A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

For this was the central problem at this stage of human evolution. Man found himself stranded in
the material world, like a passenger left standing on the platform when the last train has gone.
Instinctively, he knew he ought to be going somewhere, for this internal compulsion to go
somewhere has made man the most highly evolved creature on earth. And this has led to one of the
major paradoxes of human history - a paradox explored by Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History:
that men are at their very best when they are ‘up against it’ and at their worst when success has
allowed them to relax. Herodotus has a story of how some Persians came to their King Cyrus and
suggested that, now they had become conquerors, they should move to a more comfortable and
pleasant land. Cyrus’s reply was: ‘Soft countries breed soft men.’ Toynbee devotes a whole chapter
(pp. 31-73 of Vol. 1) to examining the difference between hard and soft environments, and shows
that the hard environments produce greatness and the soft ones weakness. In China, conditions for
civilisation were far easier on the Yangtse River than on the Yellow River, which was usually
frozen, flooded or choked with swamps. Yet Chinese civilisation came to birth on the Yellow
River, not the Yangtse. In South America, the civilisation of the Andes came to birth in the harsh
northern desert, not in the far more pleasant part which the Spaniards called Valparaiso (‘paradise
valley’). And so he goes on, with example after example, showing that ‘tough’ countries make
creative human beings: Attica and
Boeotia, Rome and Capua, Byzantium and Calchedon, Brandenburg and the Rhineland, even the
Black Country and the Home Counties of England.
Now this is not, of course, a specifically human phenomenon. All wine lovers know that the best
wines in the world come from areas where the grapes have to put up a struggle: in Bordeaux, they
have to burrow through deep gravel, in Champagne they have to fight the cold. Good soil and good
weather - as in the Rhone valley or in Italy or North Africa - produces a wine that is strong but
lacking in character. Plants, like animals, are largely ‘mechanical’, a mass of ingrained habits that
ensure their survival, but also their stagnation. Habit causes them to make no more effort than they
have to. Man is the only animal on the earth who experiences an urge to ‘go somewhere’, to move
forward. But whereas most animals are limited by habit, man is limited by habit and his brain. He
has developed too much of an ‘eye to business’, coping with external problems. So that whenever
these problems vanish, he finds himself becalmed and bewildered.
Clearly, what he needs to develop is an inward eye - an eye not merely to business - but to purpose.
It is self-evident that man is at his best when he is driven by some sense of long-term purpose, and
that, conversely, he ‘goes to pieces’ when he lacks all sense of purpose - this explains why so many
men die shortly after retiring. Our everyday purposes - keeping ourselves physically and
emotionally satisfied - are too small, too fragmentary and piecemeal to summon the best that is in
us. ‘They lived happily ever after’ is actually a formula for mediocrity. We feel instinctively that
the truly satisfying life would be spanned by one great overarching bridge of purpose. This was the
instinctive recognition that was slowly transforming the world at the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Let us look more closely at the way this craving for ‘long term solutions’ expressed itself in the life
of one of the most remarkable of all visionaries: the prophet Mahomet.
A few miles from the eastern shore of the Red Sea, in the Sirat Mountains of Saudi Arabia, there is
a sandy and inhospitable valley. It contains a well that is fed from a deep underground source, and
which consequently never runs dry. Long before the Romans set foot in North Africa it had become
a regular stopping place for caravans and for wandering Bedouins. The well - called Zem-zem -