"The Criminal History of Mankind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

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"Times New Roman";font-weight:normal;font-style:normal">And how do we ‘cause’ happiness? By what process do we enrich perception?

A simile will help to make this clearer. Think of the mind as a lake. Consciousness is the surface of the lake. All our memories and experiences lie below the surface of the lake - some in its very depths, some floating around just under the surface. When I have any new experience, I ‘complete’ it by calling up memories from below the surface. So when I set out on holiday, I relax into a state of contentment, and all kinds of memories come floating to the surface. These memories may bring a surge of delight, and the delight causes more memories to surface. And suddenly, there are so many memories bobbing around on the surface that I can hardly see the water. The more consciousness is ‘enriched’, the more I experience delight. The more I experience delight, the more memories break the surface. And these are the moments in which I want to shout ‘Of course!’ as it suddenly dawns on me that life is infinitely marvellous and exciting, and that most of us waste it by allowing consciousness to remain a mirror, a flat surface of water.

The next morning, I wake up, and consciousness is once again a smooth watery surface. I make an effort; a few memories bob up, float around for a few minutes, then sink again. And suddenly I can see the basic problem of human existence. It takes energy to bring objects to the surface. I can ‘summon’ this vital energy to a certain extent. But if I am to experience ‘holiday consciousness’, the sense of enrichment, I must start a process of ‘feedback’, whereby my delight releases more energy, and the energy causes more delight. And this seems to be the problem. It is not difficult to cause flashes of ‘delight’ - in fact, as Maslow pointed out, most healthy people have them. But it is far more difficult to start the ‘feedback process’. My mind is usually like an old car with damp spark plugs; I can press the starter until the battery is flat, and the engine still shows no sign of life.

Of course, physical stimulus helps a great deal. This is why I may experience ‘enrichment’ setting out on a holiday, and why children experience it on Christmas day. If I can relax in some new and interesting place, with a glass of wine and the prospect of a good meal, my chances of achieving ‘feedback’ are very high indeed. And here we have the motivation of crime. Haigh, the acid-bath murderer, hankered after fast sports cars, good clothes,  and expensive hotels. He clearly believed that ‘enrichment’ lay in obtaining these by any possible means. Bundy’s crimes could be translated into the belief that no ordinary man can have as much sexual experience as he wants, and that this unfulfilment is a permanent obstacle to enrichment of awareness; he decided that the simplest solution to the problem was rape and murder.

Then why do such methods never seem to succeed? Anyone who has any dealing with criminals - any policeman, lawyer or psychiatrist - will verify that, far from being happier than the rest of us, most of them seem to be gnawed by a permanent dissatisfaction. The Boston Strangler may have worked a few of his problems out of his system; but it took him two thousand rapes and a dozen or so murders, and he paid for these with his freedom and his life. As a method for the enrichment of consciousness, crime is a failure.

The reason should be obvious. Enrichment depends upon focusing the two ‘beams of perception’; and ‘meaning perception’ must be as powerful as ‘immediacy perception’. Meaning perception is a power of the mind; it depends upon a certain mental energy. And this mental energy is precisely what all criminals lack. They lay far too much emphasis on the physical stimulus in the process of ‘enrichment’. Carl Panzram committed his first burglary at the age of eleven: he was reaching out for the physical stimulus; so was Steven Judy, who committed his first rape at the age of twelve.

The poet Shelley, on the other hand, recognised from an early age that the answer lay in strengthening meaning perception. In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, he wrote:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine – have I not kept the vow? 

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave...

Shelley grasped that the real answer to enrichment of awareness lies in that action of ‘summoning’ memories to the surface of consciousness, the ‘phantoms of a thousand hours’ which lie inside us. Proust made the same discovery when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea and was flooded with memories of childhood. Proust also experienced the paradoxical sense that man is really a kind of god: ‘I have ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal...’

The poet also experiences the odd conviction that the physical world around us is not as real as it looks. Shelley writes:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats, though unseen, amongst us ...

and Wordsworth describes how he rowed a boat on to Lake Windermere by night and was overwhelmed by a sense of ‘unknown modes of being’. The man who has once experienced these insights is never likely to become a criminal, for he never makes the criminal’s mistake of believing that the physical world is the only reality. He now knows intuitively that the answer lies in a hidden power behind the eyes.

In fact, even the criminal grasps this, in his own muddled way. As the author of My Secret Life observes himself in the mirror, he is trying to add a final element of realisation to the experience; that is, he is attempting to bring his mind to a focus it does not normally achieve. And this, we can see, is the motivation behind all sex crime. Frederick Baker attempts to achieve it in the rape of a child, Jack the Ripper in his orgy of sadism, Paul Knowles in his rampage of violence. The Boston Strangler deliberately arranges his victims in obscene postures so that he can, so to speak, photograph the scene, engrave it on his consciousness, to be able to ‘summon’ it later to enrich his awareness. And this element of sharpened perception explains the addictive element in crime. The Chicago rapist William Heirens began to experience orgasm as he climbed in through a window. The French gangster Jacques Mesrine turned from fighting rebels in Algeria to armed robbery; the sharpened awareness produced by danger had become a drug.

So crime is not, as Wells suggested in The Croquet Player, some horrible legacy of our cave-man ancestry. It is an attempt to compensate for the narrowed awareness produced by split-brain differentiation; and, in that sense, it springs from the same source as human creativity. Shakespeare said that the lunatic, the lover and the poet ‘are of imagination all compact’; he could have added the criminal to the list. It is a mistake to think of the criminal as inhuman - notwithstanding some of the examples in the previous chapter. He is, on the contrary, more human than the rest of us; he is more enmeshed in the basic fallacy that makes most human life an unsatisfactory pursuit of will o’ the wisps. We are all victims of the ‘passive fallacy’, the failure to grasp that, where happiness is concerned, it is the mind itself that provides that final convulsion of achievement.

Crime is, then, a completely mistaken solution to a problem that accompanies all of us from the cradle to the grave: the problem of personal evolution. But then, as we have seen in the course of this book, most human solutions tend to be mistaken - from the paradise of the religious fanatic to the simplistic materialism of the Marxist. The criminal simply goes farther than most of us in embracing the wrong solution; and, in doing so, provides the rest of us with a flash of insight into our own stupidity - the recognition that we are making the same mistake, but - fortunately - on a smaller scale. This is the real justification for the human interest in crime.

We have seen that this is an evolutionary problem. All animals are trapped in physical immediacy. Man is lucky to have succeeded in achieving some degree of detachment from it. Instinctively he has concentrated on developing the power of the mind - meaning perception. His problem is that his very success has retarded his progress. Civilisation has enabled him to ‘rest on his oars’. He needs challenge or crisis to get the best out of him, but he built civilisation to protect himself from challenge and crisis.

Is there a way out of this vicious circle? Consider again this basic problem of the ‘dual self. Our inner-being may be divided, but we still have the two halves inside our heads, and they are perfectly capable of co-operation - in fact, they do it all the time. As I write these words, my right brain provides the insights, my left translates them into language. Of course, when I perform some simpler function - like eating my breakfast - the left hardly plays any part at all; I can even read a newspaper as I butter my toast.

And this explains how the problem comes about. For if I happen to be eating my breakfast in a hotel, and there is a noisy and irritating child at the next table, I cease to function quite so smoothly. What happens is that the child’s noise distracts my attention from the newspaper, and I - the left-brain self - begin to get angry. I cease to enjoy my breakfast and may even develop indigestion. My left brain has interfered with the smooth functioning of my right brain, my ‘robot’ and my digestion.

And what exactly happens when it interferes in this way? It causes an internal leak of energy. When I am relaxed and interested in what I am doing, my energies are ‘funnelled’ quietly and without waste into the effort I am making. The moment my left brain is distracted by some anxiety, I begin to ‘leak’. And this is civilised man’s basic problem. He ‘leaks’ all the time without even noticing it. And the leakage keeps his consciousness at a far lower pressure than it is capable of attaining.

If his anxiety increases sharply, he suddenly notices how badly he is leaking. He may experience a continual unpleasant queasiness in the pit of his stomach, and anything that reminds him of his anxiety causes a ‘sinking feeling’ - a bigger leak still. The reverse can also happen. He has a second martini, becomes interested in the conversation, and suddenly realises that he is no longer leaking. But these delightful states of mind only make us aware of how much we normally leak without even noticing it.

Anything that makes you self-conscious causes a ‘leak’ - for example, someone staring intently at your feet as you sit on the train and making you wonder whether you have odd socks on. But man’s whole evolution has been the evolution of self-consciousness. It is hardly surprising that ‘leaking’ has become the major characteristic of the human animal. We have only to look at a cat to see that its lack of self-consciousness protects it from ‘leaks’.

Anything that arouses our interest, that makes us focus intently, seals the leaks. It does this by encouraging the two halves of the brain to collaborate without fuss. This explains the disproportionate part that sex plays in human existence. We can imagine, let us say, a man who is suddenly confronted by a girl who believes she is alone, and who is hitching up her skirt to examine a ladder in her stocking. Within a split second, all his ‘leaks’ are sealed, and his attention is undivided - which is another way of saying that his brain is undivided. All kinds of physical functions can produce this state of undividedness - eating, drinking, yawning, walking, even excreting. But few of them do it as instantaneously as sex.

And it is because sex can instantly repair the leaks of divided consciousness that human beings are so prone to sexual deviation - which, as we have seen, is closely connected with crime. John Christie was too self-conscious to enjoy normal sexual intercourse - in his home town he had been known as ‘Can’t-do-it Christie’ and ‘Reggie No-dick’. But if he reduced the girl to unconsciousness, then his self-consciousness disappeared and he could enjoy sex to the full. This, in other words, was the only way in which he could unite the two beams of perception, and it turned him into a mass murderer. ‘Forbiddenness’ would add a new dimension of excitement, and therefore of objectivity. It is not surprising that he experienced a deep sense of peace after a murder, and told the police: ‘I had no regrets.’

The same analysis applies to a man who needs to get prostitutes to dress up as nursemaids or schoolgirls. His meaning perception is so weak in proportion to his immediacy perception that normal sex crushes his vitality. He feels feeble, inadequate, ‘contingent’. The sight of a schoolgirl uniform arouses a kind of inner demon; it rubs its hands and chuckles wickedly as it prepares to lift her skirt; he is no longer feeble and inadequate, but bold and defiant. And this, we can see at a glance, is the basic psychological mechanism of crime. This is why Knowles went on a crime rampage after being jilted; he was asserting: ‘I am not a weakling, a social reject. I have the power to do.’ Through criminal aggression, he was asserting self-respect. The journalist Sandy Fawkes, who became Knowles’s mistress for a few days, described him in her book Killing Time as an interesting and intelligent person. It was precisely because he was an intelligent person that he was racked by the ‘identity crisis’ to which the violence was a response. This explains the whole phenomenon of the ‘high IQ criminal’ which has become so characteristic of our time.

We can also see that the ‘identity crisis’ is due to the distress the left-brain ego feels at the belief that it is ‘on its own’. It is unaware that it possesses a powerful helper only a few centimetres away. This also explains why no poet, artist or composer in history has ever committed a calculated, first-degree murder. The artist may also suffer an identity crisis, a sense of ‘Who am I?’ Yet the fact that he is an artist means that he can never be wholly unaware of the ‘invisible helper’.

We are beginning to see our way towards a solution of the problem - not just of crime, but of the ‘bottleneck’ in human evolution.

The problem - it should now be clear - is that the left-brain ego is unaware of its powers. But then, awareness is something that can be cultivated.

Consider what happens when a hypnotist orders a man to do something that he would normally find very difficult - to stop smoking, or to lie rigid across two chairs while someone jumps up and down on his stomach. What the hypnotist has done is to immobilise the left brain - to stop it from ‘interfering’. But if we are capable of these unusual feats, why can we not order ourselves to do them? Because, as we have seen, the left-brain ego does not believe it has the power. It is unaware of its own capacities.

But this seems absurd. Every time we become deeply interested in something, every time we experience ‘holiday consciousness’, every time we perform some difficult action easily and unselfconsciously, the ego realises that it has a powerful ‘backer’. There are even times, when we are feeling very relaxed and optimistic, when this backer seems to be able to foretell the future, to prevent our making stupid mistakes, even to arrange interesting coincidences. It is presumably this right-brain ‘backer’ who quite gratuitously tells us to expect a letter from someone we haven’t heard from in years. In any case, most normal and healthy people have plenty of experience of the ‘invisible backer’. So it seems preposterous to say that our chief problem is that the left brain is unaware of its powers.

But then, experience is one thing, awareness another. I may be able to drive a car without knowing the first thing about internal combustion engines. I may be able to use a mathematical formula to solve a problem without knowing why it works. I may be able to solve the Rubik cube without knowing why a certain sequence of twists rearranges the sides. But in each of these cases, a certain mental effort can enable me to understand what I am doing, to see precisely why it works. Paying attention to the moments of close collaboration between the right and left brain can endow us with conscious awareness of some of the powers of the left brain.

Abraham Maslow discovered that, when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to recall peak experiences which they had had in the past, but had not noticed at the time, flashes of that deep sense of well-being. He also discovered that, when his students began to talk and think about peak experiences regularly, they began to have more peak experiences. The left brain was beginning to recognise the ‘invisible helper’ and its power to induce those sudden moments of supreme well-being.

And now, at last, we can see the outline of the solution to this problem of human criminality and human evolution.

Once we are aware of some fact, we can begin to absorb it into consciousness until we know it instinctively. And in the past century, we have slowly become aware of the basic facts about consciousness. Freud’s insight into the unconscious, Husserl’s into intentionality, Adler’s into the will-to-power, Maslow’s into the peak experience, Frankl’s into the law of reverse effort, Sperry’s into the double brain: all these have revolutionised our knowledge of human psychology. What has emerged is the recognition that consciousness is not a passive mirror that reflects experience. It is a hand that grasps reality. The tighter it grasps, the ‘realler’ the world becomes. And any sudden ‘clenching’ of this fist induces the flash of the peak experience. This is why, as Dr Johnson says, ‘the knowledge that he is to be hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully’. It is because he is at last using consciousness for its proper purpose, to grip. It is because we so seldom use it for its proper purpose that the hand remains so feeble. When Maslow’s students began to think and talk about the peak experience, this knowledge dawned on them instinctively, and they began to induce peak experiences by a simple clenching of the fist.

‘Clenching’ has the effect of closing the leaks, and closing the leaks has the effect of suddenly increasing the ‘pressure’ of consciousness. This, as Hesse says, is why concentrating on small things revitalises us; it closes the leaks. And ‘clenching’ does it instantaneously, bringing a flash of insight. In the same way crisis so often brings the sense of ‘absurd good news’. It causes consciousness to ‘clench’, convulsively, making us aware that it has ‘muscles’, and that these muscles can be used to transform our lives.

Nothing is easier than to verify this statement. All that is necessary is to narrow the eyes, tense the muscles, make a sudden powerful effort of ‘clenching’ the mind. The result is an instantaneous twinge of delight. It vanishes almost instantly because the ‘muscle’ is so feeble. But we know that any muscle can be strengthened by deliberate effort.

We can also observe that as we ‘clench’ the mind, it produces a sense of ‘inwardness’, a momentary withdrawal into some inner fortress. This is clearly what Kierkegaard meant when he said ‘Truth is subjectivity’. It is, in fact, a sudden flash of contact with the ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside us.

And what relevance has all this to the problem of crime? The answer can be seen if we consider again Dan MacDougald’s cure of ‘hard core psychopaths’ in the Georgia State Penitentiary. A criminal, as Sartre pointed out, is a man who has become accustomed to thinking of himself as a criminal; he feels himself to be a victim - of society, of bad luck, of his own violent impulses and lack of purpose. MacDougald ‘cured’ his criminals by making them recognise that their problems lay in their own mental attitudes. When he intervened in the case of a prisoner who was planning to kill another prisoner with an iron bar - to avenge an insult - the convict invited his enemy to have a sandwich and a coffee, and the situation was resolved; MacDougald had taught him that he was not trapped in some inevitable fatality, some murderous destiny. He had taught him the secret that has transformed man from a naked tree dweller to the most highly evolved creature on earth: that man’s controlling force - ‘Force C’ - is the most important thing about him. As Wells’s Mr Polly discovered: If you don’t like your life, you can change it.

At the moment, society shares the assumption of the criminal: that nothing much can be done. But then, all the major transformations of society have started with the few who know better. The conclusion is inescapable. Only when society recognises that it possesses the power to control crime will crime be controlled.

Looking back over three million years of human history, we can see that it has been a slow reprogramming of the human mind, whose first major turning point was the moment when the mind became aware of itself. When man learned to recognise his own face in a pool and to say I, he became capable of greatness, and also of criminality.

But if this history of human evolution has taught us anything, it is that ‘criminal man’ has no real, independent existence. He is a kind of shadow, a Spectre of the Brocken, an illusion. He is the result of man’s misunderstanding of his own potentialities - as if a child should see his face in a distorting mirror and assume he has changed into a monster.

The criminal is, in fact, the distorted reflection of the human face, the ‘collective nightmare of mankind’. And this insight is in itself a cause for optimism. As Novalis says: ‘When we dream that we dream, we are beginning to awaken’.

The End