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

history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with
a chapter predicting that mankind will find peace through the League of Nations and world government.
(It was Wells who coined the phrase ‘the war to end war’.)

What had happened? Many years later, I put the question to a friend of Wells, the biblical historian Hugh
Schonfield. His answer was that Wells had been absolutely certain that he had the solutions to all the
problems of the human race, and that he became embittered when he realised that no one took him
seriously. At the time, that seemed a plausible explanation. But since then I have come upon what I

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believe to be the true one. In 1936, Wells produced a curious short novel called The Croquet Player,
which is startlingly different from anything he had written before. It reveals that Wells had become aware
of man’s capacity for sheer brutality and sadism. The Outline of History plays down the tortures and
massacres; in fact, it hardly mentions them. Wells seems totally devoid of that feeling for evil that made
Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, speak of ‘the horrifying sense of sin manifest in human affairs’.
Wells’s view of crime was cheerfully pragmatic. In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind he
spoke of it as ‘artificial’, the result of ‘restrictions imposed upon the normal “natural man” in order that
the community may work and exist.’ He seems quite unaware that the history of mankind since about
2500 B.C. is little more than a non-stop record of murder, bloodshed and violence. The brutalities of the
Nazi period forced this upon his attention. But it seems to have been the horrors of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and the revelations of Belsen and Buchenwald, which convinced him that man was bound to
destroy himself from the beginning, and that ‘the final end is now closing in on mankind’.

I am not suggesting that Wells’s view of history was superficial or wrong-headed; as far as it went, it was
brilliantly perceptive. As a late Victorian, he was aware of the history of mankind as a marvellous story of
invention and achievement, of a long battle against danger and hardship that had resulted in modern
civilisation. And it is certainly true that man’s creativity is the most centrally important fact about him.
What Wells failed to grasp is that man’s intelligence has resulted in a certain lopsidedness, a narrow
obsessiveness that makes us calculating and ruthless. It is this ruthlessness - the tendency to take ‘short-
cuts’ - that constitutes crime. Hitler’s mass murders were not due to the restrictions imposed on natural
man so the community can exist. They were, on the contrary, the outcome of a twisted kind of idealism,
an attempt to create a ‘better world’. The same is true of the destruction of Hiroshima, and of the terrorist
bombings and shootings that have become everyday occurrences since the 1960s. The frightening thing
about the members of the Japanese Red Brigade who machine-gunned passengers at Lod airport, or the
Italian terrorists who burst into a university classroom and shot the professor in the legs - alleging that he
was teaching his students ‘bourgeois values’ - is that they were not criminal lunatics but sincere idealists.
When we realise this we recognise that criminality is not the reckless aberration of a few moral
delinquents but an inevitable consequence of the development of intelligence, the ‘flip side’ of our
capacity for creativity. The worst crimes are not committed by evil degenerates, but by decent and
intelligent people taking ‘pragmatic’ decisions.

It was basically this recognition that plunged Wells into the nihilism of his final period. He had spent his
life teaching that human beings can be guided by reason and intelligence; he had announced that the First
World War had been fought to end war and that the League of Nations and world government would
guarantee world peace. And at that point, the world exploded into an unparalleled epoch of murder,
cruelty and violence: Stalin’s starvation of the kulaks, the Japanese ‘rape’ of Nanking, Hitler’s
concentration camps, the atomic bomb. It must have seemed to Wells that his whole life had been based
on a delusion, and that human beings are incorrigibly stupid and wicked.