More “Souls In Transition”

Per Chris Smith on p. 51 of his newest book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults: “One of the apparent effects of this apparently culturally relativistic and the continual self-relativizing to which it leads is speech in which claims are not staked, rational arguments are not developed, differences are not engaged, nature is not referenced, and universals are not recognized.”

Nothing surprising here. “Emotivism,” as Alasdair MacIntyre called it already in 1984 (in After Virtue) describes the state of affairs when people no longer believe there are rational ways of securing moral agreement.  If true nearly 30 years ago, it’s hardly surprising it’s the warp and woof of the EA worldview today.

My law students may find it difficult to make the fine-grained rational arguments I’d like to see (in other words, there’s not enough “A” in the typical IRAC law school exam answer) but they certainly try; but then I suspect that pure emotivists don’t come to law school.

A bit more surprising is Smith’s conclusion on p. 67: “Interviewers could not, no matter how hard they pushed, get emerging adults to express any serious concerns about any aspect about mass-consumer materialism.”  Then, again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.  Why should I expect otherwise from a culture whose economy subsists by causing us to want to buy stuff we don’t need and which we can’t afford?