Elmer Pendell - Why Civilizations Self-Destruct
Giant intellects like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee have given us complex and tortuous reasons for the decline of civilizations. Dr. Pendell presents us with a simple one. Civilizations fall because the less capable slice of the population regularly outbreeds the more capable. In pre-civilized times nature weeds out the unfit and eventually produces a superior variety of men whose intelligence and industriousness are channeled into constructing an advanced social order that defeats nature's best-laid plans by protecting instead of eliminating the unfit. The out-come is that in several generations the protected outnumber the protectors.
Dr. Pendell scours the annals of history to prove his point, after beginning his seminal study with a remarkable analysis of the inborn, polarized egotistic and altruistic drives which are the biological basis for both the building and unbuilding of civilizations.
Most illlportantly, Dr. Pendell offers us ways and means to stop the historic and hitherto unstoppable processes of social entropy. One of his most intriguing-and most controversial-remedies is a genetically oriented marriage law to raise the birthrate of our better human specimens and substantially lower the proliferation rate of the civilization-destroying people who can neither provide for themselves nor their offspring.
Elmer Pendell, one of the world's foremost population experts and the holder of a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross, acquired his B.S. at the University of Oregon, M.A. at the University of Chicago, LL.B. at George Washington University and Ph.D. at Cornell.
Dr. Pendell's teaching career has included posts at the Universities of Nevada, Arkansas and Oregon, as well as Jacksonville State University and Cornell. His central life-long interest has been rates of human propagation and their influences on environment. As co-author of Society Under Analysis, Population Roads to Peace or War and Human Breeding and Survival, and author of Population on the Loose, The Next Civilization and Sex VERSUS Civilization, he has worked long and brilliantly on both short-term and long-term solutions to population problems.
In this latest and by all means his most significant book, Dr. Pendell plows into the crucial demographic phenomenon of our age - the accelerating decline of our institutions and our way of life caused by the higher reproduction rates of those who should reproduce least. Perhaps his most important contribution to modern thought-a contribution which comes through strongly in this volume-is his linkage of the inherited social drives of individuals to the universal tolerance extended to socially intolerable birthrate differences.
For more
