First published in 1949, Carol Jackson Robinson’s Catholic polemic The Perverse Generation resonates today, says Julian Kwasniewski.
Was 1949 a long time ago? Reading Carol Jackson Robinson’s This Perverse Generation gives a strange sense of simultaneous distance and closeness to 1949, when this book was first published. Recently republished, we have an opportunity to reflect on where the world has gone in the past 74 years, how Catholicism has (or hasn’t) addressed these changes, what work we should devote ourselves to, and with what attitudes.
At the heart of Robinson’s thought is a call to recognise and reject the “arch-enemies of true joy: Puritanism and Secularism”. Simultaneously, Robinson tries to put us in touch with “the real” through a rejection of the dehumanising political and technological dictatorships of modernity. Ultimately, we see that the supernatural and natural life are not opposed but complementary, and one cannot be salvaged without the other.
“We cannot say it often enough: it is the root things that are wrong in our society,” Robinson writes. “Too much emphasis in contemporary Catholicism is on good will and not enough on good understanding, for good will is not held in a vacuum, and ignorance is often culpably sinful.” The idea of “good will” without knowledge, or even in contradiction to the truth, has reached an all-time climax in the past decade among a Church hierarchy where there is widespread rejection of traditional teachings on family, liturgy and Eucharistic worthiness. “Our job is not to superimpose piety on a distorted foundation; our job is to go back to the old foundations and build anew.”
Another major theme is the “elimination of the human element” via industrialism. “Nothing is so striking about the machine age as the fact that we have perfected machinery instead of men. The typewriter is a very clever little machine. But is the typist clever? Apart from the dexterity of her fingers, she is, on the average, as unaccomplished a maiden as the world has ever produced. If you asked her what her talents are, she wouldn’t know what you were talking about.” If that was said of the typewriter, what about smartphones? Growing up near to and attending Wyoming Catholic College, with its “no cellphone” policy, such sentiments have always been particularly poignant to me as I compare the quality of interactions with WCC students to those of other Catholic communities and colleges. A few years before Robinson wrote, CS Lewis complained of “men without chests”. He meant that modern man emphasised reason and base passion to the point of expelling the heart which harmonised man’s higher and lower faculties. Today, when both reason and animal nature have been abandoned in the madness of transgenderism, it seems like men are not only chestless but also loinless and headless. As Robinson says: “It is an awful thing to have men so ignorant, so undisciplined and weakened, that they are almost incapable of sinning, because they are almost not men at all.”
Writing at perhaps the height of the Catholic Worker movement, Robinson is concerned about labour and technology. “Labour saving devices mark the atrophy of the human being. The major way we reach perfection (in the natural order) is through work, and modern men have robbed us of work, substituting instead organised monotony… A craftsman is moulded and strengthened and perfected. He is something and somebody. A woman is made more perfect in spinning. Is she made more perfect in a trip to Macy’s and back on the subway? It does something to a woman to make bread, it only tires her to go and buy bread in the store.” As businesses become more impersonal, families more fractured, it is still the “contraband personal element” which holds society together. In the light of Covid strictures, Robinson’s comment on socialism being the “inevitable result of such de-personalised thinking” will resonate with many.
Robinson has little regard for the weakness of modern men. However, she clarifies that it is still primarily the duty of men to reform men, not that of women to reform men. “The dilemma is: ‘women are supposed to obey their husbands, but they cannot obey their husbands because their husbands are too weak to lead them.’ The solution is not to reverse the order of nature (let men obey their wives) but to make the men strong so their wives can obey them.”
This feeds directly into “Job-Hunting versus Vocation”, where Robinson comments that since the modern world is in such a mess, our vocations “are ever more insistently vocations connected with the reorientation of things to God”. Echoing the heartache of many young people today who desire to find a fulfilling vocation, Robinson acknowledges that “Our vocations are still there. It is just that they are harder to find and to fulfil. When God asks hard things, He gives us the grace to do them.” And “the important thing is to do the will of God, to allow ourselves to be called to the vocations which God wishes, and for which we may find we were remotely preparing… even in the midst of heartache and darkness”. This chapter is almost worth the price of the book. “Usually it is what you once longed for, and never dared hope for, which was really in line with your vocation. The person who is aching to get married is usually meant to marry. If you love to take care of the sick, give speeches, teach people, plant flowers, play instruments or carve statues, that usually means something.”
Besides many helpful passages, this book also asks questions for which our situation is sufficiently changed that Robinson’s answers are no longer appropriate. My biggest reservation would be the extent to which Robinson had an extraordinarily hopeful outlook on the possibility of turning the world around “before it was too late”. She tends to admonish Catholics to stay in the world and “leaven” it, rather than withdraw for the benefit of self-preservation. In hindsight, I would argue that engagement with the world was one of the causes resulting in the secularisation of the Church from the 1960s onwards. Yet it is helpful to see the enthusiasm of the period because it partly explains the openness to the reforms which swept the Church during and after Vatican II. This is all to say, put her words in context and add salt if needed!
This Perverse Generation is certainly a work which can help us become more aware of the progress of perversion in the last few generations. The last note of the book is rightly hopeful: “unless the Lord builds the house…” If we can take to heart the call to study the truth, to love it and share it, to encounter reality through truly human work and recreation, and to love and serve our fellow men, then supernatural life becomes more urgent and more desirable. If we can see and experience the truth, we will love it. If we desire it, we will see that our strength is not sufficient for attaining it. “Once Christians cease to depend on their own natural resources and turn towards Christ, then we begin to see that this is not only a time of great trial but also a time of great opportunity.”
Julian Kwasniewski is a musician and artist who has written for the National Catholic Register, OnePeterFive and Crisis Magazine.
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