    38

    they tend to shun the new.90  When the Turkish empire was crumpling in the

    16th century, Ottoman authorities were sure that they could recapture

    former glories by returning to the traditions of the past.  Europeans came up

    with improved methods for preventing plague, but the Turks refused to use

    them.  Why?  The foreign techniques departed from the customs that had

    once made Turkey great.  Like the birds in a state of hunger, the Ottomans

    sought their comfort in clinging to tradition.  When plague did break out in

    the land, the Turks blamed it on the few foreign innovations they had failed

    to eradicate.  To stop the ravaging illness in 1580, officials destroyed--of all

    things--an astronomical observatory.  The newfangled installation, they were

    sure, had offended Allah and brought the curse of disease. 91

    Sounds like something that could never happen here.  But Allan

    Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind seems to blame our problems on a

    departure from traditional values.  He implies that our abandonment of the

    sexual and racial inequalities of the 40's and 50's has a great deal to do with

    our current plight.  His prescription seems to be a return to the standards of

    our past.  In fact, he wants to go very far back indeed... all the way to the

    values of ancient Greece.

    Others, like self-appointed science critic Jeremy Rifkin, want to head

    backwards technologically.  Rifkin has garnered great gobs of publicity by

    trying  to  single-handedly  halt  the  progress  of  genetic  engineering.    This

    modern  Luddite  is  just  one  of  a  new  army  of  American  public  figures

    determined to move us resolutely in reverse.  Religionists like Moral Majority

    leader Jerry Falwell and presidential candidate/religious broadcaster Pat

    Robertson want to turn back the clock and restore the lifestyle they knew

    when they were children.  Even radical ecologists want to throw the gearbox

    into reverse--their slogan: "back to the Pleistocene."

    Though religious leaders and ultra-conservatives claim that we have

    strayed from old-fashioned values, the opposite is the case.  Since the signs of

    America's decline first showed up in the late '70s and early '80s, our tendency

    has been to move toward the old, stable ways. You can see this

      Human superorganisms show the same pattern.  In times of trouble

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