight hours the body is flooded by vitality, with increased sexual impulses.’ Early man ate the brains of his enemies - perhaps believing he could absorb his courage and other virtues - and discovered that it made him more intelligent. It also caused him to become obsessed by sex, and removed the animal inhibition against having sex when the female was not in season.