From the Enlightenment onward, progress functioned as the secular creed of the West. For centuries our societies were defined by the conviction that the future must outshine the present, just as the present surpassed the past. Such optimistic faith was not merely cultural or institutional but all-encompassing: Everything was going to get better. In this way of thinking, there was no room for loss.
Today, that civilizational belief is under profound threat. Loss has become a pervasive condition of life in Europe and America. It shapes the collective horizon more insistently than at any time since 1945, spilling into the mainstream of political, intellectual and everyday life. The question is no longer whether loss can be avoided but whether societies whose imagination is bound to “better” and “more” can learn to endure “less” and “worse.” How that question is answered will shape the trajectory of the 21st century.
The most dramatic loss is environmental. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, disappearing habitats and the ruination of entire regions are eroding the conditions of life for humans and nonhumans alike. Even more threatening than present damage is the anticipation of future devastation — what has aptly been termed climate grief. What’s more, mitigation strategies themselves promise losses: a departure from the consumer-oriented lifestyle of the 20th century, once celebrated as the hallmark of modern progress.
Economic changes have also brought loss. Entire regions once defined by prosperity — Rust Belt America, the coal fields of northern England, small-town France, eastern Germany — are now locked in decline. The optimism of the mid-20th century, when upward mobility seemed the natural way of things, has proved exceptional rather than typical. It was, it turns out, a historical interlude. Deindustrialization and global competition have fractured societies into winners and losers, with large segments of the middle class seeing their security erode.
Europe, meanwhile, has become an aging continent. Demographic developments have led to an ever-growing share of the population entering retirement age, while the proportion of younger cohorts continues to shrink. Along with a lost sense of buoyancy, old age confronts a large part of the population — and their families — with visceral experiences of loss. Some rural areas, suffering stark population decline, have become redoubts of the elderly.
Across Europe and America, public infrastructures have weakened. Education systems in the United States, the health service in Britain and transportation networks in Germany have all come under strain, fueling doubts about the capacity of liberal democracy to sustain itself. Housing shortages and grotesque price dynamics, particularly in metropolitan areas, produce acute insecurity and fears of downward mobility across much of the middle class.
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The post The West Is Lost appeared first on New York Times.
