The Lucifer Principle - book review

"The Lucifer Principle" by Howard Bloom is a hard book to categorize. The subtitle is "A scientific expedition into the forces of history" but the book is hardly science. It is more like a collection of anecdotes that support and reinforce the author's premise. The anecdotes are, for the most part, believable although certainly not always uncontroversial. I think Bloom enjoys being politically incorrect or even down provocative as when he describes some societies as simply more barbaric and blood-thirsty and then places all Islamic nations within that collection. He idolized imperial England and regrets their downfall due, in large part, to their losing their will to fight. Of course the implication is that America is the next to go unless we start fighting and fighting bloody. Bloom emphasizes the pecking order of nations and claims that there's nothing we can do about their being a pecking order. All we can do is try to stay on top of it where we have a little more ability to control events.

Although most of the book is focused on superorganisms such as nations he doesn't leave out the individual. Here again, he sees the pecking order as "natural" and the best strategy as being on top, however ruthless you have to be to get and stay there.

This book will make pacifists cringe and those who think humanity is improving dispair. The title of the book comes from Bloom's assertion that all this blood, gore, and struggle are necessary for the human race to grown and thrive but, since we don't want to blame God for this necessity, we invent Lucifer and blame him instead. The book is easy to read, if not to stomach. I found myself wanting to argue with the author on almost every point while conceding that he's not alone in believing the ideas he puts forth.

I think this book sounds so convincing because Bloom paints everything in black and white (and bloody red all over) whereas I believe the world really is more gray. Imperialism may have advanced many third world nations faster than any other action might have but it did so with consequences which for the past 100 years have reverberated throughout the world spreading death and misery. Maybe another method of bringing civilization to the third world would have been just as effective without creating this legacy. If all we learned from the past 4,000 years is what Bloom tells us in The Lucifer Principle, then we are poor learners indeed.