Abstract
Were Christian Smith and his coauthors savvier, they might have begun their book, Lost in Transition with the second chapter. It provides copious evidence that kids these days are corrupted by consumerism. Materialism is their mantra; young people, many of whom sit in our classrooms, simply love to shop. You can imagine heads nodding.
But you will have to imagine it, because most sociologists will not get to the second chapter of this book. Few will get past the introduction, which may trigger that uncomfortable feeling among sociologists that they are about to read something “conservative.” The authors are distinctly Durkheimian, outlining a value-laden sociology. They argue that it is good for people to be able to articulate moral positions, to have values and purposes that transcend mass-consumerism, to avoid routine intoxication, to have sexual contact within the boundaries of a relationship, and to care about the larger social, political, and cultural world around them. Such moralizing is exactly what many do not want to see in their discipline. Ironically, the same morality is what most hope to instill in their own children.
All this is to say that many people will disagree with this book on principle, which is a pity. Smith and his colleagues have taken on important concerns—ones that we must care about and take care to understand. My problem with this book is not with its morality—it is refreshing to see authors clearly state where they stand—instead, it is with its data and argument.
The data are not bad. Smith uses the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a longitudinal study of American youths that began surveying a panel in 2002. Lost in Transition draws upon 230 in-depth in-person interviews among these youths; the interviews were conducted in 2008 as part of the third wave of this study. The young people were between the ages of 18 and 23 at the time of their interviews. Although there is no reason to believe that the interviews were anything but expertly done, the problem is how they are used. Smith takes verbal accounts as proxies of activity and does not place the data in the context of “the dark side of emerging adulthood.”
“I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to judge anyone else,” says one of Smith’s subjects (p. 24). We are given enough data to support Smith’s claim that young adults, “avoid all assessment, evaluation, and criticism of every moral belief and behavior” (ibid). Kids do not judge, it seems, because they do not have the moral tools to make judgments. But we cannot take the fact that youths say they do not make judgments as evidence that they do not. The authors should spend some time with people between the ages of 18–23 and then argue that such young people do not make moral judgments about one another. What people say is rarely a good predictor of what they do. In fact, using interview data from the NSYR, one of Smith’s former students has shown how interview data is a poor predictor of activity (Vaisey 2009). Youths may not be able to articulate their moral judgments, but that does not mean they are not navigating the world on the basis of their morality (and holding others to account).
Sensitive to this, Smith and his colleagues therefore argue that being able to articulate a coherent moral framework is nonetheless important. Yet this strikes me as an impossible standard. After criticizing one of their research subjects for using consequentialist moral reasoning (p. 33), the authors deploy consequentialist moral reasoning against drug use (p. 66). Coherent moral reasoning is sufficiently hard, it seems, that experts in morality are unable to use consistent moral argumentation in their own work. How, then, can we expect better of young adults when speaking spontaneously in interviews?
The second problem is that we have no sense of the activity of youths before Smith’s study. To be fair, Smith and his colleagues acknowledge this. But that does not make the problem go away. How have youths talked about morality, consumerism, intoxication, sex, and civic engagement before? If Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism is any indication, the problems of consumerism date back to at least 1976; if we read Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind we might identify the lack of moral coherence in the 1960s; if we were to take up Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, we might identify the nineteenth century as the source of indulgent individualism. We could play this game all day; humans and their children have been disappointing for thousands of years.
You need not go back to Plato on the amorality of youth (though you could). I simply wish Smith had taken more care to engage with such ideas. We have a hint of Lasch here and there. But hidden is a conversation that matters (and Smith may be far better equipped to have this conversation than others)—that with Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue or Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. Instead, we are told “what the data say,” ignoring the fact that verbal accounts do not really tell us about what people do, and absent the necessary historicizing of moral alarms when ringing the bell of “the dark side of emerging adulthood.”
There is much to engage with in this book, and in my case it was worth the time to read, think about, and disagree with. I hope other sociologists will do the same.