Howard K. Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History Review

Good Points
Provides a good bibliography for some better books.

Bad Points
Purely speculative, does a profound disservice to his sources.

General Comments
Howard K. Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History Review:
This is a book written by a dabbler, who knows a little about a lot of things, and not very much about anything in particular. Some great books come from perceptive dabblers, because their authors, free from the tunnel-vision of specialists, often come up with creative Grand Unification Theories that run across many fields, and that would never occur to those immersed deep in one field.



This is not one of those books.



The Lucifer Principle is a spectacular failure, because it promises so much, and delivers nothing but speculation. Bloom is no scientist, and there's such a huge gulf between his (good) premises and his (stupid) conclusions as to make this a complete waste of time. Everything that is interesting about his book comes from someone else, and everything that Bloom adds is hogwash. Can any intelligent reader really believe that anything meaningful can be said about the causes World War I, for example, from biology?



The first third of this book is dedicated to laying out the groundwork, based on evolutionary genetics and theories like Dawkins' Selfish Gene. This is ok material, well explained. But if this is what interests you, check out his footnotes and go read the original source, because the rest of the book does not do them justice.



Then Bloom begins leaping in and out of history, and this is where things become awful. His idea is that the connection between evolutionary genetics and history is essentially that we are immoral, and we're joined into a superorganism that propagates this immorality. This may be true, but none of his conclusions follow from anything in genetics. The gulf is too wide for science to bridge. Here, his impatient dabbler-mentality shows through. Each chapter averages only six pages, hardly enough for even an exposition of anything in history, let alone some sort of intelligent analysis.



Here's a random sampling of some of the many questionable conclusions he churns out, after a page or two of "argument":



-The people in Arab society are prone to evil because Islamic fathers don't cuddle their children enough (p. 243)



-World War I was the result of a "Teutonic... Testosterone high" (p. 280) caused by the Germans' ascending economic fortunes



-Michael Jackson is a family man that "(brings) us back to the values of our past" (p. 302)



-"We Americans have attempted to use every one of the old (diplomatic) techniques to establish peace" (p. 250), yet the "barbarians" keep dragging the U. S. into wars they don't want.



-Someone named Allan Bloom is a threat to America for having erroneously denounced MTV and Rock n' Roll, and thus diverted her energies from the real threat of Barbarian Invasions. (pp. 282-6) Apparently this has some connection to the subject of the book, too.



Bloom seethes with anger towards certain religious and ethnic groups like Moslems, Arabs, Germans and Japanese. They're all "barbarians" to Bloom, and this blind rage (and fear) keeps him from creating any sort of meaningful analysis. The book's title should act as a warning that there's no historical nuance here.

Each chapter in the last half is dedicated to dividing the world's groups into Good and Evil, and for Bloom there is no middle ground. This creates a massive inconsistency in his argument, since it is founded on evolutionary science, which is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral.



There is some good science hidden in here, but it comes from elsewhere---which is where you should go if it interests you.