Originally published 12 December 1994
If I remember rightly, I was about 12 years old when I first came across Francisco Goya’s collection of etchings called The Disasters of War.
I knew nothing of Goya, nor of the subject of the etchings, the Spanish insurrection of 1808 and the resulting war with Napoleonic France. I looked upon these terrible pictures with a child’s innocent eyes.
Anyone who has seen the etchings will not have forgotten them. Bodies without heads or limbs impaled on trees. Soldiers splitting naked bodies lengthwise with swords. Unmitigated scenes of rapine and slaughter.
It probably did not cross my young mind to wonder how humans could do such things to each other. I had been taught in school about original sin and the power of Satan in the world. The horrors depicted by Goya were surely the work of the Dark Angel.
Nearly half a century has passed and I no longer believe in Satan. Nevertheless, the intervening years have provided ample evidence of the human potential for violence. In Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Bosnia, and dozens of other places around the globe, we go on butchering those who are not of our own clan.
Now comes polymath writer Howard Bloom to tell us why we kill. In a book to be published next month by Atlantic Monthly Press, Bloom argues that evil is a by-product of nature’s strategies for creation, woven into our most basic biological fabric.
The book is The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. It is a provocative book that ranges across broad territories of knowledge — history, politics, biology, anthropology, psychology, ethics.
The book’s thesis, that reprehensible human behaviors are genetically determined, is not new; a crowd of amateur and professional sociobiologists have taken us down this path before. What gives Bloom’s version of the story a certain explosiveness is its in-your-face challenge to many of our cherished social and religious beliefs.
Borrowing from the work of biologist Richard Dawkins, Bloom begins his search for the sources of human evil in primeval seas, billions of years ago.
Certain molecules appeared by chance — ancestors to DNA — that were able to replicate themselves from inert chemicals available in the environment. Eventually the population of replicators outstripped available chemical resources. Some replicators began dismantling others to obtain the necessities of life.
Nature became red in tooth and claw. Life preyed on life. “The creator of human savagery is Nature,” Bloom writes, “who works her way through brain segments bequeathed to both men and women by our animal ancestors.”
As science, The Lucifer Principle is flawed. Although it is not unreasonable to suppose that humans are genetically programmed for aggressive (or altruistic) behaviors, there is no compelling scientific evidence that this is so.
Bloom confuses analogy with causal connection, mistakes anecdote for evidence, and chooses his anecdotes selectively. In spite of its subtitle, the book is not so much science as a string of rhetorical firecrackers that challenge our many forms of self-righteousness.
The liveliest parts of Bloom’s book are his attacks on two widely- held myths regarding our relationship with nature.
The first myth is often attributed to the philosopher Rousseau: Humans in a primitive state of nature are good, and civilization turns us into beasts. Bloom handily pops the myth with references to despicable behaviors of so-called primitive peoples and non-human primates.
He also demolishes the opposite myth: Humans in their natural state behave like predatory animals, and civilizations make us good. This is where Bloom is at his feisty best, showing how societal “super-organisms,” and the ideas that bind them together, can amplify our savagery.
According to Bloom, savageries of the sort depicted by Goya came with us into the world from our mothers’ womb. Our brains are hardwired for evil, he says, and the myths of Satan and original sin embody more truth than many of us care to admit.
Then are we doomed to unending aggression?
Bloom writes: “We must build a picture of the human soul that works; not a romantic vision that Nature will take us into her arms and save us from ourselves, but a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. We need to stare directly into Nature’s bloody face and realize that she has saddled us with evil for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her.”
The Lucifer Principle offers a gloomy assessment of human nature. However, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, I choose to believe we are not as innately aggressive nor as biologically determined as Bloom suggests.
Certainly, we have the biological potential for both aggressive and altruistic behaviors. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Our hope lies in the wondrously adaptable human brain, which apparently confers upon us freedom of will. Evil may indeed loom large in human history, but the overwhelming majority of us choose to live our lives on the non-Luciferan side of the line.
