A Criminal History of Mankind (26 page)

All human beings contain an element of the criminal; as Becker points out, every child is a manic egoist. Fortunately, few of us go as far as Panzram or de Sade. And this is not, as de Sade believes, because we are intimidated by society and its laws. It is because we are intelligent enough to recognise Kierkegaard’s ‘principle of limitation’. This is not a recent development; it seems to be as old as man’s recorded history. The ‘principle of limitation’ - the recognition that human happiness depends upon self-discipline - can be found in Hindu scriptures dating from 1000 B.C., and is present in pyramid texts and early writings from Mesopotamia. Man may be a criminal animal; but he is also a religious animal. And the religion seems to be far older than the criminality.

Crime can be understood only as a part of the total evolutionary pattern. Man developed his ‘divided consciousness’ as a means of survival. In a sense, he was better off as an animal, for the animal’s consciousness is simpler and richer. (We can gain some inkling of it from the effects of alcohol - that sudden feeling of warmth and reality.) But this instinctive consciousness has one major disadvantage; it is too narrow. It restricts us to the present moment. So man developed the left brain to escape this narrowness. It has the power of reaching beyond the present moment: the power of abstraction. And it does this by turning reality into symbols and ideas.
The left brain is fundamentally a map-maker
.

Imagine a stranger who comes to a large but primitive city. His business involves travelling all over it. He can ask his way around, or hire a local man as a guide; but neither of these methods is very satisfactory. If he wishes to be independent, his best way is to acquire a map. And if maps do not exist, he will have to make one. Once he has done this, he can find his way around the city as confidently as the oldest inhabitant. Moreover, he will know it a great deal better than many inhabitants, who are familiar only with their own quarter.

Yet in another sense, he does not ‘know’ it at all; he knows only an abstraction, a map, reinforced by a few selected areas of ‘reality’.

This is man’s present position. In fact, he spends a large part of his early life at school, acquiring a ‘map’ of the world he lives in. Yet when he leaves school, his knowledge of the
reality
of that world is very patchy. And modern life is so complex and confusing that huge areas of the map are bound to remain unexplored and ‘unrealised’. A savage who has spent the same number of years hunting and fishing will admittedly have a narrower view of the world; but what he
does
know will have the genuine flavour of reality. In a sense, modern man seems to have made a very poor bargain. He has acquired a map, and not much else.

The ‘map’ concept explains the problem of crime. A man whose actual acquaintance with the real world is fairly limited looks at his map and imagines he can see a number of short-cuts. Robbery is a short-cut to wealth. Rape is a short-cut to sexual fulfilment. Violence is a short-cut to getting his own way. Of course, each of these shortcuts has major disadvantages; but he is unaware of these until he tries them out in the real world.

So crime is the outcome of man’s greatest evolutionary achievement; his ability to make ‘maps’. Fortunately, it is not a permanent drawback. For it is not really a choice between a real world and an unreal map. It is true that the oldest inhabitant knows the city a great deal better than the map-maker. But then, if the map-maker really wants to get to know the city, he can do it in far less time than it took the oldest inhabitant. Making use of his map, he can get to know it in weeks instead of years. Man’s map-making ability, his ability to use his mind, gives him a potential for mastering reality that makes the drawbacks seem unimportant.

Before we embark on the main part of this history of crime, creativity and civilisation, let us try to summarise what we have learned so far.

Since his advent so many millions of years ago, man has shown himself to be the most remarkable creature who has ever walked the earth. With none of the advantages of the big predators, he taught himself to survive by the use of intelligence. But even so, the stream of evolution from Ramapithecus, through Australopithecus and
homo habilis
was like a broad, meandering river. Man developed because he learned the use of weapons and tools; but his development was slow because he had not yet learned to use that most valuable of all tools, his mind.

With
homo erectus
, the river entered a valley and became a fast-flowing stream. A million and a half years later - which, in geological time, brings us almost to the twentieth century - came Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man, and it is as if the river entered a gorge and suddenly turned into a torrent. The pace quickened again with the beginning of agriculture. With the building of the cities, the gorge narrowed and the rapids became dangerous.

It would hardly seem possible that evolution could flow faster still, but that is what happened at some time between the founding of the cities and the civilisations of ancient Crete and Mycenae. The sheer danger of the rapids created a new level of alertness and determination. Roaring along at top speed between narrow walls, man was forced to concentrate as he had never concentrated before. Bodies struggled in the water; wrecks drifted past him; but the noise and exhilaration swallowed up the screams of the drowning. A man who steers his raft with his jaw set and all his senses strained to the utmost has no time for compassion.

As he developed determination, man also developed ruthlessness. The narrowing of the senses became a habit - so that whenever he found himself in a quieter patch of water, protected by some buttress from the torrent, he no longer knew how to relax and enjoy the relative calm.

This explains why man has ceased to be the gentle vegetarian described by Leakey and Fromm. But he has no reason to envy those other animals who are still drifting placidly down broad rivers. For he has developed a faculty that outweighs all the danger, all the misery and violence. He has learned to steer.

When he learned to use his mind, this ability to steer made him also the first truly creative and inventive creature. He has poured that narrow jet of energy into discovery and exploration. But the sheer force of the jet has meant that whenever it has been obstructed - or whenever men have lacked the self-discipline to control it - the result has been chaos and destruction. Crime is the negative aspect of creativity.

Throughout history, the ruthless - from Sennacherib to Hitler -have ended by destroying themselves, for their tendency to violence makes them bad steersmen. It is true that their crimes seem to dominate human history. But, as we shall see, it is the good steersmen who play the major part in the story of mankind.

PIRATES AND ADVENTURERS

When we complain about the rising crime rate, we speak as citizens who take the protection of the law for granted. Police patrol our streets and country lanes. Burglary and mugging may be on the increase; but at least the robbers take their freedom into their hands every time they set out to commit a crime.

If we are to understand the history of the past three thousand years we have to make an effort of imagination, and try to forget this notion of being protected by the law. In ancient Greece, the problem was not simply the brigands who haunted the roads and the pirates who infested the seas; it was the fact that the ordinary citizen became a brigand or pirate when he felt like it; and no one regarded this as abnormal. In the
Odyssey
, Ulysses describes with pride how, on the way home from Troy, his ship was driven near to the coast of Thrace; so they landed near an unprotected town, murdered all the men, and carried off the women and goods. Greece was not at war with Thrace; it was just that an unprotected town was fair game for anyone, and the war-weary Greeks felt like a little rape and plunder. This state of affairs persisted for most of the next three thousand years, and explains why so many Mediterranean towns and villages are built inland.

What is far more difficult to grasp is that ‘law abiding’ countries like England were in exactly the same situation. Just before the time of the Black Death (as Luke Owen Pike describes in his
History of Crime in England
, 1873), ‘houses were set on fire day after day; men and women were captured, ransom was exacted on pain of death... even those who paid it might think themselves fortunate if they escaped some horrible mutilation.’ And this does not relate to times of war or social upheaval; according to J. F. Nicholls and John Taylor’s
Bristol Past and Present
(1881) England was ‘prosperous in the highest degree; populous, wealthy and luxurious...’ (p. 174). Yet the robber bands were like small armies. They would often descend on a town when a fair was taking place and everyone felt secure; they would take over the town, plunder the houses and set them on fire (for citizens who were trying to save their houses would not organise a pursuit) and then withdraw. In 1347 and ‘48, Bristol was taken over by a brigand who robbed the ships in the harbour -including some commissioned by the king - and issued his own proclamations like a conqueror. His men roamed the streets, robbing and killing as they felt inclined - the king had to send Thomas, Lord Berkeley, to restore order. When a trader was known to have jewels belonging to Queen Philippa in his house, he was besieged by a gang led by one Adam the Leper and had to hand over the jewels when his house was set on fire. The law courts were almost powerless; when a notorious robber was tried near Winchester, the gang waited outside the court and attacked everyone who came out; so the case was dropped.

Things were still almost as bad four centuries later, in the time of Dr Johnson; gangs of robbers attacked houses in the country at night and sometimes burned them down. Bands of footpads armed with knives attacked parties of prosperous-looking people in London’s Covent Garden, and Horace Walpole was shot by a highwayman in Hyde Park. ‘The farmers’ fields were constantly plundered of their crops, fruit and vegetables were carried off, even the ears of wheat were cut from their stalks in the open day. The thieves boldly took their plunder to the millers to be ground, and the millers, although aware that fields and barns had been recently robbed, did not dare to object, lest their mills should be burnt down over their heads.’ This is described by Major Arthur Griffiths in his
Mysteries of the Police and Crime
(Vol. 1, p. 66). In Queen Victoria’s London, according to works such as Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor
and
The Victorian Underworld
by Kellow Chesney, footpads could operate by day, sometimes in upper-class residential districts: Even children were not safe; ‘child strippers’, mostly women, would lure children into doorways and steal their clothes.

What is so hard for us to grasp is that the whole of society, from top to bottom, operated upon principles that would seem ferociously cruel to a modern citizen of the western world. Our present concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Dr Johnson would simply have condemned it as dangerous sentimentality. Boswell tells in his
Life of Johnson
(Everyman edition, Vol. 2, p. 447) that when, in the 1780s, there was talk of doing away with Tyburn, where executions were turned into public holidays and children were often hanged for stealing, Johnson said indignantly that ‘executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose...’ Writing about this period, an English historian of crime and punishment says:

Children were starved by drunken parents and parish nurses, they were sent out to pick pockets, they were forced to become prostitutes and many not more than twelve years old were ‘half eaten up with the foul distemper’ of venereal disease, they were made to beg and sometimes scarred or crippled so they might be more successful in exciting pity. They seldom did excite it. Pity was still a strange and valuable emotion. Unwanted babies were left in the streets to die or were thrown into dung heaps or open drains; the torture of animals was a popular sport. Cat-dropping, bear-baiting and bull-baiting were... universally enjoyed.

Christopher Hibbert:
The Roots of Evil
, p. 44.

And it was not only animals who were at risk. England had no love of foreigners, and they were likely to be jeered at and pelted with mud as they walked through the streets of London. One Portuguese visitor who got into a fight with an English sailor had his ear nailed to the wall, and when he broke away he was battered and stabbed by the mob until he died. Offenders who were sentenced to be exposed in the stocks were often stoned to death. But such brutality was not confined to the lower classes.

The Mohocks, a society whose members were dedicated to the ambition of ‘doing all possible hurt to their fellow creatures’ were mostly gentlemen. They employed their ample leisure in forcing prostitutes and old women to stand on their heads in tar barrels so that they could prick their legs with their swords; or in making them jump up and down to avoid the swinging blades; in disfiguring their victims by boring out their eyes or flattening their noses; in waylaying servants and, as in the case of Lady Winchelsea’s maid, beating them and slashing their faces. To work themselves up to the necessary pitch of enthusiasm for their ferocious games, they first drank so much that they were quite ‘beyond the possibility of attending to any notions of reason or humanity’. Some of the Mohocks also seem to have been members of the Bold Bucks who, apparently, had formally to deny the existence of God and eat every Sunday a dish known as Holy Ghost Pie. The ravages of the Bold Bucks were more specifically sexual than those of the Mohocks and consequently, as it was practically impossible to obtain a conviction for rape and as the age of consent was twelve, they were more openly conducted.

The Roots of Evil, p. 45

In the anonymous Victorian autobiography
My Secret Life
, the writer describes how he picked up a middle-aged bawd and a ten-year-old-girl at Vauxhall Gardens and possessed the girl several times. ‘Oh, he ain’t going to do it like that other man - you said no one should again.’ ‘Be quiet you little fool, it won’t hurt you. Open your legs.’ And the writer admits cheerfully (Vol. 2, chapter 9): ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry out with the pain my tool caused her, to make her bleed if I could.’

In judging the author of
My Secret Life
we should bear in mind that, had the girl been two years older, she could have legally consented to her own seduction; it was not until 1875 that the age of consent was raised to thirteen. Fifty years earlier, as Arthur Koestler and C. H. Rolph relate in
Hanged by the Neck
(1961), children were still being hanged or transported to the colonies in ‘hulks’. (There was even a special prison ship for children, which was in use until 1844.) In 1801 a boy had been hanged for stealing a spoon; in 1808, two sisters, aged eight and twelve, were hanged at Lynn; in 1831, a boy of thirteen was hanged at Chelmsford for setting fire to a house; in 1833, a boy of nine was sentenced to death - but reprieved - for pushing a stick through a cracked shop window and stealing two pennyworth of printer’s colours. Homeless children walked the streets and could be charged with vagrancy and sent to prisons which had a part set aside for their accommodation. In
Nineteenth Century Crime
J. J. Tobias mentions a Report by the Inspector of Prisons for 1836 which describes the children’s section of Newgate and mentions that, out of twenty-four, ‘seven had been committed for robbing their masters, one for purloining from his father, and another from his aunt’ (p. 152).

By the mid-nineteenth century, the public conscience had begun to wake up, largely as the result of the work of humanitarian novelists such as Dickens and Victor Hugo. It is interesting that all that was needed to bring about the change was to touch people’s imagination. On the page before he quotes Dr Johnson on the abolition of public executions, Boswell says ‘Such was his sensibility, and so much was he affected by pathetick poetry, that when he was reading Dr Beattie’s “
Hermit
” in my presence, it brought tears into his eyes.’ A ‘pathetick poem’ about public executions would probably have changed Johnson’s mind about Tyburn.

By the 1850s, people all over the civilised world were shedding tears over the fate of little Nell and the hunchback Quasimodo who died for love. When, in 1862, Sioux Indians went on the rampage in Minnesota - because they felt they had been cheated out of their land - accounts of the rising emphasised the suffering of children.

The hero of the day was an eleven-year-old boy named Mertin Eastlick, who carried his fifteen-month-old brother Johny on his back for fifty miles, but died shortly afterwards from exposure, over-exertion and lack of nourishment. Mr Eastlick had been killed, and Mrs Eastlick was lying helpless on the ground from a bullet wound. Her two little boys, named Freddie and Frank, were with her. Two squaws saw them, and catching the children they beat them to death before the helpless mother’s eyes. Many other children were only beaten, until they became helpless, and then left to die from hunger and exposure to the storm.

History of the Indian Outbreaks
by Judge Buck, quoted in Thomas
Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases
of America, p. 388.

The resulting storm of outrage convinced Americans that the Indians deserved to be deprived of their land and herded into reservations. The feeling is understandable; but we can now see that it was the Indians who were being victimised by history. They were simply behaving as they had for centuries; their cruelty was part of the warrior tradition, as the historian Francis Parkman recognised:

An inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element in their conception of the character of the warrior. Pity was a cowardly weakness, at which their pride revolted. This, joined to their thirst for applause and their dread of ridicule, made them smother every movement of compassion, and conspired with their native fierceness to give a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled.

From
Half a Century of Conflict
, quoted by John Andrew Doyle in Essays on Various Subjects, 1911, p. 75.

As with the ‘rape of Nanking’, we are dealing with the traditional warrior mentality and the need to ‘save face’. The essential point is made in an essay on Parkman by John Andrew Doyle: ‘The cruelties of the Indians were not so remote from the ideas and practices of civilised men in that age as they are now.’ Doyle is speaking of the Indians of an earlier age, whose ruthlessness was not very different from that of their white conquerors. Parkman describes the massacre of English settlers by Indians who were in the pay of the French: ‘A hundred and four persons, chiefly women and children half-naked from their beds, were tomahawked, shot or killed by slower and more painful methods.’ And at the conclusion of the massacre, a Jesuit priest who accompanied the Indians said a mass. The French employed the Indians because they were cheaper than white soldiers, and had no objection to their methods; a French priest told a correspondent: ‘They kill all they meet; and, after having abused the women and maidens, they slaughter or burn them.’ Parkman also mentions that the French handed over prisoners to the Indians, knowing they would be tortured and burned alive.

But then, this was in the century before the Sioux revolt in Minnesota, and the English were capable of showing the same ruthlessness towards their enemies. England had been at war with Spain, on and off, since the time of Elizabeth I, and the government actively encouraged pirates - called ‘privateers’ - to prey on Spanish ships; it was not unusual for everyone on board such a ship to be murdered. In England itself, coastal villages were encouraged to engage in ‘wrecking’ foreign ships, luring them on to the rocks with false lights. In
Roots of Evil
(page 40) there is the story of the captain of a wrecked ship who struggled to shore in Cheshire only to be stripped naked by villagers, who cut off his fingers to get his rings; the earlobes of a sailor were bitten off to get his ear-rings. It was only because the wreckers made no distinction between British and foreign ships that wrecking was finally made a capital offence in 1753.

We have no way of knowing when piracy and banditry became common in Europe; but it was probably towards the end of the third millennium B.C., around the time of that early Napoleon, Sargon of Akkad (2350 B.C.). The first walled cities date from about six hundred years before Sargon, suggesting that war was becoming the rule rather than the exception. Gordon Childe points out in
What Happened in History
(p. 154) that graves of this period in the small Aegean islands (the Cyclades) contained many metal weapons, ‘so it may be suspected that these insular communities combined piracy with peaceful trade, adding loot to profits, a practice normal in the Mediterranean at many subsequent periods.’ Great wars like those conducted by Sargon must have unsettled the whole region and left behind the usual aftermath of robbery and violence. When small cities and tribes are welded together into a great empire, one of the consequences is a feeling of loss of identity, which - as in the case of the Ik - leads to an increase in selfishness and ruthlessness. Dispossessed rural populations have to survive as best they can. And when kings destroy cities and their soldiers are allowed to loot and rape, some men are bound to acquire a taste for more exciting and violent ways of making a living. In his essay
‘Civilised Life Begins
’, M. E. L. Mallowen says:

The widespread contact between distant parts of the civilised world at that time implied a desire to share in the wealth available to man, and a determination to compete for it if it were withheld.

From
The Dawn of Civilisation
ed. by Stuart Piggott, Thames and Hudson, 1961.

The Mediterranean area was turning into a melting pot, and the age of violence was beginning.

Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the rise of piracy and banditry in the Mediterranean. The Greek historian Thucydides, writing towards the end of the fifth century B.C., gives the best picture of what it must have been like more than a thousand years earlier.

In ancient times, both Greeks and barbarians, the inhabitants of the coast as well as of the islands, when they began to find their way to one another by sea, had recourse to piracy. They were commanded by powerful chiefs, who took this means of increasing their wealth and providing for their poorer followers. They would fall upon the unwalled or straggling towns, or rather villages, which they plundered, and maintained themselves by plundering them; for as yet such an occupation was held to be honourable and not disgraceful. This is proved by the practice of certain tribes on the mainland who, to the present day, glory in piratical exploits, and by the witness of the ancient poets, in whose verses the question is invariably asked of newly arrived voyagers, whether they are pirates; which implies that neither those who are questioned disclaim, nor those who are interested in knowing censure the occupation. The land too was infested by robbers; and there are parts of Hellas in which the old practices still continue... the fashion of wearing arms among these continental tribes is a relic of their old predatory habits. For in ancient times, all Greeks carried weapons because their homes were undefended and intercourse was unsafe...