Book Review - Howard Bloom - The Lucifer Principle - A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
In “The Lucifer Principle - A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History”1, Howard Bloom gives an interesting perspective on the role of violence and bigotry in human affairs.
Violence is natural, sadly
For Bloom, in a world evolving into ever-higher forms, hatred, violence, aggression, and war are a part of the evolutionary plan. He advises to include this into our picture of the humans. Not as a romantic vision that Nature will take us in her arms and save us from ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. We are supposed to stare directly into Nature’s bloody face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason.
This is not a glorification of violence, but he considers the realization as necessary to understand that reason to outwit her. To dismantle the curse that Mother Nature has built into us, we need a new way of looking at man, a new way of reshaping our future.
The nature scientists uncover has crafted our viler impulses into us: in fact, these impulses are a part of the process she uses to create. As Bloom sees it, Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the sculptor’s knife. Nature does not abhor evil; she embraces it. She uses it to build. With it, she moves the human world to greater heights of organization, intricacy, and power. Death, destruction, and fury do not disturb the Mother of our world; they are merely parts of her plan. Only we are outraged by the Lucifer Principle’s consequences. And we have every right to be. For we are casualties of Nature’s callous indifference to life, pawns who suffer and die to live out her schemes.
A consequence of this is that from our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals comes our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil’s ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war. For millennia, men and women have looked at the ruins of their lost homes and at the precious dead whom they will never see alive again, then have asked that spears be turned to pruning hooks and that mankind be granted the gift of peace; but prayers are not enough.
Violence as evolutionary mechanism
Bloom identifies five principles that form the basis for violence in mammal - and especially - human societies:
The principle of self-organizing systems —replicators— bits of structure that function as minifactories, assembling raw materials, then churning out intricate products. These natural assembly units (genes are one example) crank out their goods so cheaply that the end results are appallingly expendable. Among those expendable products are you and me.
The superorganism. We are not the rugged individuals we would like to be. We are, instead, disposable parts of a being much larger than ourselves.
The meme, a self-replicating cluster of ideas. Thanks to a handful of biological tricks, these visions become the glue that holds together civilizations, giving each culture its distinctive shape, making some intolerant of dissent and others open to diversity. They are the tools with which we unlock the forces of nature. Our visions bestow the dream of peace, but they also turn us into killers.
The neural net. The group mind whose eccentric mode of operation manipulates our emotions and turns us into components of a massive learning machine.
The pecking order: The naturalist who discovered this dominance hierarchy in a Norwegian farmyard called it the key to despotism. Pecking orders exist among men, monkeys, wasps, and even nations. They help explain why the danger of barbarians is real and why the assumptions of our foreign policies are often wrong.
It follows from these principles that the occurrence of violence between groups must help the some replicator to reproduce. And unfortunately, there are some strong hints that it might.
One avenue for nature to introduce violence into our behavior is for the members of one sex to select the members of the other sex according to some metric, this is called sexual selection. The females of a species develop a craving for a certain kind of guy, and all the males compete to live up to the female ideal. Lady peacocks adore hunks with towering blue tails, so peacock gentlemen sport foppish plumes. Lady bowerbirds swoon over bachelors with an architectural flare, so bowerbird males turn sticks and scraps into a Taj Mahal. And what have human females gone for in nearly every society and time? In human societies, too, “courage” and “bravery" are selected for by women. In short, they select for the capacity or actualization of violence.
Above and beyond the individual level, violence between groups of individuals is a fact. “Madness is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups.” A study by social psychologist Bryan Mullen shows that the larger the lynch mob the more brutal the lynching. This also holds true for some social animals: For example, in ape groups, when the old dominant males are expelled, the newly triumphant members of the younger generation execute an atrocity. They wade into the screaming females, grabbing babies left and right. They swing the infants against the trees, smash them against the ground, bite their heads, and crush their skulls. They kill and kill. When the orgy of bloodlust is over, not an infant remains. Yet the females in their sexual prime are completely unhurt. The mass murder is anything but random. It has a simple goal: As long as the ladies continued to suckle infants, they would be tied to the children of the toppled authority figure. A natural birth-control device called lactational amenorrhea would keep them uninterested in sex, preventing them from entering estrus48 and blocking the females from carrying the seed of the new conquerors.
Swept up by the emotions of a crowd, humans tend to lose their ethical restraints. As a result, the greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group.
The tendency toward slaughter that manifested itself for example in the Chinese Cultural Revolution is not the product of agriculture, technology, television, or materialism. It is not an invention of either Western or Eastern civilization. It is not a uniquely human proclivity at all. It comes from something both sub- and superhuman, something we share with apes, fish, and ants—a brutality that speaks to us through the animals in our brain. For Bloom this is natural. Contrary, if man has contributed anything of his own to the equation, it is this: He has learned to dream of peace. But to achieve that dream, he will have to overcome what nature has built into him.
For Bloom, each of us is built with all the equipment necessary to be a master or a slave, a beggar or a king. Most of us, however, will be only one of these. The circle of our consciousness centers on one identity, but the others are in the darkness waiting to come out. Implicit in each of us is the whole society, the dominant individual, the outcast, and all the variations in between Every male is built with the same neuronal networks that compelled Genghis Khan to conquer an empire twice the size of Rome’s, the same set of circuits that motivated some of Genghis’s descendants to accumulate hundreds of wives and even more concubines, the same instincts that impelled Turkish sultans to have attractive women from all over their domains shipped in for a few nights of physical glory. But in most cases, those circuits will never unfurl their ambitions in the real world. We have thousands of mental mechanisms crying out vainly for a moment of triumph, thousands of potential personalities that will never be allowed to live.
Group Level Selection
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. As a result, physiological feedback loops often call upon the individual to sacrifice his health—or even his life—for the sake of a larger whole. We have inherited much of our biology, including that involved in behavior, from the cellular ancestors who first learned to form communities. As a consequence, innumerable organismic mechanisms operate within assemblies of human beings.
One of Bloom’s avenues to show that evolution is also working on the group level is the existence of self-destructive behavior: Why do stress reactions shut down our thought processes, cripple our immune system, and occasionally turn us into stupefied blobs of jelly? How do these impairments help us survive? The answer is that they don’t. Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first. A person’s position in society is created by how other people react to an individual: projecting a positive attitude works, not because of changes it makes on the individual psyche, but because of improvements it generates in relationships with others. The best way to turn off the self-destruct mechanism is not to weep over childhood traumas until we can finally love the child within. It is to realize that the self-destruct devices are controlled by social forces: our sense of how we measure up to the standards of those we respect and our relationships with friends, husbands, wives, and even our dogs and cats. (The idea that relationships with animals can protect our physical and emotional health is not whimsy. Studies of heart attack victims have shown that owning a dog or a cat diminishes the odds of a second attack.) For Bloom, science would be well served to retain individual and kin selection’s insights, admit their limitations, and move on. The fact is, if individual selection’s survival instinct is our ruling force, then self-destruct mechanisms should not exist.
The ability to show to others the membership to a certain group is important. Even on the cellular level, cells identify themselves by a kind of uniforms to identify themselves. They also prove indispensable to human society. Almost every human group makes a simple rule: thou shalt not kill members of our gang, but everyone else is fair game. Each group says that all humans are brothers and declares that murdering humans is out of the question. Most groups, however, have very strange means of defining who is human. A tribal member, in most primitive societies, is a full-fledged human being. A citizen of some other tribe, on the other hand, is usually not. Most primitive tribes feel that if you run across one of these subhumans from a rival group in the forest, the most appropriate thing to do is bludgeon him to death. Xenophobia, the fear and hatred of interlopers, is universal in higher animals. Squabbling within a group is minor compared to the snarling, spitting, and raking of claws that occur when group members encounter an outsider. Much of the animal communication observed by ethologists, in fact, seems to have evolved to help one animal tell his killer companions: “Hey, I’m one of us.” Habits are a form of social uniform. For example, Mohammed gave his followers a set of prayers and ritual washings to execute five times a day, then instructed the faithful to signal their identity with the whiskers on their chins—shunning the razor and glorying in the growth of their beards.
Human society uses hate to build structure. The frustration of humans collects much as calcium accumulated in the space between cells of the early ocean-living, cellular communities. To avoid damage within the group much of it is directed somewhere else, at outsiders. Envy and fear are turned from a source of disruption to a creator of cohesion.
Nature has compacted mankind’s frustrations to build the superorganism’s bones. The demon one society wants to eradicate is all too frequently the god of some rival group. Baal, the god of the Canaanites, was a false idol to the Jews. The former Soviet Union’s longtime gods—Marx and Lenin—are our devils. Our revered middle class was the former Soviet Union’s hated bourgeoisie.
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 its 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. This can also lead to the phenomenon of projection:
If you claim you enemy is obsessed with a vice, you can justify to obsess about this vice. You can engage in it and claim to be virtuous for it:
Bloom gives the example of oh so pious clubwomen of Orange County: they conceived an enemy — the secular humanist— roiling with forbidden sexuality and working in devious ways to insert sex into their innocent children’s lives. The only way to prevent this intrusion was to be eternally vigilant, perpetually on the lookout for the humanists’ sexual invasion. By searching for the humanist danger, the clubwomen of Orange County managed to keep their thoughts focused on sex, but this sexual obsession, they could now tell themselves, was not their fault. It was the fault of their sex-crazed enemy, without whom sexuality would never have crossed their minds. Of such rejected pieces of ourselves are our devils made.
Pecking Order
The pecking order was first observed in hens in Norway. These hens form hierarchies. Those at the top can feed first. Newcomers will be pecked upon until they fall in line in the hierarchy. Their position has real, measurable effects on individuals metabolism. This phenomenon has been discovered everywhere.
In monkeys and humans, when groups fight, the winners snag a hormonal prize: their testosterone level rises. Testosterone— the male hormone —inspires confidence and aggression. A fresh jolt of it in the blood invigorates the victors. For the losers, it’s a different story: Testosterone level plummets. The body shifts into resignation. Low baboons on the totem pole carry additional consequences in their bloodstream. Their circulation is flooded with glucocorticoids —stress hormones that constitute a slow internal poison. The baboons on top do not suffer this chemical corrosion because their bloodstreams are relatively glucocorticoid-free.
Position in the pecking order reshapes physiology.
Strangely enough, a lot of individuals arrange themselves with their position in the pecking order. After a while, top or bottom position in the pecking order gets to be a habit. Numerous studies show that a creature who has won a fight is more likely to win the next one. An animal who has lost barely shuffles through his next contest. The odds are high he’ll lose again. This may explain a phenomenon that crops up in Julius Caesar’s battle narratives. Caesar frequently confronted tribesmen bred from birth to fight, men who prided themselves on their ferocity. But when the Roman legions won a decisive victory, the proud barbarian warriors sometimes bowed their heads and marched meekly into slavery. The barbarian women— who had once been equally defiant—held up their children to the Romans and begged to be spared. Then they gave themselves up, caving in to a subservient fate. The humiliation of defeat changed these fierce fighters into beaten men. A quick slide from the pecking order’s top to its bottom seemed to radically alter their personalities and even their physiques, apparently by tilting the captives’ internal chemical balance.
This form of biochemical resignation explains why barnyards are not a perpetual battlefield. Instead, chickens seldom get into major brawls. True, when a stranger steps onto the scene, the intrusion triggers a riot. But when the dust dies down, the feathered ladies settle into a stable order. The dominant female once again luxuriates in her prerogatives, and the lowliest pullet endures her ignominious lot in life. The pecking order’s hormonal shifts help insure this peace.
Those who win are flush with internal chemicals of pride, and those who lose are numbed by glandular drugs that lull them into submission. The irony is that even the chickens on the bottom gain an advantage from the endogenous chemical brew that leaves them too lethargic to fight over their fate. If pecking order positions were up for constant grabs, each creature in the yard would have to spend her time in attacks and self-defense. The nonstop battle would waste every bird’s energy and time. Well-fed chickens would grow scrawny watching out for ambush instead of scratching in the dirt for food. And some would do worse than merely lose weight: they’d actually die from their wounds.
Bloom dives into the power of the feeling of control: Control is also the magic ingredient that keeps us alert in the face of danger. It does so by suppressing the output of endorphins. Endorphins are chemicals produced by the body to soothe our pain. They are similar in molecular construction to morphine, and they have morphine’s ability to smother suffering. Endorphins have been glorified in popular literature as blessed biological benefactors. In reality, however, they are seductive poisons. Individuals without control were afflicted with endorphin’s dulling of the senses and the mind, while the those with control with a handle on their fate remained perceptive and alert. Other experiments indicate something equally ominous: the lack of control disables the ability for long-term potentiation of neurons—in other words, it wreaks havoc on the ability to retain and act on vital information. Because the control or even the illusion of control has benefits. People are willing to pay for it. Selling control is a gainful activity has been performed by prophets and shamans in older times, today there are various professions that try to sell certainty about the unknowable future. Just having the feeling of control is worth a lot of money to people. Bankers, advisors, priests, politicians and various other institutions try to sell this kind of certainty about something they neither have not could have control over. The key to the power of the Aztec priests was similar to that which made Newton the king of science.
The struggle for position in a pecking order is not restricted to individuals. It also hits social groups. Societal superorganisms have a pecking order as well.
For Bloom, the violence of Africa, of the Islamic world, and of Latin America is not a massive deviation from the human norm. It is a simple outbreak of something we all share. The citizens of these lands are in the grip of forces no human can escape—the animal brain and the battle between superorganisms. There are no righteous societies; there are simply different degrees of depravity. In a world where some cultures elevate violence to a virtue, the dream of peace can be fatal. It can make us forget that our enemies are real and can blind us to the dark imperatives of the superorganismic pecking order. Social super organisms itch to move up on the hierarchical ladder, and many of those who want to ascend would like to do so at our expense.
This competition on the pecking order can also have adverse effects: for example the act of charity can be seen as an insult. Among the Kwakiutl, to give away goods is divine, but to accept them is less than human. Medieval European aristocrats threw an annual feast and invited the peasants in to stuff themselves. The ritual drove home the fact that the noble was on top and the peasants on the bottom. The Anglo-Saxon word for someone on the crest of a social heap—lord—was a testament to the put-down power of the handout. The word’s literal meaning: “loaf giver. This is also known from animals societies. Chimpanzees are lowering their eyes and stretching out their hands with palms upturned. They whimper, squirm, and cry to be given some precious meat. Such is the power of generosity to elevate the giver and cast down those who receive. No wonder those on whom we lavish aid are not particularly fond of us.
The fathers of our foreign policy feel that by alleviating hunger, poverty, and disease, we can pull the pins out from under the urge to shed blood and make the third world love us. The philosophy hasn’t worked. The abasement of the charity recipient is only one reason. Another: our official definitions of want bear little relationship to the reality of the human psyche. We assume that humans desire, food, clothing, and shelter, but we forget that people crave something far more vital: status and prestige. They yearn to move up in the pecking order!
Bloom thinks that equality of nations will never exist in our lifetime. Why? Because peace, freedom, and justice are deceptive concepts. Hidden beneath their surface are the instincts of the pecking order. This has also effects on those at the top of the pecking order. There is a tendency to deliberate blindness. Those at the top often fail to see problems and challenges.They are too comfortable enjoying the spoils of their position.
Ironically, however, the partial spread of peace is a product of past battles between superbeasts, the colossal atrocities that accompanied the building of the empires of Alexander, Caesar, and the ancient Chinese, the gore that oozed from the consolidation of the modern European, American, and Russian states. The movement of humans into social groups, the tendency of one social organism to swallow another, the rise of the meme, the increase in cooperation—all are ways in which the universe has ratcheted upward in degrees of order. But under the natural urge toward more intricate structures, higher planes of wonder, and startlingly new and effective forms of complexity, there is no moral sense. There is no motherly Nature who loves her offspring and protects them from harm. Harm, in fact, is a fundamental tool Nature has used to refine her creations. No, we are not Clint Eastwoods, nor were we meant to be. We are incidental microbits of a far-larger beast, cells in the superorganism. Like the cells of skin that peel in clustered communities from our arms after a sunburn, we make our contributions to the whole of which we are a part. Sometimes we make that contribution with our life, sometimes we make it with our death. Superorganisms, ideas, and the pecking order—the triad of human evil—are not recent inventions “programmed” into us by Western society, consumerism, capitalism, television violence, blood-and-guts films, or rock and roll. They are built into our physiology. They have been with us since the dawn of the human race.
Summary
“The Lucifer Principle” is an unconventional book with a lot of interesting conjectures. While it is unclear how much truth there is to each individual hypothesis, it is nevertheless interesting to ponder what influence memes, group-level selection (if it exists) and the pecking order had on our potential to violence. And what the consequences are for our approach towards domestic and foreign politics.