Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Society Accentuates the Strains on Youth

Society Accentuates the Strains on Youth

What is a juvenile delinquent? He (or she) is a young person who acts in an anti-social way, perhaps to the extent of falling foul of the law. And in this equation there are usually four factors to be considered – the nature of the young person concerned; his or her immediate background, whether this be a family or an institution; the larger pattern of the whole society; and the process of the law.

I am interested to work out what way a juvenile delinquent of today differs from me and my fellow delinquents, who burned down hedges, stole bullets and bicycles and rabbit-traps, made raids on department stores, and frequently trembled and occasionally rejoiced in doing these things when we were a great deal younger and more vulnerable than we are now.

I cannot think that the natures of young people are much different from one generation to another. Indeed I suspect that this view would involve a minor degree of heresy. Is Mao Tse-Tung less or more fallen than Julius Caesar? In potential they must, I think, share equally in the effects of Adam’s fall. If we are to look for the causes of change we will not find them in any radical change in human nature between one generation and the next.

Again, I do not think that the pattern of home life – or institutional life, for those who are brought up in institutions – has changed greatly. Parents still try to warn their children of moral dangers. Some parents take their children to church and others don’t. Certainly our homes are likely to be somewhat more affluent; but this in itself should not conduce to delinquency.

And the process of the law has not changed much either; though some people may argue that frequent floggings kept delinquencies in check in the past. I don’t remember that it was like that. When I was a delinquent I got off almost scot-free, apart from a couple of very mild thrashings from my reluctant father, who was obviously even more embarrassed by the procedure than I was. And I cannot remember any of my immediate acquaintances being in trouble with the law.

This leaves the pattern of the larger society for us to consider. And here I think we may find enough real changes to account for our modern stress and worry connected with the problem of juvenile delinquency. The difference is that I did not grow up in a world of strangers. When one of us stole a mouth organ or a liquorice strap from the local store, we were well aware that we page 17 were robbing one of our neighbours. Our guilt had therefore a special tone to it. But it could well be different nowadays. If a gang of boys hoist a car or loot a tobacconist’s shop they are converting to their own use the property of a stranger. This is where the essential difference lies.

A certain Member of Parliament was speaking recently on a TV session about juvenile delinquency; and he made the point that in a progressively developing technological society an increase in crime is only to be expected. I agree with him. But I am not as resigned about it as he seemed to be.

If the cost of new factories and bigger towns is to be more young people whose sense of relationship becomes tragically blunted, then we should perhaps have another look at the balance sheet and decide whether this kind of progress is progress at all.

What are the characteristics of the world of strangers in which more and more of your young people are going to grow up? Well, in the first place, it is a world dominated by mass media – TV, radio, newspapers, visual advertising. Very few of the young ones are thinking their own thoughts. A man chopping wood in the bush may think his own thoughts; or a housewife hanging out the washing on a sunny day; and even if the thoughts are not happy or constructive ones, they have the virtue of belonging to the mind that originated them. But the stereotyped notions and non-values of the mass media are very shabby and second-hand, however much the producers may polish them up. Yesterday, while I walked two blocks along a main street in Dunedin, I saw twenty-three images of The Girl, our modern goddess, in shop windows and on the covers of magazines in bookstalls. I did not see any images of Our Lady.

The character of society depends on its conscious and unconscious ideals. I think that one can fairly say that The Girl does not embody any Christian ideal. She would not dream of giving anything to the poor. She needs all her money (and some of her parents’ money as well) to buy cosmetics and clothes; though she is not satisfied for more than a day with the tone of a particular lipstick or the length of a particular dress. She may or may not remain technically chaste. But this is not in order to please God. Her sexual ideal is to have a continuous series of highly emotional love affairs, in which the physical dimension stops just this side of actual intercourse. This practice reassures her that she is a creature of feeling and that she has retained the power to attract the opposite sex of which she fears the loss much more than she fears the loss of her salvation.

She does not wish, when married, to bear many children. They would rob her of ‘freedom’ and spoil her narrow angular girlish figure. She will certainly practise contraception. She may also from time to time practise abortion when contraception fails. And this creature of the modern void is not a happy individual. She lives in a continual state of nerviness and self-doubt. She requires constant praise and attention from others to reassure herself that page 18 she’s indeed The Girl. The piece of sticking plaster she wears on her wrist is not a tribal decoration. It covers the gashes she made recently when trying to commit suicide. She does not possess the habit of prayer. Nevertheless her deepest unconscious suffering may come from a longing for God which has been almost wholly stifled by inane repetitive thinking and an undue attachment to material possessions.

The Girl was not created by any hippie cult. She is a product of the thinking of the hard commercial core of modern society. Some of the minds that engendered this sinister idol may even have been nominally Catholic.

The Boy is her daylong companion. The Boy buys a new coat, new jeans and a new pair of shoes every fortnight, and pays the down-payment either with his own or his parents’ money. Like The Girl he is perpetually in debt to the clothing shops in spite of his very high salary. He is both keen on making money and keen on spending it. His dearest ambition is to run a really swinging TV show. In spite of a number of casual liaisons he does not know a great deal about girls. To him they are ‘dolls’, lay figures made of cloth and flesh and paint, with whom he can experiment in his leisure hours. He very soon grows tired of any one of them. The songs he likes best are sentimental. But he is far from sentimental when he ditches a pregnant girlfriend. He does it with the aplomb of an air pilot dropping a mail bag in the jungle.

He too lacks the habit of prayer. Indeed prayer is almost mentally and physically impossible for him because he carries with him, wherever he goes, a leather-covered box on a strap. From this handsome container comes an endless idiotic blare of loud music. He also possesses a large car (not yet fully paid for) with a maximum cruising speed of eighty miles an hour. This car is his pride and his joy. In fact you could say that it is his god, his deepest object of love and worship. He does not feel lonely or unhappy when he is inside it with the noise-box turned up to full blast and the wind thundering past the windows. He has never realised how closely it resembles an enormous coffin.

In a society where The Girl and The Boy are idols, can one honestly expect that young people will easily contrive to avoid delinquency? To become like The Girl and The Boy they will always need more money than they can earn, even in our highly affluent society. Sooner or later they will be tempted to get it by dishonest means. They may feel that their actions are justified.

If they have grown up believing that money, adulation, health, ease, unrestricted sexual satisfaction, good clothes, good lodgings, are not only their due from life but things which no sensible person would want to be without, then when one or other of these social planks gives way under their feet they will feel cheated and hard done by. And there is, of course, more than this to their situation; for, if they do in fact gain precisely these possessions and satisfactions, they will have gained an inner chaos and desert of desperate boredom, since man does not live by bread alone and human happiness depends on contact with the silence and the poverty of God.

page 19

Let us not blame then those among the young who work irregularly and wear old clothes and discuss philosophy rather too loudly and too long and protest against the use of nuclear weapons. They are not often the Beautiful People that they claim to be. They are rarely chaste, since chastity is a virtue – unlike kindness or honesty – that can only make full sense within a consciously Christian environment. But at least they are reacting with aversion to our current commercial idols and the demonic inanity of mass media.

I think that a good many of the future converts to the Catholic Church will come from this group. And I hope that by then we have a Church resplendent with the beauty of poverty, a revolutionary Church, a Church that cares profoundly about people and hardly at all about things, ready to receive them. As one who came in himself from the ditches and hedgerows, I will certainly be holding out my hands to them. In a world of strangers I am quite happy to let God choose who are going to be my friends.

1968 (567)