Rethinking Materialism

Tony Judt writes that our culture has become profoundly selfish and materialistic in the past 30 years — and that this quality is not inherent in the human condition. “How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. … There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.”