A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

turn to crime - like Hornung’s Raffles or Chesterton’s Flambeau - because they find civilised life
unbearably dull. Unadventurous individuals, like Walter, may seek ‘adventure’ in seduction and the
quest for sexual variety. The element of danger may be absent, but the ‘forbidden’ provides the
excitement.
All this enables us to see that the stories in The Pearl are, in fact, a form of imaginary sex crime.
Victorian pornography only magnified a process that had been taking place since man built the first
cities. When a man lives a complex social life among his fellow men, he can no longer allow free
expression to his spontaneous impulses. He could be compared to someone who has become
accustomed to driving at ninety miles an hour on the open highway, and then has to get used to the
heavy traffic in a city. Our minds have a brake as well as an accelerator (and, for practical
purposes, we could say that the right brain is the accelerator, the left the brake). The more civilised
we become, the more we have to learn to stamp on the brake. Every impulse has to be monitored
and checked.
We can see the result in any shy adolescent. The tendency to blush and stammer springs out of a
nervous habit of applying the accelerator and brake simultaneously. And ten thousand years or so
of civilisation have turned us all into permanent adolescents. We do not all blush and stammer;
nevertheless, at almost any point in our daily-lives, we are equally ready to apply the accelerator or
the brake. This also means that we have a ‘double’ view of any challenge. Part of us is inclined to
go ahead; part holds back. Part of us sees it as a wonderful opportunity; part sees it as a dangerous
trap.
In effect, it is as if every one of us contained a kind of Faust and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s
Mephistopheles describes himself as ‘the spirit that negates’. He is the perpetual doubter. But, as
William Blake remarked:
If the sun and moon should doubt
They’d immediately go out.
Man’s life is a permanent state of ‘ambivalence’, a continual attempt to negotiate minor hurdles and
overcome inhibitions. This explains why man is the only creature who goes insane and commits
suicide.
In many of us, ‘ambivalence’ is so much a way of life that we are not really sure we want to go on
living. We do, of course. Any sudden danger makes us aware that the desire to live constitutes the
very foundation of our being. And this is why human beings voluntarily expose themselves to
dangers - drive racing cars, pilot single-handed yachts, climb mountains. Danger raises them above
the ‘ambivalence’ and fills them with the certainty that life is strange and beautiful.
This also explains why the history of civilisation is largely a history of wars; war is like driving at
ninety miles an hour. And when man is not at war, life becomes a search for what William James
called ‘the moral equivalent of war’ - forms of excitement, of purpose, that sweep away our doubts.
These ‘doubts’ have become purely automatic reflexes, like a knee-jerk or the salivation of a
Pavlov dog. The Norwegian writer Agnar Mykle has a novel, The Hotel Room, that enables us to
see this point very clearly. The hero has gone to the bedroom of a woman he knows slightly, and
tries to force her to make love. They struggle for a long time, and he finally succeeds in gaining
entrance. At this, she decides to give way. ‘But already, as he was undressing, he had caught the
faint smell from her loins that told him she had made herself sterile for the occasion. For a brief
instant that had excited him, but the next moment... the effect had been damping, fatal.’