A Criminal History of Mankind (21 page)

Why did Gosmann kill? No doubt a psychiatrist would be able to uncover the roots of the obsessions and emotional disorders that turned his thoughts towards crime. (He revered the memory of his father, an army captain, who had been shot by the Americans at the end of the war.) But the central motivation was undoubtedly the need to bolster his self-esteem. Gosmann felt himself to be weak and inadequate - a thinker who was incapable of action. His crimes were a deliberate attempt to
strengthen his identity
. And just as some couples enjoy sex more if they can see themselves in a mirror, so Gosmann tried to add a dimension of reality to his crimes by describing them in his diary. In prison he wrote in his journal: ‘I would say there is a great difference between me and Raskolnikov [in
Crime and Punishment
]. Just as long as I don’t get it in the neck from the judge, I don’t have to consider myself as the perpetrator. Raskolnikov always thought of himself as the perpetrator...’ It is an interesting comment that reveals that even his present situation had not succeeded in rescuing him from his sense of unreality: ‘How ridiculous - it can’t be happening.’ Gosmann
did
‘get it in the neck’ from the judge; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of release.

In the case of Klaus Gosmann we can see clearly the connection between crime and the sense of identity. If Gosmann had possessed the simple consciousness of an animal, he would have been incapable of crime. Most young people understand that need to deepen the sense of identity, and the feeling of envy and admiration for people of strong personality who seem to ‘know who they are’. (No doubt this was the basis of Gosmann’s admiration of his own father.) A great many of the activities of the young - from wearing strange garments to driving at ninety miles an hour - are attempts to establish the sense of identity. A dog has no such problems. It is entirely lacking in reflective self-consciousness. Consequently, it would be incapable of ‘crime’ in our human sense of the word. Crime is basically the assertion of the ‘I’. ‘I’ strike someone in the face; ‘I’ order the bank clerk to hand over the money; ‘I’ pull the trigger.

Now it should be quite obvious that without this sense of ‘I’, there can be no crime. If your dog chases sheep and you give it a beating, it will in future feel an inhibition about chasing sheep. Even when it is out for a walk on its own, it will remember that chasing sheep is a forbidden activity. Yet a burglar who has spent five years in prison - a far more savage punishment than a good beating - may ignore the inhibition next time he sees an open window. And this is because it is no longer a simple matter of response (crime) and inhibition (punishment). A third element has entered the situation: the burglar’s sense of his own personality, his ego. A sudden opportunity presents him with a challenge - ‘I can probably get away with it’ - and if he gets away with it, there is a feeling of self-congratulation: ‘I did it!’ - the feeling Klaus Gosmann recorded in his diary after his first murder. When man first became capable of that kind of self-congratulation - a fairly common form of self-awareness - he also became capable of crime.

The question of precisely when this happened may seem unanswerable. But a startling and controversial theory has been advanced in a book called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Dr Julian Jaynes, of Princeton University (published by Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1976). When it appeared reviews were almost uniformly hostile, and it is easy to understand why. According to Jaynes, the authors of the Old Testament and the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, were entirely lacking in what we would call ‘self-consciousness’. Their consciousness looked outward, towards the external world, and they had no power of looking inside themselves. He says of the characters in Homer: ‘We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes... Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind space to introspect upon.’

This is a baffling statement, because we are so accustomed to ‘looking inside ourselves’ when we have to make a decision. ‘Shall I go by train or bus?’
We talk to ourselves
, just as we would to another person. And it is hard to imagine how we could make any decision without this kind of introspection. It is true that if I step off the pavement as a bus comes round the corner, I jump back without a moment’s hesitation; but that is a very simple ‘decision’. To decide whether to take a bus or a train, I must form a mental picture of the two alternatives and compare them; I
must
look inside myself. And it is quite impossible to imagine how King Solomon or Ulysses made up their minds without going through a similar process.

According to Jaynes, the answer is that they heard voices that told them what to do: voices inside their heads. Jaynes first became convinced of this possibility when he had a similar experience. ‘One afternoon I lay down in intellectual despair on a couch. Suddenly, out of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which said, “Include the knower in the known!” It lugged me to my feet, exclaiming, “Hello?” looking for whoever was in the room. The voice had an exact location. No one was there!’ It was an auditory hallucination, and the experience led Jaynes to study the subject. He discovered that a surprisingly large number of ordinary people have had auditory hallucinations. And in ancient texts - such as the Bible and the
Iliad
- Jaynes found a total lack of evidence for any kind of introspection but an enormous amount for auditory hallucinations - which were interpreted as the voice of God, or one of the gods.

In support of this part of his argument, Jaynes draws upon the relatively new discipline of split-brain research, based upon discoveries made by Roger Sperry in the 1950s (and for which he has since received the Nobel Prize). The brain is divided into two halves, which appear to be mirror-images of each other. The specifically human part of the brain, as we saw in the last chapter, is the part that presses against the top of the skull - the cerebrum. This looks rather like the two halves of a walnut, joined in the middle by a thick bridge of nerves called the corpus callosum.

In the 1930s, it was discovered that attacks of epilepsy could be controlled by severing this bridge, and so preventing the ‘electrical storm’ from spreading from one side to the other. And, oddly enough, it seemed to make no difference whatever to the patient, who went about his business exactly as before. It was Sperry who made the remarkable discovery that the split-brain patient actually turns into two people; but they continue to work in such close cooperation that no one notices. It is only when they are subjected to experiments that prevent them from co-operating that the difference can be observed.

It has been known since the mid-nineteenth century that the left cerebral hemisphere controls our powers of speech and reason, while the right seems to be concerned with intuition and with recognising shapes and patterns. A patient whose left hemisphere has been damaged suffers from impaired speech but can still appreciate art or enjoy music. A patient whose right hemisphere has been damaged can speak perfectly clearly and logically, yet cannot draw the simplest pattern. Oddly enough, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. If someone puts an object - say a key - into the left hand of a split-brain patient (without allowing him to look at it), he knows perfectly well what it is, yet he cannot ‘put a name’ to it. If he is asked: ‘What are you holding in your left hand?’ he has no idea of the answer. For the person called ‘you’ seems to live in the left brain, and has no idea of what is concealed in his left hand.

With the eyes it is slightly more complicated, since half of each eye is connected to the left brain and half to the right. But if the patient is asked to stare rigidly in one direction, an object can be shown only to the left or right visual field. If a split-brain patient is shown an orange with the right brain and an apple with the left, and is asked to write with the left hand what he has just seen, he will write: ‘Orange’. If he is asked to state what he has just written, he will reply: ‘Apple’. When one split-brain patient was shown an indecent drawing with the right half of the brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied: ‘I don’t know.’

There is therefore strong evidence that ‘you’ inhabit the left cerebral hemisphere, and that the person in the right is a stranger. And although it could be argued that this does not apply to most of us, since we are not split-brain patients, this inference would be incorrect. Otherwise, split-brain patients would know that their corpus callosum had been severed - they would be aware that they have been cut off from their ‘other half’. In fact, they notice no difference - which suggests that, for practical purposes, they were already split-brain before the operation. In fact, a little thought will show that we are all split-brain patients. When I experience an intuition, a ‘hunch’, it walks into my left brain - my conscious, wide-awake self - from the domain of that other ‘self (which appears to be the gateway to the unconscious).

Jaynes believes that auditory hallucinations originate in the right brain. And he suggests that when one of the ancient heroes of Homer heard the voice of a god advising them what to do, this voice originated in the right brain, and sounded in the left brain as if through a loudspeaker. We have already seen that the ancient kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia regarded themselves as mouthpieces of the gods, which seems to lend support to Jaynes’s theory.

Jaynes believes that man began to develop language - simple cries like ‘Danger!’ and ‘Food!’ - as recently as seventy thousand years ago. He did not learn to speak simple sentences until much more recently - between twenty-five and fifteen thousand years ago. But although he had language, he had no self-consciousness. So a man who had been ordered to go and build a dam upstream had no way of reminding himself what he was supposed to do; ‘reminding myself’ demands self-awareness. He might, of course, repeat his instructions - the simple word for ‘dam’ - non-stop all the way up the river. But then, his right brain could help him not to forget. Most people can tell themselves that they must wake up at six in the morning, and wake at precisely six o’clock. The right brain has acted as an alarm clock. So the primitive hunter’s right brain would repeat the word for ‘dam’ when he reached the correct place, and he would hear it as a voice - probably speaking from the air above the left side of his head.

Jaynes suggests that this happened some time after the advent of the earliest agriculture, about 10,000 B.C. This was the time when men began living in larger groups - no longer a small band of hunters living in a cave, but anything up to two hundred people living in a settlement of fifty or so houses. A group that large would need a leader - a king. But when the king died, his subjects would continue to hear his voice; hence they would assume that he was still alive - a god. This, says Jaynes, is how man came to believe in the gods. The gods were an inevitable consequence of the development of the ‘bicameral mind’.

So, according to Jaynes, those early civilisations were ‘bicameral’. Men were not responsible for their actions; they obeyed the voice of the gods. And then, very slowly, consciousness (i.e. self-awareness) began to develop. This was due to a number of causes, but the main one was the invention of writing, some time before 3000 B.C. Writing - whose purpose is the storage of information - drove man into a new kind of complexity. For as soon as I begin to store information, I am forced to become more complex, whether I like it or not. An obvious example of the process is a library. I may collect books because I enjoy escaping from the real world. But as my collection expands, I must keep it in some sort of order. I must make bookshelves and adopt some kind of system of classification. This may strike me as tiresome; but unless I want to keep falling over books on the floor, or unless I keep giving them away, then I must teach myself the elementary principles of librarianship. Whether I like it or not, I have to ‘get organised’.

So the development of writing created a new kind of complexity that undermined the bicameral mind. (In the first chapter of my book
Starseekers
I reviewed the evidence that the Great Pyramid - dating from about 2500 B.C. - and megalithic monuments like Stonehenge were built as ‘computers’ whose purpose was to enable the priests to create astronomical tables.) Moreover, the second millennium B.C. was a time of unprecedented catastrophes and stresses. ‘Civilisations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunches itself into its dark and bloody close.’ The tremendous volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini - about 1500 B.C. - devastated the whole Mediterranean area. Then, between 1250 and 1150, the same area became a prey to hordes of invaders known as ‘the Sea Peoples’, who attacked the bleeding civilisation like sharks. Under all this stress, the old, child-like mentality could no longer cope. The men who rebuilt civilisation needed new qualities of ruthlessness and efficiency. Besides, all this violence demanded a more subtle response. ‘Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbour his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive.’

The first sign of this ‘change of mind’, says Jaynes, can be found in Mesopotamia. Around 1230 B.C. the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I had a stone altar built, and it shows the king kneeling before the empty throne of the god. In earlier carvings, the king is shown standing and talking to the god. Now the king is alone; the god has vanished. A cuneiform text of the same period contains the lines: