Department of Predictions, 1950

I picked up a cheap 2nd-hand copy of Thomas Merton's Selected Poems (1950), with a foreword by Robert Speaight.  The poetry (which I didn't know at all, before) is very interesting, actually; but I particularly liked this prediction in Speaight's foreword:

The materialism of America is beginning to lose its self-confidence, [and] the continent is traversed by an intense desire for contemplation.

1950. How'd that work out, I wonder?