The Essential Colin Wilson

  Western man is in the position of a conductor who is unaware that he possesses an orchestra—or is only dimly and intermittently aware of it. Active imagination is a technique for becoming aware of the orchestra. This is 'individuation'. And it is clearly only a beginning. The next task is to develop a random collection of musicians into a great orchestra. This is the real task of the conductor. And this seems to be what Jung meant when he said, towards the end of his life: 'Consciousness is the supreme arbiter.'

  HUMAN EVOLUTION

  From A Criminal History of Mankind, 1983

  Since his advent so many millions of years ago, man has shown himself to be the most remarkable creature who has ever walked the earth. With none of the advantages of the big predators, he taught himself to survive by the use of intelligence. But even so, the stream of evolution from Ramapithecus, through Australopithecus and homo habilis was like a broad, meandering river. Man developed because he learned the use of weapons and tools; but his development was slow because he had not yet learned to use that most valuable of all tools, his mind.

  With homo erectus, the river entered a valley and became a fast-flowing stream. A million and a half years later—which, in geological time, brings us almost to the twentieth century—came Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man, and it is as if the river entered a gorge and suddenly turned into a torrent. The pace quickened again with the beginning of agriculture. With the building of cities, the gorge narrowed and the rapids became dangerous.

  It would hardly seem possible that evolution could flow faster still, but that is what happened at some time between the founding of the cities and the civilizations of ancient Crete and Mycenae. The sheer danger of the rapids created a new level of alertness and determination. Roaring along at top speed between narrow walls, man was forced to concentrate as he had never concentrated before. Bodies struggled in the water; wrecks drifted past him; but the noise and exhilaration swallowed up the screams of the drowning. A man who steers his raft with his jaw set and all his senses strained to the utmost has no time for compassion.

  As he developed determination, man also developed ruthlessness. The narrowing of the senses became a habit—so that whenever he found himself in a quieter patch of water, protected by some buttress from the torrent, he no longer knew how to relax and enjoy the relative calm.

  This explains why man has ceased to be the gentle vegetarian described by Leakey and Fromm. But he has no reason to envy those other animals who are still drifting placidly down broad rivers. For he has developed a faculty that outweighs all the danger, all the misery and violence. He has learned to steer.

  When he learned to use his mind, this ability to steer made him also the first truly creative and inventive creature. He has poured that narrow jet of energy into discovery and exploration. But the sheer force of the jet has meant that whenever it has been obstructed—or whenever men have lacked the self-discipline to control it—the result has been chaos and destruction. Crime is the negative aspect of creativity.

  Throughout history, the ruthless—from Sennacherib to Hitler—have ended by destroying themselves, for their tendency to violence makes them bad steersmen. It is true that their crimes seem to dominate human history. But, as we shall see, it is the good steersmen who play the major part in the story of mankind.

  A REPORT ON THE VIOLENT MAN

  From A Criminal History of Mankind, 1983

  On 13 December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Nanking, in Central China, and began what has been described as ‘one of the most savage acts of mass terror in modern times’—a campaign of murder, rape and torture that lasted for two months. Chinese soldiers had divested themselves of their uniforms and mixed with the civilian population, in the belief that the Japanese would spare them if they were unarmed. The Japanese began rounding them up and shooting them in huge numbers, using machine-guns. The bodies—some twenty thousand of them—were thrown into heaps, dowsed with petrol, and set alight; hundreds who were still alive died in the flames. Because they were indistinguishable from the soldiers, male civilians were also massacred. Women were herded into pens which became virtually brothels for the Japanese soldiers; more than twenty thousand women between the ages of eleven and eighty were raped, and many disembowelled. Many who were left alive committed ritual suicide, the traditional response of Chinese women to violation. Boys of school age were suspended by their hands for days, and then used for bayonet practice. Rhodes Farmer, a journalist who worked in Shanghai came into possession of photographs of mass executions of boys by beheading, of rapes of women by Japanese soldiers, and of ‘slaughter pits’ in which soldiers were encouraged to develop their killer-instinct by bayoneting tied prisoners. When published in the American magazine Look, they caused worldwide condemnation, and the Japanese commander was recalled to Tokyo. The odd thing was that these photographs were taken by the Japanese themselves; for they regarded the atrocities as simply acts of revenge. In two months, more than fifty thousand people died in Nanking, and towards two hundred thousand in the surrounding countryside. (In 1982—when the Chinese were quarrelling with the Japanese about their ‘rewriting’ of history—the official Chinese figure was three hundred and forty thousand.)

  Some six hundred miles to the north-west of Nanking, the city of Peking was already in Japanese hands. But the village of Chou-kou-tien, thirty miles to the south-west, was still held by Chinese Nationalists, and there a team of international scientists were collaborating on a project that had created immense excitement in archaeological circles. In 1929, a young palaeontologist named Pie Wen-Chung had discovered in the caves near Chou-kou-tien the petrified skull of one of man’s earliest ancestors. It looked more like a chimpanzee than a human being, and the Catholic scientist Teilhard de Chardin thought the teeth were those of a beast of prey. It had a sloping forehead, enormous brow-ridges and a receding chin. But the brain was twice as big as that of a chimpanzee. And as more skulls, limbs and teeth were discovered, it became clear that this beast of prey had walked upright. At first, it looked as if this was a cross between ape and man—what earlier anthropologists such as Haeckel had called ‘the missing link’. Nearly half a century earlier the missing link theory had apparently been confirmed when the bones of an ‘ape-man’ had been discovered in Java. The ape-man of Peking clearly belonged to the same species. But the caves of the Chou-kou-tien hills yielded evidence that this was no missing link. Peking man had constructed hearths and used fire to roast his food—his favourite meal seems to have been venison. He was therefore more culturally advanced than had been supposed. This creature, who lived more than half a million years ago, was a true human being.

  He was also, it seemed, a cannibal. All the forty skulls discovered at Chou-kou-tien were mutilated at the base, creating a gap into which a hand could be inserted to scoop out the brains. Franz Weidenreich, the scientist in charge of the investigation, declared that these creatures had been slaughtered in a body, dragged into the caves and there roasted and eaten. By whom? Presumably by other Peking men. In other caves in the area, bones of Cro-Magnon man were discovered, and here too there was evidence of cannibalism; but Cro-Magnon man came on the scene more than four hundred thousand years later; he could not have been the culprit. The evidence of the Chou-kou-tien caves revealed that Peking man had fought against the wild beasts who occupied the caves and had wiped them out; after that, he had fought against his fellow men and eaten them. While editorials around the world were asking how civilised men could massacre the population of a large city, the Peking excavations were suggesting an unpalatable answer: that man has always been a killer of his own species.

  Nowadays, that view seems uncontroversial enough; the threat of atomic annihilation has accustomed us to take a pessimistic view of the human race. But in 1937, the ‘killer ape’ idea met with strong resistance among scientists. According to the theory that had been current since the 1890s, homo sapiens had evolved because of his intelligence. He started life as a gentle, vegetarian
creature, like his brother the ape, then slowly learned such skills as hunting and agriculture and created civilisation. In his book on Peking Man, Dr Harry L. Shapiro, one of the scientists at Chou-kou-tien, does not even mention the mutilations in the base of the skulls; he prefers to believe they were damaged by falling rock and layers of debris. But new evidence continued to erode the older view. As early as 1924, the palaeontologist Raymond Dart had discovered an even older species of ‘ape-man’, which he called Australopithecus (or southern ape-man). In the late 1940s, examining an Australopithecus site near Sterkfontein, Dart found many shattered baboon skulls. Looking at a club-like antelope thighbone, he was struck by a sudden thought. He lifted the bone and brought it down heavily on the back of one of the baboon skulls. The two holes made by the protuberances of the leg joint were identical with similar holes on the other skulls. Dart had discovered the weapon with which the ‘first man’ had killed baboons. It seemed to verify that similar thighbones found in the caves of Peking man had also been weapons . . .

  In 1949, Dart published a paper containing his claim that Australopithecus—who lived about two million years ago—had discovered the use of weapons. Fellow scientists declined to take the idea seriously. In 1953, he repeated the offence with a paper called The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man, which so worried the editor of the International Anthropological and Linguistic Review that he prefaced it with a note disclaiming responsibility for its opinions. For in this paper Dart advanced the revolutionary thesis that ‘southern ape-man’ had emerged from among the apes for one reason only: because he had learned to commit murder with weapons. Our remote ancestors, he said, learned to stand and walk upright because they needed their hands to carry their bone clubs. Hands replaced teeth for tearing chunks of meat from animal carcases, so our teeth became smaller and our claws disappeared to be replaced by nails. Hitting an animal with a club—or hurling a club or stone at it from a distance—meant a new kind of coordination between the hand and eye; and so the brain began to develop.

  At the time Dart was writing his paper, there was one remarkable piece of evidence for the older view that ‘intelligence came first’. This was the famous Piltdown skull, discovered in a gravel pit in 1913. It had a jaw like an ape but its brain was the same size as that of modern man. Then, forty years later, tests at the British Museum revealed that the Piltdown skull was a hoax—the skull of a modern man and the jawbone of an ape, both stained by chemicals to look alike. The revelation of the hoax came in the same year that Dart’s paper was published, and it went a long way towards supporting Dart’s views. The brain of Australopithecus was larger than that of an ape, but it was far smaller than that of modern man.

  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.