A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

can’t be happening.’ Gosmann did ‘get it in the neck’ from the judge; he was sentenced to life
imprisonment with no possibility of release.
In the case of Klaus Gosmann we can see clearly the connection between crime and the sense of
identity. If Gosmann had possessed the simple consciousness of an animal, he would have been
incapable of crime. Most young people understand that need to deepen the sense of identity, and the
feeling of envy and admiration for people of strong personality who seem to ‘know who they are’.
(No doubt this was the basis of Gosmann’s admiration of his own father.) A great many of the
activities of the young - from wearing strange garments to driving at ninety miles an hour - are
attempts to establish the sense of identity. A dog has no such problems. It is entirely lacking in
reflective self-consciousness. Consequently, it would be incapable of ‘crime’ in our human sense of
the word. Crime is basically the assertion of the ‘I’. ‘I’ strike someone in the face; ‘I’ order the
bank clerk to hand over the money; ‘I’ pull the trigger.
Now it should be quite obvious that without this sense of ‘I’, there can be no crime. If your dog
chases sheep and you give it a beating, it will in future feel an inhibition about chasing sheep. Even
when it is out for a walk on its own, it will remember that chasing sheep is a forbidden activity. Yet
a burglar who has spent five years in prison - a far more savage punishment than a good beating -
may ignore the inhibition next time he sees an open window. And this is because it is no longer a
simple matter of response (crime) and inhibition (punishment). A third element has entered the
situation: the burglar’s sense of his own personality, his ego. A sudden opportunity presents him
with a challenge - ‘I can probably get away with it’ - and if he gets away with it, there is a feeling
of self-congratulation: ‘I did it!’ - the feeling Klaus Gosmann recorded in his diary after his first
murder. When man first became capable of that kind of self-congratulation - a fairly common form
of self-awareness - he also became capable of crime.
The question of precisely when this happened may seem unanswerable. But a startling and
controversial theory has been advanced in a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Dr Julian Jaynes, of Princeton University (published by
Houghton Mifflin in Boston in 1976). When it appeared reviews were almost uniformly hostile, and
it is easy to understand why. According to Jaynes, the authors of the Old Testament and the Epic of
Gilgamesh, of the Iliad and Odyssey, were entirely lacking in what we would call ‘selfconsciousness’.
Their consciousness looked outward, towards the external world, and they had no
power of looking inside themselves. He says of the characters in Homer: ‘We cannot approach
these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes... Iliadic man did not have
subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind space to
introspect upon.’
This is a baffling statement, because we are so accustomed to ‘looking inside ourselves’ when we
have to make a decision. ‘Shall I go by train or bus?’ We talk to ourselves, just as we would to
another person. And it is hard to imagine how we could make any decision without this kind of
introspection. It is true that if I step off the pavement as a bus comes round the corner, I jump back
without a moment’s hesitation; but that is a very simple ‘decision’. To decide whether to take a bus
or a train, I must form a mental picture of the two alternatives and compare them; I must look inside
myself. And it is quite impossible to imagine how King Solomon or Ulysses made up their minds
without going through a similar process.
According to Jaynes, the answer is that they heard voices that told them what to do: voices inside
their heads. Jaynes first became convinced of this possibility when he had a similar experience.