A Criminal History of Mankind (40 page)

As to the lands of northern Europe, these are now dominated by a mysterious warrior-race called the Celts - a race quite as remarkable in their way as the Greeks and Romans. They are artists, mystics and nature worshippers; they believe that woodlands are full of tiny nature spirits called fairies. Unlike the Romans, these mighty warriors are dreamers, with a strong tinge of pessimism. They are now masters of Germany, France and England. The one civilised art they have not yet acquired is writing, and this explains why we now know so little about them.

This, then, is the world as seen from a space ship in the year 500 B.C., and the visiting scientists would find it an exciting and intriguing place. We can imagine them compiling a report which runs something like this:

For reasons not yet determined, the upright creatures on this planet have entered a sudden phase of accelerated evolution. We can state this with authority since the simpler and less evolved type still exists in large numbers, and their mode of existence is primitive. Yet we have also observed among them thinkers and philosophers who have achieved an astonishingly high level of abstract thought. This is all the more remarkable since their technical achievements are unimpressive, except in mere size, and their scientific insight is almost non-existent.

We theorise that their evolution has been accelerated by acute survival problems, and that it has proceeded in two directions at once: aggression and intellectual insight. The aggressiveness means that their more highly civilised types are almost permanently involved in warfare. Yet their finest thinkers show a truly remarkable degree of insight and self-knowledge. It seems to us an interesting question which of the two will cancel out the other.

Our neuro-physiologist believes he knows why they are so aggressive. All brains on this planet are bi-compartmented, to permit the creature to monitor and regulate its conduct through self-criticism. Survival problems have apparently driven the human creature to go farther than this, and to devote one half of its brain to scanning the material world for dangers. The absurd result is that when they have achieved conditions of peace, in which they can afford to relax, they are unable to switch off this danger-scanning device, and can only release the tensions thus created by going out and looking for challenge - i.e. war.

The problem is increased by a robotic learning device, through which these creatures can store a remarkable amount of information derived from past experience. Unfortunately, this has become so efficient in the case of their ‘civilised’ beings that they are at the mercy of their mechanical reactions, and their intuitive awareness of this makes them inclined to regard themselves as machines. As we see it, this low level of self-esteem, combined with an obsessive need to seek excitement in order to feel fully alive, constitutes the greatest danger faced by this interesting species.

Now let us imagine that the same expedition has returned to earth one thousand years later. It can see from a considerable distance that the planet is passing through another of its fluctuations in climate and is far more dry than on the previous occasion. Large areas that were formerly green are now brown; some have even become deserts. The Caspian Sea, for example, has dropped by several feet in the past five hundred years and is consequently a great deal smaller.

The travellers begin their survey over Australia and New Zealand, which they find almost unchanged from the earlier visit. In South America, civilisation has expanded dramatically; the Mayans have now created something like an empire in the northern part of South America; in Peru there are no less than three major cultures, including the Incas. But their level is roughly that of the ancient Egyptians or Sumerians more than three thousand years earlier. The Indians of North America are still virtually Stone Age hunters.

In the islands of Japan, civilisation is seen to be evolving at an unhurried but steady pace. They are a peaceable nation, these ‘dwarfs’ (as a Chinese traveller of 400 A.D. called them). Their farming methods have steadily improved and they have learned the art of weaving, so they are no longer dressed in skins. They have already a rigid sense of social order and bury their noblemen in great earthen mounds. Chinese influence is strong - and the Japanese are eager to learn from their Chinese neighbours. There are, of course, local wars, and one great prince from the southern island of Kyushu has set up his capital on the Nara plain on the central island. But it seems clear that this race will not be torn apart by violent convulsions. They love nature, and their simple religion - Shinto - is basically a form of nature worship. Everyone seems to ‘know his place’, and they have deep respect for their aristocrats and rulers. The neuro-physiologists of the team might speculate that the peaceable development of their civilisation is due to the fact that the Japanese brain seems to be less ‘divided’ than that of Europeans; its left half seems to process intuitions and patterns as well as words and ideas so that the Japanese still possess some of that unity of the earliest human beings. Yet this may also explain why the Japanese are less inventive than the Chinese, and are so fascinated by their more turbulent neighbours.

In China, the changes of the past thousand years are dramatic. The Great Wall reveals that this land is afraid of its northern neighbours, and the walled cities show that the Chinese are also afraid of one another. In spite of the wall, Mongol raiders have swept down from the north, armed with crossbows and riding fast ponies, and have driven immense numbers of people to the south. So this continent is at present in chaos with many refugees. Yet the Chinese, like the Japanese, are a people who love tradition, and who like to think carefully before they act. Buddism has spread from India and is now as influential as Confucianism or Taoism. This is not because the Chinese are deeply pessimistic about life - they take it calmly and philosophically, neither expecting too much nor assuming the worst - but because Buddhism is a meditative religion and the Chinese feel instinctively that meditation is as important as action. They are also a practical people: they have already invented paper and porcelain, and in a few centuries will invent printing and gunpowder.

Their neighbours in northern India are enjoying a period of relative stability, although they too have suffered greatly from the Mongol invaders. Half a century earlier, their King Skandagupta defeated the Huns and drove them out of India. Under the Gupta dynasty - which began in 320 A.D. - art and literature have flourished. These Hindus are the most profoundly spiritual people on the earth. Like the Chinese, they realise intuitively that the right brain must be allowed to express itself as fully as the left; so meditation is a part of the Hindu way of life. But this unworldliness means that life for the poor is harsh and brutal. There are times when spirituality comes dangerously close to stagnation.

As the travellers move west over Persia, it is obvious that this great country is still as powerful as it was under Darius a thousand years before. Under the Sassanid dynasty - founded by Artaxerxes (Ardashir) in 226 A.D. - the empire has remained warlike and prosperous. There have been no less than seven wars with Rome since Artaxerxes came to the throne, and there will be three more. The Persians have shown themselves a great deal more tolerant than the Christians, and allow Christians to worship within their empire. But at the moment the country is torn by religious dissension, due to a high priest named Mazdak, who has gained many converts with his puritanical and communistic doctrines, and whose followers have caused a civil war with their intolerance.

And so on once more to the Mediterranean, over the mighty city of Constantinople, with its walls and towers and its superb position looking out over the Bosphorus. In this year 500 A.D., Constantinople is being governed peacefully and well by the servant-emperor Anastasius. All these Mediterranean countries are crossed by Roman roads; the sea is still full of Roman and Byzantine ships. Yet Rome itself is ruled by a barbarian, Theodoric the Goth, who is much resented by the Italians. The last Roman emperor - the boy king Romulus - was deposed by Germans nearly a quarter of a century ago. Theodoric killed the leader of the Germans - Ordovacar - with his own hands, and ordered a massacre of his troops.

Nothing is more obvious than that this whole area has been under the sway of a mighty empire, men whose engineering works will last for more than a thousand years. (Of how many modern constructions can we say the same?) In Spain, in Greece, in North Africa, everything reveals their presence. Then where are they? They are already in the process of disappearing, like the Vandals, Huns and the Goths. Like a balloon that has exploded, their fragments now litter the Mediterranean.

The Celts have also virtually disappeared - driven into remote places such as Scotland and Wales by the barbarians - although one of their last great generals, the British Artorius (later known as king Arthur) will hold the barbarians at bay in England for another half century. In the rest of Europe, the barbarians find themselves in possession of the remains of the Roman Empire, and its sheer size and magnificence makes them feel awkward and uncomfortable.

The scientists would conclude their report:

Our earlier speculations about evolution have undoubtedly been confirmed. These highly civilised people have become so obsessed with the external world that they are unable to make proper use of their inner resources. And yet they are intuitively aware that they
ought
to be exploring them, and so find themselves in a permanent state of dissatisfaction and discomfort. Our investigation has shown that these Romans succumbed to the problem of the
nouveau riche
- that is to say that the moment they became wealthy and comfortable, the moment external challenges ceased to keep them up to the mark, they became lazy and corrupt.

Fortunately, Roman materialism has caused a powerful reaction, and the empire is now dominated by a sect called Christians who are far more aware of their wasted potentialities. We predict, however, that their rather simple-minded religion, directed towards a God outside themselves and a crude system of reward and punishment after death, will eventually provoke another powerful counter-reaction that will once again direct attention towards the inner resources...

For
this
was the central problem at this stage of human evolution. Man found himself stranded in the material world, like a passenger left standing on the platform when the last train has gone. Instinctively, he knew he ought to be
going somewhere
, for this internal compulsion to go somewhere has made man the most highly evolved creature on earth. And this has led to one of the major paradoxes of human history - a paradox explored by Arnold Toynbee in
A Study of History
: that men are at their very best when they are ‘up against it’ and at their worst when success has allowed them to relax. Herodotus has a story of how some Persians came to their King Cyrus and suggested that, now they had become conquerors, they should move to a more comfortable and pleasant land. Cyrus’s reply was: ‘Soft countries breed soft men.’ Toynbee devotes a whole chapter (pp. 31-73 of Vol. 1) to examining the difference between hard and soft environments, and shows that the hard environments produce greatness and the soft ones weakness. In China, conditions for civilisation were far easier on the Yangtse River than on the Yellow River, which was usually frozen, flooded or choked with swamps. Yet Chinese civilisation came to birth on the Yellow River, not the Yangtse. In South America, the civilisation of the Andes came to birth in the harsh northern desert, not in the far more pleasant part which the Spaniards called Valparaiso (‘paradise valley’). And so he goes on, with example after example, showing that ‘tough’ countries make creative human beings: Attica and

Boeotia, Rome and Capua, Byzantium and Calchedon, Brandenburg and the Rhineland, even the Black Country and the Home Counties of England.

Now this is not, of course, a specifically human phenomenon. All wine lovers know that the best wines in the world come from areas where the grapes have to put up a struggle: in Bordeaux, they have to burrow through deep gravel, in Champagne they have to fight the cold. Good soil and good weather - as in the Rhone valley or in Italy or North Africa - produces a wine that is strong but lacking in character. Plants, like animals, are largely ‘mechanical’, a mass of ingrained habits that ensure their survival, but also their stagnation. Habit causes them to make no more effort than they have to. Man is the only animal on the earth who experiences an urge to ‘go somewhere’, to move forward. But whereas most animals are limited by habit, man is limited by habit and his brain. He has developed too much of an ‘eye to business’, coping with external problems. So that whenever these problems vanish, he finds himself becalmed and bewildered.

Clearly, what he needs to develop is an
inward eye
- an eye not merely to business - but to purpose. It is self-evident that man is at his best when he is driven by some sense of long-term
purpose
, and that, conversely, he ‘goes to pieces’ when he lacks all sense of purpose - this explains why so many men die shortly after retiring. Our everyday purposes - keeping ourselves physically and emotionally satisfied - are too small, too fragmentary and piecemeal to summon the best that is in us. ‘They lived happily ever after’ is actually a formula for mediocrity. We feel instinctively that the truly satisfying life would be spanned by one great overarching bridge of purpose. This was the instinctive recognition that was slowly transforming the world at the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Let us look more closely at the way this craving for ‘long term solutions’ expressed itself in the life of one of the most remarkable of all visionaries: the prophet Mahomet.

A few miles from the eastern shore of the Red Sea, in the Sirat Mountains of Saudi Arabia, there is a sandy and inhospitable valley. It contains a well that is fed from a deep underground source, and which consequently never runs dry. Long before the Romans set foot in North Africa it had become a regular stopping place for caravans and for wandering Bedouins. The well - called Zem-zem -acquired a reputation for healing the sick, so that it became a place of pilgrimage. A cube-shaped house or temple was built over it, incorporating in one of its walls a black meteoric stone that was regarded as sacred; tradition declared that this House of God, the Ka’ba, had been built by Abraham; the historian Diodorus Siculus mentions that it already existed in 50 B.C. A town called Mecca sprang up around the sacred well.