The Age of Individualism
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-age-of-individualism.html?smid=fb-share MARCH 15, 2014 IN the future, it seems, there will be only one “ism” — Individualism — and its rule will never end. As for religion, it shall decline; as for marriage, it shall be postponed; as for ideologies, they shall be rejected; as for patriotism, it shall be abandoned; as for strangers, they shall be distrusted. Only pot, selfies and Facebook will abide — and the greatest of these will probably be Facebook. That’s the implication, at least, of what the polling industry keeps telling us about the rising American generation , the so-called millennials. ( Full disclosure : I am not quite one of them, having entered the world in the penultimate year of Generation X.) A new Pew survey , the latest dispatch from the land of young adulthood, describes a generation that’s socially liberal on issues like immigration and marijuana and same-sex marriage, proudly i...