In the following exclusive interview with THE IRISH ROVER, distinguished Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith discusses his most recent book, LOST IN TRANSLATION: THE DARK SIDE OF EMERGING ADULTHOOD (Oxford University Press, September 2011).
What are a few of the top characteristics that you discovered about this age group, the emerging adulthood, in you research for this book?
There’s 5 chapters of the book and each chapter focuses on what we believe is a problem or a challenge in emerging adulthood.
The first one is that most emerging adults we interviewed had tremendous difficulty with moral reasoning, trying to think through what’s right and wrong and why, and how you solve moral dilemmas. It’s not that they’re immoral people anymore than anyone else necessarily, but they haven’t been given the tools to clearly think about morality, so they’re lost at sea when it comes moral reasoning.
The second problem we found is that the vast majority of emerging adults seem totally sold out to and totally comfortable with mass consumer capitalism, that the meaning of life is to buy lots of stuff. It is a very materialistic orientation with not many moral cultural horizons or aspirations beyond just being financially comfortable….
The third thing we talk about is a strong orientation of becoming recurrently intoxicated and the sense that you can’t talk to people or have interesting conversations unless you are somewhat intoxicated. It’s not that we have anything against drinking per se, but it just seems strange to be so dependent on being intoxicated in order to meet new people and have a good time….
The fourth thing we point out is casual sexual relationships, the hook-up culture, where not everybody, but a lot of emerging adults end up getting hurt, damaged, betrayed, regretful, diseased, get pregnant, have abortions, et cetera…It’s not presented in the media or taken very seriously, so we wanted to put that out there for consideration.
The last is a general observation that most emerging adults that we interviewed are civically and politically disengaged. They are not very hopeful about, and sometimes quite despairing about, the public world and their ability to shape the larger world of politics, community, and civic life.
Some of those things that you just mentioned have a presence on this campus. Do see what you found in your research prevalent at Notre Dame, or is Notre Dame more of an exception?
I wouldn’t say it’s prevalent or an exception. For Notre Dame undergrads, this is their larger culture they live in. They swim in this emerging adult culture. So, they are not going to be radically different from it. A certain proportion of Notre Dame undergrads have completely bought into everything I just described.
But, there’s also the Catholic character of Notre Dame that perhaps gives it somewhat of a different feel for some students. There’s probably a larger proportion who are more thoughtful and less sold out to mainstream values and practices. I haven’t studied the student body here, so I don’t know how different it is. My general sense is there’s some difference.
The undergrads here seem to have some reservations about just rampant sex or hooking up. At the same time, alcohol is not a small matter on this campus, and alcohol is somewhat related to some of these other issues.
There’s also a pretty strong sense among undergrads that these are successful people. They are going to live successful lives. They want to be materially successful. They are on a trajectory toward success. I would not be surprised if the interest in mass material consumerism and so on is just as strong here as anywhere else.
At the same time, there is always a minority presence of people here who are interested in social justice, the common good, and a faithful Catholic living that creates a counter presence if it is not dominant.
To what extent do Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor influence your work?
Both MacIntyre and Taylor have had significant influence on my thinking at a general level about modernity, morality, tradition, and religious faith. So, for example, in the first chapter about the lack of moral reasoning, the critique comes out of Charles Taylor’s view that we should not expect young people to be sophisticated moral philosophers. That’s not the idea. Charles Taylor basically says, look; people do have moral resources; they have moral intuitions, but those have to be cultivated and articulated. People have to learn how to express, and articulate what’s behind their moral intuitions, their moral feelings, and their moral judgments. Otherwise, it’s just this amorphous, vague, and much less powerful capacity. So, people need to learn how to articulate their moral resources. That is exactly the critique of the chapter.
Again, it’s not that we think emerging adults are all immoral. They do have some moral sensibilities and resources and intuitions. They just can’t reflect upon or explain them. It gets stuck inside. It turns out to be a very subjective, individualistic impulse, rather than a reasoned resource, that they have.
MacIntyre states in his book AFTER VIRTUE that “A moral philosophy… characteristically presupposes a sociology.” Where do you see the role of sociology, and specifically your work, in academia, but then also in the much larger context of society?
Sociology as a discipline is about describing the social world and explaining how and why it works the way it does. It helps to articulate back to society, “Here’s what’s going on among us; here’s what’s happening among us, and here’s why.” So it has a powerful ability to point out that what people think is going on is not really what is going on, that there is stuff going on they’re not aware of, where they are not interpreting or explaining correctly what’s going on. So, in a way, you can think of sociology as a society’s ability to look at itself and question and reason about itself that makes reference to empirical evidence.
I think that gives the ability to create a lot of normative conversations about what are we, what do we want to be, where are we going, what are we committed to, do we like the practices and institutions of our society. This is exactly what this book is trying to do. It says, “Here is what is happening. What do you think about this? Is this a problem? What needs to change?” That is different from psychology, which focuses on individuals, or anthropology. It is a particular perspective in the discipline that I think can make a real contribution to self understanding and reasoned self-reflection, and to, hopefully, better, flourishing human lives and better societies.
I noticed in the book you talk about a social imagination for the common good, and how structures and agents interact with each other. What is this concept of social imagination?
This is partly to make the book useful in an introduction to sociology class, which I partly wanted it to be used in. In sociology, we have this idea of a sociological imagination, a certain way of seeing and understanding the world through sociological lenses. I didn’t want the book to be just interesting description or moral narrative. I wanted it to be analytical, to think why is emerging adult life like this, why are young people’s experiences like this, how is that rooted in larger social and institutional structures that form people’s lives in this way. In that sense, I don’t want the book to just describe what’s going on out there: I want it to be an exercise to help people think and see sociologically.
At the beginning of the book you say we have to establish a sense of what the good is. What does this enable you to do in your work?
Well, this book is a work of cultural criticism, and to engage in criticism, you have to have some reference to what you think is good in life. If you don’t lay your cards out on what’s good and why, then it is not clear what should be criticized. A lot of social science has implicit notions of what is good that do not get spelled out, so it can be murky as to what our values and our commitments are.
We decided in this book to come straight out and say it exactly in the introduction: Here’s what we think is good when it comes to moral reasoning. Here’s what we think is good when it comes to the economy or the public life, or parties and celebration, etc, so that nobody would accuse us of having a hidden agenda, or be unclear about what we were arguing.
To summarize that, no analysis like this can get off the ground without a normative standard by which the judgments can be made. We just decided to make that extremely explicit so that our readers would not be confused or duped. Also, we want to model and push social science to be clearer about its moral commitments.
There are many take-away points that someone reading this book could learn. If you had to give one or two of these points to a reader, what would they be?
Well that’s hard. But, the first sociological take away point is to not take their own lives too personally, to understand that their lives are set within a much larger social system with forces that form who they are. Without social imagination, they may individualize it and think, “It’s just me; it’s my personality; it’s my bad choices, etc.”
It’s not that I don’t want people to take responsibility for their lives, but it’s helpful to realize that it’s not just me and that these are huge cultural dynamics at work that are helping to form my life in this way. In other words, it is important for people to set it into a larger cultural context and realize that it’s not just them as an individual.
At the same time, it’s not that individuals just lie down and die before all of these pressures and forces. Different people make real meaningful choices within the constraints and pressures they have to work with. Some people make good choices, and some people make bad choices. Some people wreck their lives, and some people do things that lead to their flourishing.
So, it’s helpful to have that sociological perspective, but I don’t want that to turn into social determinism. Within the context, what people decide and choose, how they live, really matters not just for themselves, but for the people around them. I still think there’s a strong individual responsibility story amidst the sociological context.
I am an undergraduate seminarian in Holy Cross, and one of the phrases used to describe the priests and brothers of the congregation is “Men with Hope to Bring.” So, if this is the dark side, what is the hope for this generation?
We are very clear that we are focusing on one side of things, and that is because there have been other books published about emerging adults that focus on the bright side, the positive side. Some of them we think are just naively optimistic. So, this is a matter of balance, rather than this is the only part of the story. We think there are many good things in emerging adult life, like there is lots of freedom to grow and make mistakes, and recover. There are many chances to explore in a good way life and learn about the world.
There are certain kinds of freedoms in emerging adulthood that we think are really good. There are other positive things about emerging adult life. For example, our perspective is that emerging adults are much better in accepting people who are different from them. Compared to older generations, they have much greater comfort with people of other races and ethnicities. That is a positive side to this “whateverism.”
In emerging adults, there is a tremendous amount of energy and creativity and hope, even if it’s focused on their own personal lives. I would say that this generation has a certain amount of despair about the public world, but I would also say that somehow along with that mysteriously there’s also a lot of energy and creativity to do interesting and new things. I think those are all great.
