The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History |
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The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
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by Howard Bloom
Sales Rank: 30852
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List Price: $16.00
$10.88
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on 9-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 466 pages
Published by: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st Pbk. Ed edition March 13, 1997
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0871136643
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0871136640
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
Weighs: 1.4 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
The "Lucifer Principle" is freelance journalist Bloom's theory that evil-which manifests in violence, destructiveness and war-is woven into our biological fabric. A corollary is that evil is a by-product of nature's strategy to move the world to greater heights of organization and power as national or religious groups follow ideologies that trigger lofty ideals as well as base cruelty. In an ambitious, often provocative study, Bloom applies the ideas of sociobiology, ethology and the "killer ape" school of anthropology to the broad canvas of history, with examples ranging from Oliver Cromwell's reputed pleasure in killing and raping to Mao Tse-tung's bloody Cultural Revolution, India's caste system and Islamic fundamentalist expansion. Bloom says Americans suffer "perceptual shutdown" that blinds them to the United States' downward slide in the pecking order of nations. His use of concepts like pecking order, memes (self-replicating clusters of ideas), the "neural net" or group mind of the social "superorganism" seem more like metaphors than explanatory tools.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Pop-culture Renaissance Man Bloom-former PR agent for the likes of Prince, writer for Omni magazine, and so on-seeks to explain why civilizations rise and fall, why nations go to war, and why violence and aggression don't disappear with the ascendancy of culture. Big task. The "Lucifer Principle" is based on the metaphors of the "meme" (ideas that arise across cultures and epochs) and "the pecking order" (from chickens to nations, and all in between). This sort of slippery extrapolation is at once cleverly neat and maddeningly suspicious, and the pitfalls of trying to unite animal biology, genetics, cultural history, anthropology, and philosophy are apparent in that sundry causes and effects are all lumped together as equals: rats in a cage do this, "primitive" cultures do that, Sumerians did a third thing, so therefore we do this. The 800 footnotes are symptomatic: sources range from the Information Please Almanac to a textbook on surgical nursing and a sprinkling of audiobooks. This book falls somewhere between Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (LJ 12/87) and John Naisbitt's Megatrends (LJ 10/1/82). For general audiences.
Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
Bloom's claim that his book is a "Scientific Expedition" is what caught my interest in the bookstore, and turned out to be the basis of the betrayal I felt at reading it. While there may be some interesting (and perhaps even true!) ideas presented in the book, the fact is that the presentation undermines them so badly that it is hard to give credibility to any of them. Obviously, Bloom is well equipped with an arsenal of historical fact. However, his use of historical anecdote to "prove" points should rankle anyone familiar with careful scientific thought. Examples can be found in history to prove virtually any point, and Bloom lacks compelling evidence to support his thoughts. Most offensive to my sensibilities were his lumping of all Islamic and Native American cultures as inheretly violent. His evidence that this is the nature of Native Americans? Well, the "bloodthirsty savage" passage was written by someone who many Native Americans considered a friend! (I can just see this historian; "No, really, some of my best friends are Indians!") What bothered me more than anything, however, was Bloom's relentless abuse of the ideas of Richard Dawkins. He rides Dawkin's thinking on "memes as replicators" to an absurd horizon. At the same time, he promotes his "superorganism" concept, which has none of the properties of replication. He bases this "superorganism" idea on a group selectionist argument that has been debunked so thorougly that I find it hard to believe that he didn't deliberately omit the counterarguments. Personally, I was familiar enough with Dawkin's Selfish Gene theory to see the gaping holes in Bloom's thinking. In other areas where I have no such knowledge, I have to face the likelihood that the same careless thinking probably went in to his conclusions. Hence my mistrust of ANY points Bloom is trying to make. If you need further evidence of Bloom's readiness to dismiss inconvenient facts in order to make his point, I suggest you reread the concluding chapter. I find it telling that Bloom, in the space of a paragraph, casually dismisses a law of thermodynamics as "wrong". Such a thorough lack of understanding of his subject matter is a very un-scientific approach. The cover says the book is a work of "intellectual courage". This may be. (I certainly find it courageous to be so willing to be potentially so wrong on so many points, and to present ideas with such weak evidence.) As intellecual as it may be, it does not stand up scientifically. Bloom may need to narrow his field in order to be up-to-date on all of the relevant information, or drop his pretense at scientific accuracy.
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The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
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Updated on 9-15-2008.
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