2.     Emerging adults and (post) modernism I[i]

A cultural shift from the worldview of modernism to the worldview of postmodernism has taken place in the last half century, which is in no small measure responsible for the difference between older adults and the emerging adults of today.  Older people and today’s emerging adults think and feel from out of different paradigms.  (A paradigm, like a worldview, is the way a group of people generally looks at, or thinks, or feels about the world in which they live.)  Older adults and emerging adults don’t think alike.  They process information differently and that may be what makes emerging adults such an enigma to older adults.

Older people tend to think like modernists, emerging adults like post-modernists.  For modernists there are such things as facts.  For post-modernists there are only opinions.   When faced with a problem to be solved or an issue to be settled modernists tend to use the so-called “scientific” method.  They start with an unproven opinion, or hypothesis, then they test that hypothesis against “reality” and when that hypothesis proves to be correct, i.e. corresponds to this reality, it no longer is an opinion but a fact.  And that then definitively settles the matter.  It is the truth.

This approach presupposes that we have a direct, unmediated and error-free access to reality as an objective given outside ourselves against which we can test our hunches.  Postmodernists deny that.  They say that we only have access to our interpretation of that reality.  “Reality” is always constructed and it is never more than a construct we think up.  So, to test an opinion for its truth-value never means more than comparing one opinion with another.  Some opinions may indeed be clearer or more profound and therefore have more truth-value than others, but we can never escape the circle of conjecture.   As someone recently stated, “Truth can only be spoken of within quotation marks.” 

Our present world is still very much influenced by modernism but it is haunted by postmodernism’s suspicion and critique of science’s claim to be the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not true.  Post-modernists argue that science itself is based on an unexamined paradigm, and determined by an unproven worldview.  They state that in our culture science has unfairly co-opted a place of privilege for itself by proclaiming that its story is the only true one and by relegating all other stories to the realm of fables.  In reality (!) science is just one story among many with no more claim to the truth than any other.  It is just another story masquerading as the story above all other stories.  So, for postmodernists it is imperative to deconstruct, i.e. to question the validity of any story (or meta-narrative) that claims to be the truth.

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[i] Three sources I found helpful in understanding postmodernism:

Smith, J.K.A. 2006 Who is Afraid of PostModernism? Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic.

Middleton R. & B.J. Walsh 1995 Truth Is Stranger Than It Used To Be. Downers Grove, Ill: Intervarsity Press.

Prickett, S. Narrative Religion and Science, Fundamentalism versus Irony 1700-1999.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press chapters 1,6