Wyndham Lewis made this a theme of his group of novels 
called The Human Age . The first of these, The Childermass , is 
concerned precisely with accelerated media change as a kind of 
massacre of the innocents. In our own world as we become 
more aware of the effects of technology on psychic formation 
and manifestation, we are losing all confidence in our right to 
assign guilt. Ancient prehistoric societies regard violent crime 
as pathetic. The killer is regarded as we do a cancer victim. 
“How terrible it must be to feel like that,” they say. J. M. Synge 
took up this idea very effectively in his Playboy of the Western  
World .

     If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable 
to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform 
and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see 
others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially