The
Lucifer Principle
By Howard Bloom
Over
200 billion red blood cells a day die in the interests of keeping
you alive. Do you anguish over their demise? Like those red corpuscles,
you and I are cells in a social superorganism whose maintenance and
growth sometimes requires our pain or elimination, suppresses our
individuality and restricts our freedom. Why, then, is it of any value
to us? Because the superorganism nourishes every cell within it, allowing
a robustness none of its individual components could achieve on its
own. Take, for example, the Mediterranean superbeast known as the
Roman Empire. Rome was an evil creature with a despicable lust for
cruelty. Julius Caesar, according to Plutarch, "took by storm
more than 800 cities, subdued 300 nations and fought pitched battles
at various times with three millionmen, of whom he destroyed one million
in the actual fighting and took another million prisoners." Caesar
did not carry out these deeds with kindliness. When he leveled enemy
cities, he occasionally killed off every man, woman and child just
to teach would-be resisters a lesson.
The affluent folks back in the home city of Rome were even hungrier
for the sight of blood. Their favorite recreation was an afternoon
at the Coliseum watching desperate captives disembowel each other
in the arena.
Roman sports fans took bets on which contestant would manage to live
until nightfall. The governors sent out to rule the Roman provinces
periodically lost their tolerance for non-conformists. They crucified
a back-country preacher of peace and humility named Jesus because
his views disagreed with the standard-issue dogmas approved by imperial
authority. But the former carpenter was only one of thousands who
twisted for hours, hanging by nails from a crude wooden beam. Rome
stamped out or swallowed entire rival civilizations. She even reduced
the land she most revered-- Greece--to a sleepy, sycophantic occupied
territory. Rome, in short, was an appallingly vicious society, one
whose habits could make anyone with the slightest scrap of moral sensitivity
physically ill.
Yet Rome's rise was part of the world's inexorable march to higher
levels of form. By force--sometimes sadistic force--she brought an
unprecedented mass of squabbling city-states and tribes together.
In the
process, she allowed an interchange of ideas and goods that radically
quickened the pace of progress.
What's more, during the 300 years between Augustus and the
imposition of Christianity under Constantine, she made an additional
contribution. She introduced pluralism, an easygoing attitude which
allowed wildly diverse cultures to live peacefully side by side.
Just how much the empire contributed to her sometimes oppressed
citizens could be seen when Rome fell. A set of heroes impelled by
ideals of
ethnic conquest led their rebel bands against the colonialist power.
The
mavericks toppled the hegemonic tyrants forever and turned the city
of
Rome into a ruin.
In the process, they brought despair to Europe. During the next two
hundred years, half of the Continent's population would die. Plague
ran
rampant. Multitudes starved to death dreaming of the food that had
once
been transported on Roman ships and roads. Without a stable organizing
force, the paved highways on which provisions had traveled sank into
disrepair. On land, bandits and warrior chiefs ended the lives of
any who
might contemplate a trip along the old paths to carry desperately
needed
supplies. At sea, pirates destroyed the former Mediterranean lanes
of trade.
The grain that had once sailed from Egypt in fleets of bulging transport
hulls no longer came across with the tides. In the Gallic town of
Barbegal, the complex of Roman-run mills which had turned the imported
wheat into
flour for 80,000 consumers fell into disrepair. And the Gallic citizens
who had been freed of the Roman yoke perished by the millions.
Those who survived learned to live as prisoners in self-contained
fortress communities, cut off from the ideas and the delicacies that
had once
made life sweet. The barbarian "freedom fighters" had loosed
the chains not
of life, but of death. For Rome was an oppressor, but Rome was also
the
source of nourishment and peace. In her absence came pestilence and
war.
The superorganism is often a vile and loathsome beast. But like the
body nourishing her constituent cells, the social beast grants us
life. Without her, each of us would perish.
That knowledge is woven into our biology. It is the reason that the
rigidly individualistic Clint Eastwood does not exist. The internal
self-destruct devices with which we come equipped at birth insure
that we
will live as components of a larger organism...or we simply will not
live at
all.
Behind these superorganismic imperatives is nature's latest wrinkle
in
the research and development racket. Despite the claims of individual
selectionists, human evolution is propelled not only by competition
between single souls, but by the forms of their cooperation. It is
driven by the games that superorganisms play.
All this lies behind the mystery with which we began--the pattern
of
violence in Mao's Cultural Revolution. When China lapsed into chaos
during the cultural upheaval of the '60s, society did not fragment
into 700
million individuals, each fighting for his right to survive. The social
fabric
ripped, then reknit in a strange new way. Individuals clustered in
collaborative clumps. Stitching each gang together was a force with
no
physical substance--the idea, the meme. In their battles, the Red
Guard wolf packs obeyed a basic commandment of the animal brain--the
law of the pecking order. And they drew their energy from emotions
that remain
repressed in everyday life--the hatreds, frustrations and hidden cruelty
of
students who just a month or two before had seemed models of polite
obedience.
Behind the writhing of evil is a competition between organizational
devices, each trying to harness the universe to its own peculiar pattern,
each
attempting to hoist the cosmos one step higher on a ladder of increasing
complexity. First there is the molecular replicator, the gene. Then
there is its successor, the meme. And working hand in hand with each
is the social
beast.
Hegel said the ultimate tragedy is not the struggle of an easily
recognized good against a clearly loathsome evil. Tragedy, he said,
is the
battle between two forces both of which are good...a battle in which
only one can win. Nature has woven that struggle into the superorganism.
Superorganism, ideas and the pecking order--these are the primary
forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are
the holy trinity of The Lucifer Principle.
