A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

The worm’s eye view has introduced another complication: it has made man far more
‘hypnotisable’. We hypnotise an animal by narrowing its attention. Man’s attention is almost
permanently narrowed. Hypnosis is basically a loss of the sense of reality (clinically speaking, this
is known as schizophrenia). Man spends most of his life in a semi-hypnotised state. And this, as we
have seen, explains a great deal of violent crime. The hypnosis makes us feel trapped in triviality.
Rupert Brooke welcomed the First World War, and compared it to the experience ‘of swimmers
into cleanness leaping’. Violence usually has this effect - like a thunderstorm that clears the air.
Violence is the snap of the hypnotist’s fingers.
It begins to look, then, as if the development of ‘double consciousness’ was one of man’s greatest
mistakes. For crime is basically an attempt to escape the narrowness of left-brain consciousness.
This applies particularly to sex crime. There is a passage in My Secret Life in which Walter
describes picking up a middle-aged woman and a ten-year-old girl. Back in her lodgings, he
persuades the woman to allow him to penetrate the girl. Then he stands in front of the mirror,
holding her against him, so he can actually see himself doing it. He is trying to make himself realise
it is actually happening. Some couples have mirrors attached to the bedroom ceiling for the same
reason.
Let us look more closely at the mechanism involved here. The philosopher A. N. Whitehead
pointed out that we have two ‘modes’ of perception, which he called ‘presentational immediacy’
and ‘causal efficacy’. ‘Immediacy’ could be described as ‘close-up perception’, the worm’s eye
view. But we have another mode of perception which corresponds to the bird’s eye view. As you
read this paragraph, you take it in sentence by sentence. If the argument is too complicated, or
badly presented, you will remain in this state of ‘worm’s eye’ perception. This could also happen
simply because you are very tired, and fail to make the act of connection between the sentences.
This act of connection - of linking them together in a sequence of cause and effect - allows a leap
from the worm’s eye view to the bird’s eye view. This is what Whitehead calls ‘causal efficacy’. It
would be simpler to call it ‘meaning perception’.
Sartre’s novel Nausea is about a man whose perception is always collapsing into the ‘worm’s eye
view’. Reality suddenly seems stupid and meaningless. Sartre argues that ‘nausea’ is truer than
‘meaning perception’, because we add the meaning to life by a kind of act of faith - or delusion. A
man falls in love with a girl, and believes that she is the most exquisite and desirable creature in the
world. He marries her and they go on honeymoon. That first night is not a disappointment - in fact,
it is very enjoyable. Yet it is not quite the rapture he expected; it is somehow too real. And a year
after they are married, he makes love to her as a matter of routine; sometimes he even allows his
mind to wander and pretend it is somebody else. If he recalls that early adoration, he smiles wryly;
it seems to be based upon a lack of insight into her actuality.
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