A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

measuring device suspended from the plane - like a rope of the right length -would blow
backwards. Then the inventor Barnes Wallace came up with the solution - to place two lights in the
nose and tail of the plane, focused so that their two beams would blend into a single circle at the
correct height. When a single circle appeared on the water, it was time to release the bomb.
In moments of excitement, our two modes of perception also focus into a single point, and we
experience a sense of total reality. The bird’s eye view and the worm’s eye view combine. When a
man is feeling tired, he is flying at the wrong height; so although he is holding his wife in his arms,
he is not aware of her reality. His immediacy perception is focused, but his meaning perception is
blurred.
If, on the other hand, he is talking to a friend about his wife, he may experience a sudden
recognition of how much he loves her. His meaning perception has focused - but then, she is not
present, so there is no immediacy perception.
This is the problem of most human beings for most of the time. We are flying at the wrong height.
So, as Walter stands in front of the mirror, he is trying to focus the two beams into a point. This is
also why he enjoys making women describe what he is doing. Most of his sex life had been a blurry
perception of immediacy. The writing of My Secret Life was an attempt to restore meaning
perception. A simpler way of putting it would be to say that it restored objectivity.
And now we can begin to see the problem in historical perspective. Human evolution was first of
all a response to the challenge of survival. Man created civilisation for his own protection. But
living in cities created territorial problems. Man went to war about boundaries. Because of this
sense of the ‘alienness’ of his neighbour, robbery and piracy became part of his way of life.
War forced man to grow up. The great dinosaurs had died out from sheer laziness, because there
was no challenge. Man was faced with the opposite problem. He had created civilisation for
security, and found that his fellow human beings were a far worse menace than wild animals and
bad weather. War and natural disasters obliged him to become more vigilant than he had ever been
as a Stone Age hunter. He was forced to develop the ‘microscope’ - left-brain perception. One
result was cruelty and inhumanity. Another - more important - was increased efficiency in survival.
Then man began to discover that there were enormous compensations in left-brain consciousness.
Language is a left-brain function, and he could use language to store his past experience instead of
forgetting it. He could even pass it on from generation to generation. Homer was not alive at the
time of the Trojan War; but the whole experience had been preserved in language, and Homer was
able to write it down two centuries later, so that Greeks in the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles
could elaborate it into great dramas.
Moreover, Plato discovered that thinking was man’s natural instrument for problem-solving, rather
than old-fashioned trial and error. Any problem could be solved by thought. A slave who had never
heard of geometry could be made to solve geometrical problems by reason alone. His pupil
Aristotle inaugurated an ambitious project for applying these new techniques of thought to every
department of human knowledge - and very nearly succeeded. Man had a breathtaking vision: the
notion that he might not be merely human after all, but a close relative of the gods.
The Roman experiment seemed to reveal that this was wishful thinking. The Romans were the most
remarkable left-brain thinkers so far; they revelled in problem-solving, but they encountered all the
disadvantages of left-brain awareness: its narrowness, its tendency to become bogged down in
trivialities, its inherent pessimism. Roman civilisation seemed to prove that, in spite of the intellect