The Essential Colin Wilson (34 page)

In the early 1960s, two remarkable books popularised this disturbing thesis about man’s killer instincts:
African Genesis
by Robert Ardrey and
On Aggression
by Konrad Lorenz. Both argued, in effect, that man became man because of his aggressiveness, and that we should not be surprised by war, crime and violent behaviour because they are part of our very essence. Ardrey’s final chapter was grimly entitled: ‘Cain’s Children’. Yet both Ardrey and Lorenz were guardedly optimistic, Lorenz pointing out that man’s aggressions can be channelled into less dangerous pursuits—such as sport and exploration—while Ardrey declared, with more hope than conviction, that man’s instinct for order and civilisation is just as powerful as his destructiveness. Ardrey even ends with a semi-mystical passage about a mysterious presence called ‘the keeper of the kinds’, a force behind life that makes for order. Yet the overall effect of both books is distinctly pessimistic.

The same may be said for the view put forward by Arthur Koestler in
The Ghost in the Machine
(1967). Koestler points out: ‘
Homo sapiens
is virtually unique in the animal kingdom in his lack of instinctive safeguards against the killing of conspecifics—members of his own species.’ (He might have added that he is also one of the few creatures who has no instinctive revulsion against cannibalism—dogs, for example, cannot be persuaded to eat dog meat.) Koestler’s explanation is that the human brain is an evolutionary blunder. It consists of three brains, one on top of the other: the reptile brain, the mammalian brain and, on top of these, the human neo-cortex. The result, as the physiologist P. D. Maclean remarked, is that when a psychiatrist asks the patient to lie down on the couch he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile. The human brain has developed at such an incredible pace in the past half million years that physiologists talk about a ‘brain explosion’ and compare its growth to that of a tumour. The trouble says Koestler, is that instead of
transforming
the old brain into the new—as the forelimb of the earliest reptiles became a bird’s wing and a man’s hand—evolution has merely superimposed a new structure on top of the old one and their powers overlap. We are a ‘mentally unbalanced species’, whose logic is always being undermined by emotion. ‘To put it crudely: evolution has left a few screws loose between the neo-cortex and the hypothalamus’, and the result is that man has a dangerous ‘paranoid streak’ which explains his self-destructiveness.

Inevitably, there was a reaction against the pessimism. In
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
(1974), the veteran Freudian Erich Fromm flatly contradicts Dart, Ardrey and Lorenz, and argues that there is no evidence that our remote ancestors were basically warlike and aggressive. ‘Almost everyone reasons: if civilised man is so warlike, how much more warlike must primitive man have been! But [Quincy] Wright’s results [in
A Study of War
] confirm the thesis that the most primitive men are the least warlike and that war likeness grows in proportion to civilisation.’ And in a television series called
The Making of Mankind
(broadcast in 1981), Richard Leakey, son of the anthropologist Louis Leakey (whose investigations into ‘southern ape-man’ had been widely cited by Ardrey to support his thesis) left no doubt about his opposition to the killer ape theory. Everything we know about primitive man, he said, suggests that he lived at peace with the world and his neighbours; it was only after man came to live in cities that he became cruel and destructive. This is also the view taken by Fromm in
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
.

Yet even the title of Fromm’s book suggests that Ardrey, Lorenz and Koestler were not all that far from the truth. ‘Man differs from the animal by the fact that he is a killer,’ says Fromm, ‘the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason . . .’ And the book is devoted to the question:
why
is man the only creature who kills and tortures members of his own kind?

Fromm’s answer leans heavily upon the views of Freud. In
Civilisation and its Discontents
(1931), Freud had argued that man was not made for civilisation or civilisation for man. It frustrates and thwarts him at every turn and drives him to neurosis and self-destruction. But Freud’s view of our remote ancestors implied that they spent their time dragging their mates around by the hair and hitting their rivals with clubs, and that it is modern man’s inhibitions about doing the same thing that make him neurotic. Fromm, in fact, is altogether closer to the views that had been expressed thirty years earlier by H. G. Wells. In one of his most interesting—and most neglected—books,
‘42 to ‘44
, written in the midst of the Second World War, Wells tried to answer the question of why men are so cruel and so destructive. ‘We now know that the hunters of the great plains of Europe in the milder interglacial periods had the character of sociable, gregarious creatures without much violence.’ Like Fromm and Leakey, Wells believed that the trouble began when men moved into cities, and were ‘brought into a closeness of contact for which their past had not prepared them. The early civilisations were not slowly evolved and adapted
communities
. They were essentially jostling
crowds
in which quite unprecedented reactions were possible’. Ruthless men seized the power and wealth and the masses had to live in slums. This is Wells’s explanation of how man became a killer.

What puzzles Wells is the question of human cruelty. He makes the important observation that when we hear about some appalling piece of cruelty our reaction is to become angry and say, ‘Do you know what I should like to do to that brute?’—a revelation ‘that vindictive reaction is the reality of the human animal.’ When we hear of cruelty, we instantly feel a sense of the
difference
between ourselves and the ‘brute’ who is responsible. And it is precisely this lack of fellow-feeling that made the cruelty possible in the first place.

It has to be acknowledged that ‘fellow-feeling’ is
not
the natural response of one human being to another. We feel it for those who are close to us; but it requires a real effort of imagination to feel it for people on the other side of the world—or even the other side of the street. Sartre has even argued, in his
Critique of Dialectical Reason
, that all men are naturally enemies and rivals. If a man goes for a country walk, he resents the presence of other people; nature would be more attractive if he was alone. When he joins a bus queue, every other person in it becomes a rival—the conductor may shout ‘No more room’ as he tries to climb on board. A crowded city or supermarket is an unpleasant place because all these people want
their
turn. If a man could perform magic by merely thinking, he would make others dissolve into thin air—or perhaps, like Wells’s ‘man who could work miracles’, transport them all to Timbuktu.

This is a point that was made with brutal explicitness in Colin Turnbull’s study of a ‘dispossessed’ African tribe,
The Mountain People
. Since the Second World War, the Ik have been driven out of their traditional hunting grounds by a government decision to turn the land into a game reserve. They became farmers in a land with practically no rain. The result of this hardship is that they seemed to lose all normal human feelings. Children were fed until the age of three, then thrown out to fend for themselves. Old people were allowed to starve to death. In the Ik villages, it was every man for himself. A small girl, thrown out by her parents, kept returning home, looking for love and affection; her parents finally locked her in and left her to starve to death. A mother watched with indifference as her baby crawled towards the communal camp fire and stuck its hand in; when the men roared with laughter at the child’s screams, the mother looked pleased at providing amusement. When the government provided famine relief, those who were strong enough went to collect it, then stopped on the way home and gorged themselves sick; after vomiting, they ate the remainder of the food. One man who insisted on taking food home for his sick wife and child was mocked for his weakness.

Some writers—like Ardrey—have drawn wide conclusions from the Ik—such as that human values are superficial and that altruism is not natural to us. This is illogical. We could draw the same conclusions from the fact that most of us get bad tempered when we become hungry and tired. In the case of the Ik, the ‘culture shock’ was particularly severe; as hunters, they practised close co-operation, involving even the women and children; to be suddenly deprived of all this must have left them totally disoriented. But then, the important question about human beings is not how far we are capable of being disoriented and demoralised—losing self-control—but how far we are capable of going in the opposite direction, of using our intelligence for creativity and organisation. Negative cases, like the Ik, prove nothing except what we already know: that human beings are capable of total selfishness, particularly when it is a question of survival. In fact, many primitive peoples practise infanticide and gerontocide. In
The Hunting Peoples
(p. 329) Carleton S. Coon describes how, among the Caribou Indians of Hudson Bay, old people voluntarily commit suicide when the reindeer herds fail to appear and starvation threatens. When the old people are all dead, girl babies will be killed. ‘This is a heartrending business because everybody loves children.’ John Pfeiffer, the author of
The Emergence of Man
, describes (p. 316) how, among the aborigines of Australia, infanticide is the commonest form of birth control, and that between 15 and 50 per cent of infants are killed; it is the mother’s decision and the mother’s job, and she kills the baby about an hour after birth as we drown unwanted kittens.

There is another, and equally instinctive, element that helps us to understand human criminality: xenophobia, dislike of the foreigner. In
The Social Contract
, Ardrey points out that xenophobia is a basic instinct among animals, and that it probably has a genetic basis. All creatures tend to congregate in small groups or tribes and to stick to their own. Darwin even noticed that in a herd of ten thousand or so cattle on a ranch in Uruguay the animals naturally separated into sub-groups of between fifty and a hundred. When a violent storm scattered the herd, it re-grouped after twenty-four hours, the animals all finding their former group-members. And this instinctive tendency to form ‘tribes’ is probably a device to protect the species. If some favourable gene appears, then it will be confined to the members of the group and not diluted by the herd. A study by Edward Hall of the black ghetto area of Chicago revealed that it was virtually a series of independent villages. And even in more ‘mobile’ social groups the average person tends to have a certain number of acquaintances who form his ‘tribe’—Desmond Morris suggested in
The Human Zoo
the number of between fifty and one hundred, figures that happen to agree with Darwin’s observation about cattle. The group may adopt his own modes of dress, catch-phrases, tricks of speech. (Frank Sinatra’s ‘in-group’ was significantly known as ‘the rat pack’.) They enjoy and emphasise the privilege of belonging, and adopt an attitude of hostility to outsiders. Hall’s study of Chicago showed that there was often gang warfare between the ghetto communities.

This helps to explain how the Nazis could herd Jews into concentration camps. Hitler’s racist ideology would not have taken root so easily were it not for the natural ‘animal xenophobia’ that is part of our instinctive heritage. In his book on the psychology of genocide
The Holocaust and the German Elite
, Professor Rainer C. Baum remarks on the
indifference
of the German bureaucrats who were responsible for the concentration camps and the banality of the whole process. They were not frenzied anti-semites, lusting for blood; what was frightening about them was that they had no feeling about the women and children they herded into cattle trucks. And if we assume that this was due to the evil Nazi ideology, we shall be oversimplifying. Human beings do not need an evil ideology to make them behave inhumanly; it comes easily to us because most of us exist in a state of self-preoccupation that makes our neighbour unreal. The point is reinforced by the massacre of Palestinians that took place in two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, in September 1982. Palestinian fighters had agreed to be evacuated from Beirut—after a siege—on the understanding that their women and children would be safe. On Saturday, 18 September the world became aware that Christian phalangists had massacred hundreds of women and children—as well as a few male non-combatants—in the camps, and that the phalangists had been sent into the camps by the Israelis. While the slaughter was going on, the US envoy sent Israel’s General Sharon a message: ‘You must stop this horrible massacre . . . You have absolute control of the area and are therefore responsible . . . ’

What shocked the world—including thousands of Israelis, who demonstrated in Tel Aviv—was that it should be Jews, the victims of the Nazi holocaust, who apparently countenanced the massacre. But Baum’s analysis applies here as well as to Belsen and Buchenwald; it was not a matter of ‘evil’ but of indifference. Most of the mass-murderers in history have simply placed their victims in a different category from their own wives and children, just as the average meat eater feels no fellowship for cows and sheep.

In our humanitarian age, these horrors stand out, and we draw the lesson: that to be truly human demands a real effort of will rather than our usual vague assumption of ‘mutual concern’. Five thousand years ago, no one made that assumption; they were governed by the law of xenophobia and recognised that mutual concern only exists between relatives and immediate neighbours.

As we shall see, there is evidence of a slowly increasing criminality from about 2000 B.C. The old religious sanctions began breaking down at this period; the force that made men come together into cities in the first place was unable to withstand the new stresses created by these ‘jostling crowds’. In his book on
Animal Nature and Human Nature
, Professor W. H. Thorpe comments on the rarity of inter-group aggression between chimpanzees and gorillas, and speculates on why human beings are so different. But he then answers his own question by pointing out that, while there is very little violence between groups of animals in the wild, this alters as soon as they are kept in captivity and subjected to unnatural conditions such as shortage of food and space; then, suddenly, they become capable of killing one another. This is what happened to man when he became a city dweller. The need to defend food-growing ‘territory’ from neighbours in nearby cities made man into a warlike animal. Moreover, cities had to be defended by walls, and this eventually introduced an entirely new factor: overcrowding. And this, it now seems fairly certain, was the factor that finally turned man into a habitual criminal.