A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

that distinguishes him from the brutes, man is a hopeless weakling. It is not surprising that the
Christians laid so much emphasis on Original Sin, man’s innate wickedness; they had the Romans
in front of their eyes as living examples.
These Christians, when they took over Roman civilisation, proved to be very little better. But at
least they transcended Roman pessimism. They returned to a vision that was closer to that of Plato.
Man might not be a god, but at least he had an immortal soul, and could be ‘saved’. Unfortunately,
they insisted that he could only be saved by ceasing to use his mind, and leaving his salvation in the
hands of the Church.
The Muslims were more sensible; their Prophet had nothing against the use of reason. The result
was that science and philosophy eventually came back to Europe as a gift of the Arabs. There
followed the great surge of medieval invention, the revival of learning, the rebirth of science. When
Plutarch taught his contemporaries to appreciate archaeology, he was demonstrating that man can
use the two ‘beams of perception’ simultaneously, that he can look at a broken statue and suddenly
grasp the fact that this was made in Greece nearly two thousand years ago, or in the Rome of
Marius and Sulla.
This new confidence in the power of the human mind reinvigorated science. The results were
spectacular: new knowledge of the heavens, of the laws of nature, of the mechanisms of living
creatures. The men of the eighteenth century had good cause to be proud of human reason and
contemptuous of superstition. Science had transformed human life, and there was every reason to
believe that it would continue to do so. Bacon’s New Atlantis was not really such an impossible
dream.
This was also the period of the rise of the novel - from which we can date our modern age of
violence. There was an increasingly strong feeling that man ought to be free, and that being free
means to do what he likes. Novelists such as Monk Lewis and Maturin explored this theme of
human freedom - and wickedness – with pleasant shivers of apprehension, while de Sade instantly
carried the idea to an extreme that seemed to demonstrate that man is capable of becoming the
wickedest creature alive. But romantics such as Wordsworth, Goethe and Hoffman were
preoccupied with another problem: if man is capable of these breathtaking glimpses of freedom -
what Maslow was to call ‘peak experiences’ - then why do they vanish so quickly? Why can he not
revive them at will? This problem caused a great deal of agonised heart-searching, and was
responsible for the high number of suicides and early deaths among the romantics, who concluded
that life is a cheat.
We can see precisely where they were mistaken. They experienced moments in which the two
‘beams of perception’ became focused, and they felt an overpowering sense of delight and
optimism. In such moments, the old ‘split’ was healed; for a moment, man ceased to be a
‘bicameral’ animal and experienced a new sense of unity - no longer the simple, instinctive unity of
the cow or the drunken man but the intenser unity of a higher level. We could say that he was using
the two modes of perception as stilts that raised him far above most human beings. But, being
unaccustomed to walking on stilts, he soon found himself lying flat on his back, convinced that the
‘glimpse’ had been some kind of delusion.
We have also seen that the nineteenth century was characterised by a surge of pornography. This
could, in fact, be regarded as the underbelly of romanticism. Pornography derives from the
romantic notion that sex is infinitely delightful and infinitely forbidden. We can also see that
pornography is an attempt to achieve ‘objectivity’, a combination of immediacy perception and