A Criminal History of Mankind (22 page)

One who has no god, as he walks along the street Headache envelops him like a garment.

Headache is the result of nervous tension, of losing contact with the intuitive self. And when man suffers from stress, he reacts to problems by losing his temper. And it is at this point, according to Jaynes, that cruelty first becomes a commonplace of history. It is in the Assyrian carvings of about this period that we first see illustrations of men and women impaled, children beheaded.

This, then, is Jaynes’s fascinating if highly controversial account of the coming of self-awareness and of crime. And it is open to one very obvious objection; that it is practically impossible to imagine complex human beings - such as Sargon of Akkad or Hammurabi -without self-awareness. Jaynes points out that consciousness is not nearly so important - or so necessary - as we seem to think; a man playing the piano performs an extremely complex set of operations while his mind is elsewhere, enjoying the music. If he becomes conscious of his fingers, he plays badly. But this example is deceptive. The man had to learn to play the piano slowly and consciously; only then could he do it ‘automatically’. If he had never possessed self-consciousness, he would have been incapable of learning to play, since playing - like any other complex operation - demands self-criticism.

There are other strong objections to this aspect of Jaynes’s theory. Professor Gordon Gallup of New York State University, has conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to determine whether animals possess self-awareness. Various animals - seventeen species in all - were placed in a cage with mirrors. Then the animal was anaesthetised and its face painted with a red, odourless dye. When the animal woke up, it was easy to see whether it recognised - through its mirror-image - that its face had been dyed. Two species - chimpanzees and orang-outangs - inspected their faces in exactly the same way that a human being would under similar circumstances; none of the others showed the least interest in their reflections. Most other species behaved in various ways that showed they regarded their mirror-images as other members of the same species - making friendly overtures or even attacking the image. Some of them continued to behave in this way even after years of acquaintance with mirrors, revealing total inability to recognise themselves.

Significantly, gorillas were among those unable to recognise themselves - significantly because gorillas are closely related to chimpanzees and orang-outangs. There is one basic difference: the gorilla brain is far less ‘lateralised’ than those of the chimpanzee and orang-outang; it has not yet split into ‘identical twins’ - which in turn may explain why the gorilla lacks self-awareness.

Gallup goes on to argue that, once an animal can become the subject of its own attention, it can contemplate its own existence; and if you can contemplate your existence, you can also contemplate your non-existence. We have seen in the last chapter that Neanderthal man buried his dead with elaborate ceremonies, which certainly indicate that he was aware of his mortality. Ergo, Neanderthal man possessed self-awareness. Again, Jaynes argues that man invented the gods some time after 10,000 B.C. when he began to ‘hear voices’. But the discs and spheres carved by Neanderthal man suggest that he worshipped the sun and moon. In fact, if the skulls in the Chou-kou-tien caves are evidence of ritual sacrifice, then man’s religious sense probably dates back half a million years.

All this might seem to leave very little of Jaynes’s theory still standing. But on closer examination, this proves to be untrue. From Jaynes’s point of view, it is a pity that he regards ‘the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind’ as the essence of his theory. For this may, in fact, be its most dispensable aspect. Jaynes’s real achievement lies in pointing out that man probably developed his present form of ‘alienated’ consciousness at a fairly late stage in his history. And once this has been pointed out, we can see that it is not only consistent with the findings of split-brain research but that it has many other interesting implications. If a man is concentrating on a practical task - like driving in the rush-hour - an electro-encephalograph machine shows that his brain is ‘desynchronised’ - that most of the activity is going on in the left. When a yogi goes into meditation, the pattern becomes synchronised as the two sides work in harmony. And we can recognise this in ourselves. When we are deeply relaxed, we have a clearer sense of reality; we feel more ‘in touch’ with the world around us. The more we experience stress, the more we lose that sense of reality; in some odd sense, we no longer believe in the existence of external reality - it has become a kind of dream.

In spite of this unpleasant side-effect, ‘desynchronisation’ is a considerable evolutionary achievement. A gorilla cannot (presumably) become desynchronised; it has no ability to detach a part of its attention from the total act of living. Human beings have a similar problem when under the influence of alcohol; they have difficulty in reading a piece of abstract prose, or following a mathematical argument. Our ability to desynchronise consciousness brings an enormous gain in intellectual power. Wagner once remarked that art ‘makes life appear like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate’. In fact, all intellectual activity has this power to withdraw us from life, to enable the mind to hover like an eagle above the world of matter. There must have been a time in human history when we had no power to desynchronise - when, in effect, we were permanently drunk. This must have had the same advantage as being intoxicated - that feeling of relaxation, of ‘belonging’, of feeling at home in the world. But it also meant that we had no power to detach ourselves from the present moment, or to disobey the immediate promptings of instinct.

It might seem common sense to assume that the human brain began to ‘desynchronise’ as we developed the power to use language. But then, we know that children with left-brain damage can use the right brain for learning language - but only up to the age of about seven, when the two halves of the brain begin to specialise. If our remote ancestors were like children under seven, then the emergence of speech need not necessarily lead to desynchronisation. It is easy enough to imagine the first agriculturalists, even the first city-builders, as simple, ‘unicameral beings’ - after all, a city is not so different from an ant hill or a wasps’ nest. But the city seems to have made war inevitable. Robert Ardrey tells the story of the zoologist C. R. Carpenter, who transported a colony of 350 rhesus monkeys from India to an island off Puerto Rico, to study them in a restricted environment. On land, monkeys choose ‘territory’ - a tree or groups of trees - and live in peace with one another. On board ship, this was impossible. The monkeys also had to be kept hungry, to accustom them to new types of food. And the result was that mother monkeys tore food from their babies, and male monkeys ceased to defend their mates from attacks by other males. The infant mortality rate soared. Once on the island, the monkeys established themselves in various ‘territories’, and once again the males defended their mates and the mothers defended their babies. The lesson seems to be that without proper territory, the monkey instinct for preservation of the species becomes eroded. A similar discovery was made about human beings when city planners began to build high-rise flats with communal corridors. The rate of vandalism and mugging soared and some showpiece developments had to be demolished. Some planners tried applying what we have learned about territory, replacing the high-rise flats with small houses with individual front gardens; instantly, the crime rate fell dramatically.

In the first towns and cities, men still had their individual territory. But when cities built walls, and the population grew, overcrowding was inevitable. The result was the same as among Carpenter’s monkeys and among high-rise flat dwellers: crime, vandalism, unchannelled aggression. At first, this would be held in check by strong religious prohibitions. We know these began to break down after about 3000 B.C. - which, by coincidence, is also the date of the development of writing. Man became the kind of creature we know today - warlike, and inclined to individual violence against his own kind.

Now according to the Jaynes argument, there was a difference between the purely territorial disputes of the early city dwellers and the murderous savagery that began to develop towards the end of the second millennium B.C. The well-known palette of King Narmer -an early king of Egypt, possibly identical with the legendary Menes - dates from some time before 3000 B.C. and shows the king strutting towards a double row of decapitated enemy corpses; the inscription seems to mention a total of 120,000 prisoners. Another picture shows Narmer holding a prisoner by the hair, while he holds some kind of club aloft, apparently about to dash the man’s brains out. Closer examination suggests that he is brandishing his sceptre above his head in symbol of triumph - like a boxer shaking his hands above his head - and merely holding the prisoner in a position of ritual abasement. The beheaded enemies have not necessarily been executed. They may be merely symbols of enemies killed in battle and beheaded - like the skulls in the Chou-kou-tien caves - as part of some ritual. There is no evidence here of deliberate cruelty.

By the time of Hammurabi, more than twelve hundred years later, the empire of Sargon of Akkad had risen and fallen, and the age of the gods was drawing to a close. Jaynes speaks of the stele that bears the famous code of Hammurabi, and remarks on its boastful introduction and epilogue, in which Hammurabi describes his conquests; he points out that the code of laws sandwiched between these two has a completely different tone, serene and rational. Jaynes believes this to be evidence that Hammurabi was ‘bicameral’, and took down the laws from the dictation of his right brain, which he assumed to be the voice of the god Marduk. The likelier explanation is that the code of Hammurabi is a digest of several earlier codes and adopts their tone and phrasing. But the boastful tone of the introduction and epilogue certainly indicates that this king regards himself as a great deal more than a mouthpiece of Marduk.

The stele of Hammurabi dates from about 1750 B.C. After that period came the ‘dark ages’, when half the population of the Mediterranean world became refugees. In Egyptian art, scenes of warfare become more frequent. In
The First Great Civilisations
Jacquetta Hawkes mentions (p.386) relief’s of prisoners ‘trussed in a variety of painful and humiliating ways’. And a scene from the time of Rameses III - who reigned shortly before 1100 B.C. - shows piles of chopped-off hands. By this time, according to Jaynes, the bicameral period was at an end. The human brain had become desynchronised. At about the same time, Tiglath-Pileser I, king of Assyria, formulated another code of laws that makes a grim contrast to the code of Hammurabi. (And we may recollect that even the code of Hammurabi is harsher than earlier codes of laws.) Jaynes writes: ‘His exploits are well known from a large clay prism of monstrous boasts. His laws have come down to us in a collection of cruel tablets. Scholars have called his policy “a policy of frightfulness”. And so it was. The Assyrians fell like butchers upon harmless villagers, enslaved what refugees they could and slaughtered others in thousands. Bas-reliefs show what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out of the shoulders. His laws meted out the bloodiest penalties yet known in world history...’ The cruelty is partly the result of the desynchronisation - like the driver losing his temper in a traffic jam - and partly the result of natural selection, a thousand years of violence and hardship.

And this murderous violence also brings about a change in the pattern of history. The pendulum now swings between savage oppression and the equally savage destruction of the oppressors. The twentieth century has seen this pattern in the rise and fall of the Nazis. And it emerged for the first time in the first millennium B.C. in the story of the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians had played an important part in the history of Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. The murder of Tiglath-Pileser in 1077 B.C. brought its first great epoch to an end. For more than a century, during what George Roux calls (in chapter 17 of
Ancient Iraq
)’the dark age in Mesopotamia’, Assyria was in eclipse. In 911 B.C. it began to hack its way back to greatness; Jaynes writes: ‘... the Assyrians [began] their reconquest of the world with unprecedented sadistic ferocity, butchering and terroring their way back to their former empire and then beyond and all the way to Egypt and up the fertile Nile to the holy sun-god himself, even as Pizarro was to take the divine Inca captive two and a half millennia later on the opposite side of the earth. And by this time, the great transilience in mentality had occurred. Man had become conscious of himself and his world.’ And from then until their final downfall in 610 B.C., they ruled and conquered with a ferocity that makes the Nazis seem almost benevolent by comparison. In the British Museum can be seen the tablets of Assurakbal III, depicting the torture of captives who are stretched naked on the ground and tied to pegs; some are being skinned alive, others are having their tongues and ears ripped off with pincers. (Some of the more hair-raising tablets are hidden away in the basement of the Museum.) When Sennacherib invaded Babylon in 689 B.C. he carried out the systematic slaughter of all its inhabitants until the street was piled high with corpses; then he razed the city to the ground and diverted a canal through it to wash away the ruins. (Eight years later, he was assassinated by his sons as he was praying in the temple at Nineveh.) By the middle of the seventh century B.C., the Assyrian war machine was the most efficient and brutal the world had ever known. Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 B.C.) invented a new method of crushing revolt - mass deportation to distant places; he was indifferent to the number who died of starvation and exhaustion en route. In one year (744), sixty-five thousand people were deported.