The distinguished physician who wrote this book has been a courageous pioneer in the cause of family planning both in his native Chile and, from his post in the International Planned Parenthood Federation, throughout Latin America. In his efforts to gain for Latin American women of all classes the right to regulate their fertility and to free them from the horrible risks of improperly performed abortions, Dr. Viel’s contributions have been of inestimable importance. He has also contributed significantly to raising the level of discourse on the emotion-laden topic of population through his countless lectures, debates, and discussions all over Latin America, crossing swords as often with conservatives as with radicals. He has, I think, earned the respect and admiration of all who know him.
Unfortunately, this book does not add to Dr. Viel’s long and impressive list of accomplishments. Its flaws are the more regrettable because they stem from noble ambition to understand thoroughly. In attempting to buttress his understanding of Latin American demographic phenomena, Dr. Viel has delved into the prehistoric past and ranged broadly among diverse fields of human knowledge. The superficiality and unevenness of the resulting book are not compensated for by the general correctness of its major preoccupation—the catastrophic implications of Latin America’s rate of population increase—nor by its many sound insights. When wisdom and fallacy are so closely entwined, the risk is great that the two will not be differentiated.
Typical of the book’s unhappy tendencies toward oversimplification was the lengthy restatement of a Hobbesian view of primitive man in spite of the ethnographic evidence that societies based on gathering and hunting are able to glean a surprisingly adequate subsistence with a minimal outlay of effort. Also of serious import was the outmoded understanding of development that informed the author’s discussions, emphasizing capital as the sine qua non and the inevitability of automation while ignoring the potential of political mobilization and both the utility of and necessity for labor intensive approaches in an over-populated world with dwindling energy reserves.
