Colin Wilson - The Criminal History of Mankind

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CRIMINAL

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HISTORY OF

MANKIND

Colin Wilson

GRANADA

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London Toronto Sydney New York

Granada Publishing Limited

8 Grafton Street

London W1X 3LA

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Wilson, Colin

A criminal history of mankind,

1. crime and criminals — History

I. Title 364.09 - HV6O25

ISBN 0-246-11636-6

Printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

without the prior permission of the publishers.

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Scanned : Mr Blue Sky

Proofed : Its Not Raining

Version : 2.0

Date : 03/12/2002

INTRODUCTION

I was about twelve years old when I came upon a bundle of magazines tied with string in a second-hand

bookshop - the original edition of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, published in 1920. Since some of the

parts were missing, I got the whole pile for a few shillings. It was, I must admit, the pictures that attracted

me - splendid full-page colour illustrations of plesiosaurs on a Mesozoic beach; Neanderthal men snarling

in the entrance to their cave; the giant rock-hewn statues of Rameses II and his consort at Abu Simbel. Far

more than Wells’s text, these brought a breathless sensation of the total sweep of world history. Even

today I feel a flash of the old magical excitement as I look at them - that peculiar delight that children feel

when someone says, ‘Once upon a time ...’

In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday, including

the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition that I discovered

that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so frustrating and

incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series of events has forced

upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that

Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.’ And this had not

been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might have been understandable - but

after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the Short History I found that, like the

Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this

history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with

a chapter predicting that mankind will find peace through the League of Nations and world government.

(It was Wells who coined the phrase ‘the war to end war’.)

What had happened? Many years later, I put the question to a friend of Wells, the biblical historian Hugh

Schonfield. His answer was that Wells had been absolutely certain that he had the solutions to all the

problems of the human race, and that he became embittered when he realised that no one took him

seriously. At the time, that seemed a plausible explanation. But since then I have come upon what I

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believe to be the true one. In 1936, Wells produced a curious short novel called The Croquet Player,

which is startlingly different from anything he had written before. It reveals that Wells had become aware

of man’s capacity for sheer brutality and sadism. The Outline of History plays down the tortures and

massacres; in fact, it hardly mentions them. Wells seems totally devoid of that feeling for evil that made

Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, speak of ‘the horrifying sense of sin manifest in human affairs’.

Wells’s view of crime was cheerfully pragmatic. In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind he

spoke of it as ‘artificial’, the result of ‘restrictions imposed upon the normal “natural man” in order that

the community may work and exist.’ He seems quite unaware that the history of mankind since about

2500 B.C. is little more than a non-stop record of murder, bloodshed and violence. The brutalities of the

Nazi period forced this upon his attention. But it seems to have been the horrors of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, and the revelations of Belsen and Buchenwald, which convinced him that man was bound to

destroy himself from the beginning, and that ‘the final end is now closing in on mankind’.

I am not suggesting that Wells’s view of history was superficial or wrong-headed; as far as it went, it was

brilliantly perceptive. As a late Victorian, he was aware of the history of mankind as a marvellous story of

invention and achievement, of a long battle against danger and hardship that had resulted in modern

civilisation. And it is certainly true that man’s creativity is the most centrally important fact about him.

What Wells failed to grasp is that man’s intelligence has resulted in a certain lopsidedness, a narrow

obsessiveness that makes us calculating and ruthless. It is this ruthlessness - the tendency to take ‘short-

cuts’ - that constitutes crime. Hitler’s mass murders were not due to the restrictions imposed on natural

man so the community can exist. They were, on the contrary, the outcome of a twisted kind of idealism,

an attempt to create a ‘better world’. The same is true of the destruction of Hiroshima, and of the terrorist

bombings and shootings that have become everyday occurrences since the 1960s. The frightening thing

about the members of the Japanese Red Brigade who machine-gunned passengers at Lod airport, or the

Italian terrorists who burst into a university classroom and shot the professor in the legs - alleging that he

was teaching his students ‘bourgeois values’ - is that they were not criminal lunatics but sincere idealists.

When we realise this we recognise that criminality is not the reckless aberration of a few moral

delinquents but an inevitable consequence of the development of intelligence, the ‘flip side’ of our

capacity for creativity. The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and

intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.

It was basically this recognition that plunged Wells into the nihilism of his final period. He had spent his

life teaching that human beings can be guided by reason and intelligence; he had announced that the First

World War had been fought to end war and that the League of Nations and world government would

guarantee world peace. And at that point, the world exploded into an unparalleled epoch of murder,

cruelty and violence: Stalin’s starvation of the kulaks, the Japanese ‘rape’ of Nanking, Hitler’s

concentration camps, the atomic bomb. It must have seemed to Wells that his whole life had been based

on a delusion, and that human beings are incorrigibly stupid and wicked.

If Wells had understood more about the psychology of violence, he would not have allowed this insight to

plunge him into despair. Criminality is not a perverted disposition to do evil rather than good. It is merely

a childish tendency to take short-cuts. All crime has the nature of a smash and grab raid; it is an attempt to

get something for nothing. The thief steals instead of working for what he wants. The rapist violates a girl

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instead of persuading her to give herself. Freud once said that a child would destroy the world if it had the

power. He meant that a child is totally subjective, wrapped up in its own feelings and so incapable of

seeing anyone else’s point of view. A criminal is an adult who goes on behaving like a child.

But there is a fallacy in this childish morality of grab-what-you-want. The person who is able to indulge

all his moods and feelings is never happy for more than a few moments together; for most of the time, he

is miserable. Our flashes of real happiness are glimpses of objectivity, when we somehow rise above the

stifling, dreamlike world of our subjective desires and feelings. The great tyrants of history, the men who

have been able to indulge their feelings without regard to other people, have usually ended up half insane;

for over-indulged feelings are the greatest tyrants of all.

Crime is renewed in every generation because human beings are children; very few of us achieve

anything like adulthood. But at least it is not self-perpetuating, as human creativity is. Shakespeare learns

from Marlowe, and in turn inspires Goethe. Beethoven learns from Haydn and in turn inspires Wagner.

Newton learns from Kepler and in turn inspires Einstein. But Vlad the Impaler, Jack the Ripper and Al

Capone leave no progeny. Their ‘achievement’ is negative, and dies with them. The criminal also tends to

be the victim of natural selection - of his own lack of self-control. Man has achieved his present level of

civilisation because creativity ‘snowballs’ while crime, fortunately, remains static.

We may feel that Wells must have been a singularly naive historian to believe that war was about to come

to an end. But this can be partly explained by his ignorance of what we now call sociobiology. When

Tinbergen and Lorenz made us aware that animal aggression is largely a matter of ‘territory’, it suddenly

became obvious that all wars in history have been fought about territory. Even the murderous behaviour

of tyrants has its parallels in the animal world. Recent studies have made us aware that many dominant

males, from lions and baboons to gerbils and hamsters, often kill the progeny of their defeated rivals.

Hens allow their chicks to peck smaller chicks to death. A nesting seagull will kill a baby seagull that

wanders on to its territory from next door. It seems that Prince Kropotkin was quite mistaken to believe

that all animals practise mutual aid and that only human beings murder one another. Zoology has taught

us that crime is a part of our animal inheritance. And human history could be used as an illustrative

textbook of sociobiology.

Does this new view of history suggest that humankind is likely to be destroyed by its own violence? No

one can deny the possibility; but the pessimists leave out of account the part of us that Wells understood

so well - man’s capacity to evolve through intelligence. It is true that human history has been

fundamentally a history of crime; but it has also been the history of creativity. It is true that mankind

could be destroyed in some atomic accident; but no one who has studied history can believe that this is

more than a remote possibility. To understand the nature of crime is to understand why it will always be

outweighed by creativity and intelligence.

This book is an attempt to tell the story of the human race in terms of that counterpoint between crime and

creativity, and to use the insights it brings to try to discern the next stage in human evolution.

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HIDDEN PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE

During the summer of 1959, my study was piled with books on violent crime and with copies of True

Detective magazine. The aim was to compile an Encyclopaedia of Murder that might be of use to crime

writers. But I was also moved by an obscure but urgent conviction that underneath these piles of unrelated

facts about violence there must be undiscovered patterns, certain basic laws, and that uncovering these

might provide clues to the steadily rising crime rate.

I had noted, for example, that types of murder vary from country to country. The French and Italians are

inclined to crime passionel, the Germans to sadistic murder, the English to the carefully-planned murder -

often of a spouse or lover - the Americans to the rather casual and unpremeditated murder. Types of crime

change from century to century, even from decade to decade. In England and America, the most typical

crimes of the 1940s and ‘50s had been for gain or for sex: in England, the sadist Neville Heath, the ‘acid

bath murderer’ Haigh; in America, the red-light bandit Caryl Chessman, (he multiple sex-killer Harvey

Glatman.

As I leafed my way through True Detective, I became aware of the emergence of a disturbing new trend:

the completely pointless or ‘motiveless’ murder. As long ago as 1912, André Gide had coined the term

‘gratuitous act’ to describe this type of crime; the hero of his novel Les Caves du Vatican (which was

translated as Lafcadio’s Adventure} suddenly has the impulse to kill a total stranger on a train. ‘Who

would know? A crime without a motive - what a puzzle for the police.’ So he opens the door and pushes

the man to his death. Gide’s novel was a black comedy; the ‘motiveless murder’ was intended as a joke in

the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s essay about the loiter who murdered his sister-in-law because she had thick

ankles. Neither philosophers nor policemen seriously believed that such things were possible. Yet by 1959

it was happening. In 1952, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Herbert Mills sat next to a forty-eight-year-

old housewife in a Nottingham cinema and decided she would make a suitable victim for an attempt at the

‘perfect murder’; he met her by arrangement the next day, took her for a walk, and strangled her under a

tree. It was only because he felt the compulsion to boast about his ‘perfect crime’ that he was caught and

hanged. In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico,

raised his hunting rifle and shot dead two Mexican children; pursued and arrested, he said he was trying to

do something about the population explosion. In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland

accepted a lift from a married man in California and, without provocation, killed him with a dozen shots.

After her arrest she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill ‘and not worry about it afterwards’.

Psychiatrists found her sane. In April 1959, a man named Norman Smith took a pistol and shot a woman

(who was watching television) through an open window. He did not know her; the impulse had simply

come over him as he watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’.

The Encyclopaedia of Murder appeared in 1961, with a section on ‘motiveless murder’; by 1970 it was

clear that this was, in fact, a steadily increasing trend. In many cases, oddly enough, it seemed to be linked

to a slightly higher-than-average IQ. Herbert Mills wrote poetry, and read some of it above the body of his

victim. The ‘Moors murderer’ Ian Brady justified himself by quoting de Sade, and took pains in court - by

the use of long words - to show that he was an ‘intellectual’. Charles Manson evolved an elaborate

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racialist sociology to justify the crimes of his ‘family’. San Francisco’s ‘Zodiac’ killer wrote his letters in

cipher and signed them with signs of the zodiac. John Frazier, a drop-out who slaughtered the family of an

eye surgeon, Victor Ohta, left a letter signed with suits from the Tarot pack. In November 1966, Robert

Smith, an eighteen-year-old student, walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, made five women

and two children lie on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head. Smith was in no way a

‘problem youngster’; his relations with his parents were good and he was described as an excellent

student. He told the police: ‘I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.’ A woman who walked into a

California hotel room and killed a baseball player who was asleep there - and who was totally unknown to

her - explained to the police: ‘He was famous, and I knew that killing him would make me famous too.’

It is phrases like this that seem to provide a clue. There is a basic desire in all human beings, even the

most modest, to ‘become known’. Montaigne tells us that he is an ordinary man, yet that he feels his

thoughts are worthy of attention; is there anyone who can claim not to recognise the feeling? In fact, is

there anyone in the world who does not secretly feel that he is worthy of a biography? In a book called

The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker states that one of the most basic urges in man is the urge to heroism.

‘We are all,’ he says, ‘hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.’ In children, we can see the urge to self-esteem

in its least disguised form. The child shouts his needs at the top of his voice. He does not disguise his

feeling that he is the centre of the world. He strenuously objects if his brother gets a larger piece of cake.

‘He must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a

hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anyone else.’ So

he indulges endless daydreams of heroism.

Then he grows up and has to learn to be a realist, to recognise that, on a world-scale, he is a nobody.

Apparently he comes to terms with this recognition; but deep down inside, the feeling of uniqueness

remains. Becker says that if everyone honestly admitted his desire to be a hero, and demanded some kind

of satisfaction, it would shake society to its foundations. Only very simple primitive societies can give

their members this sense of uniqueness, of being known to all. ‘The minority groups in present-day

industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given

a sense of primary heroism ...’.

Becker’s words certainly bring a flash of insight into all kinds of phenomena, from industrial unrest to

political terrorism. They are an expression of this half-buried need to be somebody, and of a revolt against

a society that denies it. When Herbert Mills decided to commit a ‘perfect murder’, he was trying to

provide himself with a reason for that sense of uniqueness. In an increasing number of criminal cases, we

have to learn to see beyond the stated motivation -social injustice or whatever - to this primary need.

There was a weird, surrealistic air about Charles Manson’s self-justifications in court; he seemed to be

saying that he was not responsible for the death of eight people because society was guilty of far worse

things than that. Closer examination of the evidence reveals that Manson felt that he had as much right to

be famous as the Beatles or Bob Dylan (he had tried hard to interest record companies in tapes he had

recorded); in planning Helter Skelter, the revolution that would transform American society, he was

asserting his primacy, his uniqueness.

I was struck by the difference between these typical crimes of the late sixties - Manson, the Moors

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murders, Frazier, Zodiac - and the typical crimes of ten or twenty years earlier - Haigh, Heath, Christie,

Chessman, Glatman. John Christie killed girls for sexual purposes - he seems to have been impotent if the

woman was conscious - and walled them up in a cupboard in his kitchen. The cupboard is somehow a

symbol of this type of crime - the place where skeletons are hidden by people who are anxious to appear

normal and respectable. Manson’s ‘family’ sat around the television, gloating over the news bulletin that

announced the killings in Sharon Tate’s home. The last thing they wanted was for their crimes to be

hidden.

Clearly, there is some sort of pattern here. But what are the underlying laws that govern it? In the mid-

1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow sent me his book Motivation and Personality (1954), and it was

in the fourth chapter, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, that I thought I saw the outline of some kind of

general solution to the changing pattern. The chapter had originally been published in 1943 in the

Psychological Review, and had achieved the status of a classic among professional psychologists; but for

some reason it had never percolated through to the general public. What Maslow proposed in this paper

was that human motivation can be described in terms of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ or values. These fall

roughly into four categories: physiological needs (basically food), security needs (basically a roof over

one’s head), belongingness and love needs (desire for roots, the need to be wanted), and esteem needs (to

be liked and respected). And beyond these four levels, Maslow suggested the existence of a fifth category:

self-actualisation: the need to know and understand, to create, to solve problems for the fun of it.

When a man is permanently hungry, he can think of nothing else, and his idea of paradise is a place with

plenty of food. In fact, if he solves the food problem, he becomes preoccupied with the question of

security, a home, ‘territory’. (Every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage with roses round the

door.) If he solves this problem, the sexual needs become urgent - not simply physical satisfaction, but the

need for warmth, security and ‘belonging’. And if this level is satisfied, the next emerges: the need to be

liked and admired, the need for self-esteem and the esteem of one’s neighbours. If all these needs are

satisfied, the ‘self-actualising’ needs are free to develop (although they do not always do so - Maslow

recognised that many people never get beyond level four.)

Now, as I worked on a second study in criminology, A Casebook of Murder, it struck me that Maslow’s

hierarchy of needs corresponds roughly to historical periods of crime. Until the first part of the nineteenth

century, most crimes were committed out of the simple need for survival - Maslow’s first level. Burke and

Hare, the Edinburgh body-snatchers, suffocated their victims and sold the corpses to the medical school

for about £7 each. By the mid-nineteenth century the pattern was changing; the industrial revolution had

increased prosperity, and suddenly the most notorious crimes are ‘domestic murders’ that take place in

respectable middle-class homes: Dr Palmer, Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Florence Bravo. (American

parallels would include Professor Webster and Lizzie Borden.) These people are committing crimes to

safeguard their security. Charlie Peace, housebreaker and murderer, practised burglary to subsidise a

respectable middle-class existence that included regular churchgoing and musical evenings with the

neighbours.

But even before the end of the century, a new type of crime had emerged: the sex crime. The Jack the

Ripper murders of 1888 were among the first of this type, and it is significant that the killer’s

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