A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

it. Socrates believed it was a craving for knowledge; the Buddha, a craving for eternity; the Jewish
prophets, a craving for God. Yet all have in common the insight that it is a desire for inner peace, a
certain access to some inner world, and that our preoccupation with the material world is the result
of some kind of confusion.
The Romans seem to have been completely devoid of this insight. Their immense vitality found its
highest expression in self-control, self-discipline. They lacked the evolutionary appetite for wisdom
or the mystical craving for eternity. Like all ancient peoples, they possessed strong religious
beliefs; but these expressed themselves in the form of superstitions: sacrifices to the gods, belief in
oracles and omens. To us, these seem to have as little to do with religion as crossing yourself to
avert the evil eye has to do with Christianity.
In its mystical or evolutionary form, the religious impulse may be seen as man’s attempt to escape
the limitations of left-brain consciousness. Human beings, alone of all animals, developed this
divided form of consciousness in order to be able to concentrate on the particular. We needed to
learn to cope with problems and intricacies that would have given any other creature a nervous
breakdown. This ability carries heavy penalties: tension, headache, exasperation, a sense of
entrapment.
For various reasons, the people of Europe developed left-brain consciousness a great deal faster
than the people of the east - of India and China, for example. This could simply be due to later
development in the east; rice was not introduced into China until 2000 B.C., bringing about an
agricultural revolution that made large communities possible. Even under the Shang dynasty, which
began around 1500 B.C. - the time of the destruction of the Minoan Empire - China remained a
country of small villages and farms. The sheer vastness of the country meant that the majority of its
people lived in peace, far from the incursions of border raiders - it was not until the third century
B.C. that Shih Huang ordered the building of the Great Wall. Similar reasons probably explain why
India remained an essentially ‘right-brain’ culture, even after the incursion of the Aryans - who
became an aristocratic warrior class - around 1500 B.C. (Again, we observe this odd coincidence of
dates.) India’s first contact with the megalomaniac left-brain mentality occurred when Alexander
the Great invaded in 327 B.C. (although the Persians had made north-western India a province two
centuries earlier). And Alexander’s conquests hardly took him beyond the Indus. Significantly, the
unrest that followed his death led to the founding of the first Indian Empire under Chandragupta.
Asoka was his grandson; and we have seen that he gave a completely new meaning to the notion of
empire.
It was probably the earlier rise of agriculture in the Mediterranean - the ability of its farmers to feed
large conglomerations of people - that led to its accelerated development; so did the fact that it was
so much more vulnerable to invasion. The Romans developed from simple agriculturalists to
empire builders in a few centuries, while the same development in China and India took millennia.
The Mediterranean was a Darwinian forcing house, where success was achieved at the cost of
ruthlessness. The Greeks had been concerned with questions about the universe and the nature and
destiny of man; but the miseries of the Peloponnesian war made the Athenians as cruel and ruthless
as the Romans who later destroyed Carthage. When Melos expressed a desire for independence in
428 B.C. the Athenians killed all the males and sold the women and children into slavery.
Thucydides said that the trouble with Athens was that it was unable to make up its mind; new
leaders would be elected one day and executed the next. The philosophical temperament was
unfitted for survival in the Mediterranean.