A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

thinking, he would make others dissolve into thin air - or perhaps, like Wells’s ‘man who could
work miracles’, transport them all to Timbuktu.
This is a point that was made with brutal explicitness in Colin Turnbull’s study of a ‘dispossessed’
African tribe, The Mountain People. Since the Second World War, the Ik have been driven out of
their traditional hunting grounds by a government decision to turn the land into a game reserve.
They became farmers in a land with practically no rain. The result of this hardship is that they
seemed to lose all normal human feelings. Children were fed until the age of three, then thrown out
to fend for themselves. Old people were allowed to starve to death. In the Ik villages, it was every
man for himself. A small girl, thrown out by her parents, kept returning home, looking for love and
affection; her parents finally locked her in and left her to starve to death. A mother watched with
indifference as her baby crawled towards the communal camp fire and stuck its hand in; when the
men roared with laughter at the child’s screams, the mother looked pleased at providing
amusement. When the government provided famine relief, those who were strong enough went to
collect it, then stopped on the way home and gorged themselves sick; after vomiting, they ate the
remainder of the food. One man who insisted on taking food home for his sick wife and child was
mocked for his weakness.
Some writers - like Ardrey - have drawn wide conclusions from the Ik - such as that human values
are superficial and that altruism is not natural to us. This is illogical. We could draw the same
conclusions from the fact that most of us get bad tempered when we become hungry and tired. In
the case of the Ik, the ‘culture shock’ was particularly severe; as hunters, they practised close cooperation,
involving even the women and children; to be suddenly deprived of all this must have
left them totally disoriented. But then, the important question about human beings is not how far we
are capable of being disoriented and demoralised - losing self-control - but how far we are capable
of going in the opposite direction, of using our intelligence for creativity and organisation. Negative
cases, like the Ik, prove nothing except what we already know: that human beings are capable of
total selfishness, particularly when it is a question of survival. In fact, many primitive peoples
practise infanticide and gerontocide. In The Hunting Peoples (p. 329) Carleton S. Coon describes
how, among the Caribou Indians of Hudson Bay, old people voluntarily commit suicide when the
reindeer herds fail to appear and starvation threatens. When the old people are all dead, girl babies
will be killed. ‘This is a heartrending business because everybody loves children.’ John Pfeiffer, the
author of The Emergence of Man, describes (p. 316) how, among the aborigines of Australia,
infanticide is the commonest form of birth control, and that between 15 and 50 per cent of infants
are killed; it is the mother’s decision and the mother’s job, and she kills the baby about an hour
after birth as we drown unwanted kittens.
There is another, and equally instinctive, element that helps us to understand human criminality:
xenophobia, dislike of the foreigner. In The Social Contract, Ardrey points out that xenophobia is a
basic instinct among animals, and that it probably has a genetic basis. All creatures tend to
congregate in small groups or tribes and to stick to their own. Darwin even noticed that in a herd of
ten thousand or so cattle on a ranch in Uruguay the animals naturally separated into sub-groups of
between fifty and a hundred. When a violent storm scattered the herd, it re-grouped after twentyfour
hours, the animals all finding their former group-members. And this instinctive tendency to
form ‘tribes’ is probably a device to protect the species. If some favourable gene appears, then it
will be confined to the members of the group and not diluted by the herd. A study by Edward Hall
of the black ghetto area of Chicago revealed that it was virtually a series of independent villages.
And even in more ‘mobile’ social groups the average person tends to have a certain number of