Is the new generation less materialistic?
This op-ed by Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive officer of Publicis Groupe, in the New York Times takes an optimistic view of the rising generation of youth. They are, he says, post-materialistic and may bring a new post-consumerist global ethic into being. He starts by shooting at the gross materialism of the post-baby-boomer generation, which, he claims, led to the Enron and sub-prime mortgage disasters:
I believe that over the past 20 years (at least) the world has lost its bearings and has begun to wager with its moral values. Almost unnoticed, ethics have given way to cynical opportunism in business, in finance, in politics and in life in general.
How else can one explain the lies that were told to drag great nations into an unnecessary war in Iraq? Or the wholesale falsification of national accounts, as if states were hole-in-the-wall businesses scamming the tax man?
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For all these betrayals of ethics, the bill is very high. It is being paid, in the first place, in millions of jobs destroyed, wealth vaporized and businesses weakened.
It is being paid also, and above all, in a crisis of confidence. A crisis that no financial rescue plan can make go away. People, consumers, employees, shareholders — who now has any confidence? In what? In whom?
Fortunately, I do believe a change is at hand. Consider our children and grandchildren who turn 20 this year. What value system is shaping their imagination and the world they want to create?
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This new generation, activist and more inherently collective, is now taking the place of the post-Boomers, whose individualism and materialism may perhaps have contributed to the excesses for which we are now paying.
It is infinitely more connected, informed, alert and concerned than its predecessors. These young people are revolutionaries in their own way: They don’t march, but they are rethinking the world, challenging the very principles under which our society has lived since the Industrial Revolution.
They have a new post-materialist attitude to our economic and social system, to business and to consumption, that will shake our behavior and a good number of our certainties.
Today, it is our children who are shaping our ethics, not the other way around. With the firepower that comes from the click of a finger on a keyboard, or the mastery of SMS and social networks, they are changing society.
I think Maurice Levy has highlighted an important generational change, but he has not put this change in the much bigger context of the collapse of the old world order and the growth of a new order, founded firmly in the reality of human oneness and solidarity. This and the conscious development of virtues, such as honesty and trustworthiness, is what will prevent repeats of the kind of greed that led to financial meltdown and the current economic crisis.
The following comment is adapted from an unpublished paper by Baha'i scholar Matt Weinberg (Elements of A Conceptual Framework for Influencing Public Policy, 2006):
We should understand that incentives and penalties, new regulations, new rights and obligations, or creating new public authorities are not the only way of bringing about desired transformations in public behaviour. Collaborative generation of knowledge, education and persuasion are also highly effective in helping people to choose a path of social virtue and service to the common good '...when working to bring about constructive social transformation, the essential moral and spiritual forces animating human identity cannot be ignored.'
