A Criminal History of Mankind (25 page)

In another typical joke, the mother orders her daughter not to climb lamp posts, because the boys only want to see the colour of her knickers. Next time the girl admits to climbing a lamp post, her mother says: ‘I thought I told you not to do that.’ ‘It’s all right - I took my knickers off first.’

After a few pages, these jokes begin to produce an oddly claustrophobic effect; their outlook is so uniformly negative. The adult is bothered by their illogicality; the father has an orgasm in his sleep - which is just possible - but he then sleeps on when his daughter bites off the end of his penis. The mother has named her son Johnnie Fuckerfaster, but he does not recognise his own name when she calls him, and thinks she is giving him an order. It requires a major suspension of disbelief - and all for the sake of a mildly ‘naughty’ conclusion:

A mother’s boy got married, and when he got in bed with his wife he didn’t know what to do. So she said: Get on with it, and he said: Get on with what? So she said: Well, do something dirty. So he shit the bed.

It is ‘naughty’ for a girl to let a boy see her knickers. Sex is dirty, like shitting the bed; conversely, shitting the bed is funny because it is also forbidden. There are long, elaborate stories in which children are misinformed about the meaning of words: father’s penis is a train, mother’s vagina is a tunnel: (Hey Sis, come and look; Dad’s train’s got stuck in Mom’s tunnel...) Fuck means to go and get washed, shit means food, bastard means vicar: (Hello bastard, mom’s just getting fucked before she serves the shit.) Again, the whole point of the rigmarole is that the child should innocently undermine the authority of his parents or the vicar or his schoolteacher. Other jokes make their effect simply by being nauseating; a tramp eats a dead cat, or drinks the contents of a spittoon. This, like shitting the bed, is ‘dirty’ and must therefore be funny. And the ‘dirty’ is forbidden, and must be funny too.

These jokes enable us to reconstruct the peculiar mental world of the child, which most of us have so conveniently forgotten: the world seen from a worm’s eye view. Adults have their own strange ideas about what is ‘fun’ - religion, politics and sport. But every child knows better. They know that ‘fun’ is doing those exciting things you are not supposed to do, all those things that adults call ‘naughty’. This is why most children have a streak of cruelty that makes them enjoy pulling wings off flies or throwing lighted matches at the cat; here, on a small scale, they can become an Alexander the Great, free to give way to the normally forbidden desire to cause pain. The child’s world is almost entirely defined by the authority of adults, and by their secret desire to flout that authority.

But have adults really outgrown these attitudes? A comedian only has to make a disparaging remark about a well-known politician to bring loud laughter, even applause. It need not be a particularly funny remark, provided it has a touch of malice - a sense of giving the two-finger salute to authority. Humorists who make a virtue of anarchism - the Marx Brothers, Lennie Bruce, Mort Sahl, Spike Milligan - are generally regarded as the comedians of the intellectual, for the man with a sophisticated sense of humour, more ‘daring’ and therefore funnier than the straightforward clown. (Even T. S. Eliot admired Groucho Marx.) Yet anyone who is slightly over-exposed to this type of humour - say, watching a season of Marx Brothers films on TV - soon becomes aware that its premises will not bear close scrutiny. Defiance of authority, deflation of dignity and pomposity, are really rather thin stuff after the first five minutes. Refusal to take anything seriously is only funny up to a point; then an odd taste of futility begins to creep in. When Groucho sings ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it’, we only find the sentiment amusing for as long as we fail to think about it. Chaos is refreshing only so long as we can feel that pleasant sense of law and order hovering in the background.

We have here the same fallacy that vitiates the work of de Sade. The heroes of
The 120 Days of Sodom
are really schoolboys who believe that something must be pleasant because it is forbidden. There is one passage in which a prostitute describes how one of her clients made her leave her feet unwashed for weeks, then ate the dirt from between her toes. While most of the libertines grimace with disgust, Curval takes the prostitute’s foot and sucks between her toes. (Significantly, Curval is a Lord Chief Justice - de Sade’s equivalent of the anti-politician joke.) But another of the libertines goes on to make the significant remark: ‘One need but be mildly jaded, and all these infamies assume a richer meaning: satiety inspires them... One grows tired of the commonplace, the imagination becomes vexed, and the slenderness of our means, the weakness of our faculties, the corruption of our souls lead us to these abominations.’ And, apparently unaware that he has just levelled the most devastating criticism at his own philosophy, de Sade proceeds to his description of the next perversion - an elderly general who likes to masturbate himself against the scars of an old woman who has often been flogged in public for theft.

This, then, is the essence of crime: unreasoning resentment of authority. The child is, in a sense, a natural criminal, since he lives in a world of authority: authority stretching as far as the eye can see, from parents and schoolteachers to policemen and prime ministers. As he grows up, he learns to share the burden of authority - perhaps over younger brothers or sisters, or over younger children at school. Eventually, he has children of his own, so that he now slips naturally into his place in the adult power structure. Yet although his reason is now convinced of the need for authority and law, his emotions continue to resent it - hence the laughter when a comedian makes a joke against authority. In most of us, the two never come into open conflict. The head remains a supporter of law and order, the heart of anti-authoritarianism. The case of de Sade is of symbolic importance because he not only tried to reconcile the two: he attempted to justify his heart with the use of his head. De Sade is anarchy incarnate; he performed the service of carrying its arguments to the point of absurdity.

Yet it is de Sade who can provide us with the deepest insight into the question: why is man the only creature who kills and tortures his own kind? This is because de Sade is, in himself, a kind of one-man textbook of criminology. His view of human beings is determinedly materialistic and pessimistic. If he were alive to see the rising crime figures of the late twentieth century, he would laugh sarcastically and say: I told you so. For, according to de Sade, man is a being who was created accidentally by Nature, and who has only two basic urges: survival and satisfaction of his desires. This situation is bound to produce a conflict of interests. The hungry tiger needs food; the antelope often has no choice about becoming its dinner. Human society has its own equivalent of tigers and antelopes: the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. The haves not only use their superior strength (or wealth) to satisfy their desires; they also use their cunning to convince the have-nots that there are moral laws that forbid robbery and murder. Sooner or later, says de Sade, the have-nots are bound to discover that moral laws are an invention of the rich; then they will try and take what they want, and the crime rate will soar...

According to de Sade, man’s basic desire is to become a god. And if any man could become a god, he would experiment with every kind of pleasure: eat things he had always wanted to eat, do things he had always wanted to do, take revenge on old enemies, torment people he loathed. Above all, he would satisfy his sexual desires with everyone who aroused them, probably a hundred times a day. Can any human being honestly declare that he would behave differently? If not, then the point is proved. Man is naturally a criminal, but fear of punishment forces him to restrain his desires...

If we accept de Sade’s materialistic premises - which, after all, are the same as those of many modern scientists and philosophers - then his arguments are difficult to refute. Yet there is one obvious point at which they are open to objection. The satisfaction of every casual desire does not seem to guarantee happiness. Desires seem to be subject to the ‘law of diminishing returns’. A man who could satisfy every desire the moment it arose would probably end by committing suicide out of boredom. This was de Sade’s own problem. As a wealthy and reasonably good-looking young man, he had tried all the ‘normal’ sexual pleasures before he was in his mid-teens. He spent the rest of his life in pursuit of ‘the forbidden’, the ultimate sexual pleasure. And the harder he tried, the more it seemed to recede from him. The perversions became so extreme that they became wild and grotesque - almost funny.

When we examine this ‘infinite regress’, we can pin it down to what might be called ‘the fallacy of simple experience’ - de Sade’s conviction that experience satisfies the senses in the same straightforward way that food satisfies the stomach. When I am empty, food is bound to have the effect of filling my stomach - this is a physical law. Yet even so, I might find it appetising, or boring, or even nauseating, depending on my state of mind. We all know that good digestion is fifty per cent ‘mental’. And sex is a great deal more than fifty per cent. In the wrong mood, sexual fulfilment is a will o’ the wisp, flickering in the distance and then vanishing. De Sade’s conviction that there is an ‘ultimately satisfying’ sexual experience -if only we had the moral courage to try and find it - is an illusion.

The answer to de Sade is contained in a passage in Kierkegaard’s
Either/Or
:

The history of [boredom] can be traced to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored
en famille
; then the population of the world increased and the people were bored
en masse
. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand...

The fallacy here lies in the notion that the answer to boredom lies in distraction, in looking for something ‘interesting’ to do. De Sade’s work is a kind of sexual tower of Babel. The true answer to boredom, says Kierkegaard, lies in the ‘rotation method’, the method by which a farmer changes his crops from year to year so that the
ground itself
never becomes exhausted. ‘Here we have... the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much amusement. One need only hark back to one’s schooldays... how entertaining to catch a fly and hold it imprisoned under a nutshell... How entertaining sometimes to listen to the monotonous drip of water from the roof...’

What does the prisoner in solitary confinement actually
do
? What does the schoolboy do as he listens to the rain? The answer is that lack of expectation makes him slow down his senses, which has the effect of amplifying his perceptions. And he produces this ‘slowing down’
by increasing his attention
. It could be compared to a scientist focusing a slide under a microscope, or a man pouring wine through a funnel so that not a drop shall be lost. The schoolboy ‘funnels’ his attention on to the beetle under the nutshell. De Sade has the temperament of a spoilt brat; he is too impatient to ‘funnel’ his attention, and then wonders why the experience is so unsatisfying.

This effect is explained by an observation made by Roger Sperry. He noted that the right brain - the intuitive hemisphere - works at a slower pace than the left. The left brain - the ‘you’ - is the part, that copes with the world, and it always seem to be in a hurry. The right ambles along casually at its own pace. The result is that the two halves are always losing contact. Every time ‘you’ become tense or anxious or over-tired, the gap between them increases and life begins to take on an air of unreality. This is because it is the business of the right brain to provide experience with a third dimension of reality. And it can only do this when the two halves are, so to speak, strolling side by side.

So when the prisoner focuses on the spider, when the schoolboy focuses on the beetle, he is slowing down the left until it is moving at the same pace as the right. And when this happens, the experience becomes ‘interesting’. He has, in effect, pressed a switch that alters consciousness from the left brain ‘thinking mode’ to the right-brain ‘feeling mode’. This also explains why alcohol can sometimes produce those delightful states of relaxation in which we feel totally contented to rest in the sensory reality of the present. It halts the impatient forward rush of the left brain and persuades it to relax. De Sade had discovered that sex can produce the same effect. But neither alcohol nor sex works all the time; the left brain may simply refuse to slow down.

All this makes it clear that crime is an unfortunate waste-product of human evolution. Human intelligence involves the power of
foresight
, and foresight enables a man to calculate how to achieve comfort, security and pleasure. It also makes him a potential criminal, for the simplest way to achieve what he wants is to go out and grab it - the method advocated by de Sade.

If Jaynes is correct, this presumably did not apply to our caveman forebears, for their right and left brains had not yet lost contact. It was only the complexities of civilisation that led man to develop the independent left brain so that criminality became possible.

We have already seen why de Sade’s approach - the criminal approach - fails to achieve its object. Its sheer obsessiveness defeats its aims. The manic egoist, driven by resentment, gradually destroys his own sense of reality. (Panzram is an obvious example.) The result may be self-destruction; but, if he is lucky, he recognises his mistake in time and reverses his direction. (Many of the saints were men who began life as ‘sinners’ and egoists; they discovered their mistakes in time.)