Most people know one Howard Bloom. Rock fans know the man once called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known,” the publicist who helped build or sustain the careers of Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Queen, Aerosmith, Run DMC, Joan Jett and a hundred more. Readers of big ideas know an entirely different Howard Bloom: a scientific thinker whose books have been praised by The Washington Post, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and whom Britain’s Channel 4 placed in a lineage of seminal thinkers including Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Freud. The secret is that there was only ever one Howard Bloom, and science was the thread running through everything he did.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1943, Bloom fell for science as a boy, and it never let him go. Even while he was running the biggest PR firm in the music business, he was conducting what he has described as a hunt for the gods inside of you and me. The music industry, as he tells it in his memoir Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me, was his laboratory, a place to study how myths and movements are born, how crowds come alive and how a single performer can pull thousands of people into one shared feeling. By his own account, everything from the wolf-pack behavior of music executives to the herd instincts of the press helped shape his insights. The real magic of rock, he has observed, happens at a concert, when individuals merge into a pulse of common emotion.
That idea, that we are far more connected than we think, sits at the heart of his science. His first book, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, which The Washington Post called “mesmerizing,” went looking for the biological roots of human evil. Bloom argued that societies behave like superorganisms, bound together by shared ideas and ruled by pecking orders and ancient instincts, and he traced how those hidden forces have steered events across history and around the globe.
His second book pushed even further. Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, described by The New Yorker as “reassuring and sobering,” took aim at the popular notion that selfish genes turn us into selfish loners. Long before anyone was talking about the internet as a planetary mind, Bloom made the case that living things have been networking into group intelligences for billions of years, and that each of us is part of a larger whole. Elizabeth Loftus, a past president of the American Psychological Society, said the book was filled with scientific firsts.
Bloom then turned his lens on the economy. The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism offered a fresh look at the system that drives the modern world, earning praise from James Fallows of The Atlantic as “impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable.” Then came his most cosmic question of all. The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates asks how a universe that started from next to nothing could keep producing galaxies, life, minds and music. The late Barbara Ehrenreich put it simply: “Bloom’s argument will rock your world.”
His work has not stayed confined to popular books. Bloom has served as a visiting scholar in the Graduate Psychology Department at New York University and as a core faculty member at The Graduate Institute in two fields, Conscious Evolution and Organizational Leadership. He has published papers exploring the importance of evolution before life began, how social groups function as learning machines, how cities may influence human genes and how the cosmos itself can be understood as a kind of ongoing conversation.
Not everyone in the scientific world thinks as broadly, and that is exactly what his admirers love. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has written that Bloom has raced ahead of the timid scientific herd with a grand vision of humanity: that we strive as individuals, yet we are also part of something larger than ourselves. Gear Magazine dubbed him “the next Stephen Hawking,” and Buckminster Fuller’s archivist called him the Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium.
That is the science of Howard Bloom in a single breath. Whether he was standing backstage with Prince or tracing the evolution of mind from the Big Bang forward, he has always been chasing the same mystery: what binds us together, what lifts us up and what makes a cosmos that began with nothing so astonishingly creative. The rest of us are lucky he has spent a lifetime sharing the answers.
