Smith (with Patricia Snell) begins their book with extensive descriptions of three interviews as representative of the age group - a technique that Robert Bellah used in Habits of the Heart. The analysis begins in chapter 2, "The Cultural Worlds of Emerging Adults" (pp. 33-87). One of the virtues of Smith's analysis is his connection between "low culture" ("popular culture" and "high culture" (philosophical discourse) to produce what Charles Taylor calls "the social imaginary" --the inarticulate presuppositions of persons' lives. This at times can lead to a loss of the precision in our understanding of both, but it also helps see these as deeply related - which helps see the cultural logics that either malform perceptions or truthfully form us to be grasped by what is real.

Smith divides the chapter into two sections: Important Typical and Alternative Cultural Themes and Implications for Emerging Adult Religion. The "cultural themes" functions much as an illustrated list; the "alternative themes" seem almost as the binary opposition to the "typical" - and therefore reproduce the same cultural presuppositions in its very opposition. I wish to highlight what I think is most significant of Smith's analysis. I do not do this for descriptive purposes of the overall phenomenon, but to highlight what I have seen most evident and most fundamental.

Smith writes, "Perhaps the most pervasive, consistent them in the lives of emerging adults is the fact of their frequent and varied major life transitions. To an extent matched by no other time in the life course, emerging adults enjoy and endure multiple, layered, bid, and often unanticipated life transitions" (p. 34). Amid these deeply socially dependent transitions, "the central, fundamental, driving focus of nearly all emerging adults is getting to the point where they can 'stand on their own two feet.' Life's major challenge for them is transitioning from dependence to independence, from reliance on others to self-sufficiency, from being under other's authority and eye to living on their own" (p. 34).

Two things. First, we need to see the contradiction in this life stage at its very foundation. The very fact that life is always transitioning means that one cannot establish "independence" because one is always moving, moving, moving, having the social conditions necessary for 'independence' consistently cut out from underneath one. Second, the terms also set up a false dichotomy. The movement is seen from "dependence" to "autonomy" from "under authority" to "living on their own." This is just plain false. The issue is always good dependence, appropriate dependence; good authority, appropriate authority. No one lives as completely dependent, nor completely autonomous, as under authority or free from authority. By setting the terms in this binary system, the culture produces a type of personal and emotional drama that keeps the transitions going.

Second and related, the culture and phase presupposes what Michael Sandel calls "the unencumbered self" - before the good or true or beautiful, lays a self that is determined by the will. Smith writes, "The majority of emerging adults can express very well how people are shaped and bound by their personal subjective experiences. But most have great difficulty grasping the idea that a reality that is objective to their own awareness or construction of it may exist that could have a significant bearing on their lives. In philosophical terms, most emerging adults functionally . . .are soft ontological antirealists and epistemological skeptics and perspectivalists - although few have any conscious idea what those terms mean. They seem to presuppose that they are simply imprisoned in their own subjective selves, limited to their biased interpretation of their own sense perceptions, unable to know the real truth of anything beyond themselves. They are de facto doubtful that an identifiable, objective, shared reality might exist across and around all people that can serve as a reliable reference point for rational deliveration and argument" (p. 45). Again, the irony is thick. A shared objective social order has so formed us within a "reliable reference point" that there is no reliable reference point. Science, materialist//values, production. Knowledge//faith. Pure reason//practical reason. Again, notice the binary opposition - subjective versus objective; realist versus antirealist. Kant would be proud. We have met the modernism within the so-called postmodernist, and we have found that it is us.

Smith writes, "This, it seems, is not merely basic American individualism. It is individualism raised on heavy doses of multiculturalism and pumped up on the steroids of the postmodern insistence on disjunction, difference, and differences 'going all the way down'" (p. 48). As a result, most emerging adults "are still sorting out what their purpose in life might be, to what good they want to devote themselves. Here we mean not mainly some philosophical 'ultimate purpose of life' . . but rather the more prosaic issue of what one as a person out to be doing with one's life. Nearly all emerging adults have a general vision . . of what a 'good life' looks like. But more specific questions about careers and causes and life devotions are as yet unformed" (p. 53). Concrete purpose is always based in the will, and only in the will, and therefore life becomes paralyzing; to move for the right concrete purpose leaves one on a hamster wheel. Whereas earlier generations were moved in horde into a bureaucraticly-determined "slot" that sucked their life from them over the years, no slots really exist within the present generation and life is sucked out of them in the paralysis of beginning. Education, therefore, is important, but "higher education seems to have almost entirely to do with the instrumental advantages it produces--as well as the fun one can have in college" (p. 54).

Of course, to deal with such pressures, drugs, alcohol, and sexual expressions are rarely far from the surface. They are means of experimentation; perhaps it is a time even to end experimentation that came from earlier in life as one moves towards "settling down" - which, of course, is deferred: "rather than being settled, most of them understand themselves to be in a phase of life that is free, fluid, tentative, experimental, and relatively unbound. They want to enjoy it while it lasts. . . .They want to acquire independence and the ability to stand on their own two feet. But most of them also do not want full adulthood to come too quickly" (p. 56).

Smith charts how optimistic emerging adults generally are in their ability to negotiate through life. Yet most of their time and energy is taken up negotiating interpersonal relationships: "they pursue these private-sphere emotional and relational investments with fervent devotion. Much of their lives appear to be centered on creating and maintaining personal relationships. What makes emerging adults most happy are their good relationships with family, friends, and interesting other associates" (p. 73). Smith writes, "the apparent move of Americans away from civic participation [or, I might add, more importantly, congregational participation] and the enjoyment of 'lifestyle enclaves'--previously noted by various cultural observers - may for emerging adults be progressing yet further toward the nearly total submersion of self into fluidly constructed, private networks of technologically managed intimates and associates" (p. 74).

Perhaps this is enough for this entry. Certainly a lot to chew on. The underlying irony of all is that the liberal democratic political ideology and its institutions has formed a culture so suspicious of any institutions that undercuts the type of social stability necessary for human beings to flourish outside a constant transition that requires personal reassurance within relationships that must always be maintained, reconfigured, and reinforced. Chased into institutionally arranged "private networks" for significance, the society refuses emerging adults an appropriate stability to help them to face the constant flux that the world puts on them, encasing them in their own subjective, unencumbered self.