The Pivot of Civilization

Margaret Sanger is the mother of modern contraception and the founder of Planned Parenthood. In her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, she outlined her theories of eugenics (control of the human race by selective breeding) and racial purity (3 years before Hitler did the same in Mein Kampf).

The basis of her support of contraception was entirely due to her belief that inferior humans should be killed to enable a superior race to appear over time (Social Darwinism). Sanger did not just entertain popular ideas of her time - she was the champion of the cause. In her book she says: “the most urgent problem of to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” She goes on to say: “possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.” Birth control was, in her mind, “the greatest and most truly eugenic method.”

Needless to say, Planned Parenthood today have tried very hard to distance themselves from their founder.

* Notice that the Introduction was written by the Socialist H.G. Wells: some science-fiction does become science-fact.

The Study of Western Culture

One of the chief defects of modern education has been its failure to find an adequate method for the study of our own civilization. The old humanist education taught all that it knew about the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, and taught little else. In the nineteenth century, this aristocratic and humanist ideal was gradually replaced by the democratic utilitarianism of compulsory state education, on the one hand, and by the ideal of scientific specialization, on the other.

The result has been an intellectual anarchy imperfectly controlled by the crude methods of the examination system and of mind of the student is overwhelmed and dazed by the volume of new knowledge which is being accumulated by the labor of specialists, while the necessity for using education as a stepping-stone to a profitable career leaves him little time to stop and think. And the same is true of the teacher, who has become a kind of civil servant tied to a routine over which he can have little control.

Read the entire article by Christopher Dawson - one of the 20th Century's greatest historians - here.

Laudator temporis acti.