Free A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson Page B

altogether closer to the views that had been expressed thirty years earlier by H. G. Wells. In one of his most interesting - and most neglected - books, ‘42 to ‘44 , written in the midst of the Second World War, Wells tried to answer the question of why men are so cruel and so destructive. ‘We now know that the hunters of the great plains of Europe in the milder interglacial periods had the character of sociable, gregarious creatures without much violence.’ Like Fromm and Leakey, Wells believed that the trouble began when men moved into cities, and were ‘brought into a closeness of contact for which their past had not prepared them. The early civilisations were not slowly evolved and adapted communities .  They were essentially jostling crowds in which quite unprecedented reactions were possible’. Ruthless men seized the power and wealth and the masses had to live in slums. This is Wells’s explanation of how man became a killer.
    What puzzles Wells is the question of human cruelty. He makes the important observation that when we hear about some appalling piece of cruelty our reaction is to become angry and say, ‘Do you know what I should like to do to that brute?’ - a revelation ‘that vindictive reaction is the reality of the human animal.’ When we hear of cruelty, we instantly feel a sense of the difference between ourselves and the ‘brute’ who is responsible. And it is precisely this lack of fellow-feeling that made the cruelty possible in the first place.
    It has to be acknowledged that ‘fellow-feeling’ is not the natural response of one human being to another. We feel it for those who are close to us; but it requires a real effort of imagination to feel it for people on the other side of the world - or even the other side of the street. Sartre has even argued, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason , that all men are naturally enemies and rivals. If a man goes for a country walk, he resents the presence of other people; nature would be more attractive if he was alone. When he joins a bus queue, every other person in it becomes a rival - the conductor may shout ‘No more room’ as he tries to climb on board. A crowded city or supermarket is an unpleasant place because all these people want their turn. If a man could perform magic by merely thinking, he would make others dissolve into thin air - or perhaps, like Wells’s ‘man who could work miracles’, transport them all to Timbuktu.
    This is a point that was made with brutal explicitness in Colin Turnbull’s study of a ‘dispossessed’ African tribe, The Mountain People . Since the Second World War, the Ik have been driven out of their traditional hunting grounds by a government decision to turn the land into a game reserve. They became farmers in a land with practically no rain. The result of this hardship is that they seemed to lose all normal human feelings. Children were fed until the age of three, then thrown out to fend for themselves. Old people were allowed to starve to death. In the Ik villages, it was every man for himself. A small girl, thrown out by her parents, kept returning home, looking for love and affection; her parents finally locked her in and left her to starve to death. A mother watched with indifference as her baby crawled towards the communal camp fire and stuck its hand in; when the men roared with laughter at the child’s screams, the mother looked pleased at providing amusement. When the government provided famine relief, those who were strong enough went to collect it, then stopped on the way home and gorged themselves sick; after vomiting, they ate the remainder of the food. One man who insisted on taking food home for his sick wife and child was mocked for his weakness.
    Some writers - like Ardrey - have drawn wide conclusions from the Ik - such as that human values are superficial and that altruism is not natural to us. This is illogical. We could draw the same conclusions from the fact that most of us