A Criminal History of Mankind (103 page)

Yet what of those occasions when the delight suddenly returns - when, for example, he comes back from a long business trip, finds her looking radiant, and falls in love all over again? If this is illusion, it must be a singularly persistent one to triumph over experience.

What has happened, in fact, is simply that the two modes of perception have once again combined; immediacy perception and meaning perception have fused together.

In
The Dam Busters
, the story of the wartime RAF squadron, Paul Brickhill explains how they succeeded in destroying the Moener dam. The bombs were spherical, and had to bounce along the surface of the lake to strike the dam from the side. But in order to do this, they had to be dropped from an exact height above the water. The altimeters were not accurate enough, and any form of measuring device suspended from the plane - like a rope of the right length -would blow backwards. Then the inventor Barnes Wallace came up with the solution - to place two lights in the nose and tail of the plane, focused so that their two beams would blend into a single circle at the correct height. When a single circle appeared on the water, it was time to release the bomb.

In moments of excitement, our two modes of perception also focus into a single point, and we experience a sense of total reality. The bird’s eye view and the worm’s eye view combine. When a man is feeling tired, he is flying at the wrong height; so although he is holding his wife in his arms, he is not aware of her
reality
. His immediacy perception is focused, but his meaning perception is blurred.

If, on the other hand, he is talking to a friend about his wife, he may experience a sudden recognition of how much he loves her. His meaning perception has focused - but then, she is not present, so there is no immediacy perception.

This is the problem of most human beings for most of the time. We are flying at the wrong height. So, as Walter stands in front of the mirror, he is trying to focus the two beams into a point. This is also why he enjoys making women describe what he is doing. Most of his sex life had been a blurry perception of immediacy. The writing of
My Secret Life
was an attempt to restore meaning perception. A simpler way of putting it would be to say that it restored
objectivity
.

And now we can begin to see the problem in historical perspective. Human evolution was first of all a response to the challenge of survival. Man created civilisation for his own protection. But living in cities created territorial problems. Man went to war about boundaries. Because of this sense of the ‘alienness’ of his neighbour, robbery and piracy became part of his way of life.

War forced man to grow up. The great dinosaurs had died out from sheer laziness, because there was no challenge. Man was faced with the opposite problem. He had created civilisation for security, and found that his fellow human beings were a far worse menace than wild animals and bad weather. War and natural disasters obliged him to become more vigilant than he had ever been as a Stone Age hunter. He was forced to develop the ‘microscope’ - left-brain perception. One result was cruelty and inhumanity. Another - more important - was increased efficiency in survival.

Then man began to discover that there were enormous compensations in left-brain consciousness. Language is a left-brain function, and he could use language to store his past experience instead of forgetting it. He could even pass it on from generation to generation. Homer was not alive at the time of the Trojan War; but the whole experience had been preserved in language, and Homer was able to write it down two centuries later, so that Greeks in the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles could elaborate it into great dramas.

Moreover, Plato discovered that thinking was man’s natural instrument for problem-solving, rather than old-fashioned trial and error.
Any
problem could be solved by thought. A slave who had never heard of geometry could be made to solve geometrical problems by reason alone. His pupil Aristotle inaugurated an ambitious project for applying these new techniques of thought to every department of human knowledge - and very nearly succeeded. Man had a breathtaking vision: the notion that he might not be merely human after all, but a close relative of the gods.

The Roman experiment seemed to reveal that this was wishful thinking. The Romans were the most remarkable left-brain thinkers so far; they revelled in problem-solving, but they encountered all the disadvantages of left-brain awareness: its narrowness, its tendency to become bogged down in trivialities, its inherent pessimism. Roman civilisation seemed to prove that, in spite of the intellect that distinguishes him from the brutes, man is a hopeless weakling. It is not surprising that the Christians laid so much emphasis on Original Sin, man’s innate wickedness; they had the Romans in front of their eyes as living examples.

These Christians, when they took over Roman civilisation, proved to be very little better. But at least they transcended Roman pessimism. They returned to a vision that was closer to that of Plato. Man might not be a god, but at least he had an immortal soul, and could be ‘saved’. Unfortunately, they insisted that he could only be saved by ceasing to use his mind, and leaving his salvation in the hands of the Church.

The Muslims were more sensible; their Prophet had nothing against the use of reason. The result was that science and philosophy eventually came back to Europe as a gift of the Arabs. There followed the great surge of medieval invention, the revival of learning, the rebirth of science. When Plutarch taught his contemporaries to appreciate archaeology, he was demonstrating that man can use the two ‘beams of perception’ simultaneously, that he can look at a broken statue and suddenly grasp the fact that this was made in Greece nearly two thousand years ago, or in the Rome of Marius and Sulla.

This new confidence in the power of the human mind reinvigorated science. The results were spectacular: new knowledge of the heavens, of the laws of nature, of the mechanisms of living creatures. The men of the eighteenth century had good cause to be proud of human reason and contemptuous of superstition. Science had transformed human life, and there was every reason to believe that it would continue to do so. Bacon’s New Atlantis was not really such an impossible dream.

This was also the period of the rise of the novel - from which we can date our modern age of violence. There was an increasingly strong feeling that man
ought
to be free, and that being free means to do what he likes. Novelists such as Monk Lewis and Maturin explored this theme of human freedom - and wickedness – with pleasant shivers of apprehension, while de Sade instantly carried the idea to an extreme that seemed to demonstrate that man is capable of becoming the wickedest creature alive. But romantics such as Wordsworth, Goethe and Hoffman were preoccupied with another problem: if man is capable of these breathtaking glimpses of freedom - what Maslow was to call ‘peak experiences’ - then why do they vanish so quickly? Why can he not revive them at will? This problem caused a great deal of agonised heart-searching, and was responsible for the high number of suicides and early deaths among the romantics, who concluded that life is a cheat.

We can see precisely where they were mistaken. They experienced moments in which the two ‘beams of perception’ became focused, and they felt an overpowering sense of delight and optimism. In such moments, the old ‘split’ was healed; for a moment, man ceased to be a ‘bicameral’ animal and experienced a new sense of unity - no longer the simple, instinctive unity of the cow or the drunken man but the intenser unity of a higher level. We could say that he was using the two modes of perception as stilts that raised him far above most human beings. But, being unaccustomed to walking on stilts, he soon found himself lying flat on his back, convinced that the ‘glimpse’ had been some kind of delusion.

We have also seen that the nineteenth century was characterised by a surge of pornography. This could, in fact, be regarded as the underbelly of romanticism. Pornography derives from the romantic notion that sex is infinitely delightful and infinitely forbidden. We can also see that pornography is an attempt to achieve ‘objectivity’, a combination of immediacy perception and meaning perception. A man who is in bed with a girl in the dark is trapped in mere sensory impressions; in such a situation there is very little difference between Cleopatra and the fat girl next door. The experience needs to be completed by a sense of reality - meaning perception. This is so feeble in human beings that it tends to switch off when we are in the dark. Yet the human imagination is such a remarkable faculty that a written description of the sexual act can be more ‘real’ - more intense - than the experience of an actual girl in the dark. It is the ‘forbiddenness’ that produces the surge of intensity, and the momentary experience of ‘focusing’. The poet Swinburne affords an interesting example. He was obsessed by flogging and by punishment, and some of the best of the
Poems and Ballads
dwell on pain. His friend Monckton Milnes was a collector of pornography, so Swinburne had access to a great deal of it. His interest in pornography - like the alcoholism of his middle years - was an attempt to revive the intensity of the poetic vision - to clamber back on his stilts. What he craved was ‘objectivity’, the moment of focus. In fact, neither pornography nor alcohol could get him back on his stilts, and his poetry became depressingly dull.

So we can see that the upsurge of sex crime in the second half of the nineteenth century was not simply an expression of human depravity, a result of the wicked self-indulgence that began with the rape of Clarissa Harlowe; it was a clumsy attempt to focus the two beams of perception, a form of perverted romanticism. It is, in fact, the attempt of the individual to evolve at the expense of society.

By 1900, romanticism was dead; it had died of despair. The romanticism of Wordsworth and Goethe is vigorous and optimistic; the romanticism of Verlaine, Dowson and Trakl is tired and sad. The poets of this ‘tragic generation’ had come to accept that the ‘moments of vision’ were an illusion, and that there was no point in struggling. Better to accept that life is a cheat and a fraud and turn your face to the wall...

But the vision of freedom was not dead. It revived in a new form in the twentieth century, calling itself ‘existentialism’. Kierkegaard, the founder of existentialism, had observed that a schoolboy can experience a curious feeling of freedom by concentrating on a fly in the inkwell or the drip of rain from the roof. Hermann Hesse observed that it is when we give our attention to
small
things that we feel renewed and invigorated. Sartre observed the paradox that he had never felt so free as under German occupation, when he was likely to be arrested. Camus recognised that Sisyphus can be free even when condemned to roll a rock uphill for ever. All had recognised that freedom is an inner state in which we cease to leak energy. It is true that man is being continually undermined by boredom. Yet in flashes of insight, he becomes aware of the paradox that
anything upon which he concentrates his full and total attention becomes interesting
. A blank wall would become fascinating if you could put into it the same interest you put into an absorbing book. When Dostoevsky stood in front of a firing squad, he was overwhelmed by the revelation that nothing is boring.

These ‘new romantics’ - for existentialists were precisely that - were less pessimistic than their forebears. They believed that human existence is meaningless; but they also accepted that man has the power of free choice. They also had access to the most important philosophical insight of the twentieth century: Edmund Husserl’s recognition that
consciousness is intentional
. That is to say, consciousness is not simply a mirror that reflects reality; it is more like a hand that has to reach out and
grasp
the things it apprehends.

Now this was, in fact, the answer to the problem that had driven the romantics to despair. They had observed that in ‘moments of vision’ the world seems self-evidently fascinating and delightful, but that for most of the time it seems dull and exhausting. They tried to reconcile the two perceptions, and decided that the ‘moments of vision’ were probably some kind of illusion. With Husserl’s recognition that consciousness is intentional, the problem vanishes. If you look at your watch without paying attention, you fail to see the time. If you look at a blank wall with total attention, you become aware of ‘meanings’ that normally go unperceived. Consciousness participates in perception; it reaches out and
attacks
reality, as the teeth of a mechanical digger tear up the earth.

This recognition is of incalculable importance. Ever since he developed ‘divided consciousness’ - with one side of the brain acting as a microscope, the other as a telescope - man has felt alienated from existence, a passive spectator. What was so exhilarating about the rise of science and technology was that they made man aware that the mind is not really passive - that it can help him transform reality. Husserl’s insight goes deeper still; it is the recognition that consciousness itself is the transformer of reality. At the moment we use it crudely and clumsily, as a baby reaches out to grab at some shining object. But if consciousness is a kind of hand, then it could be trained and developed for as many subtle uses as the hand: for grasping, for striking, for lifting, for caressing, for fashioning, for creating.

The yogis of India caught a glimpse of this truth. In fact, we all recognise it when we experience moments of excitement or absorption. Setting out on a holiday, we experience a delight that goes beyond the satisfaction of our desire for change. There is somehow a recognition that the world is a bigger and more interesting place than we gave it credit for, and that if we could now grasp this insight, it need never again be lost.

Hulme was clearly wrong. Man is
not
a ‘fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant’. He changed drastically when he developed ‘divided consciousness’ to cope with the complexities of civilisation, and he has been changing steadily ever since. His greatest problem, the problem that has caused most of his agonies and miseries, has been his attempt to compensate for the narrowing of consciousness and the entrapment in the left-brain ego. His favourite method of compensation has been to seek out excitement. He feels most free in moments of conquest; so for the past three thousand years or so, most of the greatest men have led armies into their neighbours’ territory, and turned order into chaos. This has plainly been a retrogressive step; the evolutionary urge has been defeating its own purpose.