Life Cycles and Cohorts

It's been interesting in the last 40+ hours to follow the varied reactions to the news about Osama Bin Laden's demise. In the midst of all the questions about "how knew what when" and the inevitable harping about how "President Obama didn't do this, the military did", it's been fascinating to track how evangelicals of various ages are responding.

Some of my contacts are responding with deep concern as they try to struggle over the difference between justice and vengeance. They wonder what "loving enemies" really looks like. What distinguishes this group from at least some others is that they are putting primacy on what Jesus actually said. Those who are celebrating find themselves drawn rapidly to Old Testament historical books or out-of-context Pauline epistles. Anyway, this group of folks are struggling over how the Church could celebrate nationalism over the Gospel. I tend to share their concern.

I'm generalizing, but the folks in this camp are slightly older than college students. They've been out of school for a few years and wrestled with trying to make sense of Christian living in the post-Christian-College world.

I ran across a great piece in the Washington Post today by Alexandra Petri, their "popular culture" blogger. She was one of the folks celebrating outside the White House on Sunday night. She explains: "Osama was our Voldemort." It's a fascinating analysis. I hadn't realized that Petri was in her very early 20s (she writes quite well). But she makes reference to being 12 to 14 in 2001. If you look at pop culture trends in the early 2000s, the Harry Potter books top the list. It's no surprise that she and others would draw a parallel between the total evil created by Rowling and the evil perpetrated on 9/11. And to finish the parallel for that generation, the last Harry Potter movie should beat Voldemort in just over two months.

Pegging this response to "people of that age" is fascinating. It suggests that it's not just "college students acting out". It's what happens when the life cycle changes interact with concrete events of the cohort. So my troubled friends didn't want Osama around indefinitely. But their experience of all this was different. Being slightly older means a lot.

I'm reminded of the analysis that Robert Putnam and David Schwartz did in American Grace that I discussed in my other blog. In figuring out changes in religion in America, Putnam and Schwartz attempted to separate life cycle effects (growing older, having children, empty nest) from cohort effects (growing up in the 60s or 80s or 2000s). What we're looking at is the interaction between the two.

The last time I taught Intro to Sociology, I used Annie Dillard's wonderful little book An American Childhood. It's one of the best testaments to growing awareness of one's place I've ever read. Over the course of the book, she moves from stories of her family, to her school, to her neighborhood, to the social structure of Pittsburgh. She gets to that outermost concentric circle at about 12 years old.

I just wrote an introductory e-mail to the students in my senior seminar course for this fall. Just to say "hi" and ask them about themselves. When we're together this fall, I need to learn a lot more about their lives from 12-15. While we all go through the journey to a developed sense of self in the world, the world we interact with is different than those of other generations.

I tell students that I'm a sociologist today because I was 14 when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated. My emerging sense of justice was caught up in the idealism of those times and then shockingly replaced. That's very different than seeing thousands of people die one sunny morning while you're eating breakfast (on the west coast).

This isn't simply about knowing which pop culture references to toss out in a lecture (my Simpsons references went nowhere when I did my interview lecture at Spring Arbor). It's not about relevance.

It's understanding the events that shaped our students in forming their view of themselves and how they interact with the world. It becomes all the more important that I grasp where they've been. I have a lot to learn from them.

If our classes are going to have impact on the students in the decades to come, as they move through their life cycles, it will not happen because I told them what it was like for me to grow up but only because I heard what it was like for them.