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