Blood Rites: Origins and the History of the Passions of War (A Virago book) (Hardcover)

If we can accept the fact that the latest evolutionary stage of war has been completed--from multi-national/mechanical (1914 to 1945) to Cold/covert/technological (1946 to 1989), to terrorist/"asymmetrical" (today, in the 21st century)--we can see that this book easily surpasses anything written in the last decade for the title of Most Important. More than the ocean of tomes recently produced on the psychology of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban (and the Middle East as a whole), or those depicting the consequences of biological and chemical weaponry on American soil, Barbara Ehrenreich has, with this book, surpassed the innovative, seminal and profoundly contraversial scholarship of anthropology, psychology and political science of the past thirty years.

BLOOD RITES: ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF THE PASSIONS OF WAR is one of the greatest, most frightfully illuminating books I've ever read. In the context of unified-field, "theory of everything" books on culture and the human psyche--the holistic/spherical direction into which Western consciousness seems to be finally heading--this book ranks with work like the 19th century Godfrey Higgins' ANACALYPSIS, scientific mythographer Alan Alford's WHEN THE GODS CAME DOWN, Camile Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE, linguist Kuhn's THEORY OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS and CHANGES OF MIND by philsopher/psychologist Dr. Jenny Wade. I believed few works in this new discpline of evolutionary psychology/anthropology could ever come close to the impact of THE IMPERIAL ANIMAL by Tiger and Fox. Ehrenreich, however, with BLOOD RITES, via encapsulating all of their discoveries within an even newer and more all-encompassing paradigm, surpasses it with a quantum leap.

Ehrenreich's idea is that the primal fear of predation of Paleolithic man has driven much of what we know as the genesis of culture, from religion to war. Early man's very real fear of being eaten alive in the jungle by much physically stronger animals, back when early human kind/hominids didn't leave willingly but was forced out of the trees by climatic changes in the Savannahs of central Africa--is the generative force behind the primal rituals of the blood. These rituals--blood rites--symbolize the eventual supremacy over the man-eating animals via man learning to hunt even better, and subsequently successfully fight for their survival as a species. In other words, they symbolize the ultimate transformation of the jungle: prey to predator. These rituals, with their corresponding symbol meaning, are the DNA of culture itself.

The reenactment of this rite in every human community--the transformational ritual that told the story of mankind's most humble and frightened beginnings--in turn created much of society as it exists even today; from the characteristics of ancient culture's many gods and the corresponding behavioral architecture of ancient religions...to the shape and purpose of modern day war.

How Ehrenreich proves her point will change the way you look at everything, including many other historically intellectuals and the actual validity of their ideas, regardless of how foundational to our culture they may seem. Particularly because so many influential thinkers and philosophers of the past three centuries have consciously and unconsciously based their theories of human existence on a now defunct paradigm: the unvanquished hunter-gatherer man of Neolithic times as the beginning of human civilization and thought. Ehrenreich reveals this foundational idea to be a myth of its own. *That alone*, when contemplating its implications, will change the way you look at literally everything--especially the true horror that is war.

This is a book to be experienced, moreso than simply read. Those whose hearts question obvious things, like why the irrationality of war continuously re-demands supremacy over our lives, will have many questions answered by this work. But for those whose questions go deeper...deeper into the intellectual architecture of Western man and its place in the human psyche...for those who understand, who feel, but lack the words to explain the feeling of seeing an ignored pink polka-dotted elephant on the coffee table of every celebrated thinker of the past--from Descartes to Hobbes to Rouseau to Darwin to Nietzsche to Freud to feminist Susan Faludi...for those who question it all, but even the fairly current answers to so much of why culture is what it is only yields more questions, this book will change you in ways that could not be predicted. It is books like these for which Kuhn's term *paradigm shift* was created.

And instead of like a college textbook, its 250-odd pages read like a novel. She is a brilliant intellectual and masterful storyteller herself, rolled into one.

The influence this book will have on everything from child psychology to international politics to art will assert itself for many generations to come. In these times (it was first reviewed by the New York Times four years before the September 11th Tragedy), every American--every literate person--should read it.