Scrambled Age, Part 1

I found myself in the position of trying to explain postmodernism yesterday to various people at church. In my conversations I relied mainly on what I learned in researching the following thesis paper that I wrote in Summer 2002. I will present it on this blog in sections. If you’d like to read it in its entirety now click here.


Finding Truth in a Scrambled Age:
A Postmodern, Gen-Xer, Evangelical Perspective

I am a member of Generation X. I do not resent the label. I hardly know what it means. I suppose that is the point. About 10 years ago, everyone was so fascinated by our complacency and lack of identity. We were trying to find our place in the world. Like generations before us, we were trying to make our mark, but our mark was decidedly ambiguous. We were not particularly fond of the world we were born into. It seemed so fabricated and forced. Where our grandparents sacrificed our parents splurged. "He who dies with the most toys wins." That was the motto. Everyone was in the rat race trying to keep up, then trying to one-up their neighbors. At work, it was all about success. At home, it was all about image. We gagged at the thought. We became an "anti-" generation, nonconformists by creed. We just wanted to be ourselves, not become cookie-cutter cutouts of our parents. It became our moral struggle, to fight for the freedom to simply be. Now we are all grown up and starting families of our own. Reluctantly, tentatively, we have joined the "real world." But we do not see it the same way as our parents. Things have changed.

A new way of thinking has emerged and come to prominence in our time. Consistent with our cause of nonconformity, we decided that none of us should tell anyone else what the other should or should not do. We took "if it feels good, do it" to whole new levels and set a new moral standard: do whatever is right for you. This new morality may not have started with us, but we were the first to really own it, the first to just assume it and assert it without too much opposition. It resonates with the way we see the world. The thinking goes that since we do not want others telling us what to do we must refrain from telling others what they should do. Thus, we are free to decide for ourselves. It is a kind of golden rule. It allows us to do whatever we believe, think or feel is right. On the other hand, it also restricts our being able (read "allowed") to speak out about what is right or wrong because now all of that must necessarily be nothing more than opinion. According to our new morality we do not want others to force their morality on us. So, on such matters, the only acceptable moral voices are individual consciences. The Bible's "judge not lest you be judged," in this new context, is the supreme ethic.

This is but one perspective—my perspective—on what has happened in America in the last 20 years. The generation after me, born in the last two decades of the 20th century and called "millennials," are just graduating high school. They see it differently because they have grown up in this new ambiguous climate; it is all they know. But I have lived in two worlds. They may look the same, but the world we are in now is entirely new. We call it Postmodern.

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