Howard Bloom

It is amazing what a person can get away with under the pretense of science. Mr. Bloom certainly evinces his bigotry of Islam, the "Islamic world" and Arabs under the guise science. The Lucifer Principle is merely a vehicle to support a political agenda disguised as science. This is not too surprising since it comes from a political writer.

To extrapolate societal and human behavior from animal behaviour is a large logical leap that can't be proved, but merely inferred. While genetics show more influences behaviour, within a species, it is questionable whether it carries over to other species higher up the phylogenetic scale, and certainly to humans, where geography, environment and culture play a big role in behavior. Thus, Bloom’s assertion that what is observed in lower phyla directly contributes to killer cultures of the Islamic world.

Show me the data? Regarding killer cultures, Bloom spends significant page space to point out that Arabs by nature have a blood lust, and that Islam justifies the blood lust. Are there not other killer cultures? What about violence in Norse culture, Aryan culture, Mongol culture, and now American culture? How about in his own Jewish culture? Certainly the Old Testament is replete with genocide, justified as God’s will and sanction for the Israelites.

Both Arabs and Jews descend from the same father, Abraham. If violence is in the genes, as Bloom argues, then why are Jews exculpated from possessing a killer culture, but Arabs are not? Certainly history has shown the old kings of Judaism wiped out whole tribes for not believing in the same God as them (see Karen Armstrong's Holy War). But forget about the past, we only need to look at America, coming off of the Newtown, CT tragedy. Despite the mass slaughter of children, we as a society are not willing to give up our “right to carry” military assault rifles for hunting and self-protection. I would submit that more people were killed in America by domestic abuse, homicide, drugs, and other forms of violence than by Islamic terrorists. In fact more civilian people in Pakistan (30,000) have been killed by America since 9/11 than actual Americans killed from 9/11.

Bloom asserts that Islamic cultures in particular glorify violence, yet how much violence is depicted in our most prevelant cultural medium, television? We glorify violence. This nation was built on violence (ask the American Indian, or the Black man-see Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the US) and we promote violence through TV-here's a meme for you. And despite this violence, we export it to the third world, whether they like it or not (see Ben Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld).

Bloom asserts that Islamic fundamentalism/terrorism is the consequence of one meme "nibbling at the flesh" of other cultures. Yet the violence of American cultural meme has had a far more pernicious effect on the Islamic world than the Islamic world on the West. So which superorganism "nibbles at the flesh" of which superorganism?


The author faults Muslim’s for reacting to European invasion during the Crusades citing it as an example typifying Muslim behavior. Islamic distrust of European culture (whether from the Crusades or European colonialism) is therefore over-reaction.

The Crusades, after all, was really about Christian Europeans reclaiming what was rightfully theirs. Regardless of the fact Europeans are from Europe, they have superior claim to the Middle East because Christianity and Judaism arose out of the Middle-East. Well, where did Islam arise from? Europe?

Bloom cannot excuse the Crusades as an attempt at reinstituting "Western" values in a region that was formerly Christian. And I am not sure what Western values Christians were inculcating since they slaughtered the Jews when they took Jerusalem, and sacked Constantinople during the Crusades. Or the fact that Constantinople beseeched the Muslims of Egypt for aid against European Franks. Conflating Christianity with Western-secular values is erroneous. Christian Arabs are culturally equivalent Muslim Arabs, eating and dressing the same, speaking the same language (and even referring to God as Allah). Similarly, Bloom cannot excuse the racist mentality of European colonials in the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent – yet he does. The complete subjugation, denigration, and massacre of whole populations in Algeria, India-Pakistan, the Levant warrants the ire by these peoples towards the European colonials.

People seem to get all upset when Muslims try to acknowledge their cultural heritage and value sets; perceiving as expressing fundamentalist beliefs. They fear the Islamic meme will overtake America. Despite such absurdities, we continue to pass anti-Sharia laws, block the building of mosques and cultural centers (like the Ground Zero “mosque”, produce truly hateful and bigoted videos against Muslims, and even books like the instant one, to keep a meme of fear and distrust alive. I would argue this type of meme is just as insidious as any killer culture meme.

I don't disagree that virulent memes spread across religions, and Islam certainly has its share. But so do all other religions. Singling out one religion and one broad set of people (Muslims, Arabs, etc. to the exclusion of the rest of humanity is misleading and intellectually dishonest. I think Howard Bloom just does not like Muslims and Islam, and thats okay, but he should have the honesty to apply his logic universally, not just to the group he does not like. show less

A sprawling, playful, sometimes quixotic exploration of how our DNA has manifested -- necessarily, Bloom argues -- capitalism. Rather than arguing the relative merits and pitfalls in the system or pitting it against socialism -- a tired matchup these days -- he shows the psychological, sociological, even genetic and physical origins of the economic system that arguably dominates the globe. The book closes with an impassioned plea for those who have benefited most from the capitalist system show more to use their bounty to help those who are the least among us. Setting aside my personal bias against capitalism gone wild and my prejudice against libertarianism, the book is a rollicking read and makes its points with a great deal of joy. show less

Wow...Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything meets Cecil B. DeMille ("Then came the really big stretch. The stretch beyond sanity. The stretch that translates from one medium to another. The stretch that Leonardo made. The stretch to metaphor. The stretch from water to light.")

Bloom wrapped a tremendous amount of history, knowledge, speculation and conclusions into a tome. It's quite readable, but I don't know that he'll convert anyone. Readers might want to try Lawrence show more Krause's A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing for a physicist's take on the matter.

Recommended if only for the stunning amount of reference material cited. show less

In Brief: I enjoyed Bloom's premise and the ideas he set forth, although I can't share his enthusiasm.

What I Didn't Care For: The style in which this book was written became tedious after a few hundred pages. I don't fault Bloom for his enthusiasm but the constant repetition (doubtless done for effect and, if I were being charitable, for thematic resonance) grates on the writer in me.

There were some issues with the argument presented here. While I am personally enchanted by the same show more thoughts of unity and emergence that drive Bloom, I am less convinced by the specifics of his argument. The philosophical idealism I am attracted to (which started with Plato, ran through Spinoza's panpsychism and Leibniz's rationalism before reaching a zenith in Hegel) is, to be frank, kooky by my own admission. I like the idea for what it implies, but I am the first to admit that I cannot support it on strong grounds, certainly not compared to the naturalism which my pragmatic side cannot ignore.

I see threads of this trajectory in Bloom's argument, though where Hegelian thought eventually lead to Marx (and the Left's eventual realization that the dialectic was a dead end), Bloom seems to arrive at a parallel justification for modern-day ideals of liberalism and capitalism. Applying teleological arguments to history is always a dangerous proposition, more likely the benefit of hindsight and confirmation bias than a true "story of history". To be fair, Bloom does acknowledge this in the final chapter (although, perhaps predictably, ideals win out over criticism).

For an Idea Book, I don't see this as terribly problematic, but it is worth mentioning that, scientific arguments aside, this is a book on metaphysics and the true nature of reality. As a consequence, it is subject to all the same criticisms that have faced Hegel and other forms of idealism: namely, how do we prove it? Can we prove it? Are these even questions for science to answer?

Regarding the how, I am reminded of Karl Popper's reservations with Freud and Marx, which eventually led to his famous definition of science as falsifiable conjectures. It was not the power of psychoanalysis and Marxism to explain that was in question; it was the fact that they could explain everything, without exception. While Popper was careful to note that non-scientific ideas were not invalid, it was hard to see how they could qualify as scientific. So it was with Marx, so it remains.

As for the latter question, I think that emphasizing science as the only appropriate tool to understand reality is misguided (especially if we restrict this to current science), and here I have a much deeper objection to Bloom's specific claims of anthropomorphism. Viewing the universe through a human lens is expected and, in some sense, unavoidable; I can forgive that, but I do have real concerns about the proposed *nature* of the humanity that Bloom proposes to map to universal laws (or vice versa). To treat the fundamental categories of nature as operating on notions of attraction and seduction and competition is hasty, at best, and even if we grant this argument, it is by no means clear that this is a total account of terrestrial life, let alone human action and behavior. Indeed one could easily construct a counterargument based on alternative interpretations of evolutionary theory alone, to say nothing of philosophical traditions that do not emphasize the limited set of subject-object relations taken for granted in Western (particularly American) thought.

While I am sympathetic to Bloom's desire for unity, we're treading on perilously non-scientific ground here, and we should accordingly be cautious in making claims to truth, enthusiasm notwithstanding. On that same note I would have preferred a deeper and more nuanced look at the philosophical assumptions underlying the interpretation of the scientific account of nature.

The Good: This is a big book, in ambition as well as page count, and that will always capture my sense of wonder. Bloom clearly did his research here, as attested by his formidable collection of notes spanning a range of disciplines across the history of humankind and the universe.

Even though my pragmatic side encourages restraint and my ideals conflict with Bloom's particular interpretation of the natural world, there is much to think about here and I do appreciate the larger attempt to explain how we get "something from nothing".

Overall: Whether or not Bloom succeeds in making his case is up to the reader. I didn't find myself entirely persuaded by the specifics, although I can't help but appreciate the larger argument. show less