A Criminal History of Mankind (23 page)

Many powerful nations have collapsed because they became lazy and effete - like the Romans and Persians of later times. The Assyrians never made that mistake. They were prepared to smite hard and brutally to maintain their grip on their subjects. And it was this very efficiency that brought about their downfall. The Semitic peoples have never been notable for co-operation; they are too much inclined to squabble amongst themselves. But the brutality of the Assyrians finally drove their enemies to unite. Around 654 B.C., Assurbanipal was faced by a hostile coalition of Babylonians, Elamites, Chaldeans and half a dozen other peoples, led by his own brother, the king of Babylon. The Assyrian war machine ground into action; Babylon, now rebuilt, was starved into submission; the king escaped being tortured to death by burning himself alive in his own palace. Then Assurbanipal went about ‘pacifying’ the various rebels with his usual sadistic brutality. By 639 B.C. all his enemies had been smashed into submission and the land of Elam had been erased from the map. From his magnificent palace in Nineveh, Assurbanipal contemplated the whole world prostrate at his feet, and savoured his victory. But it was at the cost of inflaming the whole Mediterranean world with a frenzied and impotent hatred. And when Assurbanipal died, they rose up again; and this time they succeeded. The Assyrians received no more mercy than they had given. Their enemies - led by king Nabopolassar of Babylon - set out to exterminate them as if they were plague rats. They were so thorough that they left no Assyrians to recall the story of their greatness. Two centuries later, the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus were retreating up the Tigris valley - the famous story is told by Xenophon - when they passed the gigantic ruins of Nineveh and Kalah. They were baffled by the mystery of these great empty cities, whose immense fortifications made them look impregnable. All Xenophon could find out - from local peasants - was that the cities had been miraculously depopulated by direct intervention of the gods. The conquerors who had terrorised the Middle East for so many years were no longer even a legend.

There is a baffling paradox involved in all this. The Assyrians responded to the challenge of disaster and chaos by becoming the most ruthlessly efficient conquerors the world had ever seen. They were undoubtedly the ‘fittest’, and according to the Darwinian principle, they should have survived. Yet, for some reason, human history contradicts the Darwinian principle - not once, but again and again.

From the time of the Assyrians to the time of the Nazis, history has been full of ruthlessly efficient men who ended in failure. And it is of central importance to understand why this is so; for we are now dealing with the essence of crime. The criminal is basically a person who sees no reason why he should not get what he wants by stealth, or by force, or both. Confronted by a difficult knot, his first impulse is to take a knife and cut it. In the short run, this is usually successful; but even in the moderately short run, things usually begin to go wrong. In the case of the individual criminal - like Carl Panzram - the reason is obvious enough. In the case of nations - like the Assyrians, the Huns or the Vandals - it may be rather more complicated, but it amounts finally to the same thing. The real objection to criminal violence is not the harm it inflicts on society - although this can be horrific enough - but the fact that, in the long run, it invariably fails to achieve the criminal’s objective. It is basically a miscalculation. For crime is essentially a
left-brain
way of achieving objectives. It refuses to recognise any value but the achievement of the objective. And somehow, the objective gets lost in the process.

It was this paradox that fascinated the historian Arnold Toynbee, who has described how he became aware of it on a May evening in 1912. Toynbee had spent the day in the deserted citadel of Mistra, which looks out over the plain of Sparta. For six hundred years, Mistra had been a flourishing town, until one morning in 1821 a horde of wild invaders had massacred its inhabitants and left it a ruin. Pondering on this completely pointless slaughter and destruction, Toynbee was overwhelmed by ‘a horrifying sense of the sin manifest in human affairs’, and of ‘the cruel riddle of mankind’s crimes and follies’. Why is man the only animal who takes pleasure in destruction for its own sake? This is the question that runs through the eight thousand or so pages of Toynbee’s
Study of History
.

It is appropriate that the scene of the realisation should have been above the plain of Sparta. For the Spartans, like the Assyrians, are an example of the futility of sheer ruthlessness. In the eighth century B.C., the Lacedemonians (Sparta is the capital of Lacedemon) found their own land too small for the growing population, so they invaded the territory of their neighbours, the Messenians. For sixteen years the Messenians fought like tigers, but the Spartans finally conquered. However the Messenians detested the invaders, and a century later they made a desperate and tremendous attempt to throw off the foreign yoke. This war was even bloodier, and it lasted twenty years. At the end of it, both sides were exhausted; but the Spartans were the winners, and they took murderous reprisals. And now they took the step that would eventually turn Sparta into a living fossil. The sheer agony of that long battle made the Spartans determined never to allow it to happen again. So they turned Lacedemon into one vast army camp. They thought and ate and drank nothing but military discipline. Messenia had to be held in an iron grip, so they set out to transform themselves into iron men.

The land of Messenia was divided into equal allotments, each of which was handed over to a Spartan ‘peer’; the natives became slaves - helots - whose business was to support him. If any child of a helot showed the least sign of talent or brilliance, he was promptly murdered; the Spartans were determined to save themselves trouble in the next generation. All their own children - girls as well as boys - were destined for military training from birth. (Weak children were condemned to die of exposure.) At the age of seven, Spartan children left their homes and went into training camps. Girls received the same military training as boys; in athletics, they competed with them on equal terms, even wrestling naked with them in front of a male audience. The highest virtue in Spartan life was sheer toughness, ability to endure pain and hardship. In due course, the males entered the army. There was no family life for them; they lived in a barracks and ate in the mess. On a girl’s wedding night, she surrendered her virginity, then her husband left her and went back to barracks. To show she was a soldier’s wife she cut her hair short and wore male clothes. If her husband seemed unable to produce healthy children, he was expected to find a better man to occupy his bed; if he was unwilling, then his wife had to arrange it. A man who ate poorly at mess was likely to be penalised; it was evidence that he had been indulging himself in the debilitating pleasantness of family life.

It all sounds rather like
Nineteen Eighty-Four
- and even more like that giant in Wagner’s
Ring
who killed his brother to get the Nibelung’s treasure, then turned himself into a dragon and spent the rest of his life guarding it. The Spartans became the dragons of the Hellenic world. When their neighbours, the Athenians, looked like becoming too powerful, the Spartans felt they had to conquer Athens to maintain their own position. And after a war that dragged on for twenty-seven years, they were again victorious. Yet the one thing they were
not
ready for was the leadership of the Hellenic world. They had trained themselves for hardship and struggle; success demoralised them. Some of the soldiers they sent abroad to govern colonies became notorious for debauchery. And the Spartans who stayed at home remained rigid, completely fixed in their conservatism; Toynbee compares them to soldiers standing permanently on parade with arms presented. And while they stood there, the cobwebs grew all over them. The Spartans did not vanish in a spectacular holocaust, like the Assyrians; they merely became the victims of a kind of spiritual arthritis and quietly faded out of history.

Here we can see very clearly the importance of Jaynes’s insight. The Spartans were the ultimate ‘left brainers’. They fixed their minds on one thing and one thing only, and pretended that nothing else existed. Before the Messenian war, Sparta was creating its own tradition of art and music; this came to a complete halt in the middle of the sixth century B.C. It was not revived until more than five hundred years later, when the militarist system in Sparta was finally smashed in the second Macedonian war. A symbol of the sheer futility of the Spartan ideal can be seen in their later custom of inducing boys to display their toughness by allowing themselves to be flogged to death at the altar of the moon goddess.

The left cerebral hemisphere is the critical part of the brain, the part that can overrule our impulses. (This explains why even cats and dogs have two hemispheres; all creatures need the power to change their minds.) It would not be too inaccurate to say that the Spartans outlawed creativity and turned themselves into a nation of critics. The left brain directs our energies into a narrow, fast current like a mountain stream; the right allows them to spread into a broad, slow-moving river. But the right also enables us to see where we are going, to survey the surrounding landscape and decide where we want to go next. The left becomes easily trapped in its own obsessive forward movement and loses all ability to change direction. When this happens, there are two possibilities: self-destruction or slow exhaustion. The Assyrians are an example of the first alternative, the Spartans of the second.

Two thousand years or so later, Sherlock Holmes found himself confronting the same dilemma. In his earlier days, Holmes was much given to relieving his boredom with morphine or cocaine. When, in
The Sign of Four
, Watson asks him whether he has any work on hand at the moment, Holmes replies: ‘None. Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them?’ When Doyle wrote
The Sign of Four
, it was not recognised that cocaine was addictive (Freud made his original reputation by administering it to cure morphine addiction); and in any case Holmes was saved from addiction by his own increasing success. But the example serves to show us that the nature of the problem has not changed in the three thousand years since Rameses III. Man has achieved his pre-eminence by showing himself to be the greatest of all survivors; he has survived droughts, ice-ages, famines and earthquakes. And at a certain point in his history, evolution subjected him to the strangest of all experiments: confining his sense of identity to his left brain. (It makes no difference whether or not we accept Jaynes’s estimate of
when
this happened; the important thing is that it happened.) It paid off spectacularly. With this new detachment from nature, man began to study it with a critical eye and observe its habits. In the third century B.C., a Greek philosopher named Eratosthenes, who lived in Alexandria, heard that there was a well in a town called Syene - modern Aswan - where the sun was reflected at midday on midsummer day. This meant that it was precisely overhead, and that a tower in Syene would cast no shadow. But towers in Alexandria
did
cast shadows at midday on midsummer day. Eratosthenes measured such a shadow, and calculated that the sun’s rays struck the tower at an angle of 7l/2°. And if the earth is a globe (a traditional piece of knowledge that seems to date back to ancient Egypt), then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be 7-1/2% of the earth’s circumference. Since this distance is five hundred miles, Eratosthenes was able to work out that the circumference of the earth must be 24,000 miles. The modern measurement is 24,860 miles at the equator, so Eratosthenes was incredibly accurate. Another Alexandrian Greek, Aristarchus, measured the angle from the earth to the sun when the moon was directly overhead and half-full, then used simple trigonometry to work out the size of the sun and moon and their distances from earth. His calculations were not quite as accurate as Eratosthenes’, because of the difficulty of judging exactly when the moon was half-full; but he worked out that the moon is fifty-six thousand miles away and the sun well over a million. The impact upon his fellow Alexandrians must have been stunning. The story of Icarus told them that if a man flew too high he would get close to the sun and melt his wings; now Aristarchus was telling them that a man could fly a thousand miles high and hardly be any closer to the sun. He added that, since the sun was far larger than the earth, it was quite possible that the earth travelled round the sun and not vice versa.

These remarkable discoveries reveal the impact of man’s newly-acquired ‘bicameralism’. The earliest farmers were undoubtedly interested in the sun and moon; but they would not have dreamed of doing anything so boring as measuring angles and calculating distances. Yet this was one of the most important consequences of bicameralism; it meant that people often did ‘boring’ things merely to escape from boredom - a paradox with which we are all familiar. The result was the discovery that calculation and measurement give us a new power over the physical world.

But it was another ‘change of mind’ that had - and continues to have - the greatest consequences for the human race. When a man is trapped in this thin and unsatisfactory left-brain awareness, he hungers for the richer consciousness of an animal, as a starving man dreams of food. He craves the sense of oneness with nature, that immediate, comfortable feeling of contact with reality. The result is the attitude we now call ‘romanticism’ - the obscure longing for distant horizons, for ‘unknown modes of being’. As W. B. Yeats put it:

What the world’s million lips are searching for Must be substantial somewhere...