The Pivot of Civilization | Page 4

continue and prosper. We are
beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions from
our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with methods
of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider right
and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the
American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans,
seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and
cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest
parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic. There
are collections of drawings from English and American asylums
extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality with the Maya
inscriptions of Central America. Yet these neolithic American societies
got along for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. they respected
seed-time and harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and
terrible order. And they produced quite beautiful works of art. Yet their

surplus of population was disposed of by an organization of sacrificial
slaughter unparalleled in the records of mankind. Many of the
institutions that seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled the
invading Europeans with perplexity and horror.
When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based on
very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual
methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of
the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side,
honest and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something
essentially sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others
equally honest and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it as
not merely unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and
abominable. We are living not in a simple and complete civilization,
but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different
fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims
and ends.
I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or Authoritative
Civilization. It rests upon the thing that is, and upon the thing that has
been. It insists upon respect for custom and usage; it discourages
criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and conservative, or, going
beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The vehement hostility of many
Catholic priests and prelates towards new views of human origins, and
new views of moral questions, has led many careless thinkers to
identify this old traditional civilization with Christianity, but that
identification ignores the strongly revolutionary and initiatory spirit
that has always animated Christianity, and is untrue even to the realities
of orthodox Catholic teaching. The vituperation of individual Catholics
must not be confused with the deliberate doctrines of the Church which
have, on the whole, been conspicuously cautious and balanced and sane
in these matters. The ideas and practices of the Old Civilization are
older and more widespread than and not identifiable with either
Christian or Catholic culture, and it will be a great misfortune if the
issues between the Old Civilization and the New are allowed to slip
into the deep ruts of religious controversies that are only accidentally
and intermittently parallel.
Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional
disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though they

were a part of nature, we have what I may call--with an evident bias in
its favour--the civilization of enquiry, of experimental knowledge,
Creative and Progressive Civilization. The first great outbreak of the
spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece; the martyrdom of
Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the ambitious
encyclopaedism of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage and a
new wilfulness in human affairs. The fear of set limitations, of punitive
and restrictive laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly
fading in human minds. These names mark the first clear realization
that to a large extent, and possibly to an illimitable extent, man's moral
and social life and his general destiny could be seized upon and
controlled by man. But--he must have knowledge. Said the Ancient
Civilization--and it says it still through a multitude of vigorous voices
and harsh repressive acts: ``Let man learn his duty and obey.'' Says the
New Civilization, with ever-increasing confidence: ``Let man know,
and trust him.''
For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate,
apologetic and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New has
fought its way to a position of contentious equality. The two go on side
by side, jostling upon a thousand issues. The world changes, the
conditions of life change rapidly, through that development of
organized science which is the natural method of the New Civilization.
The old tradition demands that national loyalties and ancient
belligerence should continue. The new has produced means of
communication that break down the pens and separations of human life
upon which nationalist emotion