    23

    The

     reformers preached poverty and purity.  They railed against the

    corruption of money, fine palaces and showy clothes.  And they

    promised to sweep clean the holy places of leadership.  Gathering

    followers, the reformers frequently toppled the old rulers.  Then a

    strange thing invariably occurred.  The ascetic leaders who had praised

    the simple ways of the desert moved into the palaces of the materialists

    they had driven out.  Served by slaves and fattened on the fine food

    and pleasant ways of the city, they, too, grew self-satisfied and

    wealthy.42

    Each of these zealots had made a mass of humanity hungry for

    the goods of the folks on top.  Each had justified that hunger as

    saintliness.  Each had pulled a social beast together with ideology.

    And each had used the social momentum of a ravenous superorganism

    as a crowbar to pry open the palaces of power.

    Today the descendants of the Shiite Bedouins attack a new set of

    city sophisticates, machine-gunning them in buses, torching their

    shopping districts, or bombing them in cafes.  This time, the vulnerable

    city folk against whom the Shiites direct their rage are Egyptians,

    Frenchmen, Germans, and Americans.  The alleged motivation of

    today's army of the faithful: religious idealism.  The real goal: a bigger

    piece of the action.   Once again, ideology has become the device that

    justifies a superorganism's need to nibble the flesh of its neighbors.

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