3.      Emerging adults and (post)modernism II

On the issue of facts vs. opinion emerging adults clearly side with the postmodernists.  In their lives nothing is true no matter what any more.  What they miss in life is a sure-fire way to solve problems that works for everybody.  They are faced with the fact (!) that the way they try to solve their problems often differs totally from the way the others they meet in the world try to solve theirs.  And, in the absence of objective criteria, who is to say that their way of solving problems is better than that of the others?   So, they feel that the best they can do is to decide what is best for them, and allow others to do the same for themselves.  Their motto seems to be, “You in your small corner and I in mine.”  Of all the generations in the past the emerging adults seem to be most keenly aware of the plurality and relativity of human opinions.  On that point they seem to be indistinguishable from the postmodernists.  

It will have become clear, I hope, that emerging adults have an aversion to absolutes and a penchant for tolerance.  They are typically tentative about their own opinions, while at the same time fiercely defensive of the right of others to freely voice the truth as they see it.  In this they are like the postmodernists who hold similar sentiments.  An anecdote may illustrate this characteristic more clearly.

A young friend who is enrolled in a PhD program of studies in Canadian university recently complained to me that she found it so difficult to complete her Masters thesis.  She had by now accumulated more than enough information but found it hard to compile it all into one coherent document.  I could commiserate with her because I had had similar problems when I was enrolled in a PhD program years ago.  When I asked her what she found so hard about that her answer surprised me.  She said that in order to complete her thesis she would have to state her opinion in absolute terms, as if it were the only truth.  “And that,” she said, “would make liars out of all those people who do not agree with my version of the truth.”  The reason she had trouble completing her Masters thesis was she was reluctant to do this.   

This anecdote betrays an ethical concern for others that I have also found in other emerging adults.  Quite possibly the reason why they are so uncertain about their own lives is their fear that by being more sure of who they are and what they can do, they disqualify the certainty that others may have about their identity and their capabilities.  This concern echoes nearly verbatim postmodernism’s concern about meta-narratives.