IDEOLOGY IS THEFT
By Howard Bloom

The Invisible World As A Weapon

Humans rally around ideas because they solve some of our problems, because they offer the biological blessings of the illusion of control, and because they are the threads that hold us together in the vast network of a superorganismic mind, weaving scattered individuals into a cooperative beast of awesome power and size.

But webs of ideas also do more. As hungry replicators eager to remold the world, they often turn their ultimate weapon--the superorganism--into a killing machine. And, contrary to the doctrines of some modern critics, they do not engage in this "hegemonic imperialism" only in the malevolent west.

Two hundred years after the fall of Rome, a merchant named Mohammed lived in the desert town of Mecca, a bleak and isolated community on a caravan route over which passed camels carrying goods to far-off, elegant cities like Damascus. 1 At the age of twelve, when he was an apprentice to his uncle--a trader-- Mohammed had made his first trip to cosmopolitan Syria to learn the export/import business. When he reached 25, Mohammed married a well-to-do woman of 40 and became a respectable, wealthy burgher, a man whose opinions were listened to.

But all that changed when Mohammed reached a mid-life crisis at 39. He began to have visions. He'd been sitting in a cave in the mountains one day, he said, praying in solitude, when the angel Gabriel had appeared in a blinding light, grabbed him in a bear hug, and forced him to read a message from God. Since then, claimed Mohammed, he'd been functioning as God's spokesman on earth. 2

Some modern scholars feel that Mohammed's visions may have been the result of epileptic fits. 3 The citizens of Mecca would have found the diagnosis believable. When Mohammed planted himself on streetcorners and declaimed the new truths that the angel Gabriel had communicated to him, his fellow Meccans were certain that this formerly upstanding, middle-class man had gone mad. They mocked Mohammed or ignored him. One put a slimy camel foetus down his neck as he was praying. Another tried to strangle him. Only a few believed him. Among the believers were a handful of close relatives, one good friend, and a disconcerting number of slaves.

The citizens of Mecca were none too happy with the havoc Mohammed's new notions wreaked on their households. Slaves who'd abandoned the tried and true religions stopped their household chores and ran off to pray and wash themselves at all kinds of strange hours. But Mohammed would not keep his visions to himself. When a plot was hatched to murder him, Mohammed fled. He sought refuge in a community where his views might be a bit more welcome, over 200 miles away in Medina, another town isolated in the desert along the caravan route. In Medina, Mohammed found more willing listeners. During the course of a few years, he was able to build a following large enough to dominate his adopted city's politics.

The fledgling prophet was no man of peace. He consolidated his hold over Medina by ordering opponents assassinated.4 Then he masterminded a series of assaults on passing Meccan caravans and the armed escorts sent to protect them. When Meccans, fearful of Mohammed's new power, attacked the outskirts of Medina, the "blessed one" led his faithful against the intruders and won. The holy man's military success impressed some of the fierce tribes that wandered in the hills outside of town. They signed up with the new, battle-tested religion. A few years later, the prophet marched his troops 200 miles to the Jewish town of Khaibar and conquered it. He killed all of Khaibar's 900 men and carried off the women and children as slaves.

At last Mohammed was ready to take revenge for the indignities his former neighbors in Mecca had heaped on him. In 630 AD, eight years after he had fled, the prophet led an army of 10,000 followers back to his old home town. The Meccans were not particularly interested in being treated as the Jews had been the previous year. They gave up with scarcely a fight. Thanks to the heavily armed Islamic squadrons parading through the streets, Mohammed was able to convert Mecca's inhabitants to the beliefs they had formerly scorned as the ravings of a madman.

The sword of Islam was not sheathed once Mohammed's birth- place had been conquered. The city's wealthy traders and illiterate Bedouins joined the army that had begun in Medina, and went out to conquer the world for their new belief. They were astonishingly successful. In short order, the legions of Islam overran the ancient empires of Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt. During the next hundred years, the Mohammedan hordes spread across northern Africa, taking Algeria, Morocco and Libya. They invaded India--attacking the towns that had defied even the invincible Alexander the Great. They snipped off parts of Spain and nearly conquered France. They even faced the mighty forces of the Chinese army at Talas in central Asia.

Within a few generations of Mohammed's death, these followers of a streetcorner ranter, these men from backwater towns and primitive desert tribes, had built an empire of awesome size. But their victories wouldn't stop there. In coming centuries, Mohammedans would repeatedly make the Europeans tremble--eventually attacking even Vienna.5 They would seize African lands as far away as the Sudan and the Niger. They would convert Afghanistan, win over the Mongols, and spread their rule as far as the Pacific islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. The notions of a man who had claimed to meet an angel in a cave would spawn battles whose bloodshed would soak the earth for the next 1,400 years.

The True Route to Utopia

The appeal of prophets often lies in their ability to paint a picture of an irresistible utopia, and to convince us that this better world is almost within our grasp. Marion Keech, the woman who communicated with extra-terrestrial Guardians, promised her followers that they would shed all earthly ills and bathe in blessings they could scarcely imagine--after they had been whisked away from our decaying galaxy. William Miller, the founder of Seventh Day Adventism, predicted that God would come to rearrange the world we know, and that those who followed Miller would find themselves possessors of a sparkling new paradise. And Karl Marx explained that the elimination of capitalism would trigger the creation of a whole new human nature, one which would flood the greedy dens in which we live with brotherly goodwill.

The supernatural predictions of Keech, Miller, and Marx all failed to materialize. And yet, in a strange way, every one of them bore the seeds of a hard-nosed truth. The power of ideas to draw individual humans into a structured mass can make the utopian prophecies of world-views come true. If the system of belief pulls together a large enough superorganism, the faithful will, indeed, taste a bit of heaven.

Nearly two thousand years ago, a group of believers drew together around Joshua, a young carpenter from the relatively impoverished northern hill-town of Nazareth, convinced the parable- spinning woodworker was the Messiah. The believers were Jews, a people who had been living under the oppressive thumb of distant conquerors on and off for nearly 750 years. 6 At the moment, the Jews were dominated by the arrogant, militaristic Romans, who had swallowed up the Hebrew state and made it part of The Empire. The prophets of old had predicted that someday a savior would come who would liberate the Jews from their humiliation. That champion would lift Israel from its abject subjugation and make it the first among nations, giving it a prosperity and happiness that would never end.

The followers of the populist preacher (later renamed Jesus by the Greeks) believed he was the long-hoped for redeemer.7 Unfortu- nately, the Roman overlords got wind of the sermonizer's presence, sensed his subversive potential and executed him. That, however, did not stop his followers. They still believed fervently that He was The Chosen One. Surely, they said, He would triumph over death and return to them.8 In fact, He himself had predicted His resurrection. Any day now, the faithful told each other, He would come back, bringing with Him the new earthly order.9

God never quite arrived. Or did he? Over the next three hundred years, the waiting followers of the martyred Galilean became a minority spread from one end of the Roman Empire to the other. Decent Romans spurned and mocked them. Occasionally, they were the subject of vicious persecutions.

But like a magnet, the Christian beliefs drew a steady stream of new converts, pulling their devotees into a mass so solid some called it "the body of Christ."10 By 310 AD, there were massive, well-organized Christian communities in every major city of the Empire.11 Despite an official policy of repression, Christian views were argued ever more openly in the corridors of power. Finally, they reached the ears of the Emperor. Apparently, these Christian notions made an impression.

In 312 AD, Emperor Constantine was on the eve of battling a rival at the Milvian Bridge outside of Rome. Tradition has it that he looked into the sun and thought he saw in its blazing face the sign of the cross. The Roman ruler took it as an omen. He felt that in the impending bloodbath, Christ would give him victory. Constantine's forces won the day. And the Emperor in the coming years made the religion that he felt had brought him his triumph the official creed of the state.12

In Constantine's eyes, Christ was a god of war. The nearly illiterate emperor had the cross emblazoned on his soldiers' shields and banners.13 The real Jesus, a country preacher of peace, would have been horrified. But that scarcely mattered now. Christianity took over the Roman armies, administration and wealth. In coming years, it would go farther still, absorbing one barbarian tribe after another. And, indeed, the church's glory would outlive the Roman Empire. As the Christian congregation grew to engulf Europe, its key figures would prosper with it. Christianity's Pope would become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the Continent--a figure capable of overawing kings and humiliating emperors (as Pope Hildebrand did to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV). Its cardinals and bishops would bedeck themselves in a splendor so regal that earls and barons would turn green with envy. And Christians by the millions would take upon themselves the privilege of killing, torturing and raping those who weren't members of their triumphant creed.

Christ may have failed to arrive with a band of angels to transform the ravaged lands of Israel into a paradise. But the belief preached in His name had lifted the humble and given them glory. It had elevated believers from their lowly status as contemptible cultists, placing some in thrones and palaces, and making them the lords and masters of nearly all they surveyed. For the Christian elite, life did indeed become a bit of heaven on earth.

Meanwhile, the growth of the Mohammedan superorganism in the East brought a similar shower of heavenly rewards. As the Empire of Islam grew in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries, so did the wealth and power of its adherents. Every time the soldiers of the faith conquered a new city, the treasures of the defeated metropolis poured into the coffers back at the center of the Empire. Former small-time merchants from a dusty desert town moved into the palaces of the conquered cities as the new overlords. And these nouveau riche religionists showered their wealth and good fortune on their families back home. Descendants of the backward traders of Mecca and Medina, along with great grandchildren of desert chieftains who had thrown their lot in with the new religion, became as gods on earth. They possessed the finest homes the architects of the day could conceive. They had slaves and harems, dancing girls and the most succulent food. They held the power of life and death over the newly subjugated citizens of the conquered lands.

The writings of Abû 'Ali al-Muhassin al-Tanûkhî, a judge in tenth century Baghdad, gave an astonishing sense of the Islamic elite's opulent lifestyle. Tanûkhî recalled, for example, that the Abbasid Caliph "Mutawakkil desired that every article whereon his eye should fall on the day of a certain drinking bout should be coloured yellow. Accordingly there was erected a dome of sandalwood covered and furnished with yellow satin, and there were set in front of him melons and yellow oranges and yellow wine in golden vessels; and only those slave-girls were admitted who were yellow with yellow brocade gowns. The dome was erected over a tesselated pond, and orders were given that saffron should be put in the channels which filled it in sufficient quantities to give the water a yellow colour as it flowed through the pond." When the servants unexpectedly ran out of saffron mid-way through the afternoon, the Caliph ordered them to fetch yellow fabrics from the public treasury and soak them in the water channel so the leaking dyes would keep the pond flowing with liquid of the correct hue. The afternoon's decorating scheme cost the empire's citizens 50,000 dinars.14

Allah had promised great rewards to the faithful. And He had delivered in spades. But no holy force stood behind the presentation of His gifts. The mechanism responsible was something far more down-to-earth. Mohammed's ideas --like those of Christ-- had been a remarkably successful social glue. Had created a superorganismic bond. And the growth of the superorganism possesses the one power every prophet from Jesus to Marx has dreamed of --the capacity to deliver a small slice of utopia.

Why Men Embrace Ideas -- And Why Ideas Embrace Men

Humans grab at ideas because ideas knit them together in groups of folks who agree with them. They provide the comfort of companionship and mutual aid. That's one way memes seduce humans into their power. What are some of the others?

Memes ride the human mind by offering the men and women who spearhead their cause a richer life. Fidel Castro, who carved out a slice of the New World to feed the Marxist-Leninist meme, acquired the run of half-a-dozen homes, a fleet of Mercedes-Benz limousines, jeeps (actually, the Russian equivalents--Gaziks), luxuriously wood-paneled helicopters, a fishing villa, boats, gourmet foods, fine scotch, and what may be the ultimate luxury--a personal pate chef. 15 Memes frequently make the temptation to riches and power even sweeter by disguising the pursuit of these prizes as selfless idealism, ascetic dedication to a cause. Castro, after all, was not a greedy man. He was a dedicated "idealist." Memes also seduce us with the illusion of control, thus tweaking our hormones into higher gear and turning up the vigor of our immune system. What's more, sometimes memes actually deliver on their promises of mastery. The insights and technologies they produce sometimes actually do help us get a handle on the elusive forces of our fate.

These enticements are some of the reasons humans embrace the meme. But why does the meme grab on to humans? So it can use a social bunch as a tool for self expansion, driving a superorganism like a tank (more about that in our next chapter). Memes have an ultimate ambition: taking vast chunks of the world into their possession and restructuring it according to their form.

It may seem strange to call a meme ambitious. But the mere shape of a successful meme dictates its acquisitive behavior. In fact, the evolutionary race between concepts guarantees that those which develop the cleverest lures are most likely to survive. Take, for example, the religious memes that include the notion of hell. Anyone who doesn't bite the hook enthusiastically is guaranteed a dire fate indeed. Who says so? The meme. The casual non-believer is supposedly setting himself up for a hot time in the old town sometime shortly after his death. The meme--be it Christian or Moslem--comes complete with vivid images of an infinite skillet in which the unwise will sauté for infinity.16 (Buddhism handles the problem differently: fail to follow the precepts of the faith and you may spend your next incarnation as a sextaplegic cockroach.)

These nifty little visions of horror work wonders. Terrified humans by the score allow unprovable concepts to take up residence in their skulls. After all, grabbing the meme is the only way to avoid ending up browned and crispy. What about those converts who occasionally doubt that the religious meme is really on the up and up? Or those who are tempted to subject the meme to the hostile light of logic? The successful meme, like any parasite, has barbs with which to prevent the would-be-rationalist from shaking it out of his system. Only those will be saved, says the religious meme, who have faith. And what is faith? It is a blind and unquestioning conviction, an absolute willingness to harbor the meme forever, never trying to dislodge it from your gullet. Spit me out, says the meme, and you will tempt a fate worse than death.17

No, memes do not always sit and plot their conquests. They do not have to. In the true manner of all replicators, memes work automatically to resculpt as much of this lowly world as they can possibly grasp. And they have an invaluable ally.

Memes fan out across the planet carried by vigorously scheming hosts. These humans, out for idealism, gain, guts or glory, spread the meme with a vigor and enthusiasm that would have made Johnny Appleseed's fruit tree planting look lazy by comparison. The Romans conquered the Gauls and turned all Gaul into a Roman province. Roman memes leaped eagerly into Gallic minds. The Saxons over- whelmed the Britons and turned them into peasants in a new England ruled by a Saxon aristocracy.18 Saxon memes spread through the brains of the subjugated tribes. Americans took Hawaii and brought it under Washington's rule, schooling the island's children in American ideals, American memes. The Soviets seized Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The commissars put the workers of these newly "liberated" states through political indoctrination sessions every day when work was over. They jailed those who disagreed with the new official dogmas.19 Eventually the Soviet invaders shaped dependent nations whose leaders turned to Moscow for all major opinions, and whose goods streamed into the Soviet economy like blood cells flowing from the hand to the heart. The Russians had fed entire new populations to their meme. And the meme, in turn, had given the Russians a reward--a dramatic increase of prestige and power.

At the center of each society is an imperious master--the meme. The gunboats of 19th century America, the tanks of the Soviet Union, and the armies of Islam were merely the arms through which a meme reached out to grab fresh matter. They were the hands with which the meme reshaped raw substance in its own peculiar way.

Righteous Indignation = Greed for Real Estate

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements ....Edward Gibbon

There is no nation, it seems, which has not been promised the whole earth .... Elias Canetti

An amoeba making its way through a pond filled with fellow creatures has a habit those other beastlets may find irritating. The amoeba is a sluggish, microscopic blob that wobbles slowly through the fluid it calls home, looking for something to eat. When it encounters some other enthusiastically wriggling micro-creature, it gradually enfolds the neighbor in a watery embrace. To do it, the rubbery amoeba doubles up around the hapless creature, pinches itself together, and literally surrounds the drop of water that contains its guest. Then it sucks the drop and its inhabitant deep inside its own body. The ingested droplet now appears to a microscopist as a temporary bubble (technically known as a vacuole) moving within the amoeba's transparent form.

The amoeba floods the bubble-like dungeon in which it has trapped its captive with digestive fluids. Slowly those liquids pick apart the proteins, amino acids, oxygen and hydrogen which make up the body of the squirming prisoner. The host absorbs the resulting soup. Then his metabolism busily reassembles the components of his erstwhile boarder, this time fashioning them into sections of amoeba. One entelechy has disappeared. Another has been replenished.

William Buckley, the archconservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a highly credentialed liberal, were arguing one day on Buckley's TV show about America's budget deficits. They disagreed about nearly everything. The one notion they concurred on enthusiastically was that bureaucratic agencies --such as government departments-- mindlessly and inexorably attempt to increase their power, their budget, and their size. Like hungry amoebas, social groups have an automatic desire to grow.

Schlesinger and Buckley had noticed a mechanism that guides the behavior of every kind of social pack, from a cluster of converts in a brand new religion to the followers of a fresh scientific idea or the patriotic citizens of a state. Jeffrey S. Wicken, of Penn State University, feels that this hunger is characteristic of all evolving complexes of components--from genes and memes to massive ecological systems. He says, "for any evolving system, innovations and strategies that focus resources into the system, while at the same time stabilizing the web of energetic interconnections of that system, will be selected for."20

Superorganisms are hungry creatures, attempting to break down the boundaries of their competitors, chew off chunks of their opponents' substance and digest and redistribute it as part of themselves. Human conglomerations have an advantage over those of other species, for in their voracity they are driven by two henchmen: the meme and the animal brain.

Egged on by its co-conspirators, the ravenous voice of a superorganism calls out to charismatic men and women. Disguised as revelation or inspiration, it has spoken to humans as diverse as Mohammed, St. Paul, Moses, Hitler, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, Lenin and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Its message varies. But under the many disguises is one imperative: gather a group together and awaken them with my words. Take all those who find themselves in the condition which I describe and weld them into a mighty force which will impose its dominion on a large swatch of the world.

The voice of the superorganism calls out to those on a lower level as well. To them, it dictates sacrifice. The converts have a sublime perception of truth and feel caught up in a frenzied oneness with some superior being whose power leaves them in awe. But the holy vision or lofty secular ideals that create this thrill may be merely the voice of the larger social beast calling for some ultimate contribution--demanding that a seventh century Mohammedan hurl himself against the defenses of a city far from his ancestral home; or that his descendant drive a truck of explosives into an American office building.

Americans, too, have heard the cry of the superorganism. We have been eager to funnel fresh food into the hungry maw of our society. Albert Beveridge, an influential American senator21 at the turn of the century, had a habit of making statements like the following: "[God] has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns.... He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.... He has marked the American people as His chosen Nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America... We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace."22 Beveridge's words were designed as a justification for swallowing foreign societies, and reassembling them as pieces of the American organism. Two territories that the Senator and his colleagues were particularly eager to absorb were Cuba and The Philippines.

An amoeba hunting for fellow creatures whose substance it can absorb would find such rationalizations for digesting its prey quite handy. Just think, his hunger represents an attempt to regenerate a senile world!

An ideology is usually a high-minded mask for a group's itch to take power and resources from other social groups. It's a meme --a cluster of ideas anxious to fatten on the substance of a superorganism's neighbors.

Hans Morgenthau, the political theorist, has said that men don't willingly accept the truth about human nature, and especially about political nature. The aim of politics, Morgenthau says, is not to make people better or to alleviate their misery. It is to increase the power of one man or group of men against the power of another man or group of men. Morgenthau says our enemies are never as bad as we make them out to be, and we are never as good as we think. We're convinced we're moral. And we know damn well that our enemy is only out for power and resources, but has no morals at all. Yet we, too, are out for power and resources. And our enemy, like us, has a moral sense. He uses that moral sense just as we do, says Morgenthau, to narrow the aperture of his consciousness and ignore his lust for power.23

Hidden by the positive attributes of political and religious movements is the rapacious desire to redistribute resources, removing a chunk from their superorganism and adding it to ours. Marxists have a slogan: "Property is theft." They explain that capitalism is an excuse for plunder. It allows the property-owning classes to rob the workers of the fruits of their labor. But under Marxism's sophisticated arguments about the dialectic principle in history lies another form of thievery. For Marxism's implicit message boils down to something like this: the dirty capitalists have cornered all the goods. They hoard the tools of production, and they end up with most of the riches that result from industrialization. Those filthy bastards, let's knock them off their sacks of greenbacks and divvy up the loot.*

Marxists deplore imperialists. But Marxist revolution and Imperialist conquest share something very strong in common. They're both the expropriation of someone else's property by violent means.

* Some are under the impression that Marx called for compassionate social justice--an equitable redistribution of wealth. However the founding father of modern Communism made it clear that this was not what he had in mind. In his Communist Manifesto, he attacked socialists who "want to improve the condition of every member of society...[and] wish to attain their ends by peaceful means." Marx vilified these moderates as "fantastic...reactionary...fanatical and superstitious," dismissing them as creators of "castles in the air." (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, London, 1967, pp. 116-117.)

Marxism and imperialism aren't the only urges for plunder disguised by pious finery. The "just" God of the Old Testament promised the Hebrews someone else's milk and honey. When Mohammed brought the "merciful" words of Allah to Mecca, he handed out a rationalization that helped the Meccans snatch a third of the known world from its previous owners. The Crusaders later used Christianity as an excuse to try seizing many of those lands back from the Mohammedans.24

Ideas do more than merely bond a group together. They justify that group's expansion. Like the hungry amoeba, the superorganism is anxious to grow. It is anxious to feast on the flesh of its neighbors. Ideas dress the act of cannibalism in the garb of rectitude.

Shiites

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." ....H.G. Wells

Battles don't just take place between societies, they take place between the groups within a social unit. And ideology is what galvanizes these groups for their struggle over turf and power. In 1917, Russia was in serious trouble. Russian citizens had entered the First World War with tremendous enthusiasm. Then they had bogged down on the eastern front for years, losing battle after battle to the Germans. The demands of the war had strained the country's infrastructure past endurance. Transport and supply had broken down. Soldiers fought without bullets, went through the winters without adequate clothing, and made it through each day with scarcely enough to eat. The faltering railroad system ceased bringing adequate supplies of food to the cities. In Petrograd and Moscow, citizens waited at three A.M. in line for a scrap of bread, their faces literally turning blue as the temperature dipped to minus 40. 25

A frustrated mass of humanity was boiling with anger, anxious to find someone to blame for its misfortunes, eager to uncover a scapegoat. The Bolshevik ideology gave them the perfect target for their hostility. Said Lenin, all these problems were the fault of the propertied classes and the bourgeoisie. Why was Russia at war? Because the propertied classes demanded it. Why was Russia losing? Because the propertied classes were sabotaging the efforts of the soldiers. Why were people starving? Because the propertied classes were hoarding all the food. 26

The answer --destroy the propertied classes and, in the process, take from them everything they had: their homes, their clothing, their power. And that's exactly what happened. The enraged populace had toppled the government of the czar long before Lenin arrived from exile. But now, inspired by his oratory, hordes of common men and women rushed into the elaborate homes and well-stocked stores of the better off, snatching their food, fur coats and furniture.

The new ideology did not solve Russia's problems, nor did the theft of clothing from the closets of the well-heeled substantially enrich the masses. The war which the Bolsheviks had promised to end dragged on. The short supplies of food became more intense. Iron and coal production ground to a virtual standstill.27 To make matters worse, Russia was plunged into a bloody civil war. In that internal battle, more than 14 million Russians were killed. Over five million simply starved to death.28 Others were shot by neighbors whipped to a murderous frenzy.

The peasants had been promised the greatest fruits of the new order's redistribution of resources, and were told that they would receive the land expropriated from the landlords. But, as Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in the official Soviet Writers Union Weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, "The promised gates of paradise proved to be a trap."29 Years later, the land the peasants had been assured would be theirs was taken firmly from them by the Revolutionary authorities under Stalin. Those who objected did not fare well. According to the Russian government's History of the USSR, "in some regions 15-20 percent of the peasants were deported; for every kulak [relatively well-to-do peasant] deported three or four middle or poor peasants were arrested." Peasants were packed into unheated cattle cars and sent to distant mountain locations. They lay half-naked on the frigid floors of railway stations along the route, dying of typhoid and simple starvation. In all, nearly fifteen million of them were killed. Aleksandr M. Nekrich, a longtime member of Russia's USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of History, calls the result "the first socialist genocide."30

But under the new ideology, power and resources HAD shifted. They had slid from the old propertied classes to a new elite. The new privileged class was the pyramid of dedicated Bolshevik bureaucrats, who now had an absolute hold over the land, the factories, and the food.

An ideology had been the tool a leader --Lenin-- had used to unify a group. Ideology had been the weapon with which that coagulation of humanity then seized the resources of another. Ideology had been the force that allowed one superorganism to coalesce from chaos and swallow a neighbor.

Like Marxism, religions often tell the folks on the lowest rung that it's morally imperative for them to grab the goods of the class on top. In the 14th century, a group of groaning individuals wandered from city to city in Europe, whipping themselves as they marched. They generally came from poor homes. And their acts of self-punish- ment were more than the exercises of self-denial that at first they seemed. These flagellants had been told by their leaders that the end was about to come. When it did, rich cardinals and bishops would be tumbled from their lofty castles, tossed out of their comfortable beds and torn away from their jewelry chests. The poor, the folks who had mortified themselves in the name of God, would take over. Meanwhile, these humble folk satisfied their sacred ambitions by killing and robbing Jews.31

Mohammedanism, too, appealed at first to the poor and the downtrodden. Even Christ's basic motto was "the meek shall inherit the earth." The Savior was not promising some intangible piece of sky, some heavenly wisp of cloud. He was offering real estate.

Ideology is not only the mechanism that allows a superorganism to pounce, it is the indispensable armor with which one group inside a society girds its loins for warfare against another. In the early years of Islam, battles developed between two major Moslem sects, each professing its own form of orthodoxy. But under the surface of the ideological struggle was an entirely different kind of a fight. It was a confrontation between subcultures for dominance of the Islamic world.32

The battle between the Shiites and the Sunnis began only a generation or two after Mohammed's death. On the surface, the debate was over who should inherit the power of The Prophet. Who, in short, was the man Allah had chosen as the new spokesman of his truth. On one side, the Shiites believed that the proper leader of Islam was Ali. Ali had taken Mohammed seriously at a rather difficult time. When the merchant planted himself on corners and attempted to preach the truths he had picked up in his cave-bound conversations with an angel, not a soul outside his own home believed him. His only follower was his wife!

Ali was The Prophet's ten-year-old cousin when Mohammed began his harangues. The youngster listened attentively to the seemingly lunatic new religion. Then the boy threw in his lot with his older relative.33 The Prophet probably welcomed the new believer with disproportionate enthusiasm. If he couldn't make a dent among the adults, at least he had won over a child.

When Mecca's town fathers plotted to murder Mohammed while he slept, young Ali acted as a decoy. The killers crept up to the Prophet's bed in the middle of the night, only to discover that the sleeper stretched out upon it was the faithful youth.34 Meanwhile, the holy man was hot-footing his escape through the desert. Not long after, Ali made the long trek to Medina to rejoin his mentor. To bring his bonds to the Chosen One Of God even closer, Ali married Mohammed's daughter, Fatima. Young Ali became Mohammed's lieutenant and standard bearer when the Holy One led his followers in raids on passing caravans from Mecca. Ali sustained sixteen wounds in one battle alone. And The Prophet treated Ali as an adopted son. Now that Mohammed was dead, the Shiites35 believed Ali was the man all Mohammedans should obey.

Ranged against the Ali-following Shiites were those who believed in the legitimacy of the Banu Umayya. In the days when only Mohammed's wife and nephew had believed in his utterances, another had come to uphold the truth of His mission. It was Mohammed's best friend, Abu Bakr, the first male adult to embrace the Koran.36 From the moment of his conversion, Abu Bakr had stood by The Prophet with an astonishing loyalty. When Mohammed fled from Mecca, the only man he trusted to travel with him was Abu Bakr. When Mohammed had moments of doubt or weakness, it was Abu Bakr who sustained him.

In 632, Mohammed grew sick and feverish. Then he weakened and died. His last words: "No one is needed now but that friend [Allah]." But someone else was needed: a Caliph, a successor. Abu Bakr became that successor. He organized armies of Arabs and sent them out to conquer. And conquer they did, beginning the process that would quickly dismantle the ancient empires of the Byzantines and Persians, digesting them as segments of an entity whose name the world was only now beginning to hear --the Empire of Islam.37

Ali waited patiently in the wings as Abu Bakr led the faithful. The young man was certain that his day of justice would come. When Abu Bakr died, Ali and his Shiite followers were confident the mantle of power would descend on him. But it did not. Instead, it passed to members of the Banu Umayya tribe. The Banu Umayya, like Mohammed himself, were Mecca's merchants. They were men of the world, accustomed to dealing with the polished citizens of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad. They were organizers, able to understand and administer the affairs of state. All these skills were desperately needed in a superorganism that would go from the possession of one town to the digestion of Persia, Armenia, Syria and Egypt in only 33 years.38

But the Shiites were not willing to take the Banu Umayya's succession lying down.39 They claimed that the usurpers had stained the holiness of Islam. With their captured wealth and expropriated palaces, their elegant robes and princely ways, the Shiites claimed that the Umayyads had strayed from the spiritual path of Mohammed's truth. The followers of Ali staged a series of battles and murders to purge The Prophet's legacy. And they lost.40

On one level, the conflict between the Shiites and the Umayyads (whose successors are today's Sunni Moslems41) was over religion. It was an argument about which is the true Islam--the Islam of wealth, sophistication and ultimately corruption, or the Islam of purity, self-denial, and attention to the poor. But on another level the struggle was something else: it was the grappling of two superorganisms to see which could swallow the other, a wrestling match between two massive subcultural divisions among the followers of Islam. It was a contest between the people of the country and the merchants of the city, a fight between rich and poor. While the Umayyad followers were city dwellers obsessed with trade, the adherents of Ali, the Shiites, were uneducated, accustomed to living at the subsistence level, and dedicated to the notion that bloodshed was the only source of a man's nobility. The Shiites identified with the poverty of Ali himself, a man so penniless he'd been forced to turn to relatives to obtain the money he needed to raise his children. These illiterate wilderness dwellers felt that the Spartan way of life which had fallen upon them as a necessity was holy, but the customs of the city were not.

The Shiite followers of Ali overlooked the fact that though Mohammed had preached generosity toward the impoverished, he himself had been a city dweller, a man of wealth, and --like the Banu Umayya-- a merchant.

The battle was more than a contest between abstract ideas. The Shiites were fighting for the right to install members of their own group as the governors of the just-conquered cities of Cairo and Damascus and as the rulers of Mecca and Medina. They were out to guarantee that when the treasures of battle flowed back from the conquered capitals of distant lands, a Shiite would divvy them up, and Shiites would receive the jewels, tapestries and slaves.

Ultimately, the Shiites lost, and the Umayyads became the rulers of an empire that would someday extend as far west as Spain and as far east as India. But the battle between subcultures in the Arab world did not simply end. In fact, it became a semi-permanent feature of Islamic society. In later ages, new reformers sprang up, inveighing against the wealth and luxuries that had corrupted the old leaders.

The reformers preached poverty and purity. They railed against the corruption of money, fine palaces and showy clothes. And they promised to sweep clean the holy places of leadership. Gathering followers, the reformers frequently toppled the old rulers. Then a strange thing invariably occurred. The ascetic leaders who had praised the simple ways of the desert moved into the palaces of the materialists they had driven out. Served by slaves and fattened on the fine food and pleasant ways of the city, they, too, grew self-satisfied and wealthy.42

Each of these zealots had made a mass of humanity hungry for the goods of the folks on top. Each had justified that hunger as saintliness. Each had pulled a social beast together with ideology. And each had used the social momentum of a ravenous superorganism as a crowbar to pry open the palaces of power.

Today the descendants of the Shiite Bedouins attack a new set of city sophisticates, machine-gunning them in buses, torching their shopping districts, or bombing them in cafes. This time, the vulnerable city folk against whom the Shiites direct their rage are Egyptians, Frenchmen, Germans, and Americans. The alleged motivation of today's army of the faithful: religious idealism. The real goal: a bigger piece of the action. Once again, ideology has become the device that justifies a superorganism's need to nibble the flesh of its neighbors.

Poetry and the Lust for Power

The hunger of subcultural superorganisms disguises itself in strange and mysterious ways. Let's return for an example to modern medicine, which we normally think of as an objective science, above the mere vagaries of political lust. Like any picture of the invisible world, medicine wears the austere mantle of objective truth. But in reality, today's medical beliefs were once an ideology one group used to seize power from another.

Homeopathy was developed by a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann in the early 1800's. 43 Hahnemann--who had studied traditional medicine at Leipzig, Vienna and Erlangen--believed in giving patients highly diluted dosages of what he called "remedies." 44 These were a vast array of substances that actually produced low levels of the symptoms they were designed to cure. Hahnemann was using a principle similar to the one employed today by "clinical ecologists," medical specialists who treat allergies to food, pesticides, plastics, and other substances by giving minuscule quantities of the substance to which the patient is allergic. These microdoses seem to help the body fight off the allergen's negative effects. Treatments of this nature have been demonstrated in recent years to reduce symptoms ranging from depression and uncontrollable rages to backache and skin irritation. 45

It is not surprising, then, that Hahnemann claimed to be able to treat a tremendous variety of human diseases. His form of medicine was so successful that by 1900 there were homeopathic medical schools and hospitals all across America. 46 What's more, homeopathy seemed to work. In the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1878, the mortality rate of patients treated by traditional methods was 16%. The rate of death for the patients who had been fortunate enough to find a homeopathic doctor, on the other hand, was less than half that. 47

But merely being able to produce cures isn't enough to establish a medical discipline. A new scientific order is a social organism --a collection of humans welded together by a common belief. And freshly-hatched superorganisms are often extremely vulnerable. Older social clusters would prefer to kill such youngsters before they can grow. In 19th century medicine, the entrenched and hostile social beast was another professional clique, a coterie which had labored for generations to establish its authority.

Homeopathy's rival: allopathy. Allopaths, with their dogmatic belief in bleedings, mercury and opium48 waged a pitiless war to discredit the newcomers. They founded the American Medical Association to purge the medical profession of their rivals.49 And through government manipulation and a public smear campaign, they succeeded, hounding the homeopaths out of the medical schools, out of the medical societies, and out of access to the carefully cultivated image of medical infallibility.50

At first glance, this was a battle between two scientific truths, two systems of belief. But under the surface, it was a struggle between superorganisms over the lucrative proceeds of the medical trade.51 The allopaths won.

As we've mentioned before, today's doctors--the heirs of the allopaths-- are only able to deal effectively with about fifty percent of the complaints brought to them. The other fifty percent they haughtily dismiss as representing nonexistent ills. Yet many of the symptoms they overlook may be produced by the very same allergic problems the homeopaths claim to have dealt with successfully. The result: you and I are saddled with a medical community whose "knowledge" is the result of a battle between subcultures. Because we are in the hands of the winners, a set of cures that could have healed us has all but disappeared.

Even a wisp of imagination as fragile as poetry can be used in the squabble between subcultures over who will get the goods. In the first century AD, high-born citizens of the Roman Empire were obsessed with ambition. Many drove themselves night and day to win honors in the eyes of their countrymen and to rise in the hierarchy of the state. They entered what was called the cursus honorum --the racecourse of honors. The system was simple. If you were just starting out, you competed with other young men to win a government position reserved for neophytes. Once you landed the prized new post, you were able to work your tail off and clamber to the next position up the ladder. You showed your worthiness for advancement through a variety of means --diligence, splendid speeches in the forum, donations of warships and monuments to the state, and presentations (at your own expense) of massive public spectacles. If the crowds and the folks in power liked what you had done, you moved step by step upward on the stairway of honors. And finally, if you had labored long and hard enough, you might attain the ultimate prize, becoming one of the two consuls, the highest officers in the land and the supreme commanders of the army. The cursus honorum was a splendid motivator. It impelled Rome's best and brightest to dedicate nearly all their energies to the betterment of their society.52

But Horace, the Roman poet, wrote loftily that the struggle for political power was vain and meaningless. True beauty and happiness, his poems said, were to be found in the quiet moments of private life, a life in the countryside, isolated from the tension and bustle of teeming Rome. Ah, how elevated, how inspired, how ethereal Horace's delicate verses and their sentiments seemed. How far from the low rumblings of ambition. Or were they?

The Roman cursus honorum was open strictly to men of noble birth. Horace was not an aristocrat. In fact, he was the grandson of a slave. Horace's father had been a freedman who'd done well...well enough to send Horace to school with the upper crust. After graduation, Horace had continued to hobnob with the elite. But, nonetheless, he wasn't one of them. Horace could not participate in the traditional race for power.

He could, however, spend time on the farm a wealthy patron had given him. There he could quietly write his heart out. Curiously enough, Horace's poetry said in subtle ways that the men who strove for state honors were not very important after all. They were grasping for something mean and low. They deserved far less respect than one might think.

The men on whom all eyes should be fixed, the men who truly merited respect (and by implication the men who merited the prestige and power that follows where respect leads), were the artists who labored contemplatively in their cottages. And who was the king of the cottage artists? Who was the man to whom all the goods should fall? Well Horace, of course.53

Over the generations that followed, Horace's ideal of meditative withdrawal would take an ever greater hold on the Roman spirit. Men who once had eagerly looked forward to their days on the racecourse of honors became ashamed of their earthly ambition. Instead, they went off to the country to contemplate their souls. The best men of Rome were no longer eager to participate in bettering their state. And Rome's vigor slowly slipped away. The frail ideas of Horace's poetry had masked his personal desire for power. And they had shifted the energies of the nation, re-ordering the Roman superorganism's values, resculpting its psychic metabolism. The sublime ideals of the poet had produced hard-nosed consequences in the real world.

Poetic exhortation and medical debate are the lambent dance of the most insubstantial of all human phenomena--analysis, emotion and imagination. Poetry and medicine have produced blessings of sometimes awesome proportions. Yet the elevated and often incom- prehensible colloquies in which doctors and poets indulge are sometimes far more than at first they seem. They hide the greed of superorganisms.

When Memes Collide -- The Pecking Order of Nations

Nature's way of testing any self-replicating device is competition. For over three-and-a-half billion years 54 , she has set the products of the genetic system in a race to see who can corner the good things of this life. Like a driver strapping himself into his machine at Le Mans, each string of genes has hunkered down into the creature it constructed and driven up to the starting line. The winners of the moment are still here. The losers have retired from the track. Homo Habilis, Australopithecus, Peking Man, and Cro-Magnon, all had their moment in the sun and are gone.

Bodies are usually the genes' racing machine. But memes have driven a radically different kind of device onto the field. Their contraptions of choice are extended social groups. These superorganismic vehicles are big and complex. But their advantages are awesome: speed, maneuverability, and incalculable horsepower.

The Le Mans of superorganisms has a set of very simple rules. To understand how they work, let's take a quick look at some of the strange battles between beings of a smaller size --chickens, monkeys, you and me.

Just after World War I, a Norwegian naturalist named Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe decided to spend some time down on his parents' farm watching the quaint ways of chickens. Schjelderup-Ebbe's study uncovered a subtle form of competition disguised as barnyard peace. When the hens were fed, they approached the trough with extraordinary decorum. Though all were hungry, none ran up and grabbed whatever it could. First a rather regal-looking hen stepped up to the container of grain and proceeded to dine. The others simply watched. Then another came forward to partake of the meal, and eventually stepped aside. Yet another marched in to take her turn.

Schjelderup-Ebbe took careful notes. When he reviewed them, he realized something surprising. The order in which the feathered diners took their turns at the trough was not arbitrary. Far from it. Every day, the same bird went first, the same went second, and so on down the line.

When Schjelderup-Ebbe tossed a strange chicken into the yard, he made another discovery. The normally peaceful birds quarreled like bar-room brawlers. It seemed that the stranger was trying to establish a place in her new society. That meant she'd have to shove some of the other birds below her. And the already-established fowls were not going to tolerate the humiliation of being moved to a subservient position without a struggle. They fought against downward mobility for all they were worth.

Schjelderup-Ebbe wasn't content to simply watch the feathers fly. He kept note of exactly who was attacking whom. And he counted every vicious peck. When the naturalist toted up the arithmetic, lo and behold, another strange phenomenon emerged. Some birds received hardly any jabs at all. No one dared touch them. Others were pecked beyond endurance. They were easy targets, and nearly everyone wanted to get in a lick.

The birds no one laid a beak on were distinguished by more than just their invulnerability. They also happened to be the creatures who stepped up first to enjoy a meal. And the birds who ended up with many a hole in their feathered coats had their own unique dining distinction. They were always among the last in line.

Schjelderup-Ebbe had discovered that in the world of chickens there is a social hierarchy, a division into aristocrats and commoners --a lower, middle and upper class. The alert researcher called the phenomenon a peck-order.55 It wasn't long before naturalists were discovering similar social orders in a bewildering variety of species.56

Research on pecking orders (they're known technically as dominance hierarchies) has gone on now for roughly 70 years. And it has yielded some startling revelations. Position in the pecking order effects far more than just how many feathers you lose. It readjusts your lifestyle, your chances of survival, your sex life, and your physiology.

The pecking order can determine whether you live or die. According to the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, the highest wood pigeons in a pecking order go to bed at night with a full stomach. The birds on the bottom frequently don't. The lower-class pigeons perch on the evening roost with a meager meal working its way through their gut--just enough fuel to carry them through the night. If the weather grows unusually cold or if they don't find food the next day, some of those birds on the underside of the heap may not make it alive. On the other hand, the comfortable birds on the top of the tree nearly always manage in even the most troubled times. Their right to all the best food and lodging makes sure of that fact.57

Pecking order privileges include sex. Three male and three female rats were left alone in a cage to battle out their social system and sleep with whomever they liked. Two males lost out in the struggle for top position. They apparently also ended up with an empty dating calendar. When the females gave birth and their pups were examined, it turned out that all of them had been sired by the one dominant male. The experiment was run another twenty-one times, with different rodent participants on each occasion. The final result: the dominant rats managed to father a walloping 92% of the young.58

Where you end up in the pecking order can even change your physical makeup. A dominant male monkey has a higher sperm count, more visible testicles, and a far more regal posture. The monkeys who don't make it to the top skulk around stoop-shouldered and less sexually potent. But if some meddling researcher kidnaps the ruling simian and leaves his lordly spot vacant, the round-shouldered subordinates will grab for the empty throne. The monkey who ends up on top will undergo a change. His testicles will drop. His sperm count will climb. And his hunched posture will melt away, replaced by an authoritative upright strut. The new king of the castle goes through a biological transformation...simply because he's moved up on the hierarchical ladder. For a monkey's physiology, position in the pecking order is everything.59

Humans not only undergo the same changes when they're under society's heel, but their blood pressure goes up...and stays there. The result is an increase in the odds of heart attack and stroke, and a loss of mental swiftness.60

Blood and sperm are not the only bodily substances to shift their concentration in response to pecking order changes. 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. The fresh jolt of it in the blood invigorates the victors. For the losers it's a different story. Testosterone level plummets.61 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. Their bloodstreams are relatively glucocorticoid-free. Once again, position in the pecking order reshapes physiology.62

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.63

All of this may explain a phenomenon that crops up in Julius Caesar's battle narratives. Caesar frequently confronted tribesmen who had been 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.

Biochemical resignation explains why barnyards are not a perpetual battlefield. 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 non-stop 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.64 A long-term truce has its benefits, even if it leaves you under everybody's heel. At least it lets you live your life in quiet, freeing up your time to poke around for grubs and worms. In the last analysis, the cocky aristocrats, the status-conscious crones in the middle, and even the picked-on runts have a solid reason to go with the status quo.

The struggle for position in a pecking order is not restricted to individuals. It also hits social groups.65 There is a form of pecking order Schjelderup-Ebbe never studied --the pecking order of superorganisms.

On the outskirts of an Indian village lived two tribes of langurs --lanky, curious monkeys. It was easy to see which group had made it to the top of the pecking order. One langur clan had staked out a territory in the center of town. This group lived the life of Reilly. It's members hung around the bazaar, waiting for a small boy to toss aside a half-eaten fruit or for a passerby to drop a crust of bread. They picked through the garbage for gourmet treats--wilted vegetables or melon rinds. When the rains came, these pampered langurs stretched out under the overhangs of roofs. When it was sunny, they turned those roofs into a playground. Getting along from day to day was a breeze.

The second crew of langurs lived in the hills just outside of town. Life for them was anything but easy. They were forced to comb the ground for edible shoots. They stripped the greenery off the trees for dinner, and they dug the occasional insect out of a rotting log for a protein treat. When it rained, they huddled miserably under the dripping leaves. In the pecking order of local groups, their superorganism was on the bottom.

Every once in a while, the monkeys from the hills became fed up with their gritty lot in life. They came down to the village where the pickings were easy. The monkeys of the bazaar, however, were not particularly interested in opening their neighborhood to these intruders from the wrong side of the tracks. The privileged lady langurs who lived in town got together and chased their underprivileged cousins back to the woods from which they'd come.

But no social group's position in the pecking order is written in stone. One day the male leader of the bazaar langurs was fooling around with a sidekick in the middle of the town road. The hill langurs stood at the edge of their territory, grudgingly watching the fun. Suddenly, a car came hurtling down the tarmac. The lordly male of the elite group looked up startled--but too late. The car sideswiped him and sped away. The leader of the bazaar troop was dead.

Sensing a sudden shift in the balance of power, the chief of the hill tribe sauntered over to the aristocratic ladies of the ever-so-snobbish bazaar set --the same supercilious aristocrats who had chased him and his companions away an endless number of times. The hill langur leader donned the simian symbols of authority --an upright, arrogant posture and a self-confident stride. He swaggered straight to the queen of the bazaar clan and mounted her. Knowing that with their old leader dead she and her companions had just slid down the pecking order, the formerly snooty matron gritted her teeth but gave in. Her face was screwed up with conflict. But even as he copulated with her, the new master of the high-class neighborhood looked around him with an expression that seemed to radiate a casual contempt.

The troop of langurs from the hills, the group that had always been treated by its bazaar-dwelling cousins as second class, had moved taken a giant stride up the ladder of status. The luxurious real estate of the town market now belonged to them. The troop from the ritzy neighborhood at the center of the town, on the other hand, had taken a dive toward the bottom.66

Human superorganisms also have their pecking orders. The Soviet Union and the United States struggled for generations over who was number one. Tanzania and Chad are painfully aware of their position on the bottom of the heap. They belong to a bloc whose pecking order position is outlined in its very name: the third world.

There's good reason for a group to want to climb as high in the pecking order as it can. The superorganism at the summit has the best territory, the best food, the best of everything. That's why some ant species go to war. The ant colonies that win increase their territory. They build insect empires. The larger the size of an ant society's territory, the better each ant citizen is fed and the bigger each worker is able to grow. When it comes to sex, the winning colony scores an extra bonus. It is able to produce more winged, sexually active queens and males when the mating season comes around. As a result, even its chances to start fresh offshoots is greater than those of its less successful neighbors.67

There are other good reasons for wanting your group to reach the top of the pecking order. Remember Jane Goodall's tribe of chimps? After many years, the clan split in half. One gang stuck with the old home territory. The other wandered off to start life in a fresh new place. Between them, they established a pecking order of groups. The tribe that stayed home had the largest membership and the choicest land. It was clearly on top. Eventually this favored clan began to pick on the troop that had pulled up stakes. At first, the privileged group merely advertised its superiority by harassing the gang on the bottom. Later, the mood of the dominant clan grew ugly. The top tribe wiped its rivals out. Being on the bottom of this pecking order turned out to be suicidal.

No wonder human groups so often try to move up by manipulating ideas or by making war. The Helvetians in the days of Julius Caesar were one of those superorganisms driven by the lure of pecking order glory. As Caesar tells the story in his Conquest of Gaul68, the Helvetians lived in a state of considerable size parked roughly where Switzerland is today. But the Helvetians wanted more land. They wanted more slaves. And above all, they wanted more power. In fact, they wanted to rule over every tribe in sight.

The Helvetians did not just grumble about their pecking order aspirations, they did something about it. They laid out a methodical plan of conquest. They planted and harvested for two full years to lay in a store of supplies. They bought up all the oxen and wagons for hundreds of miles around. Then, in the third year of the grand plan, they packed all their earthly possessions, got together their wives and families, burned their twelve major towns and their four hundred villages, and set off on the glorious campaign. Caesar swears that over a quarter of a million Helvetians marched out to seek their fortune. There were so many of them that it took 21 days just to get the entire group from one side of the river Rhone to the other by boat and raft.

As the Helvetians marched, they pillaged and plundered, enslaving inhabitants of the territories on their route. They were doing just fine until they met the armies of another superorganism with an equally blind ambition to climb the pecking order. That rival social cluster was the clump of humanity known as Rome.

Caesar put superior engineering to work. He built an instant bridge. In one brief day he crossed the river that had held up the Helvetians for nearly a month. His men were better disciplined and infinitely better organized. They outmaneuvered and outfought Helvetia's massive force of warriors. When it was all over, the Helvetians begged for peace. Caesar was relatively kind. He sent the rebels back to the territory from which they'd come, and ordered them to rebuild the homes they'd burned. The Helvetians had gambled mightily --and lost. Of the 368,000 who had left to conquer Europe, only 110,000 remained.

Like Helvetia, the Roman superorganism had once sent its citizens out in military swarms to descend upon their neighbors. The Helvetians had failed to achieve their dreams of pecking order triumph. Rome, on the other hand, had not. She took over the entire European barnyard.

A strange thing happens to the memes of the superorganism that mounts the pecking order's peak. They spread as rapidly as the germs of plague, exultantly leaping from mind to conquered mind. Today, most of the population of Europe, South America and North America speaks languages rich in Roman words. It does its public business in buildings adorned with the flourishes of Roman architecture. It reads and writes the Roman alphabet. And it looks to the days of Rome's glories as those in which its own civilization was forged. For the meme of Rome gambled on driving the Roman superorganism up the hierar- chical ladder of nations. It placed its bets on making its host the first chicken at the trough. And the meme of Rome hit the jackpot.

Superior Chickens Make Friends

There is one more advantage to moving up the superorganismic pecking order: friends. A group high on the ladder of nations has them. A group at the bottom doesn't. That simple fact is vital to the spread of memes.

In 814 B.C., Phoenician merchants from the coast of what is today Lebanon sailed half way across the Mediterranean and set up a trading colony on the northern shores of Africa. They called the new encampment Kart-Hadasht --"New Town." Folks in Europe mispronounced the Semitic name. In the mouths of these westerners it came out as "Carthage." 69

The sea-going traders of Carthage did very well for themselves. They built ships to carry rare goods from one country to another, explored the coasts, and looked for barbarian towns whose craftsmen made strange objects. Carthaginian trading vessels showed up as far afield as the Baltic, the Cameroons, and even an unheard-of island we know today as Britain. 70 After all, you never knew when some backwoods trinket might fetch a steep price back in the centers of sophisticated civilization --Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis or Thebes. 71 Occasionally the shipboard entrepreneurs' hunt for new commodities turned up raw materials of considerable value. For example, in Spain the Carthaginians discovered they could buy tin that had been trekked across seas and mountains all the way from Cornwall. 72

Business for the Carthaginians was brisk. Back home, they dug an extra harbor and enlarged the size of their merchant fleet. To protect their seafaring executives from pirates, they constructed a sizable navy. Carthaginian warships were miracles of technology--swift, narrow galleys driven by sail and oar that could accelerate like a jackrabbit, and ram an enemy vessel hard enough to snap it in half.

The Carthaginians soon started colonies, planting settlements straight across Africa's northern lip, and bringing distant Spain into the Carthaginian sphere of influence. In the barnyard of Europe's central sea, the Carthaginian superorganism was soon at the top of the pecking order.

Though the population of Carthage was small, its power was vast. Why? On those rare occasions when Carthaginians went to war, their armies were accompanied by mobs of foreign troops. Their astonishingly flexible cavalry came from one north African tribe --the Numidians. Their slingers--slingshot-wielding equivalents of today's sharpshooters --came from yet another North African nation: the Balearics. And their infantry was supplied by the peoples of Libya.73 Since the Carthaginians were on top of the heap, everyone wanted to share in their good fortune.

Then a tribe that had been in diapers when Kart-Hadasht's first buildings went up decided to challenge Carthage's supremacy. At first the idea seemed like a joke. The Carthaginians were the most skillful sailors in the world. The upstarts, on the other hand, had no idea of how to rig a sail or work an oar. In fact, they didn't even know how to build a ship.

All that soon changed. The shore-bound challengers were Romans. What they didn't know, they were more than willing to learn. In 260 B.C. the enterprising citizens of the Italian city state managed to find the wreck of a Carthaginian warship that had run aground. Roman military engineers pored over the battered vessel, examining every detail. They took it apart and noted each trick of the boat's construction. Then they built a copy of their own. When the Roman technicians tested their imitation warship, it worked as well as the original. So the Romans rapidly hammered together an entire fleet, turning out a startling 220 ships in only three months.74 These traditional landlubbers were now the proud possessors of a navy.

The soldiers of the seven-hilled city set out on the seas for conquest. Rome attacked Carthage's central base for Mediterranean trade: Sicily. The Carthaginian merchants could not hold out against Latin ferocity. The island became a Roman possession. As part of the peace settlement, Rome also demanded --and got-- every island that dotted the sea between Sicily and the African coast. Then Rome broke the treaty under which she had been granted this windfall and seized Carthaginian-controlled Sardinia and Corsica as well.75

With these enemy outposts in the middle of their sea lanes, the Carthaginians were in trouble. Their merchants could no longer sail in safety from one market to another. Every Carthaginian trading vessel was in danger of Roman naval attack.

But a Carthaginian general named Hamilcar Barca had an idea. He wanted to put the Romans on the defensive.76 And he was determined to open new sources of supply to replace those the Romans were cutting off. Hamilcar Barca's plan: to outflank Roman might by turning one of the old Carthaginian trading partners into a massive province. That territory was Spain. Its conquest would allow the Carthaginians to monopolize Spanish goods, carrying them by land, if necessary, back to Carthage's customers in the East. What's more, a massive Carthaginian domain hulking to the west of the Roman sphere of influence might make the toga-wearers feel less secure about their Mediterranean rampage.77

To put his plan in motion, Hamilcar Barca kissed his wife and most of his children goodbye, took one nine-year-old son as a companion, mobilized his soldiers, and marched well over a thousand miles to the Spanish coast. There, his troops demonstrated just who was on top of the local pecking order. During nine years, they won a steady stream of battles against the native troops. Spanish tribes eventually flocked to the Carthaginian side. A small mob of Iberian, Celtiberian, Tartessos and Gallic chiefs offered to ally their men with the Carthaginian military machine.78

Barca not only enlarged his army --he enriched the Carthaginian treasury depleted by Roman trade obstructions. How? He pumped shiploads of silver, timber and tin from the hills of Spain into the Carthaginian commercial pipeline.

Watching Hamilcar Barca's every move was his son Hannibal.

Despite Hamilcar Barca's brilliant maneuvers, things in Carthage were going from bad to worse. Roman leaders cooked up phony stories of Carthaginian evil-doings, spread the propaganda to the Roman population, then declared one "just" war after another to avenge the manufactured slights.79 Carthage, which thrived on trade, not war, was being hammered into bankruptcy.

Eventually old Hamilcar Barca died. But his son Hannibal was determined to carry on. The 29-year-old came up with a daring scheme to save the Carthaginian homeland.80 He would stamp the Roman infection out at its source. Leaving his younger brother behind to hold Spain, Hannibal would gather up his army of allies and spring a surprise attack on Rome itself. He'd do it by approaching the city from a route no one could possibly anticipate. He'd take his forces --elephants and all-- through the treacherous mountain passes far to Rome's north.

The strategy seemed foolproof. For years the Romans had been certain that no army of any size could cross the mountain slopes alive. Since invasion from the north was clearly ludicrous, the generals of Rome left their northern flank virtually undefended.

Crossing the Alps with nearly 70,000 men, horses and elephants was no easy matter.81 Pack animals and battle steeds plunged off the sides of thigh-wide mountain trails to their death. Men bogged down in the snow, exhausted and starving, then gave up on their lives. And the primitive folks who made the mountains home inflicted damage with surprise attacks. But in the end, Hannibal and his followers accomplished the impossible. They clambered down from the treacherous mountain slopes to the "impregnable" northern Italian plains.

When Hannibal's troops descended from the Alpine forests, the Romans were astonished... and totally unprepared. Hannibal pulled off stunning victories against the armies Rome sent north to meet him. At the Battle of Cannae, for example, the Carthaginians wiped out a Roman army that outnumbered them two-to-one.82 Between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans died, including 80 senators and 29 military tribunes.83

Hannibal shrewdly took advantage of the old pecking order rule: friends flock to the beast on the top; they abandon the beast on the bottom. Whenever the Carthaginian triumphed, he reduced his Roman prisoners to slavery. But the Romans had been bolstered by armies of allies--troops from the conquered tribes of the Italian boot. The savvy commander sent his non-Roman prisoners back to their tribal towns unharmed. All he asked was that they carry a simple message: Carthage had nothing against the non-Roman Italians.84

The gesture worked. As Hannibal demonstrated his strength, one Italian tribe after another deserted Rome and threw its lot in with Carthage. After all, it looked like the city of the seven hills was slipping down the pecking order...fast.

The Greek historian Polybius says that at his peak, Hannibal managed to hold together an army of extraordinary diversity. "He had Libyans, Iberians, Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Italians, [and] Greeks who had naturally nothing in common with each other."85 It was the Carthaginians' seemingly unstoppable winning streak that kept them all together.

Hannibal outfoxed the Roman forces every time they met. He stormed across the Italian peninsula, taking towns and overwhelming garrisons almost at will. Soon panic seized the Roman populace. They imagined the Semite from North Africa showing up outside the walls of their city any day or night. But Hannibal was in no position to attack the center of Roman strength. Marching over the mountain passes, he had been unable to carry the siege equipment that would allow him to defeat the city's heavy fortifications. Hannibal waited for that vital hardware to be sent by sea. He charged back and forth across Italy during thirteen long years, hoping for the ships that would deliver these vital armaments. Unfortunately, they never came. The city council of Carthage sent out ship after ship to aid Hannibal. But not one boat ever made it. The Romans may have been doing poorly on land. But they still controlled the Mediterranean.86

Eventually, the Romans ordered an up-and-coming young citizen from a distinguished military family, Scipio Africanus, to confront Hannibal's brother --Hasdrubal-- back in Spain.87 (You may recall Scipio from an earlier episode in this book. He was the general who marched into the Roman Senate toward the end of his life and tore up his account books, outraged that he'd been accused of corruption.) Scipio was as good at defeating Hannibal's brother as Hannibal was at trouncing Romans. When Hasdrubal lost, he moved down the pecking order. And as the defeated Carthaginian's feathers grew unkempt, his Spanish allies one by one deserted him.88 In fact, they threw their lot in with the new master of the Spanish barnyard--the Romans. The rule that pecking order victories bring you friends had boosted Carthage's strength for years. Now it was beginning to work against her.

Hearing of the Carthaginian defeats in Spain, Hannibal's Italian allies, too, trickled away. Carthage was sinking on the hierarchical ladder. And none of the tribes wanted to go down with her.

Finally, Scipio secured all Spain for Rome and turned his attention on the Carthaginian mother city.89 In 203 B.C. Hannibal, who had held Roman citizens in terror for over a decade, was forced to flee for home to take over his native city's defense. He went with scarcely an ally left.

When it was all over, Carthage was beaten.90 Her trading empire was gone. Her colonies were in Roman hands. The north African and Spanish troops which had long been the mainstay of her military power turned their backs. And Hannibal, who had built an army of allies to corner Rome, became a fugitive.91 The town that had ruled the Mediterranean roost was friendless and alone.

The final result was simple. The Carthaginian meme died out, replaced by that of Rome. Carthage's language disappeared. Her religion was forgotten. Her great men became historical obscurities. Even one of her most glorious trading colonies in Spain --Gades-- lost her Carthaginian name. Henceforth she would be known as just Cadiz.92

The phenomenon is not restricted to ancient times. Humans in the modern era are still motivated by the primordial pecking order rule: friends flock to the bird on top; they shun and even abuse the bird on the bottom. This simple principle has cropped up in the recent history of America.

When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the achievement made two statements. It broadcast Russia's growing military power. The rocket was an adaptation of an intercontinental ballistic missile, something the U.S. didn't have at the time. Suddenly the Soviets were in a position to annihilate North American cities with nuclear weapons. The launch of Sputnik also announced that America was no longer the undisputed master of world technology. Militarily and scientifically, the Soviet Union had taken a massive leap up the hierarchical ladder. And America had been nudged a wee bit down.

The result in the third world was electrifying. Small nations rapidly fled from the nation they felt was slipping and stampeded to the side of the superorganism shinnying up the pole. Third world newspapers dripped with hatred of America and gloated over her humiliation. "Russians Rip American Face" screamed a headline in Bangkok's Sathiraphab. A professor in Beirut, Lebanon, said his students were so jubilant, "You would have thought they launched it themselves."93 In third world minds, the Soviet triumph was helping the downtrodden nations vicariously trounce the beast on top --America.

Sputnik was not the only event of that era to telegraph a Soviet rise. In 1949, a group of Marxist-Leninists were cheered on by the Soviets as they took control of the most populous country on the planet --China. In 1956, Moscow ordered its tanks into Hungary, and the U.S. didn't dare come to that country's defense. And in 1960, an island nation just a speedboat ride from Miami declared its right to throw its lot in with the Soviet Bloc.94 As the Russians rose in the pecking order, their pool of friends increased. And as we sank, the number of our faithful companions declined.

The cumulative result was a dramatic increase in the number of Soviet allies and a drastic shrinkage in ours. During the early 50's our friends in the United Nations were so numerous that any issue submitted to a vote went resoundingly our way. By the mid-sixties, frequently almost every nation voted against us.

For a superorganism, slips in the pecking order can produce catastrophe. The Yanomamo --the "fierce people" of the jungles around South America's Orinoco River --pride themselves on constant warfare. Fighting is their way of life. But to make war, you need allies. Who gets the most allies? The tribe on the top of the pecking order. And who gets the least? The tribe on the bottom.

Like the chicken at the bottom of the pecking order, everyone takes advantage of a trounced tribe's helplessness. Rival groups raid the low-ranking clan over and over again. Enemies lay in wait by its gardens. Knowing this, the shunned tribe is forced to hide out in the jungle, where it can't get decent food. Succulent yams lay in the soil of their garden plot, but these picked-on people can't even think of digging them up. They know they'll be setting themselves up for ambush.

Stronger tribes attack the group on the bottom to steal its women. Knowing this, the men of the friendless clan remain perpetually on alert. Slowly the tribesmen without allies grow more starved and exhausted. Sometimes in the end they no longer have the strength to survive 95. Deprived of friends, the tribe at the pecking order's foot may finally disappear, its most desirable members and goods absorbed by its rivals. The superorganism that once was strong simply ceases to be.

It's lonely at the bottom. No wonder most creatures prefer to be on top.

Worldviews As The Welding Torch of the Hierarchical Chain

"Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is alright."
Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams, to Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes

Poetry, science, ideology and religion --the blindmen's canes with which we feel out the invisible world, the glue that binds us together as a collective creature whose cells are individual souls --help stir the social beast to a pecking-order inspired cannibalism. And once the battle is over, the meal is complete, and the rival society is no more, poetry, ideology and religion may serve a new purpose. They often become the torch that welds the citizens of the swallowed loser into a new pecking order. They help turn captive chunks of the vanquished group into parts of the superorganism that sits there licking its lips.

Take, for example, Hinduism. The Hindu religion has seemed to its admirers in the west a profoundly spiritual view of the world. It rejects materialism, lays aside earthly desires, tells its adherents to go with the flow, to accept the world as it is, to build up a positive karma and strive for nirvana in a selfless world. What could possibly be more benign?

But under the surface, the Hindu religion is not what at first it seems. In fact, it is the device with which one conquering group managed to validate its theft of power, prestige, and goods from a rival superorganism.

In approximately 1,500 B.C., a cluster of Aryans drove their herds of cattle from Iran to northern India through the Hindu Kush mountains. These were men who centered their lives around two things: their cows and their fighting. So inextricably were the two woven together that the Aryan word gavisti had two meanings. The first: "to search for cows;" the second: "to fight." On the Indian side of the mountains, these violence-prone Iranian cattle herders found a people far more sophisticated than they were. The Iranian intruders could neither read nor write. The people native to India, however, excelled at both. The Iranians had never seen a building more complex than a temporary hut. The Indians had lived for over a thousand years in elaborate cities. But apparently the Iranians had something that the Indian inhabitants lacked: an eagerness to fight. During the next few hundred years, the Iranians attacked the indigenous Indian population relentlessly, and brutally beat the unfortunate locals into submission.

It was a pecking order triumph par excellence. The Iranian invaders reduced the Indians to the shameful role of a conquered people and declared themselves the lords of the land.96

But where, pray tell, does the lofty and otherworldly religion fit into all of this? Hinduism was the picture of the invisible world crafted over the following centuries by the priests of the Iranians. At Hinduism's heart was a simple notion. There were several classes of human beings, as distinct from each other as worms are distinct from lions. First there were the "twice born" --men favored by the gods with all their holy blessings. Then there were the shudras and the out-castes, loathsome people so beneath the contempt of the heavenly deities that the gods refused to accept their prayers.

The deities had ordained it thus. They had declared in their infinite power that the twice-born were to ride forever on the shoulders of the dirtier and humbler classes of men. For the twice-born were close to divinity. The lower castes were not. And who were these exalted twice-born mortals? The Iranians.

This pious self-aggrandizement of a conquering barbarian tribe led to the famous Indian caste system. The top three castes were exclusively reserved for the "twice-born" Iranians. One of these privileged orders (Kshatriyas) contained the Iranian warriors and aristocrats. The second (Brahmans) included the Iranian priests (those wonderful folks who came up with the system to begin with). And the third caste housed the Iranian landholders and merchants (Vaisyas). Way down on the bottom of society, squirming like insects beneath the Iranian heel, were the original Indian natives, the occupied peoples. They became the loathed shudras and out-castes. The defeated Indian shudras, were promptly put to work. They were sent into the fields to raise the crops upon which the wealth of the Iranian nobles, priests and merchants would soon be based.

The Iranian overlords were fair-skinned. The natives who had been placed in a state of permanent humiliation were dark in hue. That complexion difference was embedded permanently in the name of the social structure. You could tell a member of the contemptible Shudra class by his skin-tone. So the newly-initiated hierarchical layers were called varna--castes --the Iranian word for color.97

Under the Hindu system, the descendants of the Iranians were born with all the privileges that Hitler's Nazis would someday dream of. Take, for example, the prerogatives of the Iranian priests, the Brahmans. Anyone from a lower caste who jostled a Brahman on the street committed a sin. If he bumped the Brahman with his arm, the arm was cut off. If he touched the Brahman with his foot, the foot was surgically removed. If he sat in a Brahman's chair, he had a ten-inch red hot rod rammed up his nether parts. If he complained to the Brahman about this treatment, he had the same smoking piece of metal shoved down his throat.98

Anyone of lower class who sipped water from a pool at which a Brahman was contemplating a drink polluted it. A Brahman could make whatever accusation he wanted against a creature of lower caste and the accused would be punished. But the lower caste citizen could make no complaint against the Brahman. Once a Brahman had married at least one woman of his own superior caste, he could go into the street during festivals, roam about searching for some nice-looking girl from the lower strata, marry her if it pleased him, and discard her when he tired of her charms. But no man of lower social position could marry a Brahman girl. The members of the Iranian race were treated as Ubermenschen --overmen.

Why did the Hindu religion tell its adherents to go with the flow, to abhor the things of this world, to set aside earthly desires, to hope only for an improvement of their lot after this life is over? Because Hinduism was designed to keep the conquered shudras in their place. It told those trapped in the lower castes to be content with their humiliation and shun the appalling actions that might spring from desire and discontent. It instructed them never to overthrow their Iranian masters.

A brilliant invention made the society work: specialization. An entire class of human beings was consigned to agriculture for a lifetime. Another class was given the lifelong specialty of warfare. Presumably, perpetual practice made each better at his craft. And, of course, there were the specialists in religion who spent their time suppressing vanity and desire--the two things that could have torn the pecking order apart. For desire would have made those pinned in the lower orders hanker to move above their humble posts.

The armies of professional religionists, the priests and monks, seemed at first glance to serve no useful economic purpose. But, in fact, they were the keepers of an indispensable meme. They declared that if you had the patience to tolerate imprisonment in a lower caste during this life, you would be rewarded by rebirth later in the next caste up the ladder.99 If you held still long enough, you could actually become an Iranian!

In a strange way, the Iranian overlords knew that they were fashioning a new superorganism from the swallowed pieces of the society they'd overwhelmed. Their ancient chronicle, the Rig-Veda, written in the days when the conquerors were piecing together their idyllic new social system, put the argument for superorganism quite bluntly. The Brahmanic priests, said the Veda, were man's mouth. The warriors were his arms. His thighs were the Vaishyas (the tradesmen and landowners). And the Shudras (the farmers) were his feet!100

The Brahmans were not the only folk to turn plunder into a permanent condition, grafting the conquered into the underbelly of their own superbeast. The aristocrats in many civilizations are the fossils of earlier conquering hordes. Their position at society's apex is the residue of robbery.

In England, the titled classes, the folks who hold their noses in the air and disdain their lowlier countrymen, are the descendants of Saxon, Viking and Norman soldiers who pillaged, slaughtered and raped in successive waves from roughly 470 to 1066 AD.101 In Japan, the aristocracy which has sat securely in place for nearly 1,800 years is the remnant of a population of nomadic Mongoloid horsemen who came across the sea from Korea in the first century A.D., brutalizing the local population into submission with long iron swords.102 Yet we still gush with excitement over princes and princesses who show off at elaborate parties and are featured in fashionable magazines, not realizing that the virtue which distinguishes their families from ours was the greater willingness of their ancestors to use violence.

In Japan and England, just as in India, religion, philosophy, poetry and ideology have all been used to nail the lowly conquered in their place. For a view of the invisible world holds a very visible world together--the world of society. A web of memes justifies the subjugation of those on the bottom, upholds the power of those on top, and sometimes maintains the specialized roles that allow a static society to work. Even more, it clothes the power of those who rule with a sublime halo, disguising overlords as the chosen of God --or, in the case of Marxism, the inevitable heirs to the forces of history. It beatifies the pecking order.

 

Notes

1. For a sense of what Mecca was like in those days, see The March of Islam, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1988, pp. 22-23.

2. This account of the life of Mohammed and the development of Islam is based on the following sources: Sarwat Saulat, The Life of The Prophet, Islamic Publications Ltd., Lahore, Pakistan, 1983. William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman, The Islamic World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983. H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, Macmillan, New York, 1926. J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1980. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin Classics, New York, 1985, p. 652.

3. St. Paul's epiphany on the road to Damascus has also been attributed to epilepsy.

4. Tim Newark, The Barbarians: Warriors & Wars of the Dark Ages, Blandford Press, London, 1985, p. 86.

5. The sieges of Vienna began in 1529 under a second wave of Islamic empire-builders, the Turks. See Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey; Volume I: Empire of the Gazis; The Rise and Decline of The Ottoman Empire 1280-1808; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p. 94.

6. Roland H. Bainton, Christianity, pp. 17-27.

7. Sources for this interpretation of Christianity's beginnings include: The New English Bible: New Testament, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1961; Charles Guignebert, Jesus, Knopf, New York, 1935; Joseph Klausner, The Messianic Idea in Israel, trans. W.F. Stinespring, Macmillan, New York, 1955; Edgar J. Goodspeed, Introduction to the New Testament, University of Chicago Press, 1937; and Roland H. Bainton, Christianity.

8. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin edition, p. 276.

9. Roland H. Bainton, Christianity, pp. 39, 47. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 266-267.

10. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, pp. 28, 118, 127, 139, 141. For St. Paul's invention of the phrase, see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 370.

11. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin edition, pp. 309-315.

12. The story of Constantine's vision of a cross in the sun goes back to Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. Twenty five years after the battle at the Milvian Bridge, Eusebius, a contemporary of Constantine's, declared that the Emperor had mentioned seeing the vision of the cross in the sky. On that cross, Eusebius reported, were the words "By this conquer" (per Roland H. Bainton, Christianity, p. 90). Eusebius should have known what he was talking about. He had dinner with Constantine during the Council of Nicaea, delivered the eulogy to Constantine that opened the official deliberations, and sat at the Emperor's right hand during the Council's sessions. (Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 572. And Bainton, Christianity, p. 96.) On the other hand, Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, claimed that the story of Constantine's vision was a fairy tale (Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin edition, p. 383). Gibbon felt Constantine's conversion to Christianity was a more gradual process. But whether the Emperor had visions or not, Constantine not only made Christianity the Empire's official religion, he took to presiding over doctrinal councils and made himself the virtual head of the Christian church. (See also: George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, (trans. Joan Hussey), Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1969, pp. 46-48; and Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 613-622.)

13. H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, p. 337.

14. Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-Tanukhi, "Ruminations and Reminiscences," excerpted in William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman, The Islamic World, p. 102.

15. Tad Szulc, Fidel, pp. 80-86.

16. Even the august third century Christian theologian Origen--who felt the notion of a flaming furnace beneath the earth was a fantasy-- had to admit that hellfire was a devilishly convenient tool for keeping the faithful in line. (Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 327.)

17. These insights into blind faith and hellfire originated with Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, p. 212.

18. For a detailed, archaeologically based description of the Anglo-Saxon conquest, see Michael Wood, In Search of the Dark Ages, pp. 1-60.

19. For a chilling first-hand account of how the Marxist meme was pounded into the brains of Bulgarians, see Georgi Markov's The Truth That Killed (Ticknor & Fields, New York, 1984). Markov was an award-winning writer in Communist Bulgaria and a member of the regime's intellectual elite. In 1969, disheartened by an appalling lack of freedom and by the corruption of party members, Markov defected to London and became a broadcaster, beaming his opinions back to the land he had left behind. Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov was not pleased with Markov's open dissent. On September 7, 1978, the radio commentator was killed on a London street with a poisoned pellet shot from a James-Bond-style umbrella.

20. Paraphrased by David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, "Consequences of Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics for the Darwinian Tradition," in Bruce H. Weber, David J. Depew and James D. Smith, eds., Entropy, Information, and Evolution: New Perspectives on Physical and Biological Evolution pp. 335-6.

21. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower, pp. 177-78.

22. quoted in William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey; A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Volume I, The Start, 1904-1930, p. 68.

23. from an audio-taped interview with Morgenthau in the series Sum and Substance, by Herman Harvey, Ph.D., available from Books On Tape, Newport Beach, California.

24. Aziz Atiya, Crusade, Commerce and Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1962, p. 18.

25. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1977, pp. 37-41. John Reed, the highest-paid American reporter of his day, was a witness to the critical events of the Russian Revolution. His account was highly sympathetic to the Bolshevik faction. In fact, it was a passionate exposition of the Bolshevik point of view. The introduction to Reed's book would eventually be written by none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. See also Harrison Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow, pp. 334-5.

26. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World, pp. 10, 35.

27.4 n 1921 Russian pig-iron production was about one-fifth of its 1913 level, that of coal a tiny 3 per cent or so...." J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, pp. 842-843.

28. These figures come from the official Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR. Cited in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia In Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, p. 120. Also see Bruce W. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1989.

29. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "Civic Timidity Is Killing Perestroika," Liturnaya Gazeta, reprinted in World Press Review, July, 1988, p. 27.

30. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia In Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, p. 235. The figure of fifteen million deaths comes from Iosif G. Dyadkin, Unnatural Deaths in the USSR, 1928-1954, Transaction Books, New Brunswick, New Jersey, p. 25. Dyadkin was professor of geophysics at the All-Union Geophysical Research Institute in the Soviet town of Kalinin until he was arrested in 1980 for writing this book.

31. J.R. Tanner, C.W. Previte-Orton, Z.N. Brooke, eds., Cambridge Medieval History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1968, p. 285. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Oxford University Press, New York, 1974, pp. 136-140. Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, pp. 194-197.

32. For an extremely good account of the struggle that split the early Moslem world between Shiites and Sunnis, see Mohammad Heikal, The Return of the Ayatollah, Andre Deutsch Limited, London, 1981 (1983 paperback edition), pp. 75-80. Heikal was the longtime editor of Egypt's leading newspaper, Al Ahram, and was a close confidant of Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser. His analysis provides the foundation on which my narrative is based. For the emotional dimension of the Shiite faith, see Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, pp. 146-154. See also E.L. Danie, "Abbasid Dynasty," in Ainslie Thomas Embree, ed., Encyclopedia of Asian History, Vol. I, p. 3.

33. Sarwat Saulat, The Life of the Prophet, p. 17.

34. H.G. Wells, Outline of History, p. 375. Sarwat Saulat, The Life of the Prophet, p. 39-40.

35. The followers of Ali wouldn't begin to formally define themselves as Shiites ("Shi'at Ali," the party of Ali) until after Ali's death. (Mohamed Heikal, The Return of the Ayatollah, p. 79.) For the sake of simplicity, I've taken the liberty of referring to them as Shiites from the beginning.

36. This is a figure of speech. Mohammed's revelations were not formally assembled into the Koran until 20 years after the Prophet's death.

37. H.G. Wells, Outline of History, pp. 374-380.

38. H.G. Wells, Outline of History, p. 382. J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, p. 323. Ronald Grigor Suny, "Armenia," Academic American Encyclopedia, Volume 2, p. 172.

39. Fazlur Rahman, Islam, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1979, p. 171.

40. H.G. Wells, Outline of History, p. 384.

41. P.M. Holt, Ann K.S. Lambton and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge History of Islam: Volume I, The Central Islamic Lands, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1970, p. 72. J.M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World, p. 326.

42. William R. Polk and William J. Mares, Passing Brave, Ballantine Books, New York, 1973, p. 103. Polk is director of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago and was a staffer in the State Department's Policy Planning Council under the Kennedy administration. Mares is a former reporter for the Chicago Sun Times. In 1971, the pair mounted an expedition to cross the great sand barrier of Northern Arabia by camel. It was a deliberate effort to recapture the way of life of the Bedouins who had founded Arabic culture.

43. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homeopathy and the American Medical Association--Science and Ethics in American Medicine 1800-1910, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 1982. pp. 6, 22-23. The Columbia Encyclopedia in One Volume, pp. 779, 842. Peter L. Petrakis, "Homeopathy," Academic American Encyclopedia, Vol. 10, p. 212.

44. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 328-331.

45. The assertions of the clinical ecologists have been supported by studies published in a wide variety of journals, including Annals of Allergy, Allergy in Otolaryngologic Practice, Journal of the International Academy of Metabology, Proceedings Third World Congress of Psychiatry and Britain's prestigious The Lancet. For a clear and impressive overview of the maverick field of clinical ecology, see Dr. Marshall Mandell and Lynne Waller Scanlon, Dr. Mandell's 5-Day Allergy Relief System, Pocket Books, New York, 1980, pp. 46-117. Don't be fooled by the frivolous title of this book. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine calls it "remarkable" and Bernard Rimland, Director of the Institute for Child Behavior Research and founder of the National Society for Autistic Children, calls it "excellent." See also: "What Is Clinical Ecology?" The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, Denver, Colorado; and William H. Philpott, M.D. and Dwight K. Kalita, Ph.D., Brain Allergies, Keats Publishing, Inc., New Canaan, Connecticut, 1987, pp. 7, 231. In 1991, a media attack was mounted to discredit clinical ecology as "bogus science." Indirect evidence suggested that the publicity assault may have been orchestrated by the insurance industry to discredit MD's who testified in damage suits against polluters.

46. In 1896, there were 110 homeopathic hospitals, "145 dispensaries, 62 orphan asylums and old people's homes, over thirty nursing homes and sanatoria, and 16 insane asylums." And a count of homeopathic medical schools in 1900 put the total number at 22. (Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 304, 442, 450.)

47. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 298-302.

48. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 17, 59-60.

49. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 179-184.

50. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 140-450.

51. Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy, pp. 432-3.

52. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 61, 65-66, 82. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Penguin edition, pp. 91-92. Ernle Dusgate Selby Bradford, Hannibal, p. 73.

53. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, pp. 129-34.

54. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos, p. 64.

55. John Sparks, The Discovery of Animal Behaviour, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1982, pp. 226-230. Joseph Altman, Organic Foundations of Animal Behavior, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1966, p. 454.

56. David McFarland, ed., The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, pp. 139-140. For a description of pecking order among grackles, see Harold Burtt, The Psychology of Birds: An Interpretation of Bird Behavior, p. 23. See also James W. Grier, Biology of Animal Behavior, pp. 568-569.

57. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 141. See also Robert Burton, Bird Behavior, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1985, p. 133.

58. E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology, p. 141.

59. David Barash, The Whisperings Within: Evolution and the Origin of Human Nature, pp. 179-180. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 97, 118, 137, 139.

60. Lydia Tomoshok, Ph.D., Craig Van Dyke, M.D., Leonard S. Zegans, M.D., Emotions in Health and Illness: Theoretical and Research Foundations, Grune & Stratton, London, 1983, p. 76. Jack D. Maser, Martin E. P. Seligman, Psychopathology: experimental models, 1977, p. 287-288. Bruce Bower