A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

his family and his animals lived and died. There was no sewage for the
houses, no drainage, except surface drainage for the streets, no water
supply beyond that provided by the town pump, and no knowledge of
the simplest forms of sanitation...
From I. E. Parmalee Prentice: Hunger and History, quoted by Hazlitt.
And again and again there were appalling famines. In Rome in 436 B.C. it was so bad that
thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber; in England in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries there was a famine approximately every fourteen years, in one of which 20,000
people died in London alone.
In our comfortable twentieth century, we have forgotten the way our ancestors lived for thousands
upon thousands of years. Of course there must have been crime in these ages of hardship and
poverty; but it was nearly all crime of want. The kind of crime discussed by Yochelson and
Samenow is essentially that of a luxury society. The peasant of the Middle Ages had almost no
choice; he could not even leave his village without the permission of the local lord. By comparison,
modern man - even the poorest tramp - has a thousand choices. And the essence of criminality is
that it is the choice of the ‘soft option’. Yochelson and Samenow observed that one of the central
characteristics of the criminal is ‘the quest to be an overnight success’. They cite the case of a
soldier who had won medals in Korea and who was arrested for robbing a petrol station when he
came out of the army. The newspapers treated this as the story of a war hero who found civilian life
too harsh and difficult. The truth is that the man had become accustomed to admiration and success
and found civilian life an anti-climax; he decided he might as well use his army training in a career
of robbery. It seemed to be ‘the soft option’. The decision was typical of the criminal’s shortsightedness,
and consequent poor judgement.
Yochelson and Samenow make us aware that the patterns of criminality change from age to age,
and that it is rash to make generalisations about ‘human nature’ without specifying which period of
history we are talking about. The statement ‘You can’t change human nature’ is based on a fallacy.
Human nature began to change about half a million years ago, when man’s brain - for some
unknown reason - began to expand far beyond his needs. It has been changing ever since.
Even the statement ‘War is as old as humanity’ has been challenged by the historian Louis
Mumford. In The City in History, he argued that it was when men came to live together in cities - in
about 5000 B.C. - that they began to make war. When primitive man formed a raiding party, it was
not to kill people and burn villages but to take a few captives for sacrifice to the gods and for ritual
cannibalism.
Mumford’s own view of the fall of man into warfare and crime runs like this. When ancient man
became a farmer - about 12,000 years ago - he recognised more than ever before his dependence on
the earth and its bounty. Even as a stone age hunter, he had his gods and nature spirits, and his
shamans worked their magic rituals before the hunting party set out. Now that he harvested crops,
he became aware of the earth as a living being, a great mother. The shamans became a priestly
caste; primitive temples and sacred groves became the focus of village life. The king was chosen,
not as a leader, but as an intermediary between man and the gods - rather as the pope is chosen
nowadays. And if the harvest failed, the king would be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. (This part
of Mumford’s argument is based on Frazer’s Golden Bough.}