Whatdya mean, Substack? This here’s a Superstack!!
Happy summertime, folks! It’s been a gloomy old winter and a long time coming, but now the sun is out in my world and, I hope, yours. The homicide rate always goes up with the temperature, so they tell us, but when you’re able to sit outside with a cold beer and a good book, it’s difficult to credit how anyone would want to spoil it by behaving in an ugly manner.
And, some philosophers assure us, the real nature of sin is exactly that - aesthetically displeasing behaviour. Perhaps ‘God is good, God is truth, God is beauty’, but, if so, the devil is His opposite on all three counts. Crime is as ugly as sin and sin is as ugly as the ugliest serpent in the Garden.
Here’s an interesting observation: the creatures that human beings tend to find the most aesthetically repulsive also tend to be the ones that posed the greatest threat to our ancestors’ survival. Even if you happen to be one of those people who rather likes snakes, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies, you’ll surely agree that they are hardly pretty. (See that word, ‘creepy-crawly’? Is there a reason why the word ‘creep’ means more than one thing?)
In his memoirs, a man named Stanley Scott recalls looking through photographs of felons in the Police Gazette. Stanley Scott was the governor of Britain’s Parkhurt Prison, a man who dealt with criminals all day every day. He describes:
“…the ‘bruiser,’ the half-imbecile, the man with a cast, the man with the huge, bulbous head of the deranged mind. Collarless men, rough and dirty, just as they came into prison, unshaven, unkempt, down-at-heel; female ‘pub-hangers’ with bibulous complexions and dim eyes; much waisted [sic], effeminate little boys, set smiles flickering on their lips […] human monstrosities, their faces distorted by vicious scheming and loose living; men and women with that curious squint that comes from an abnormal brain…”[i]
Stanley Scott clearly believed that criminals looked different from regular civilians like you and me. To detect them would require no special skills, just our own two eyes. Criminals, in other words, were their own worst enemies. Their guilt was written where no one could avoid seeing it. Their own faces grassed them up.
Such ideas ought to seem hokey and outmoded today. The modern world is surely more enlightened.
Is it, though? You’d never mistake the villain in an action movie for the hero (particularly if the hero is James Bond). Villains have their own look. You can spot a villain a mile off. Villains look, well, bad.
Even today we expect criminals to have a certain look, and not necessarily a good one. We imagine Death Row as a collection of stopped clocks and cracked mirrors. And when we expect to see things, of course, we start looking for them. In the Southern states of the USA you can (as I recently did) buy a magazine called Just Busted News for the bargain price of $1. There’s nothing inside but mugshots of recently convicted felons. ‘Look Who’s in Jail’ says the cartoon police officer on the front.
Why would you buy Just Busted News? I’ll tell you why. It’s interesting. As long as you keep your browsing down to a few minutes at a time, in fact, it’s really interesting. If an antelope is on the right side of the protective fence, it will stop everything it’s doing to stare at a pride of lions…just stare and stare. What is the antelope learning? Is it the same thing that readers of Just Busted News are learning?
I suspect so. I’m not alone. One of history’s most interesting scientists thought so, too. Sir Francis Galton hit on the idea that physical appearance might be a clue to criminality. Perhaps it would even tell us the type of crime a person might be responsible for. Perhaps your typical murderer, for instance, looked different from your typical thief, or your typical fraudster. A nice idea, this, but how to find out?
Galton devised a means. In this week’s newsletter I’ll tell you all about it, you lucky subscriber, you. And remember, if you have friends who’d like to learn, too, why be selfish? Tell them all about Crime & Psychology! It’s the best, kindest, most aesthetically pleasing thing you can do. Those blue buttons below? Pretend they’re Tyson Fury and you’re Oleksandr Usyk:
This week’s bullet points are all about Sir Francis Galton. Here is what you need to about one of history’s most interesting scientists:
· He was very clever indeed. One well-known researchers put his IQ at nearly 200[ii]. That would make Galton one of the smartest people in the history of people.
· His cousin was no less a bloke than Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species. Galton was one of Darwin’s first readers and immediately became a proponent of functionalism – the idea that the characteristics of a living organism depend on the purpose they serve.
· Statistics! He developed many of the techniques upon which Psychology – not to mention most other sciences – came to depend. Fellow nerds will be interested to learn that he developed the basics of correlation while sitting in a railway station – the kind of noisy environment in which most of us struggle to concentrate on a paperback.
· He was first to bring scientific credibility to the criminological study of fingerprints. By way of homage, their distinguishing features are still known as Galton marks.
· Galton was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham[iii], which is where your humble correspondent first went swimming, with his school, aged five. Disappointingly, Galton failed to put in an appearance.
That’s all for this Sunday. I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. Don’t forget to Like, Share, and tell your friends about Crime & Psychology!
Quentin Matsys image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. References provided partly out of academic habit, but also so you can look up anything that you find particularly interesting.
[i] Scott, Stanley: The Human Side of Crook and Convict Life, Hurst & Blackett Ltd, London, nd
[ii] Terman, Lewis M: ‘The intelligence quotient of Francis Galton in childhood’, American Journal of Psychology, 28, 209-15, 1917
[iii] England, not Alabama.