More than Money

Our lives in the age of Postmaterialism

My Dear Grandchild,

You and I, born 62 years apart, belong to a particular historical moment—one whose early days took place in my youth and one that appears to be ending in yours. In any event, you and I are postmaterialists.

The term was coined by political scientist Ronald Inglehart (1934-2021). Inglehart, who had a half-century career based at the University of Michigan, wrote a series of repetitive but highly influential books in which he literally charted, with dense empirical data collected from around the world, cultural change over generations. His core point, with implications running in a bunch of different directions, was that the economic stances of one’s youth have a major (though not necessarily decisive) impact on one’s cultural attitudes for the rest of one’s life. For most of human history, Inglehart, observed, members of any given society spent most of their lives trying to secure the basic needs of themselves and their families: food, shelter, and protection from the vagaries of fate, whether in the form of (now curable) diseases to the predations of powerful neighbors or a remote government. This imperative dominated civilization well into the twentieth century—the oldest people alive as I write these words lived in the shadow of World Wars and the Great Depression, which tended to intensify the default condition of scarcity and insecurity in everyday life. Even people born in the aftermath of such events experienced their legacies as part of their collective memory, shaping the prevailing notions of realism and common sense, even if they themselves didn’t accept them.

The end of the Second World War—the climax of a series of cataclysms that shook the planet in the first half of the twentieth century—ushered in a long period of peace and prosperity in much of the world, beginning in the West and spreading to Asia and elsewhere in the decades that followed. Slowly and unevenly, but unmistakably, Inglehart argued, the materialist demands around the planet gave way to a new paradigm of postmaterialism: growing numbers of people could take where their next meal was coming from for granted and could begin not only to imagine, but actually pursue, the life they wanted to live rather than the one they had to live. The consequences of this emerging new common sense have proven tremendous in global economics, politics, and sex as well as gender relations, among other realms.

The first place this culture of postmaterialism really became obvious was in the United States in the years following World War II. It surfaced in a demographic cohort known as the Baby Boom (1946-1964), of which I was one of its youngest members. Its earliest members entered adolescence and young adulthood in the 1960s, and the very term “Sixties” has had connotations of affluence, protest, and abundance from that moment to this one. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple—the Sixties were also a time of oppression and violence, too. But among the young, there was a powerful sense that such realities need not be regarded as inevitable or even acceptable. Their own lives would be shaped by greater expectations, whether or not they were actually realized.

Inglehart recognized that there were powerful countervailing forces impeding postmaterialism. Growing up in a repressive Communist society where materialism was the core premise of Marxism, for example. Higher education, an important index of postmaterialism, was unevenly distributed in affluent societies, so the working classes were slower to accept it. Even when postmaterialism later spread to other parts of the world, such as East Asia, their longstanding Confucian values, rooted in hard work and filial piety, checked instincts toward self-fulfillment.

Still, Inglehart insisted, postmaterialism gradually gained traction globally. As the children of materialism became middle-aged, they assumed the levers of power, slowly pushing aside the more conservative values of their parents and grandparents. Eventually, there was a tipping point—he uses the seemingly sudden embrace of gay marriage in the 2010s, or the sharp decline of religious observance, as indications of this (he regards the two as related in their rejection of longstanding cultural practices that seemed increasingly outmoded). There are still plenty of places in the world that have not experienced this form of cultural evolution—he cites much of the Muslim world, for example, and much of Africa—but he regarded it as demographically inevitable, much in the way humans shifted from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, for example, or from agriculture to industrialization (each of which had distinctive characteristics about how people should behave).

Toward the end of his life, Inglehart began to explore some other countercurrents to his theory of cultural evolution. He noted, for example, that the very affluence that underwrote postmaterialism began to erode compared with societies that continued to place emphasis on productivity—whether defined in terms of employment or raising children. He also noted that there were signs that affluence was deteriorating in the face of the inequalities fostered by technology. I’ll get to that later.

For now, I end with where I began: you and I. My grandparents lived lives of real insecurity, fearing eviction, domestic violence, and other forms of upheaval that imposed real limits on what my parents could go on to do. But they came of age in an age of Great Expectations at mid-century, and my firefighter grandfather always emphasized to me the importance of doing work that you loved (which in his case happened to be firefighting, but not something he reckoned would be the passion of his first-generation college-educated son). Your parents on both sides had working-class roots, but they themselves were encouraged to think for themselves, find and choose meaningful work, and pursue self-fulfillment as a self-evident good because these things were regarded as attainable, if not always easy or free of compromise. I think it’s fair to say that pretty much no matter what happens, you will come of age with that as a powerful paradigm that shapes your sense of what you can do. And I say that amid my sense that the world is changing in a way that you will have to navigate—because, dear child, it never stands still. I’m hoping to help you keep your balance.