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The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

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This is a very provocative speculation about the nature of human beings and human groups. It is built on biological science, but interpreted in a highly idiosyncratic way. A definite page-turner, with a lot of scientific and some scholarly references, but how accurate is it?

This is a selective but often chillingly familiar guided tour through human history. Bloom cleverly and casually crosses fields of study, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes making literal comparisons, and often being unclear as to which he intends. The result is an intriguing mixture of science, historical interpretation, and science fiction. The flavor is distinctly Darwinian, but with a twist.

"The Lucifer Principle" itself is a simple acknowledgement that in the natural world we take the bad with the good, often as the flip side of the good. The same forces that promote cooperation also promote barbarity.

Bloom starts out with a vivid presentation of the Darwinian vision emphasizing the competition of vehicles for the benefit of their replicators, the "selfish gene" theme at its most lurid. "Survival of the fittest" has its way. At that point, Bloom introduces the twist. He proposes something that sociologists latched on to, but which most evolutionary theorists of recent years have avoided like the plague. He raises the spectre of the "superorganism."

The superorganism was once a popular theme of old structuralist anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss, who saw society as a complex machine driven with the help of a common cognitive structure of individuals in terms of certain themes. Bloom's superorganism is a much more ambiguous blob, held together by "memes" which hook into our primitive drives.

The structuralists mostly saw the superorganism from the top-down, attempting to find patterns in culture that revealed its nature. Bloom instead derives the superorganism from the bottom-up by showing how people who share culture tend to form alliances. The alliances take on the direction given by the "memes" which exploit biological drives.

The idea that groups of organisms can share a fate so closely that they live or die as a unit is something that evolutionary theorists backed off from because it seemed that the genetic self-interest of organisms would nearly always tend to overpower any tendency for traits to arise "for the good of the group." We might end up with traits that help us exploit living in groups, which Matt Ridley calls "groupishness" in contrast to
"selfishness," but it is still genetic self-interest.

Bloom departs from this mainstream view by making the argument that mechanisms for suicide have evolved for both cells (apoptosis, programmed cell death) and individual self-destruction. These same things are explained in very different terms in mainstream evolutionary biology, as either artifacts of adaptations, or adaptations for one set of conditions that become maladaptive in other circumstances.

Evolutionary theorists tend to avoid seeing self-destruction as adaptive. The common theme, Bloom points out, is loss of connectivity with the group. When neurons can't hook up during the wiring of a nervous system, they commit hara-kiri. When humans can't hook up with each other, Bloom theorizes, they also tend to go off and remove themselves from the gene pool. An intriguing possibility that make a new interpretation of "learned helplessness" and "stress" research. This is perhaps Bloom's most interesting and potentially fruitful idea. Bloom builds much better technically on the group selection aspects of his thinking in "The Global Brain."

In "The Lucifer Principle," he just introduces the idea of the superorganism and applies it to various selected historical events.

It is in explaining how individuals can be wired to self-destruct, that the concept of group selection is raised, entirely without fanfare. The diseases we attribute to "stress" Bloom says are nothing of the kind, but diseases of disconnection from the superorganism.

The adaptive benefit would have to be to the superorganism rather than to the genes of the individual in order for Bloom's argument to work. He doesn't mention how controversial this idea is in the book, probably avoided for rhetorical purposes.

Bloom is an entertaining writer who uses the most dramatic examples he can find to make his points well. If there is a general weakness in his writing, it is that he often avoids confronting how exceptional some of his ideas are.

The Lucifer Principle uses alternating chapters cleverly to introduce fundamental biological themes like dominance hierarchies and recent extensions like memes, and at the same time bring in Bloom's "superorganism" and apply those themes in a novel way to groups rather than individuals. So we frequently end up with huge groups of human beings compared dramatically in their behavior to individual animals. We have superorganisms vying for their place in the pecking order, having a collective shift in perception, becoming bullies when they are frustrated. All illustrated with selective and sometimes idiosyncratic historical accounts.

All in all, it works very well as narrative, and introduces some novel ideas that could have profound implications. If Bloom is right about "superorganisms" leveraging human primitive drives through bits of culture, the result doesn't look good for our species. There is certainly a lot of food for thought here, especially if Blooms sometimes radical caricatures are taken for their larger lessons rather than as gospel.

Bloom is particularly hard on Islam, not as people but as a culture, both for the success of its spread and the historical brutality of its adherents. He makes the distinction
between extremists and the rest of us, to avoid stereotyping Muslims as violent fanatics, but also points out that it is the extremists than often end up driving the bus. Bloom also uses the "meme" concept very casually, and sometimes in conflicting ways, in order to simplify his explanation of culture and build on his main theme of superorganisms climbing the pecking order.

An anxiety-provoking and well-narrated book that I hope gets a lot of things wrong, but I fear might be all too accurate. He certainly pulls together and makes sense of an amazing diversity of ideas.

Howard Bloom's central thesis here is that nation states, tribes, and other human conglomerates are "superorganisms" held together by memes, that is to say, shared ideas. From this he has it follow that it is the health of the superorganism that counts and not the individual. Individuals are likened to the cells of a larger body. They are expendable, and indeed programed to die in order to serve the collective good. The Lucifer Principle itself is our commitment to savagery as the way to settle differences.

This is an old and hoary thesis familiar to all who have studied history, and it is from history that Bloom garners his most impressive evidence. He recalls a litany of genocides and murders from the brutal campaigns of the Roman empire through the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas to the Saddam Husseins, the Ayatollahs, and Pol Pots of today. He also draws on evidence from biology, citing the murderous tendencies of apes and the automatic homicides of ants and other social insects. He goes to great lengths to show that the pecking orders in chickens and rats are similar to those in humans and that when these orders are disturbed or unsettled, violence of the most savage sort ensues. In the end he proposes a pecking order of superorganisms, and using this metaphor, attempts to explain why various nations and religions have to this very day slaughtered one another. Along the way he warns us to remain strong militarily and economically against the barbarians at the gate.

What sets The Lucifer Principle apart from other books with a similar message is Bloom's stark and engaging style and the unrelenting flood of evidence he presents festooned with 782 footnotes and a 40-page bibliography. I've never read a book that makes the assertion that people are animals as thoroughly as Bloom does here. You've heard the mantra: people are animals, but what Bloom does is make sure you realize it's true.

Well, it is true. But so what? We are domesticated animals (we domesticate ourselves), and with the right governance we may yet control the awful savagery that has always plagued humankind. We are nowhere near to doing that now, but extrapolating from the experience of the United States itself, in which a diverse people continue to live without the tribal wars that infect other parts of the world, it might be seen that the rule of law (a "meme," if you will, in competition with the rule of might) will eventually prove triumphant. Even though the culture of the Bible Belt is very different from that of California or New York, there is no chance that the one will be invading the others.

What Bloom is writing about, then, is the tribal imperative under what I call the War System. His "superorganism" is just a metaphor for a large and powerful tribe, a nation state, a religion, a culture. Those who complain this is not "scientific" are correct. Bloom is writing history, sociology and political science. These are disciplines in which one does not "prove" assertions in a scientific sense but instead points to a preponderance of evidence. I think he's done a good job in hanging the murderer sign around our necks, but I don't think humans are as completely sown into the fabric of the superorganism as he thinks.

Bloom allows himself to get carried away by the felicitous logic of his metaphors (memes as the genes of cultural evolution; human organizations as organisms) to the point where he forgets they are just metaphors; that is, handy ways of talking, but not scientific fact. While some people are driven primarily by their emotions and the mesmerizing mentality of the herd, other people are able to live out their lives in relative peace and harmony. Bloom's intense concentration on the violence in human beings blinds him to the fact that, even though history is strewn with vile heaps of human carnage, the vast majority of people have killed no one and are just trying to make a living. My belief is that the War System is on its last legs, and I mean that in a historical sense. I will not live to see its demise, nor will my grandchildren, but perhaps their grandchildren will.

Furthermore, there are powerful forces of change working in the world today from microbiology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, etc., not to mention globalization, lead by the vested interests in the developed world. These forces are changing humans and human culture so quickly that perhaps in a few generations we will be very different from what we are today, and will have no use for "The Lucifer Principle."

Aside from his overriding thesis, Bloom presents a number of compelling ideas, one of which is that "Contrary to contemporary theory, evolution is not built solely on competition between self-interested loners. It also relies on contests between teams of individuals striving for group survival." He believes that group selection explains "self-destruct mechanisms" within individuals. (p. 70) Another is that when people experience prosperity the level of violence increases. He gives some examples of this phenomena beginning on page 258 and explains it through an increase in testosterone in the newly prosperous. The really downtrodden, he avers, stay that way and have low testosterone levels.

Finally I must point to his prescient (this was written in the early 90s) and compelling analysis of the situation in the Middle East where the tribal mentality still reigns supreme and where most of its inhabitants are under the spell of what Bloom calls a "killer culture." His indictment of Islam and the Arab mentality goes a long way toward explaining 9/11 and the terrorist mind set. He quotes Nobel Prize-winning novelist Elias Canetti who called Islam "a killer religion, literally <a religion of War.>" (p. 225) He supports his indictment with some rather astonishing quotes from Yasar Arafat and the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Bloom's claim that his book is a "Scientific Expedition" is what caught my interest in the bookstore, and turned out to be the basis of the betrayal I felt at reading it. While there may be some interesting (and perhaps even true!) ideas presented in the book, the fact is that the presentation undermines them so badly that it is hard to give credibility to any of them. Obviously, Bloom is well equipped with an arsenal of historical fact. However, his use of historical anecdote to "prove" points should rankle anyone familiar with careful scientific thought. Examples can be found in history to prove virtually any point, and Bloom lacks compelling evidence to support his thoughts. Most offensive to my sensibilities were his lumping of all Islamic and Native American cultures as inheretly violent. His evidence that this is the nature of Native Americans? Well, the "bloodthirsty savage" passage was written by someone who many Native Americans considered a friend! (I can just see this historian; "No, really, some of my best friends are Indians!") What bothered me more than anything, however, was Bloom's relentless abuse of the ideas of Richard Dawkins. He rides Dawkin's thinking on "memes as replicators" to an absurd horizon. At the same time, he promotes his "superorganism" concept, which has none of the properties of replication. He bases this "superorganism" idea on a group selectionist argument that has been debunked so thorougly that I find it hard to believe that he didn't deliberately omit the counterarguments. Personally, I was familiar enough with Dawkin's Selfish Gene theory to see the gaping holes in Bloom's thinking. In other areas where I have no such knowledge, I have to face the likelihood that the same careless thinking probably went in to his conclusions. Hence my mistrust of ANY points Bloom is trying to make. If you need further evidence of Bloom's readiness to dismiss inconvenient facts in order to make his point, I suggest you reread the concluding chapter. I find it telling that Bloom, in the space of a paragraph, casually dismisses a law of thermodynamics as "wrong". Such a thorough lack of understanding of his subject matter is a very un-scientific approach. The cover says the book is a work of "intellectual courage". This may be. (I certainly find it courageous to be so willing to be potentially so wrong on so many points, and to present ideas with such weak evidence.) As intellecual as it may be, it does not stand up scientifically. Bloom may need to narrow his field in order to be up-to-date on all of the relevant information, or drop his pretense at scientific accuracy.

Buy and read this book if for no other reason than that the author foresaw the global radicalization of Islam against the West in terms much starker than Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and much broader than Yossef Bodansky's brilliant tome on "Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America.

Leon Uris is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is "an act of astonishing intellectual courage," and I will say that the author has pulled together an extraordinary collage of details in an intricately assembled "story" in which he challenges the assumptions of a number of major conventional intellects. There are 58 "parts" to this book, each part between two and six pages long, with an astounding array of multi-disciplinary quotes and footnotes. No scared ox goes ungored.

Some of the history in this book, of the origin of Mohammed as a possible lunatic and then a vengeful warrior using religion to grab real estate, and of the early split between Sunni and Shiite over the issue of the succession, is very useful today.

The author centers the disparate and very broad-ranging pieces of the book on three core ideas: Earth as a superorganism within which a tribe or religion is itself a superorganism; memes as unifying ideas that create us versus them for the sake of changing the pecking order and feeding off weaker tribes, and--in the only optimistic note in the book, at the end, of collaboration and information sharing as the only means to break out of the pattern of dog eat dog.

He specifically slams religion, and especially fundamentalist religion, as a false god that substitutes faith for control, and as a tool of controlling elites who need to keep the impoverished masses from waking up to the raw fact that masses of people can indeed "take over" factories and estates.

On page 94 the following quote struck me as applying equally to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: "Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture dresses the demon of hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose."

There are numerous gifted phrases throughout this book, and I can understand the frustration of some in absorbing this dizzying array of data points, but it is surely worth making the effort.

He makes much of the evolution of the brain from reptile (survival) to mammalian (social) to primate (individual) and emphasizes that even the most advanced humans still have all three brains in some form, with the lower forms subject to arousal.

Overall I rate this book one of the ten most useful books relevant to understanding and defeating radical Islam, which the author says is "a meme growing ravenous," a sleeping giant that has been awakened. He goes back in time to look at how the US, in forcing the French and English to give up the Suez Canal, actually helped inspire Arabia to plan for a day when the West might be sent packing. Similar, the first Gulf War, when the Coalition defeated Iraq, undermined secular Moslem regimes, and further inspired Islamic fundamentalists.

In the author's view we erred gravely in not understanding the asymmetric scope of the threat of Bin Laden and post-Taliban Afghanistan, and we appear to have erred in a truly gigantic way in not seeing that the second Gulf War was in fact doing Iran's bidding and accomplishing something Iran could never have done on its own. The author views Bin Laden as having replaced Russia as a "friend" to the Third World, and anticipates both a rapid spread of Islam among the poor, and a plague of animosity toward to the USA specifically.

The book includes a fascination discussion of psycho-social aspects of nations and tribes and other social groups including religions. While some have been derisive of his discussion of "pecking orders" I believe--having lived overseas most of my life--that he nails it. Not only does instability cause the accepted pecking order to go out the window, but prosperity actually destabilizes established pecking orders. When we eventually implement the grand vision of Jeffrey Sachs (see my review of "The End of Poverty" we will need to be very mindful of the animal force that will be unleashed at the same time, and not make the mistake we made in Iraq, of failing to plan for stabilization and reconstruction.

The last two ideas in this book that really grabbed me are from page 292, on how America began a perceptual shut-down and decline from 1973 onwards, culminating in the cheating culture and lazy obese children and parents that are the bane of most teachers' lives today. America is in "slow" mode and has lost its competitive drive.

The book was hugely ambitious, and it is easy to be snide, as some reviewers are, but I for one found this as close to genius and as close to breath-taking intellectual derring-do as any book I have read in a while. If America is to survive the multiple threats to the Republic, it will take leaders capable of reading and understanding this book, and implementing a 100 year strategy for winning the six front war, beginning on the home front with a draconian reform of our educational and information sharing and distance learning environment.

Who is Lucifer?

You know, Lucifer---Satan, Baphomet, Old Scratch, Wicked Nick, His Infernal Majesty. The Devil!

That's the Deep, Dark, shadow-haunted question, which reeks of sulphur and brimstone, into which erstwhile publicist and intellectual romper-stomper Howard Bloom takes a merry spelunk.

Bloom, former PR generalissimo and uber-strategoi for pop-culture uber-titans Prince, Michael Jackson, Billy Idol, and Run-DMC, has brewed up a brilliant, acid, caustic, but constantly engaging and entertaining little read in "The Lucifer Principle". It's a deft, dense, and wickedly ripping yarn you can read on the course of a Red Eye from Logan to LAX, and be engaged all the way, and between its covers---given heft by a forest of footnotes---Bloom ponders a singular question:

Where does Evil come from?

It's no idle question: it confounded the Ancients, addled theologians, fired the brains of Popes, Imams, and mountain Holy Men alike, and has set off revolutions, Crusades, Holy Wars, and Inquisitions.

Is it Nurture or Nature, Communism or Capitalism, the Devil or the Deep Blue Sea that takes a thinking ape who can dream of peace and yet sharpens a stick, or thrusts it into his neighbor's guts, or sacks all of the cities of the Northern Steppe and salts the ground on which they stand, or stacks the skulls of his countrymen? Or for that matter, imbues him with a frenzy to set off a bomb in a crowded shopping plaza, or flick the switch that shifts Defcon 1 into blazing, thermonuclear apotheosis?

Bloom's thesis this: the Devil is holed up in every single one of us. The desire to brutalize, murder, pillage and destroy, to revel in the weeping of the Enemy's women---all of that "evolved apes behaving badly" stuff---is literally hard-wired into our very genetic guts. It's what binds us into evolution, advances are flag and standard, sews our seeds into the next generation.

It's true: neither Angels nor Beasts, Men can dream up Heaven; but they're mostly capable of living out Hell. The blood-drench 20th century provides all the backup Bloom needs for that, and our young 21st century is already making up for lost time in stuffing the carnage of one hundred years into its first decade.

At its foundation, Bloom's thesis is essentially Social Darwinism: each organism competes for limited resources, food, shelter, sex. But Bloom takes one step beyond into heresy: it is not just individual competition that drives evolution, but social competition. We are like single cells in that respect, welded into competing social organisms, struggling 'superbeasts'.

Bloom breaks his theoretical napalm out into five key ideas:

1)Competition & the Self-Replicators: like semiconductor and cell phones, Nature revels in throwing together chunks of biomass and spitting out new organisms---all in the name of Evolution. Those little self-replicators are you and me, and we're totally, astonishingly cheap and utterly expendable.

2)Superbeast! We're social creatures: no "The Man in Black fled into the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed him" here, children---we're joiners. We're the unsung gladiators of a massive arena battle between macro-organisms larger than ourselves.

3) The Meme: ideas have consquences---one of which is that in just a million years, they've managed to outpace genes in organizing disparate flesh and welding it into a force for global dominion.

4) The Neural Net: Memes ride the tide of a gargantuan global learning machine.

5) The Pecking Order: It's lonely at the top, because everybody is trying to get there. And since no super-organism is clawing away for Downward mobility, something's gotta give. That's going to be *your* place at the table, pilgrim.

Half the fun of "The Lucifer Principle" is in the getting there, so I won't spoil your first encounter with Bloom. Suffice it to say that binds the sinews of his theory together with tasty junkets to the jungle fastness of the Yanomamo, the "Fierce People" of the Amazon who put a premium on wife-beating and savagery, to the war camps of gorillas and chimpanzees, to a hunt for capitalist rotters in the dark dungeons of China's Cultural Revolution, to the parliament of Victorian England and the Congress of Superpower America, both shambling along a trail of tears branded 'good intentions'.

This is a thick, rich, rollicking read, certainly not orthodox, but all the more prickly and provocative for it. Believe or skewer, you'll be hard pressed to forget "The Lucifer Principle".

The Devil, after all, is in the details.

JSG

'The Lucifer Principle' draws together over 25 years of cutting-edge research into socio-biology, memetics, cultural transformation theory, and socio-political theory to examine the hidden impulses that pervade our society. The book has fundamental insights into the nature of Evil, and the longterm - and often unappreciated - power of 60 million year old genetic programs and deep brain structures.

Deftly written with intelligence and wit, Bloom is able to make contemporary science directly relevant to the new reader. He draws on many cultural, historical, and scientific examples to examine key principles: the pecking order, the superorganism (group-mind), and the meme. He writes provocatively on the Closing of the American Mind amidst geo-political chaos, the impact of neuro-biological research on feminism and other debates, and pulls apart group politics and political fanaticism with grat verve. Bloom is criticised by some pro/con extremists as simply attacking Islam, but a close reading of his work shows an awareness of the coming crisis with Islam (Samuel P. Huntington) and the dangers of militancy in attacking the contemporary Open Society. Bloom is not above demolishing other fanaticisms either.

'The Lucifer Principle' has become one of the most influential science books since its publication, hailed by 22 world scientists as a major work. Hidden throughout the text are revelations on Bloom's pioneering use of perceptual engineering within the rock PR industry (his clients included Michael Jackson, Prince, Bette Middler, Simon & Garfunkel, AC/DC, and Joan Jett), and hints at the future direction of the landmark 'International Paleopsychology Project' he now runs. The book is extensively annotated, but is easily readable and accessible - a testament to Bloom's skill as a writer.

Few books will change your life or conceptual worldview. This is definately one of them. Highly recommended.

No doubt a very captivating read, but as so many before me have said, not a lot that's new. The notion that each of us is a speck in a superorganism should have occured to anyone who has spent an hour of sober (or not so sober) thought about his or her existence. Is this not how religions are started? The struggle of heirarchy is apparent to anyone who has studied nature on the broadest scale. Yes, America is in decline for many of the reasons that Bloom cites, my favourite being an apparent lack of goal striving. My own observation leads me to believe that this is most apparent in young people, not in corporations. Ironically, this is most likely the legacy of the drop-out generation of the sixties, that is now the NASDAQ generation, glued to their Wall Street Journals like religious zealots, hoping that investment will do for them, and America, what raw manufacturing did in the past. I find Bloom's paranoia about Islam to be more naked than other readers seem to. Terrorism from any quarter is indeed frightening, but Bloom cites massive corporate ownership by Arabs as legitimate reason for mistrust. Strangely, Mr. Bloom has no problem with massive ownership by Jews. Perhaps the most important part of the book is the forward, particularly the last line - not read it and believe, but read it and think. Amen to that!

While it is unlikely that anyone can read this book and agree 100 percent with the ideas being developed, it does have some profound insights. It seems at first glance to be somewhat mystical in its nature talking of the superorganism and how it 'chooses' different roles for those involved. Ultimately it makes these choices to propagate its own survival, and within that we begin to view what we tend to call 'evil'. But really it is no more or less mystical or material (depending on how you choose to view it) then what individual cells within our own bodies do, fighting and dying and reproducing. What Bloom has done is to see this collection of individual building blocks to create a larger whole (like the human body) and apply it as a template from the most simple cells to the most complex beings, that then comprise another whole. We have trouble recognizing this whole, just as a cell would have trouble 'recognizing' its role as a constituent of a body. If you read Global Brain by the same author you get a clearer picture of how this design scheme is implicit within all of nature from bacteria to humans. It's an interesting theory and well in its infancy if it proves to be of value. I think because of that it cannot be whole heartedly endorsed, but nor should it be outrightly rejected, not until more research has been done. For me it ultimately seems thatBloom attempts to answer the most intractable philosophical questions, such as, 'Why is there evil?' in a biological way. It is very easy to read and gives some great information that would be enjoyable even if taken outside of the research Bloom is doing. A good book.

This book is certainly an enjoyable read, however there are some problems with Bloom's conclusions. He supports his bold theory with piece-meal evidence from historical anecdotes taken completely out of context. While his facts seem to be accurate and well researched, some of his conclusions are based wholly on conjecture and personal bias. This is not to say that I did not agree with Bloom on some points, but I think his "scientific approach" leaves much to be desired. Further, his conclusion that the Islamic culture is in fact a "killer culture" is a little disturbing to me. My only fear is that some readers, who are looking to justify their hatred of certain groups, will use parts of Bloom's theory to justify their beliefs. Having said that, I would recommend the book, but with the admonition to maintain a healthy skepticism, which is necessary when reading virtually anything.

If you are looking for a stimulating read, then paperback edition at Amazon's prices is not a bad investment. The book includes a sweeping overview of human history, discussions of interesting tidbits of anthropology and an attempt to show how memes influence behaviors of human society. Memes are presented as virulent ideas that take hold upon the masses, seemingly beyond the victim's will. Memes are thus comparable to biological and software viruses, but no scientific proof that memes exist is provided, whereas we have conclusive proof that the other kinds of viruses do exist.

The author makes the case that religions are memes. Indeed, the author points out some destructive aspects of Hinduism (citing proof that the Hinduism was designed by a Iranian ruling class that conquered India in the distant past) were deliberately crafted. In the case of Islam, the author cites proof that Mohammed was mentally ill and that his conversations with the angel Gabriel were delusions. However, the founders of Christianity seem to escape similar judgement. Perhaps this is because the author researched Christianity's origins in depth and found that Christianity had a perfectly altruistic basis. I suspect though that the author went looking for references that described the origins of Hinduism and Islam in negatives, but didn't look for similar references for Christianity. Or perhaps he did, but didn't find any. In any case, the credibility of the author's veiled portrayal of Christianity as a superior religion would have been bolstered if he'd been up front with his research. In the interest of full disclosure, the author should have stated what his religious beliefs were.

The book is also an exercise in bashing 1980s U.S. culture and advancements, and points out that U.S.'s failure to capitalize on its research lead in technology like VCRs as evidence that the U.S. in in decline. Although the book is somewhat dated (1997), even in 1997 we saw the U.S. achieve prohibitive leads in software, the Internet, computers, and an open minded base of U.S. consumers that embraced these technologies. The author seems to miss the fact that the profit margins in software, ISP service, and PCs are higher than VCRs, and the author doesn't note that in 1997 the U.S. economy was roaring, while the rest of world was still sputtering. The U.S.' prohibitive lead in productivity is ignored. The author notes that history has shown that time and again, a seemingly invincible power is overthrown by its neighbors, but he doesn't even consider the advantages that the U.S.'s geography has in preventing a fate that the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Chinese empires suffered. As a citizen of one the U.S.'s two closest neighbors, I'm well aware of the might of the U.S., and can assure Mr. Bloom, that at no time in the future will Canada's barbarians ever succeed in taking down the U.S., if for no other reason, than the U.S. wields the biggest stick on earth. A stick which on one hand, Bloom criticizes the ancient Chinese for de-constructing which led to being defenseless from the hoards, but on another hand, he criticizes the Reagan administration for re-building.

Bloom also criticizes the quality of 1980s rock music as further evidence of U.S. decline. I suppose Disco from the 1970s was superior? In any case, comparing quality of pop music seems like a poor way to measure cultural decay.