By Paul Weiser
Of necessity, a given civilization has the duty of maintaining itself. Failing this, it cannot improve, progress, or even gracefully decline - for each requires survival. The question then becomes, given that civilizations are made of people as well as ideas, what tasks must every civilization (including our own) accomplish?
It has been said that a society's fundamental task is to civilize young men. This is superficially true: if the civilization's ideas are not inculcated into its adolescent males, its young men disciplined, they fall into the default male mode of hierarchical gang formation, casual and group violence for advancement and amusement, and rape as the sexual outlet of choice with the available women as personal property of the strongest.
This is a daunting picture, and certainly fatal to civilization. Yet in fact most societies handle their young men easily, with prison and the army: a little technology and a few brutal, experienced older men expropriate the gang pyramid's commanding pinnacle and direct its violence toward the society's enemies (inward or outward). No, civilization has an easier, less obvious but far more critical task to perform.
What we are learning to our horror is that while failing to civilize young men is destructive, failure to civilize young women is catastrophic. Boys can learn how to behave from men other than their fathers, but both boys and girls must first learn to behave from their mothers. Boys gone wild are a commonplace; girls run wild cannot transfer the fundamental value of respectability to their children.
No tradition, even an ever-altering tradition of progress, can survive this utter absence of transferred tradition. A society which tolerates gangsterism in its men is decadent and unjust, but one which tolerates individual sluttishness in its women contrives its own rapid and complete annihilation.
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