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The Lucifer Principle is a book by
Howard Bloom. It sees a social group, not an individual, as a primary "unit of selection." “Individual selectionists” like
Richard Dawkins
see the individual as the only unit of selection. They rule the
competition between groups out of any influence on genes. The Lucifer
Principle says that both competition between groups and competition
between individuals shape the evolution of the genome. The Lucifer
Principle shows these facts at work especially in human evolution. The
Lucifer Principle "explores the intricate relationships among genetics,
human behavior, and culture" and argues that "evil is a by-product of
nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most
basic biological fabric".
[1] It sees selection (i.e. through violent competition) as central to the creation of the '
superorganism'
[2] of society. It also focuses on competition between individuals for position in the '
pecking order'
and competition between groups for standing in pecking orders of
groups. The Lucifer Principle shows how ideas are vital in these pecking
order battles. Vital in creating cohesion and cooperation. Vital in
powering competition. And vital in fueling the process of cultural
evolution. Says The Lucifer Principle: “Superorganism, ideas and the
pecking order…these are the primary forces behind much of human
creativity and earthly good.”
However, The Lucifer Principle argues that cooperation and our
commitment to a higher purpose, our commitment to the group, can blind
us to the negative consequences of our actions. “From our best qualities
come our worst,” says the book. “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 come our excuses 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 are often the generators of the
actions we most abhor…murder, torture, genocide and war.”
Though The Lucifer Principle is a book of science, it is designed to
wake us up to the dark side of our cooperative acts, the dark side of
our idealism. Says the book’s conclusion: “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 our
race. But there is hope that we may someday free ourselves of savagery.
To our species, evolution has given something new…the imagination. With
that gift we have dreamed of peace. Our task…perhaps the only one that
will save us…is to turn what we have dreamed into reality. To fashion a
world where violence ceases to be.”
The book proposes as the mechanism for human cultural development the selection of specific
psychological
traits in a given population to support the culture it develops, as
well as some universal traits supportive of the humans' nature as a
social animal, necessary for the formation and maintenance of social
groups
instinctively formed by humans, and of cultures developed by these societies, through propagation and replication of
memes.
It also sees ever enlarging human societies with their specific
cultures compete throughout history in violent competition and war. It
claims the selection processes manifesting themselves as
Evil from an individual's point of view.
Reviews of the book
[3]
saw it as 'ambitious' and 'disturbing' in its conclusions that
societies based on individual freedom might succumb to systems such as
communism or Islamic fundamentalism.
[4][5] The Washington Post
said that "Readers will be mesmerized by the mirror Bloom holds to the
human condition... He draws on a dozen years of research into a jungle
of scholarly fields...and meticulously supports every bit of
information...." while
Chet Raymo in the
Boston Globe termed it "a string of rhetorical firecrackers that challenge our many forms of self-righteousness."
Bloom later wrote
[6]
that he and his publisher had been threatened by Islamic groups who
objected to aspects of the book. He claimed that "Arab pressure groups
asked ever so politely that
The Lucifer Principle be withdrawn
from print and that nothing that I write be published again. They
offered to boycott my publisher's products — all of them — worldwide.
And they backed their warning with a call for my punishment in seventeen
Islamic countries." Bloom states that the Attorney for the
Authors Guild
wrote to his publishers, warning of an author boycott if the book was
pulled from the shelves. The publishers asked Bloom to rewrite a chapter
on Islamic violence, which led to the creation of 358 lines of
footnotes attesting to the facts he presented within it.
[6]
Today, there is a strange acknowledgement that what Bloom wrote about
Islam in The Lucifer Principle is based on expertise. Bloom is a
frequent guest on Iran’s Press-TV, Iran’s Alalam-TV, Saudi Arabia’s
KSA-2-TV, and even on Syria’s Ekhbariya-TV.
References
External links
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