May 12, 2010

One of the important larger conditions that is necessary to grasp in order to understand emerging adult life is…the contemporary cultural crisis of knowledge and value.

Emerging adults have been raised in a world involving certain outlooks and assumptions that they have clearly absorbed and that they in turn largely affirm and reinforce. Stated in philosophical terms, their world has undergone a significant epistemic and axiological breakdown. It is difficult if not impossible in this world that has come to be to actually know anything objectively real or true that can be rationally maintained in a way that might require people actually to change their minds or lives.

Emerging adults know quite well how they personally were raised in their families, and they know fairly well how they generally "feel" about things. But they are also aware that all knowledge and value are historically conditioned and culturally relative and they have not, in our view, been equipped with the intellectual and moral tools to know what to do with that fact. So most simply choose to believe and live by whatever subjectively feels "right" to them, and to try not to seriously assess, much less criticize, anything else that anyone else has chosen to believe, feel or do. Whether or not they use these words to say it, for most emerging adults, in the end, it's all relative. One thought or opinion isn't more defensible than any other. One way of life cannot claim to be better than others. Some moral beliefs may personally feel right, but no moral belief can rationally claim to be really true, because that implies criticizing or discounting other moral beliefs. And that would be rude, presumptuous, intolerant and unfeeling. This is what we mean when we use the terms crisis and breakdown.

Such a condition arguably encourages the true virtues of humility and openness to difference…[b]ut when life's push comes to shove for emerging adults, such a condition also thwarts many of them from ever being able to decide what they believe is really true, right, and good. Thus, their commonly unsettled lifestyles are often accompanied by a troubling uncertainty about basic knowledge and values.

Very many emerging adults simply don't know how to think about things, what is right, or what is deserving for them to devote their lives to. On such matters, they are very often simply paralyzed, wishing they could be more definite, wanting to move forward, but simply not knowing how they might possibly know anything worthy of conviction and dedication. Instead, very many emerging adults exist in a state of basic indecision, confusion, and fuzziness. The world they have inherited, as best as they can make sense of it, has told them that real knowledge is impossible and genuine values are illusions.

Behind this, we think, are in part the powerful influences of various intellectual and cultural movements that have saturated the institutional worlds in which most emerging adults have grown up. One of those is academia's wave of deconstructive postmodernism, which has sought to reduce all knowledge and value claims to arbitrary exertions of power and control. Another is the glut of fragmentation of information on the Internet and elsewhere, which lacks authorized gatekeepers to judge, evaluate, and rank the merits or value of its excess of data. Yet another is the diffuse influence of anthropological and sociological teachings on social constructionism and cultural relativism, which undercut any sense of objective standards for evaluating self and others. Still another influence comes from various multicultural movements, particularly as taught in schools—many of which we think have real value but which also, in their less thoughtful modes, often degenerate into mere assertions that all differences of any type must simply be accepted without reflection, dialogue, or assessment.

Whatever the relative worth of these various movements and trends, their intended and unintended effects have clearly powerfully shaped emerging adults today. In some ways, this has been for the good, we think. But in other ways, the effects have been confusing and debilitating. Emerging adults struggle earnestly to establish themselves as autonomous and sovereign individuals. But the crises of knowledge and value that have so powerfully formed their lives leave them lacking in conviction or direction to even know what to do with their prized sovereignty.

Emerging adults are determined to be free. But they do not know what is worth doing with their freedom. They work very hard to stand on their own two feet. But they do not really know where they ought to go and why, once they are standing. They lack larger visions of what is true and real and good, in both the private and public realms. And so, it seems to us a small set of predefined default imperatives quickly rush in to fill that normative and moral vacuum.

One of those is mass consumerism's slavish obsession with private material comfort and possessions, the achieving of which nearly every emerging adult views as a key purpose in life. Other imperatives, in the meantime, may be the amusements of alcohol and drug intoxication, and the temporary thrills of hook-up sex. Yet even in the early emerging adult years, signs were evident to us that many already find these culturally given, default purposes, amusements, and thrills unsatisfying, if not outright wounding. Many know there must be something more, and they want it. Many are uncomfortable with their inability to make truth statements and moral claims without killing them with the death of a thousand qualifications. But they do not know what to do about that, given the crisis of truth and values that has destabilized their culture.

And so they simply carry on as best they can, as sovereign, autonomous, empowered individuals who lack a reliable basis for any particular conviction or direction by which to guide their lives.

Reprinted from Souls in Transition by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright (C) 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.