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    Oliver Cromwell--The Rodent Instincts Don a Disguise

      "...suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing

    intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a

    gas?  Armies were like plants, immobile, firmly-rooted, nourished

    through long stems to the head.  We might be a vapour, blowing where

    we listed.  Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind...."

                                                                    T.E. Lawrence

    "Let peace be sought through war."

                                                                    Oliver Cromwell

    In the good old days of the stone chopper and the Neanderthal,

    the driving force between group battles was the longtime champion of

    replicators, the gene.  But roughly 50,000 years later, the self-

    duplicating device calling the shots would be that invisible bit of

    mental stuff called the meme.  For the last 2,500 years or so, when

    superorganisms have developed a craving for each others' flesh, their

    attempts at cannibalism have usually begun with battles of words,

    skirmishes of concepts, and wrestling matches over which picture of

    the invisible world is the "truth."

    Once given a "righteous" cause, men all to frequently thrill to the

    call of battle.  General Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so

    terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."  Lofty classics like Beowulf,

    The Iliad, and countless others are about men who looked forward like

    nothing else to lopping off a few heads.  In The Varieties of Religious

    Experience, 19th century psychologist William James quotes a General

    Scobeleff saying, "The risk of life fills me with an exaggerated rapture.

    ...A meeting of man to man, a duel, a danger into which I can throw

    myself head-foremost, attracts me, moves me, intoxicates me.  I am

    crazy for it, I love it, I adore it."49

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