After the End of History: The Curious Fate of American Materialism

Foreword

After the End of History Foreword by Neva Goodwin This is an extraordinary book. For anyone—scholar, student, casual reader—it is extraordinary to learn so much in such an entertaining manner . For the scholar, the footnotes and bibliography provide an unsurpassed summary of the newly developing ‹elds of studies that explore the causes and the meanings of quality of life, or happiness, or well-being. For other readers, the book is a witty dialogue that reveals two amusing characters as they probe questions of the greatest interest: What causes happiness? Why do life circumstances, such as riches or achievement, not necessarily bring about the happiness that might be expected? Do people generally know what to do to promote their quality of life? Is our society developing toward—or away from—an increase in human well-being? It is interesting to raise these questions. What makes this book really exciting is the fact that Robert Lane also goes a good way toward answering them. And who better than he to do so? Over his long career at Yale University , Lane has earned a worldwide reputation as both a leader and a synthesizer in exploring what the social sciences say about how our states of mind are related to what we do, have, and are. With a broad command of the behavioral sciences, Lane has brought solid data and theory to bear on such perpetual questions as “Under what circumstances does money buy happiness?” “Are friends an adequate substitute for money?” and “Do the answers to these questions differ in rich countries and poor countries?” Building on the data in his recent books, The Market Experience (1991) and The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000), Lane now extends his ‹ndings and their application to broader questions of a possible shift from materialism to humanism, the problems of transition for developing and advanced countries alike—and the obstacles in materialist societies to such a transition. No one has read more widely or thought more deeply about the human condition in modern times than Robert Lane. In this book he makes his discoveries available in a delightful form to readers inside and outside of academia. It is the sort of book that is bread and music to a bright and eager mind and that the friends and relatives of such people will discover joyfully as the ideal gift. One protagonist of the book is an economist, Adam, who is convinced that he knows what matters—material wealth—and (in principle, at least) how to get it. The other character is a humanist, Dessie, who feels passionately that the economists are still ‹ghting the last war—the war to get enough to stay alive—and that, for the parts of the world where that war has essentially been won, there are more pressing concerns . Dessie sets out to persuade Adam that the materialist emphasis is passé for most of the industrialized world and that social scientists should be thinking about other, more direct routes to well-being. Many readers will be especially interested in the implication that differences between left and right are also losing relevance as compared with the humanist/materialist spectrum. Surveying the world’s literature, Dessie lines up the philosophers’ conclusions on what really matters in a human being’s life. He also exposes Adam (who is far from being a helpless or passive player in this drama) to what can be learned from anthropology and primatology about where we should turn our efforts when we have gone beyond the problem of scarcity. The economist is reluctantly lured away from his discipline’s reduction of all goals to the “maximization of utility,” which gets translated into a simple search for satisfaction of wishes (with the assumption that satis‹ed desires are equal to happiness). Early on, Dessie lays out a major issue by saying, “I see this friendly quarrel as a con›ict between the dominant materialism of our time, of which you are a high Foreword viii priest, and an alternative vision that, for want of a better term, I shall call a humanist vision. As it happens, you have recorded history on your side, and I have the future on my side—a future forti‹ed with research on the quality of life and human development.” Adam replies, “I’ve never argued with a visionary before. It will be a new experience, but not one I...