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A Gathering of Herds, p. 4 The herds are gathering. Our gang against theirs. With God on our side, with Allah on theirs. Good against Evil. Once again, the holocaust. Sadly to say, a holocaustic predisposition in the human species is an old story, many times told. Armies of Egyptian pharaohs returning triumphantly with bushel baskets of severed Nubian foreskins, miles of crucified captives lining both sides of the Appian Way to decorate the route of homecoming Roman legionnaires, rows of impaled bodies serving Assyrian princes as public notices of valor and conquest, human scalps dangling from the belts of Americans winning the West and Indians defending it, waves of Christian crusaders sweeping mercilessly through friend and foe alike, Mongolian horsemen spearing their human targets on the gallop, bodies broken on the wheel for the Inquisition, burned at the stake in witch hunts, hanging from tree limbs in the light of hooded nightrider bonfires, paramilitary death squads, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Siberian gulag, gas chambers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are, or at any rate, have become, a holocaustic species. Perverting the instinct to survive into a license to kill. And always, everywhere that we go, maiming, murdering and destroying, in our minds and in our cries, we imagine ourselves to be carrying out the will of God. Slaying righteously. War and religion seem inevitably to go together. The troops must be blessed. Muslim and Judeo-Christian. On both sides, this will be a faith-based war. As usual. Instincts of the herd appear to demand it. Where can one look in an effort to comprehend the triple alliance of war, religion and herding? At the deer lick, the chicken roost, the chimpanzee troop, in a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, a flock of sheep? In so many species herding is an ordinary affair. And among humans? In clubs, lodges, societies, churches, unions, parties, corporations, theatrical performances, rock concerts and sports events, in ideologies and philosophies, in -isms of every conceivable variety, each with its following of -ists. We scarcely feel human, it appears, without belonging to something. As with deer, and chickens and chimps, no one of the many herds to which we throng thrives without the offices of a leader, king of the hill, head of the roost, alpha male. Be it in the person of a raj, sahib, sultan, sheik, boss, caesar, kaiser, czar, monarch, king, president, chairman, marshal, mogul, nabob, führer, commandant, generalissimo, governor, liege, lord, sovereign, chief, numero uno, top honcho, big cheese, big brother, bishop, pope, guru, by whatever title, we need him. Without him, we fear, there will be anarchy, chaos. So we make an exchange: his leadership for our allegiance. And more: entrusting our spirit to his authority, we discover ourselves dispirited without it. With nothing to hang on to and no one to show us the way, what will we do? Enthusiastically applauding George W. Bush, we gather together for the defense of democracy and freedom. Cheering on Osama bin Laden, we join hands for the liberation of Islam. Followers on both sides ignore the valuable oil partnerships entered into by Bush, senior and junior, with the bin Ladens. Confident of our support, leaders band together in herds of their own. Fully tracking the origins of our readiness to make war, we might ultimately find ourselves exploring the gut of an ameba. What impulses move that elegantly simple, one-celled creature, mother of us all, to a predatory ingestion of its environment? Ferreting out the sources of our attraction to herding and guidance from leaders, a whole host of species offers clues in addition to our own. In the need for religious experience, however, our species stands alone. For thousands of years, these three, war, herding and religion, have woven their way in mutual support through human affairs. Triplets sprung from a single womb, their presence has animated much that we know about the human psyche. The stream of human consciousness has run a long course. For a million years or more it has been evolving, punctuated by holocausts, radiant in compassion. Every living human being has poured hopes, fears, delights and struggle into its evolution. From the very first nanosecond of the big bang, evolution may be the only meaning in life we'll ever find. And goodness of heart, life's best reward. THE END
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