    69

    As we saw earlier, William Divale and Marvin Harris scrutinized data

    from 561 primitive tribes and discovered that within this sample 21% of the

    males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence.  The

    percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and

    children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American

    Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts when trying to

    eradicate an enemy tribe, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-

    hei-hei!"175  Our techno-capitalist civilization comes nowhere near the

    resulting grim proportion of butchery.  If it did, roughly 720 million modern

    humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every

    generation.  Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the

    bloodlettings of the current century, appalling as they've been, are less than

    one-tenth what they'd amount to under aboriginal conditions.  That

    reduction in violence is a blessing of the superorganism's evolution.  It is a

    result of the growth of social agglomerations from tiny clusters of men and

    women huddled in jungles and plains to massive nations sprawled across

    entire continents.

    Ironically, however, the partial spread of peace is a product of past

    battles between superbeasts, the colossal atrocities that accompanied the

    building of the empires of Alexander, Caesar and the ancient Chinese, the

    gore that oozed from the consolidation of the modern European, American

    and Russian states.

    The movement of humans into social groups, the tendency of one

    social organism to swallow another, the rise of the meme, the increase in

    cooperation--all are ways in which the universe has ratcheted upward in

    degrees of order.  But under the natural urge toward more intricate

    structures, higher planes of wonder, and startlingly new and effective forms

    of complexity, there is no moral sense.  There is no motherly nature who

    loves her offspring and protects them from harm.  Harm, in fact, is a

    fundamental tool nature has used for her creations.

    No, we are not Clint Eastwoods, nor were we meant to be.  We are

    incidental microbits of a far larger beast, cells in the superorganism.  Like the

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