it now would not be meet and
seemly."(2)

The fate of what the world has learned to call social and economic
development has left no doubt that not even the most idealistic motives
can correct materialism's fundamental flaws. Born in the wake of the chaos
of the Second World War, "development" became by far the largest and most
ambitious collective undertaking on which the human race has ever
embarked. Its humanitarian motivation matched its enormous material and
technological investment. Fifty years later, while acknowledging the
impressive benefits development has brought, the enterprise must be
adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening failure. Far from
narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small segment of the human
family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and the condition of the vast
populations mired in hopeless want, the collective effort that began with
such high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss.

Consumer culture, today's inheritor by default of materialism's gospel of
human betterment, is unembarrassed by the ephemeral nature of the goals
that inspire it. For the small minority of people who can afford them, the
benefits it offers are immediate, and the rationale unapologetic.
Emboldened by the breakdown of traditional morality, the advance of the
new creed is essentially no more than the triumph of animal impulse, as
instinctive and blind as appetite, released at long last from the
restraints of supernatural sanctions. Its most obvious casualty has been
language. Tendencies once universally castigated as moral failings mutate
into necessities of social progress. Selfishness becomes a prized
commercial resource; falsehood reinvents itself as public information;
perversions of various kinds unabashedly claim the status of civil rights.
Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence, pride--even
violence--acquire not merely broad acceptance but social and economic
value. Ironically, as words have been drained of meaning, so have the very
material comforts and acquisitions for which truth has been casually
sacrificed.

Clearly, materialism's error has lain not in the laudable effort to
improve the conditions of life, but in the narrowness of mind and
unjustified self-confidence that have defined its mission. The importance
both of material prosperity and of the scientific and technological
advances necessary to its achievement is a theme that runs through the
writings of the