Margaret Clare Devlin, Boomers' Families:

How a Generation Became a Force for Destruction, (Castle of Grace LLC, Oil City Pennsylvania, 2021)

In one of my numerous podcasts, I announced that I was a guinea pig in a social experiment which had been kept a secret from me for my entire life. The name of that experiment was social engineering. It began shortly after the Allied victory in World War II by driving my family out of our ethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia, and it eventually drove my generation insane with a combination of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. The one thing that remained constant during this period of time was the silence of the social engineers and the ignorance of the guinea pigs who had been the unwitting recipients of their ministrations. The author who writes under the pseudonym of Margaret Clare Devlin has done the baby boomer generation a favor by breaking that silence in a way that is no less shocking than it would have been if a lab rat had stood up to the scientist who was experimenting on it and said, “Cut it out” or, better, “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” After a lifetime spent as part of an unnamed experiment which wrecked her life and the lives of everyone in her family, one of the guinea pigs finally figured out what was going on and decided to tell her story in all of its gruesome detail. Boomers’ Families springs from the Catholic tradition which Augustine founded when he wrote his Confessions and Thomas Merton resurrected for Americans when he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s required reading for every baby boomer whose life got ruined by the enemies no one ever warned him against in an undeclared culture war whose main strength was that the victims didn’t know that war was being waged against them.

Boomer has become an Internet cuss word commonly used by a generation even more ignorant of what happened to those who had the misfortune to be born in American between 1946 and 1964 than the original generation of guinea pigs, to which I belong. Devlin clears the air by claiming that “The boomers were the pawns of the social engineers”1 of their parents’ generation, who came to power after World War II. This eliminates the preposterous claim that a bunch of confused teenagers changed the world in the 1960s, even though they were led to believe this by the same media which encouraged them to wreck their lives with sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll.

This tragedy begins with the social engineering which the “ruling elites” inflicted on the parents of the baby boomers by war, the instrument John B. Watson, father of Behaviorism, defined as the most drastic and most effective form of social engineering.

As a prelude to telling the story of the destruction of her own generation, Devlin explains how the moral compromises the GI generation made with American culture turned them into proxy warriors whose first assignment was the social engineering of their own families. Devlin identifies Dr. Spock as the man who turned mom into a manager in the newly created corporation known as the nuclear family; moms became social engineers by reading Dr. Spock. Alienated from their own children by the regimen of bottle feeding which got imposed on them as the “scientific” alternative to the breast, mothers were encouraged to become “genial social facilitators who encouraged conformity without causing discomfort or confrontations.”2 Mothers had become “bottom-level social engineers.”3 Child rearing had become “a management strategy that called for emotional subtlety” because it was based on deception and manipulation. As a result, their mothers gave Boomers “their first experiences of social engineers.”4 Primed by their exposure to the manifestly absurd ideas of childrearing proposed by John B. Watson in the 1930s, the GI generation heaved a sigh of relief when the avuncular Dr. Spock took over his role by dispensing advice that fit in perfectly with what dad was experiencing at the office and what mom was seeing on daytime television. As a result, “The G.I. generation seemed to comply to Spock’s idea of mother as manager with willingness, even enthusiasm.”5 Spock’s book became a bestseller, and the Boomers were simultaneously spoiled and emotionally deprived, setting them up to need affirmation from powerful outside forces, and for that reason “the social engineers could manipulate them to instigate and carry on the sexual and cultural revolution.”6 If Spock had had a deeper understanding of human nature than Watson, he does not explain it in his book on childrearing because the child is a kind of tabula rasa for both thinkers. Spock “advances a kind of manipulative management” in lieu of the love and discipline which would allow the child to take control of his impulses and channel them into productive habits under the guidance of caring parents. Bereft of any deeper understanding of human nature or the effects of original sin, Spock proposes a form of childrearing which becomes “an exercise in ‘on the scene mediation’ and ‘deft manipulation,’”7 which set an entire generation up to become guinea pigs in an experiment they saw as so natural that it needed no explanation, much less preventative measures against it. Spock, in Devlin’s words, helped the parents of the G.I. generation “groom a generation of children, the Boomers, who would fulfill all the requirements of the social engineers, including Boomers’ successes in rearing more social engineers.”8

The main social engineer in the Scheeben family was Devlin’s mother, who “operated like a social engineer, not so much in exercising direct control, but through a highly evolved form of manipulation.”9 Holy Mother Church had become, like Devlin’s biological mother, a social engineer “because the hierarchy encouraged American Catholics to assimilate into the American way whenever they could.”10 The Church at some point during her childhood and adolescence had stopped “teaching doctrine.” As a result, “it was not helping me to grow up.”11 Neither social engineering, nor the resultant sexual revolution could have swept the baby boomers away “without the simultaneous collapse of our Catholic faith.”12

As in the catastrophe described in Genesis, where Adam had to ratify Eve’s weakness before the Fall could happen, the crucial figure enabling the demise of her family was Devlin’s father. The social engineering which Devlin’s father had to accept because he was in the armed forces during World War II set his entire generation on the path that would bring about the ruin of their families. Four years after the end of the war, on June 8, 1949, Devlin’s father received his Ph.D. in sociology. According to Aldous Huxley, he should have become one of the social engineers who was determining the new course of behavior in the Brave New World which came into existence in earnest after World War II. Instead, he became one of its victims, spouting Catholic platitudes in a battle against an enemy he could not identify with no clear sense of how social engineering was destroying his family.

Six years into his career as a professor of sociology at a Catholic university in the Midwest, Devlin’s father addressed a convention of 5,000 Catholic educators urging them to be “articulate, positive and forceful in the expression of the Christian spirit” and to have a “comprehension and practical appreciation of our religion as the only basis of a way of life.”13 Aware that something deadly which he could not identify was seeping into American culture, Devlin’s father compared the “deadly sensate philosophy” of secularism to carbon monoxide gas. There was a paradox here. After defining the problem as “secularism,” Professor Devlin contradicted himself by saying that “you can’t see it; you can’t smell it; you can’t feel it” because “it doesn’t announce itself.”14 Devlin’s father should have faulted social engineering instead of secularism, but he didn’t know that it existed, and because he didn’t know that it existed, he didn’t understand how it worked, and because he didn’t know that sexual liberation, one of the main weapons in the arsenal of social engineering, was a form of control, Devlin’s father succumbed to the temptations which the social engineers were dangling in front of the G.I. generation. “My father,” Devlin reports:

subscribed to Playboy, drank hard liquor every evening, and dosed up on the television drug. The enemies of the Church could easily recast the mentality of a man who had such habits and kept such company. By the time I had become a teenager, he was no longer listened to in my family. Who he had been and what had happened to him would remain a mystery to me for decades.15

Devlin’s father became a victim of the social engineering he failed to understand. Professor Scheeben “had powerful ideas and a tenacious and profound Catholic identity, shaped by a broad and deep Catholic education,”16 but he had been fatally weakened by succumbing to the vices which he failed to recognize as weapons that were being deployed against him to corrupt his morals and destroy his faith. He also failed to see that the main conduit which allowed toxic culture into his home was his wife.

Determined to fill the vacuum which her husband’s abdication of authority created in the family, Devlin’s mother became “the Scheebens’ own personal social engineer.”17 Devlin describes her mother’s “native liberalism”18 as the regimen which replaced her father’s traditional Catholicism as the unwritten constitution of the Scheeben household. Liberalism in this instance meant Irish Catholic assimilation to America culture during a period when that culture turned toxic and predatory. Isolated in his den, where he anaesthetized himself with alcohol and Playboy centerfolds, Professor Scheeben ceded control of the family to his wife, who:

ruled the roost with her liberal “spirit,” we drank in liberalism with our mother’s milk. And like the liberalism that engineered the sexual revolution and could not face the truth about the damage it has caused, my mother’s liberalism also depended on dishonesty: my mother would never face the truth about what her liberal policies did to our family.19

Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, Professor Scheeben lost his authority over his family because:

he could not abide losing his wife’s love. That was the deal: give her the power, and she would continue to be companionable; contradict her way of doing things, and she would freeze him. He could not fight her emotionality in dealing with all life’s happenings, but he also would not join her in running things her way, that is, unreasonably; my father was a reasonable and logical man. And so he found the only way to live in peace with her and to keep some of his principles was to withdraw from family matters, and especially to withdraw from any authority over his children. For we children collectively were the emotional battlefield on which he had to engage my mother. . . . “Many people thought your father was a wimp,” Aunt Patricia told me. “He couldn’t control his children because his wife would not let him. ‘Rich, why have you changed so much?’ I once asked him. He said, ‘Patricia, I married her to love her, not to fight her.’”20

Professor Scheeben became “a broken man” and a tragic figure because:

the power of his intellect, so rightly formed by reason and faith, could not bring about the practice in his family of his ideas and his beliefs. What tripped him was my mother’s emotional disorder. Her narcissism demanded that he hand the children and the household over to her. To challenge that demand, my father would have needed the psychological and emotional strength that could have withstood the loss of my mother’s love. He did not have that strength; but he did have the strength of character to remain himself, to keep his ideas, even in the midst of his surrender. On those, he would not compromise. And, sad to say, my mother came to belittle these.21

A vicious circle ensued according to which Professor Scheeben’s drinking increased in response to his wife’s rebellion against his authority, which led to more drinking, which led to more rebellion, which led to more isolation, as he retired angrily to his den only to emerge to make sarcastic commentary on a situation he could not rectify.

Scheeben’s ignorance became culpable in 1968 when he and his liberal Irish Americanist wife rejected Humanae Vitae, the Church’s encyclical condemning contraception. The rejection of Humanae Vitae turned Devlin’s parents into “cafeteria Catholics,”22 who would go on to pick and choose which aspects of the faith they would observe according to the dictates of American culture. Because her parents rejected the Church’s teaching on birth control, “Catholicism seemed to leak out of my family” in 1968.23 “We all seemed to know it was going. My mother and father still went to Church, but they showed no fervor in their faith.”24 Wilhelm Reich had pointed out the connection between deviant sexuality and loss of faith in his seminal work The Mass Psychology of Fascism 35 years earlier, but the Scheeben family had to learn that lesson in the expensive school of experience. Betrayed by her parents’ rejection of Humanae Vitae, Devlin noticed: “My faith faltered in my teens. The breakdown in my home, the drug use, and the growing temptation to have a sexual relationship…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the October 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)