Elmer pendell why civilizations self destruct

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Very close to 'As New'. Language: English. Weight: 9 ounces. Paperback: Pictorial Wraps. Pendell's book Population Roads to Peace or War argued that democracy would be imperilled if population growth did not slow. A follow-up to the work, Human Breeding and Survival: Population Roads to Peace or War, advocated population limitation as a means of reducing social problems such as hunger. Why Civilizations Self-Destruct was cited favorably by white supremacist.

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All prices are net to all. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance in expediting your order. So we will first focus our attention on the latter. Are you-for your purposes-on center stage? Is the world, as you appraise it, centered on you? You might ask, how could it be otherwise? You have to make your value judgments, your comparisons, your appraisals, from your point of view-from your place on the axle of the chariot wheel.

The seat of your self-importance is your consciousness. Could life have any meaning to you-to anybody-without consciousness? To comprehend life and to "know thyself" 2 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct require that in some measure we understand the meaning of consciousness.

Let's try. Consciousness, a functioning of brain cells, is an awareness, a receptivity, a state of readiness. We have to be ready to record experience.

If we say we have an inborn tape recorder, only the word "tape" is a figure of speech. Consciousness not only records experience; it plays back previous expenence. Other functions of consciousness are comparing, choosing, classifying, evaluating, controlling, deciding, analyzing, discriminating, distinguishing, guiding, managing, organizing, planning, predicting, synthesizing, summarizing and systematizing.

Some of these overlap. Most imply purposive action. Since your consciousness is the organizer of your mental workshop, if you are not efficient, blame it on your orgamzer. Remembering is a crucial part of consciousness, that is, the process of recalling information from the subconscious. Before you make up your mind about something, the subconscious may be commanded to check on similar decisions in the past. More often, you accept conclusions shaped by your attitudes, and make your present decisions accordingly, at a great saving in time and mental energy.

A derivative function of consciousness is remembering for its own sake, for the sheer nostalgic fun of it-singing the old songs, mooning over the pictures in college yearbooks, rehashing the victories and defeats of days gone by. You are not limited to the satisfactions of the present. Even if today goes badly, you are able to take pride in the cumulative successes of the past. Your consciousness is the safety deposit box of your most treasured moments.

The level of consciousness depends on intelligence. He lives most who thinks most. The more intelligent you are the better your consciousness functions. The better your consciousness functions the more intelligent you are.

Our neural systems operate, at least in part, on a form of electric energy. Consciousness itself seems to run en- The Individual on Center Stage 3 tirely on electricity. Sometimes, when calling upon the brain and nerve cells needed to look up a word in a dictionary, it narrows down and acts like a spotlight. At other times, it penetrates a problem like a laser beam. Then, performing as a spotlight again, it may be checking over the individual's preparations to leave for home in the rain.

In all cases consciousness is organizing, organizing, organizing. Though literary critics speak of a stream of consciousness, its sudden changes of content make the spotlight metaphor more apt.

Not until you go to sleep does the light go out. Sleep itself deserves some consideration. It is the absence of consciousness-as darkness is the absence oflight.

The young child may resist his nap, considering it an interruption of his existence. He fights to retain consciousness as one might fight to retain life. It is a bitter struggle-between the hereditary urge to remain conscious, to hang on to life, and the hereditary urge to let go, and go to sleep.

Consciousness is inherited in the sense that it is an attribute of specialized brain cells. Its efficiency is partly inherited, and so are its tendencies, which differ among individuals. Consciousness is not passive, it does not wait for outside forces to act upon it.

It has an inborn and persistent searching drive, which often intensifies into curiosity and less frequently into a desperate urgency, as to the what, where, why or how of certain facts. This searching drive is the reason we are restless, dynamic, and often frustrated, self-starters. Fantasies may serve, at first, as tentative explanations for the what, where, why or how.

They amount to hypotheses, which must be tested. But when and if the fantasies are transformed into convictions, they become a part of the self-and a challenge to them is a direct challenge to us.

Some of the work of consciousness is accomplished in the subconscious. The processing involves classifying and mulling over the day's experiences. This sorting out, which 4 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct might be described as a struggle for consistency, also includes dreaming. This struggle for consistency became a part of both consciousness and the subconscious because it has survival value.

It is a method of deciding what has and what does not have practical applications for everyday life. The analysis of experience takes place in the interpretive cortex, which is located in the temporal lobes of the brain.

Part of the sorting goes on in the back office the subconscious and some of the records never get to the front office consciousness. There is a less accessible mental reference file called "the unconscious," of which hypnotists and followers of Sigmund Freud have made some use.

Consciousness came into play because it helped to keep our forebears alive. It helped to decide which berries to eat, and how many, and which to avoid. It helped us to choose which path to take, which companions to trust, who had the greatest strength and the widest knowledge. It helped us to predict how broad a gulley could be jumped and how small a branch would bear our weight.

It told us how to avoid stepping on thorns and what to do if we stepped on one. Such knowledge determined which individuals survived and which perished. And the ultimate traits of a species depended on which individuals survived. The earliest forerunners of consciousness, tropisms, which work somewhat like magnets, cause some single-cell animals to approach or avoid light and heat.

Tropisms exist in plants too. The young trees lean toward the sun. The bean vines send tendrils exploring in the wet earth. The plant that devours insects has what must be a mutated tropism. It is an educated guess that a half-billion years ago in some single-cell animals mutations occurred which yielded intense tropistic reactions that were preserved and amplified because they favored survival. Time passed. The Individual on Center Stage 5 Some cells, as they divided, bunched together and some of these became specialized, developing into nerve cells and conducting electric current more readily than others.

Reflexes protected the complex organism, as tropisms had protected the single cells. In a later gradation certain stimulating situations required, for the survival of an organism, relatively complicated response patterns. The organism was stimulated by a feeling, and action followed. If the action was appropriate, the organism survived. The feeling was a desire for something different, and we call it an instinct.

Any organism in a comparably hazardous circumstance without it did not survive. Consciousness and instinct seem to have been identical in their dim beginnings: an unease, a yearning, a need.

At first there was probably a feeling of discomfort, resulting in movement to restore the status quo ante-in other words to terminate the pain and so the awareness of it. But the experience was not lost. The scar from the discomfort may have been the beginning of the subconscious-a track to lead back to painlessness if discomfort came again from the same source.

One of the warning feelings that aroused primitive consciousness was coldness; another was hunger. The discomfort and its cure would have left an effect, chemical or electrical, on membranes, constituting a basis for response to subsequent similar experience. Results of experiences would accrue, like data fed into a computer.

Consciousness, having survival value, has influenced behavior from its beginning. And behavior never could or can be adequately explained without reference to consciousness. That doesn't mean that the work of behaviorists has been a total loss; merely that such work has been incomplete and that those behaviorists who denied the importance of consciousness or who gave it the silent treatment were woefully mistaken.

Very gradually, by means of many life-saving mutations, 6 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct consciousness broadened to include precepts, concepts, memory, decision-making and purpose. When it reached this stage, the precepts and concepts would be organized for the defense of the consciousness and the cells in which consciousness resided.

Success in the struggle for survival has depended on a self-centered orientation. A consciousness has to be somewhere. Where is it? It is in the brain cells of the organism it serves. It is where afferent nerves can register their messages and efferent nerves instruct muscles or glands to act.

For routine matters there are lesser centers called "plexuses," which receive afferent signals-such as those having to do with the digestive process-and send instructions over efferent nerves. If anything goes wrong, the plexus does what a computer does-sends an "error" signal to the brain. Thinking of experiences is like thinking of the stars in a planetarium; there has to be a point of reference.

In the planetarium it is earth, where the viewer is sitting. In the individual it is the self. Yet the boundaries of self are amazingly elastic. We identify self not only with our mind and our ideas, our emotions and attitudes, but with our nose, our voice, our dog, even our rich uncle. Our family is the most important family. Our town is the nicest town.

We feel closely bound to a professional football team in another state or with a quarterback who used to win football games for our college, though our hero is now with a team half way across the country.

If someone criticizes his country, he suffers because something which is partly him is damaged. In a sense, a country is part of self. And, as we keep repeating, the center of self. IS conscIOusness. The Individual on Center Stage 7 Does a dog's consciousness operate from center stage? It could operate no other way. But a dog learns early that he must cooperate with humans and that where judgments or wishes clash with his master he must yield.

His dominance is limited to other species than Homo sapiens and to some other dogs. Systematized activity has to be keyed to consciousness, which is to say, to self. No other orientation is possible or perhaps even imaginable. We have sometimes heard a person say, "If I were he, I would do thus and so. How many love songs emphasize: "You, you, you, only you; and what I'll do for you! A political candidate finds it helpful to remember names of voters.

Remembering a name is recognition of the separateness, the identity, the individuality of its owner. How the politician may stand on the issues means less to many voters than his habit of remembering their names. Various groups have been sure they are "God's Chosen People. If consciousness is unsuccessful in maintaining status, there is compensation in the peripheral glories of being part of something successful.

Once upon a time there was Gulliver. The Lilliputians tied him up, without realizing what good things he could do for them. Lothrop Stoddard was Gulliver and the Lilliputians were the small-minded, anti-hereditarian behaviorists of his time.

His most important work The Revolt Against Civilization was published in , and a few years later, as the book began to take effect, the Lilliputians massed for collective 8 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct action against it and the rest of his writings.

They won, at least for half a century. The following from page 52 of Stoddard's book is one of his most important paragraphs: Every individual is inevitably the center of his world, and instinctively tends to regard his own existence and well-being as matters of supreme importance.

This instinctive egoism is, of course, modified by experience, observation, and reflection, and may be so overlaid that it becomes scarcely recognizable even by the individual himself. Nevertheless it remains, and subtly colors every thought and attitude. Each individual feels that he is really a person of importance. No matter how low may be his capacities, no matter how egregious his failures, no matter how unfavorable the judgment of his fellows; still his inborn instincts of self-preservation and self-love whisper that he should survive and prosper, that 'things are not right,' and that if the world were properly ordered he would be much better placed.

After the anti-hereditarians had discredited Stoddard, the self-centered nature of man seems to have been widely neglected. It was revived in a roundabout way in by Robert Ardrey in African Genesis, in the introduction to his chapter, "The Romantic Fallacy.

Time, energy and interest are limited, so most of the details are merely lumped together. The practice applies to the selection of clothing, books, movies, autos, friends, almost everything. When you put certain people in an unfavorable category, others who would classify them differently will accuse you of prejudice and discrimination. In many instances you are prejudging, reaching conclusions before you have considered the essential facts.

Usually your critics are prejudging too. They have not dug for the truth any more than you. You will probably defend your classification without think- The Individual on Center Stage 9 ing through the particular circumstances.

Your critics will similarly argue for their ideas rather than test them. A superiority feeling is not a complex, but the primordial state of consciousness.

While we may sometimes bolster our own egos by ridiculing what seems to be the pretensions of our neighbors, let's not lose sight of the fact that the feeling of superiority is an aspect of putting self in the center of things, an act required by consciousness for coordination. After one has been jolted a few times by experience, he is likely to reassess himself, and to see himself as others see him. Or he may lean over backward and develop an inferiority feeling.

The latter can appropriately be referred to as a complex because it sums up a variety of experiences. But an egocentric position will remain the major basis of orientation, no matter how small a speck of dust man believes himself to be. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a sociological classic published in the early s, investigated "four desires" that emanate from a self-centered orientation. The desire for security needs no elaboration.

The desire for recognition is a wish for attention, a gratification at seeing our name in the newspaper, a compulsion to "show off. Attention, of course, is more welcome if it is favorable, but for many people even mildly derogatory publicity is preferable to none.

Somewhat different, though springing from the same source, is the desire to be effective, "to get results. The young boy lights a firecracker, the older boy engages in vandalism, the college student starts a riot, and Arthur 10 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct Bremer tries to kill George Wallace. Others may channel their desire to be effective into more constructive channels, such as putting a man on the moon, or working on a plan to bring water to Los Angeles from the Snake River.

Another result of the ego-pointing aspect of consciousness is the desire for dominance. Life is competitive and individuals work their way up or down to a rank or status which is determined by their performance. Usually status is an informal, not a rigid, classification. But once dominance is established, the challenges to it are few. Among the baboons, the older ones retain their lofty status for years after they have lost the strength to defend it.

Status contributes to survival in some species by preventing interminable struggles for leadership. In species where dominant males have plural mates it improves genetic quality. Stratification of human beings does not conform to the American tenet that "all men are created equal. The lines were formerly drawn according to income, family hackground and leisure.

More recently they have been drawn according to people's functions in the production of goods and services. Class lines become more, not less, visible as American business and industry become more bureaucratic.

Status depends less on family background, now that mobility is so great that families rarely remain together. Lei- The Individual on Center Stage 11 sure no longer serves as a status symbol, because the man who wields the most power often works longest. According to Packard, we have developed a five-class system with a college diploma serving as a minimum requirement for the top two classes.

The highest class is composed of top management and professional people. Though most of us are vague about class divisions in this country, by the time we are forty, we have found our permanent niche in the class structure and have grown accustomed to it.

Packard writes: Status distinctions would appear to be inevitable in a society as complicated as our own. The problem is not to try to wipe them out-which would be impossible-but to achieve a reasonably happy society within their framework. To what, besides self and immediate bodily needs , does consciousness give direct attention?

For some the mere flow of life may monopolize their attention. For most people, however, a sense of purpose, which derives from their conclusions about the appropriateness of their activities, will keep some order in daily life. Purpose is likely to reinforce some habits, which in turn reinforce purpose.

Since it gives persistence to motivation, it has, at least in the past, improved our chances of survival. In a modern setting, in the short run, a sense of purpose has little to do with individual survival, since civilization takes care of the indigent. In the long run, however, a sense of purpose-or better a strength of purpose-determines the level of civilization.

If individuals had no sense of purpose their behavior would be unpredictable, and social organization would be impossible. Proceeding from hunting and agricultural stages to village and city living, individuals have coordinated their behavior and the resulting social patterns have become a framework in which the sense of purpose of newer group members takes shape.

The inherited tendency of individuals to formulate and persist in 12 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct their various purposes is necessary to successful city organization. If birthrates, emigration or immigration are such as to result in a large proportion of the inhabitants of a city being of low intelligence or lacking purpose, urban conditions deteriorate.

As to the hereditary tendency of men to be purposeful, it seems to belong to that aspect of intelligence which has to do with the power of anticipation. Purposefulness, moreover, involves considering the influence of present actions on future results. As Leonard Hobhouse said in Mind in Evolution, purpose "involves an idea of an end. Armed with the perspective of a strong purpose, decisions are relatively easy.

Random impulses, which may be competing or conflicting, are subordinated or excluded. Anything that does not contribute to the main effort is ruled out. To a person with a central purpose, boredom is rare. Life is intense, fascinating and consistent. And in working for an ideal, the individual can be confident and comfortable that he is standing in the center of things. Later when we investigate the requirements for building civilizations, we shall see the parts that egocentricity and consciousness play in the formation of social structure.

In chapters immediately following, however, we will continue to examine our mental equipment for the reason that the state of a civilization depends largely on what is in the individual's mind. In recent times, in part because of the influence of John Dewey and Benjamin Spock, unlimited human egotism has come to be considered the whole story, as if all the world must yield to the tantrum throwers.

No longer are serious endeavors made to mold the individual to fit society. Important decisions must be made "at once. The Individual on Center Stage 13 Any drive is, and has to be, restrained in some measure, either by other drives and values, or by other people.

In spite of the space we have lavished on ego in this chapter, we shall find that it does not constitute "the whole person" on which civilizations are built. Chapter 2 The Legacy of Instinct A fire-mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jellyfish and a saurian, And caves where the cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod,Some call it Evolution, And others call it God.

William Herbert Carruth Anyone who tries to understand the rise or fall of civilizations without attention to biological evolution is plunging into a labyrinth without "a clue or a sword. Mind and body evolved together, and they work together. Mental patterns are geared to body form and functions.

We are born with a network of mental inclinations which accompanied, guided and protected us in our multimillion-year journey "up from the ape. The hand, for instance, was functional way back when our habitat was mainly in trees. Contemporaneously, babies probably developed a reflex which caused them to The Legacy of Instinct 15 grasp what touched their hands-the fur on their mothers' back or the branch that would keep them from falling.

So when we came down out of the trees, more than twenty million years ago, the hand and the mind were ready to pick things off the ground instead of merely working together for the purpose of hanging on to mothers and trees.

Now the hand-mind partnership was ready to grab stones and clubs. But our reflexes have also received help from more complex sources. Since his hands were originally used for grasping, they adjust readily to a girl's waist, as they have previously adjusted to a baseball bat, to a fishpole, an ax, a hoe-to almost anything but emptiness. To be empty-handed is what makes our young man uncomfortable. There is another mental pattern which must have become fixed in heredity at the time the grasping reflex was developing.

That is the fear of falling. Whether we label this a drive, urge, wish, instinct or appetite is not important -so long as we recognize acrophobia as inherited and derived from mutations in the hundreds of millions of years of our evolutionary span.

Here we might say that mutations are changes in genetic patterns. We have learned much about them from studies made by H. Muller of evening primroses, fruit flies and human beings. Radiation is one cause of genetic changes. There may be others. Muller brought about heritable changes in fruit flies by the use of X-rays.

The eventual effects of mutations are unpredictable, but they are more often harmful than helpful, just as random deviations in any system are more likely to be inharmonious than harmonious. Through the eons of biological evolution the harmful mutations, which led to inefficient or otherwise inappropriate behavior, made their possessors more prone to extinction.

Even though the adverse mutations might outnumber the beneficial ones to 1, the 16 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct ultimate result would be greater adaptability to the environment, since the harmful changes would be eliminated while the beneficial changes would be cumulative.

Many people have rejected evolution because they have not read enough about it to understand it. Having heard that harmful mutations outnumber helpful mutations, they find it hard to believe that human beings could have developed by evolution from less efficient creatures. The essential which they have overlooked is that in a fiercely competitive evolutionary situation handicapped competitors cannot survive. If the competition is between individuals, the handicapped individuals are eliminated.

If group cooperation protects those individuals for a few generations, the group itself falls victim to the harsh competition. The upshot is that when and where evolution prevails, "only the fit survive.

The study of instincts properly began in , after Darwin had discovered that species of animals evolved from earlier species and that human beings followed the same law. But in the s a few psychologists gained prominence by claiming that human behavior is fully explained by conditioning.

Their theory was known as Behaviorism. They demonstrated that people could be conditioned to do things they never would have done otherwise, and they claimed that nothing "comes naturally.

People with axes to grind have kept this mythology alive to the present day. Many sociologists followed the lead of the behaviorist The Legacy of Instinct 17 psychologists, and it was not long before the disparagement of instincts became an academic vogue. One sociologist who bore a great deal of responsibility for the trend was Dr. Bernard, then of the University of Chicago. He published widely on instincts and authored the article on the subject in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

Bernard concluded that instincts play practically no part in "the cultural elements in human behavior," a conclusion he reached by definition. He defined instinct as "a specific and definite inherited or unlearned response which follows or accompanies a specific and definite sensory stimulus or organic condition that serves as a release to the inherited mechanism.

According to him an instinct is an inherited response-not a specific and definite sensory or organic condition. It appears that, in Bernard's thinking, the efferent aspects of experience constitute the totality of instinct. The afferent part, "the sensory stimulus or organic condition," is not, in Bernard's view, a part of instinct itself. Consistent with his emasculated definition of instinct, Bernard could then claim that instinct had little or no part in inducing human behavior.

Thus, shutting his mind on what is dynamic in heredity, he became a crusading behaviorist. Bernard dismissed other writers who had used "organic conditions" as inherited bases of cultural behavior with one sweeping sentence: "The pro-instinctivists began to rearrange their broken legions in the form of redefinition and of substitute categories, such as drives, desires, wishes, harmonic urges and prepotent reflexes.

At the same time they asserted that we still inherit, in full force, the motivational part, the drives themselves. Bernard chose to sweep their work under the rug. The gap between reality and the theory of the anti- 18 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct hereditarian behaviorists seems to be related to their avoidance of the concept of consciousness.

Having not developed any concepts to explain the reality of consciousness, they decided to ignore it. We can't exclude consciousness and its elder brother, the subconscious. That's where the urges are, and the fears, and all the other emotions.

To omit consciousness and the subconscious in the explanation of behavior is not to mention the engine when explaining the operation of an automobile. Actually, consciousness serves as a guide and monitor of our actions. There are specific inherited fears other than the fear of falling. Some people have claustrophobia, a fear of closedin places. And some scholars are convinced that we have an inborn fear of snakes.

If so, we acquired it in our treeclimbing stage. Snakes constitute a great danger to monkeys, but monkeys don't have to be told of the danger. They have a built-in warning mechanism with neural connections always at the ready. Less specific fears are also instinctive, from vague uneasiness to sheer terror, each triggered by a wide variety of circumstances which spell danger.

From the dawn of time, fear has saved innumerable lives-and it still does. Does the terror of a nightmare have any survival value?

Maybe so. This is not to say that the content of a dream has any similarity with the events that initiate it. For instance, you may return late to your college dorm and enter your room quietly and stealthily, so as not to disturb your sleeping roommate.

The sleeper's extrasensory perception cues him only to the fact that something or someone is there. In his dream, lions may be about to pounce upon him. If you had walked in normally, there would have been no alarm in your roommate's dream and probably no dream at all. It was fear of the unknown that triggered the minor nightmare. Intelligence arose as a supplement to instincts and Leonard Hobhouse elucidates this genesis in his book Mind in The Legacy of Instinct 19 Evolution pp.

He tells of the efforts of two wasps to put two dead spiders in storage. One looked at her storage hole, then at the spider, then went back to the hole and made it larger before attempting to put the spider in it. After moving the spider in, she tried to cover the hole with different objects-a stone, a lump of earth, a leaf and finally a dryer leaf, which was easier to drag.

Altogether she worked an hour on the project. The other wasp crammed her spider into her storage hole, wedged a few pellets on top of it, pushed dust over them, smoothed the surface and finished the slipshod job in five minutes. Hobhouse provisionally calls this problem-solving ability of wasps "the play of intelligence within instinct. In "pure" instinct, each stage by passing brings on the next, and the instinct must run through its course by a prescribed series of stages or not at all.

It cannot, outside narrow limits, adopt alternatives. Intelligence, on the other hand, grasping the ultimate aim, is indifferent as to the method by which it is reached. Thus as intelligence rises, the fixed processes of instinct dissolve. But intelligence does not spring into being fully armed from the head of Zeus.

It is born within the sphere of instinct, and at first grasps only a little bit of what instinct prompts. It apprehends, say, the next stage, and, ordinary means failing, guides some special effort to reach that stage, the next stage, not the ultimate end, being the purpose understood and realized by the animal.

It is easy to see how from this point it may develop, taking remoter stages or ends into account, until it grasps the final purpose and meaning of conducl. Clearly also, as this development proceeds, the need for detailed determination of response by heredity disappears. The scope of reason is very narrow at first, allowing only one or two alternatives in the event of a mental impasse.

At first narrowly limited in scope, intelligence deals with proximate ends. As it expands, it comes to embrace the remoter and at length the ultimate end to which action is directed. Along with this advance the power of choosing the means best suited to the purpose expands, and the determination of successive stages of action by hereditary structure simultaneously disappears. And how does Hobhouse define instinct?

Instinct is an enduring interest determined by heredity and directing action to results of importance to the organism without clear prevision of those results. The first part of that definition has particular relevance for humans. Instinct is "an enduring interest determined by heredity. Habit, custom, conditioning and intelligence take over. But what a vast importance there is in those "enduring interests," otherwise defined as moods, emotions and dispositions.

In triggering motivations, a large proportion of the initiative is still instinctive. Consciousness and the subconscious mind are still largely organized on the basis of inherited impulses and longings. Says Hobhouse: Heredity lays the foundation of our entire mental life. We inherit not only capacities for sensation and emotion, but also capacities for distinguishing, analyzing and combining them.

We have contrasted intelligence with instinct, referring to intelligence as the work of the individual, and to instinct as the product of heredity. My own definition for intelligence is brief.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. It is based on the heredity of brain cells, but its development is markedly influenced The Legacy of Instinct 21 by environment.

What Intelligence Quotient IQ shows is a combination of the two. If your IQ score is very far above the general average, which is expressed as , you have a favorable helping of both nature and nurture. Catherine Morris Cox has estimated the IQ scores of some of the prominent men of the past.

Probably you would too. And I should guess that some of those whom Dr. Cox studied would have had higher or lower scores than those she arrived at. Part of the talent for problem solving is "creativity. However, I believe that creativity is useful only if it is combined with a higher than average IQ Otherwise the creative person is likely to lack the balance to see the long-range results of his creativity, which may be more destructive than constructive.

So I think there is a social risk in giving special responsibilities and worldwide recognition to individuals whose intelligence is so narrowly concentrated that it leaves its possessor with an unimpressive IQ score. A great many emotions belong to our psychological repertory because at various stages of our evolution they have saved lives.

Fear, dread, abhorrence, revulsion, disgust, anger, rage, hate, envy, greed, frustration, impatience, 22 Why Civilizations Self-Destruct grief, guilt, remorse, surprise, curiosity, joy, superiority, inferiority, love, respect, adoration, loyalty, happiness, yearning, hunger, sorrow, loneliness, drowsiness, appreciation, satisfaction, feelings of urgency, security, smugness, freedom, gratitude-each must have had a life-saving function.

The list is not intended to be either exhaustive or precise, merely a reminder that life is very largely motivated by inherited emotions-and the actions authorized by inherited brain cells. Intelligence replaced the end stages of instinctual behavior, for the simple reason that flexible responses had a greater survival value than rigid responses. There are also a formidable number of antagonistic feelings which have slipped into our survival mechanism because they stimulated our ancestors to escape or avoid dangers of various sorts.

The friendly feelings are more fully explained in the next chapter and the unfriendly feelings in a later chapter.

Both have their roles in civilization. Chapter 3 The Social Appetite To understand and to be understood make our happiness.