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

If Wells had understood more about the psychology of violence, he would not have allowed this insight to
plunge him into despair. Criminality is not a perverted disposition to do evil rather than good. It is merely
a childish tendency to take short-cuts. All crime has the nature of a smash and grab raid; it is an attempt to
get something for nothing. The thief steals instead of working for what he wants. The rapist violates a girl

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instead of persuading her to give herself. Freud once said that a child would destroy the world if it had the
power. He meant that a child is totally subjective, wrapped up in its own feelings and so incapable of
seeing anyone else’s point of view. A criminal is an adult who goes on behaving like a child.

But there is a fallacy in this childish morality of grab-what-you-want. The person who is able to indulge
all his moods and feelings is never happy for more than a few moments together; for most of the time, he
is miserable. Our flashes of real happiness are glimpses of objectivity, when we somehow rise above the
stifling, dreamlike world of our subjective desires and feelings. The great tyrants of history, the men who
have been able to indulge their feelings without regard to other people, have usually ended up half insane;
for over-indulged feelings are the greatest tyrants of all.

Crime is renewed in every generation because human beings are children; very few of us achieve
anything like adulthood. But at least it is not self-perpetuating, as human creativity is. Shakespeare learns
from Marlowe, and in turn inspires Goethe. Beethoven learns from Haydn and in turn inspires Wagner.
Newton learns from Kepler and in turn inspires Einstein. But Vlad the Impaler, Jack the Ripper and Al
Capone leave no progeny. Their ‘achievement’ is negative, and dies with them. The criminal also tends to
be the victim of natural selection - of his own lack of self-control. Man has achieved his present level of
civilisation because creativity ‘snowballs’ while crime, fortunately, remains static.

We may feel that Wells must have been a singularly naive historian to believe that war was about to come
to an end. But this can be partly explained by his ignorance of what we now call sociobiology. When
Tinbergen and Lorenz made us aware that animal aggression is largely a matter of ‘territory’, it suddenly
became obvious that all wars in history have been fought about territory. Even the murderous behaviour
of tyrants has its parallels in the animal world. Recent studies have made us aware that many dominant
males, from lions and baboons to gerbils and hamsters, often kill the progeny of their defeated rivals.
Hens allow their chicks to peck smaller chicks to death. A nesting seagull will kill a baby seagull that
wanders on to its territory from next door. It seems that Prince Kropotkin was quite mistaken to believe
that all animals practise mutual aid and that only human beings murder one another. Zoology has taught
us that crime is a part of our animal inheritance. And human history could be used as an illustrative
textbook of sociobiology.

Does this new view of history suggest that humankind is likely to be destroyed by its own violence? No
one can deny the possibility; but the pessimists leave out of account the part of us that Wells understood
so well - man’s capacity to evolve through intelligence. It is true that human history has been
fundamentally a history of crime; but it has also been the history of creativity. It is true that mankind
could be destroyed in some atomic accident; but no one who has studied history can believe that this is
more than a remote possibility. To understand the nature of crime is to understand why it will always be
outweighed by creativity and intelligence.

This book is an attempt to tell the story of the human race in terms of that counterpoint between crime and
creativity, and to use the insights it brings to try to discern the next stage in human evolution.