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.