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

~ Howard Bloom (Author) "In 1580, Michel de Montaigne, inspired by the discovery of New World tribes untouched by Europe's latest complexities, initiated the idea of the "noble savage..." (more)
Key Phrases: perceptual shutdown, social beast, tennis time, United States, Oliver Cromwell, South America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The "Lucifer Principle" is freelance journalist Bloom's theory that evil-which manifests in violence, destructiveness and war-is woven into our biological fabric. A corollary is that evil is a by-product of nature's strategy to move the world to greater heights of organization and power as national or religious groups follow ideologies that trigger lofty ideals as well as base cruelty. In an ambitious, often provocative study, Bloom applies the ideas of sociobiology, ethology and the "killer ape" school of anthropology to the broad canvas of history, with examples ranging from Oliver Cromwell's reputed pleasure in killing and raping to Mao Tse-tung's bloody Cultural Revolution, India's caste system and Islamic fundamentalist expansion. Bloom says Americans suffer "perceptual shutdown" that blinds them to the United States' downward slide in the pecking order of nations. His use of concepts like pecking order, memes (self-replicating clusters of ideas), the "neural net" or group mind of the social "superorganism" seem more like metaphors than explanatory tools.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Pop-culture Renaissance man Bloom-former PR agent for the likes of Prince, writer for Omni magazine, and so on-seeks to explain why civilizations rise and fall, why nations go to war, and why violence and aggression don't disappear with the ascendancy of culture. Big task. The "Lucifer Principle" is based on the metaphors of the "meme" (ideas that arise across cultures and epochs) and "the pecking order" (from chickens to nations, and all in between). This sort of slippery extrapolation is at once cleverly neat and maddeningly suspicious, and the pitfalls of trying to unite animal biology, genetics, cultural history, anthropology, and philosophy are apparent in that sundry causes and effects are all lumped together as equals: rats in a cage do this, "primitive" cultures do that, Sumerians did a third thing, so therefore we do this. The 800 footnotes are symptomatic: sources range from the Information Please Almanac to a textbook on surgical nursing and a sprinkling of audiobooks. This book falls somewhere between Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (LJ 12/87) and John Naisbitt's Megatrends (LJ 10/1/82). For general audiences.
Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 466 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st Pbk. Ed edition (March 13, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871136643
• ISBN-13: 978-0871136640
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (139 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #32,870 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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73 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars We are giant competing blobs, October 19, 2002

By	Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling analysis of why we kill each other, January 2, 2004

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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.

205 of 247 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Careful Thinkers Beware! Frustration Ahead., July 8, 2000

By	Jeffrey Niehaus (Santa Barbara, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.