STEPHEN MILLER
Materialism and Its Discontents
Materialism has virtually no defenders. The latest edition of
Bartlett's Fa–
miliar Quotations
offers the following remark made about materialism by
one Arthur Charles Erickson in 1973: "North American civilization is
one of the ugliest to have emerged in world history ... [because] its in–
veterate materialism ... has become the model for cultures around the
globe." If the United States has often been accused of being a materialis–
tic civilization, the Reagan administration was especially attacked on
these grounds - so much so, it would seem, that in his inaugural address
George Bush felt the need to distance himself from the supposed
materialism of his predecessor. For Bush asked: "Are we enthralled with
material things. . . ?" The implication was: Not me, not my presidency.
The bow in the direction of antimaterialism was applauded by a
writer in
The New Republic,
who called the paragraph that included this
remark "Bush's best paragraph." Moreover, that same week materialism
was attacked in
The New York Review oj Books;
Robert Craft ended an
essay on Albert Einstein by citing what he called "an arresting remark"
Einstein made in 1936. Einstein said that "the intellectual decline brought
on by a shallow materialism is a far greater menace
to
the survival of
Jewry than numerous external foes who threaten its existence with vio–
lence." Attacking the shallow materialism ofJews, Einstein unfortunately
was rehearsing the standard line of rabid anti-Semites. More often than
not antimaterialism has been a dark and sinister force in the last two
hundred years - in large part because it has gone hand in hand with anti–
Semitism. As Fritz Stern put it, describing the climate of opinion in late–
nineteenth-century Germany, Jews were considered "a race that for long
had been suspected of being uniquely gifted in the materialistic, that is,
evil pursuits."
But what is materialism? It is a difficult "ism" to define, for in the
last two hundred years it has come to refer to several different but related
notions. In common contemporary usage, materialism - usually preceded
by the adjectives "vulgar" or "shallow" - means, as the
American Heritage
Dictionary
would have it, "undue regard for worldly concerns." When
