by Colin Wilson
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.
It is only in recent years that we have become aware of the role of overcrowding in producing stress and violence. In 1958, a scientist named John Christian was studying the deer population on James Island, in Chesapeake Bay, when the deer began to die in large numbers. There were about three hundred on the island; by the following year, two hundred and twenty of these had died for no
apparent cause. Post mortems revealed that the deer had enlarged adrenal glands—the gland that floods the bloodstream with the hormone called adrenalin, the stress hormone. James Island is half a square mile in size, so each deer had more than five thousand square yards of territory to itself. This, apparently, was not enough. The deer needed about twenty thousand square yards each. So when numbers exceeded eighty, they developed stress symptoms, and the population automatically reduced itself.
A psychologist named John B. Calhoun has made a similar observation when breeding wild Norwegian rats in a pen. The pen was a quarter of an acre and could have held five thousand rats. With a normal birthrate, this could have swelled tenfold in two years. Yet the rat population remained constant at a mere two hundred.
Calhoun was later to perform a classic experiment with his Norwegian rats. He placed a number of rats into four interconnecting cages. The two end pens, which had only one entrance, were the most ‘desirable residences’—since they could be most easily defended—and these were quickly taken over by two highly dominant rats with their retinue of females. All the other rats were forced to move into the two centre cages, so that these soon became grossly overcrowded. There were also dominant males in these two centre cages (it was Calhoun who observed that the number of dominant rats was one in twenty—five per cent), but because of the overcrowding, they could not establish their own territory. And as the overcrowding became more acute, the dominant rats became criminals. They formed gangs and indulged in rape, homosexuality and cannibalism. In their natural state, rats have an elaborate courting ritual. The criminal rats would force their way into the female’s burrow, rape her and eat her young. The middle cages became, in Calhoun’s words, a ‘behavioural sink’.
Ever since Lorenz’s On Aggression, ethologists have warned about the dangers of drawing conclusions about human behaviour from animal behaviour; but in this case, it is impossible to see how it can be avoided. We have always known that our overcrowded slums are breeding grounds of crime. Calhoun’s experiment—performed at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland—shows us why: the dominant minority are deprived of normal outlets for their dominance; it turns into indiscriminate aggression. Desmond Morris remarks in The Human Zoo: ‘Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds, or commit murder. Among human city dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur.’ Animals in captivity also develop various ‘perversions’—which leads Morris to remark that the city is a human zoo. And the reason that a ‘zoo’ breeds crime is that dominance is deprived of its normal outlets and turns to violence. As William Blake says: ‘When thought is closed in caves, then love shall show its root in deepest hell.’
Yet the warning about extrapolating from animal to human behaviour deserves serious consideration. Why is not every large city in the world a ‘sink’ of violence and perversion? It is true that many of them are; yet others, such as Hong Kong, where you would expect to find the ‘dominant rat syndrome’, have a reasonably low crime rate.
Ardrey provides one interesting clue in the chapter on ‘personal space’ in The Social Contract. He describes an experiment carried out by the psychiatrist Augustus Kinzel in 1969. Prisoners in a Federal prison were placed in the centre of a bare room, and Kinzel then advanced on them slowly, step by step. The prisoner was told to call ‘Stop!’ when he felt that Kinzel was uncomfortably close. Non-violent prisoners seemed to need a ‘personal space’ of about ten square feet. But prisoners with a long record of violence reacted with clenched fists long before Kinzel was that close; these prisoners seemed to need a ‘personal space’ of about forty square feet.
This seems to support the ‘personal space’ theory. But it still leaves unanswered the question: why do some criminals need more than others? And the answer, in this case, requires only a little common-sense. When I am feeling tense and irritable, I tend to be more ‘explosive’ than when I am relaxed; so much is obvious. My tension may be due to a variety of causes—hunger, overwork, a hangover, general frustration and dissatisfaction. The effect, as John Christian discovered with his Sika deer, is to cause the adrenal glands to overwork; the result of long-term stress in animals is fatty degeneration of the liver and haemorrhages of the adrenals, thyroid, brain and kidneys. The tension causes fear-hormones to flood into the bloodstream. In The Biological Time Bomb (p. 228) Gordon Rattray Taylor mentions that this is what causes the mass-suicide of lemmings, who are also reacting to over-population. He also describes how American prisoners in Korea sometimes died from convulsive seizures or became totally lethargic; the disease was named ‘give-up-itis’.
But then, we are all aware that our attitudes determine our level of tension. I allow some annoyance to make me angry or impatient. When the telephone has dragged me away from my typewriter for the fifth time in one morning, I may say: ‘Oh dammit, NO!’ and experience rising tension. Or I may take the view that these interruptions are tiresome but unavoidable, and deliberately ‘cool it’. It is my decision.
It seems, then, that my energy mechanisms operate through a force and counter-force, like garage doors on a counterweight system. Let us, for convenience, refer to these as Force T—the T standing for tension—and Force C, the C for control. Force T makes for destabilisation of our inner being. Force C makes for stabilisation and inhibition. I experience Force T in its simplest form if I want to urinate badly; there is a force inside me, making me uncomfortable. And if I am uncomfortable for too long, the experience ceases to be confined to my bladder; my heartbeat increases, my cheeks feel hot. My energies seem to be expanding, trying to escape.
Consider, on the other hand, what happens when I become deeply interested in some problem. I deliberately ‘damp down’ my energies, I soothe my impatience, I focus my attention. I actively apply a counter-force to the force of destabilisation. And if, for example, I am listening to music, I may apply the counter-force until I am in a condition of deep ‘appreciation’, of hair-trigger perception.
When we look at it in this way, we can see that the two ‘forces’ are the great governing forces of human existence. From the moment I get up in the morning, I am subjecting myself to various stimuli that cause tensions, and I am continually monitoring these tensions and applying ‘Force C’ to control them and—if possible—to canalise them for constructive purposes. Biologists are inclined to deny the existence of free will; yet it is hard to describe this situation except in terms of a continuous act of choice. The weak people, those who make little effort of control, spend their lives in a permanent state of mild discomfort, like a man who wants to rush to the lavatory. Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘Those who restrain their desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained’, and this is one of the few statements of that remarkable mystic that is downright wrong-headed. (Admittedly, he is putting it into the mouth of the devil.) Beethoven was notoriously explosive and irascible; but his ‘inhibitory force’ was also great enough to canalise the destabilising force into musical creation.
It is obvious that Sika deer, Norwegian rats, lemmings, snow-shoe hares and other creatures that have been observed to die of stress, lack control of the inhibitory force. Certainly all creatures must possess some control of this force, or they would be totally unable to focus their energies or direct their activities. But in animals, this control is completely bound up with external stimuli. A cat watching a mouse hole, a dog lying outside the house of a bitch on heat, will show astonishing self-control, maintaining a high level of attention (that is, focused consciousness) for hours or even days. But without external stimuli, the animal will show signs of boredom or fall asleep. Man is the only animal whose way of life demands almost constant use of the inhibitory faculty.
We can see the problem of the Ik: they had no reason to develop the inhibitory faculty where personal feelings were concern
ed. As hunter-gatherers, their lives had been very nearly as uncomplicated as those of the animals with whom they shared their hunting grounds. Placed in a situation that required a completely different set of controls, they became victims of their own destabilising forces.
All of which suggests that, in the case of Kinzel’s prisoners, ‘personal space’ was not the real issue. This can be grasped by repeating his experiment. The co-operation of a child will make the point even clearer. Ask the child to stand in the centre of the room, then go on all fours and advance towards him, making growling noises. The child’s first reaction is amusement and pleasurable excitement. As you get nearer, the laughter develops a note of hysteria and, at a certain distance, the child will turn and run. (It may be an idea to conduct the experiment with the child’s mother sitting right behind him, so that he can take refuge in her arms.) More confident children may run at you—a way of telling themselves that this is really only daddy.
Now reverse the situation, and take his place in the centre of the room, while some other adult crawls towards you and makes threatening noises. You will observe with interest that although you have set up the experiment, you still feel an impulse of alarm, and a release of adrenalin. To a large extent, the destabilising mechanism is automatic.
You will also have the opportunity to note the extent to which you can apply the control mechanism. The imagined threat triggers a flight impulse and raises your inner tension. One way of releasing this tension is to give way to it. If you refuse to do this, you will be able to observe the attempts of your stabilising mechanism—the C Force—to control the destabilising force. You will observe that you still have a number of alternatives, depending on how far you choose to exert control. You can allow yourself to feel a rush of alarm, but refuse to react to it. You can actively suppress the rush of alarm. You may even be able, with a little practice, to prevent it from happening at all.