This is a fascinating cultural transformation. Right when a positive view of material progress seemed to have more evidence to back it up than ever before, cultural and academic elites turned against it.
I do not have a complete explanation for the pivot, but I think some important factors were:
1) The coming of age of the Baby Boomers: the first generation that could take a materially comfortable life for granted.
2) The rise of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, particularly among college-educated baby boomers. This was concentrated among academics, teachers, entertainers and artists.
3) The decline of traditional religion as a moral foundation, particularly among the group above. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies essentially filled the role of religion in being a moral foundation for many people.
4) The fundamental conflict between the reality of material progress and the assumptions of those ideologies, so people felt a moral need to explain away material progress as either a bad thing or not important.
I do not think all of the above were inevitable, but they might be a negative side-effect of widespread affluence.
Thanks, Michael! I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and while my views are still evolving, I'm leaning most towards your first explanation. If you've never experienced real adversity, poverty, or lack of freedom, you tend to take those things for granted—and start acting like a spoiled brat. So the first generation to be born on a plateau will tend to exhibit this scepticism about progress. There are signs this is starting to happen in China now, with young people losing belief in progress and becoming nostalgic for the optimism of the 1990s.
By contrast, I'm starting to put less weight on specifically Western factors like postmodernism or secularization. I agree that postmodernism is a proximate cause of the current skepticism about progress, but that only raises a deeper question: why did postmodernism take hold in the first place? Ungrateful attitudes toward freedom and prosperity long predate it—just look at what Orwell was writing in the 1930s. And one of the most prominent advocates of degrowth today is Japanese, not Western.
As for the decline of religion, I think it’s plausible that these ideologies are filling a God-shaped hole. But interestingly, many of their core beliefs—about a lost paradise, the intrinsic goodness of nature, and the moral corruption of humanity—mirror Christian ideas more than they reject them. And some of the haters of modernity (like Bruno Latour) were actually Catholic.
Yes, I don’t disagree with you on any of those points, but it leaves a serious conundrum for Progress supporters: the more material progress that we get, the more we take it for granted and even (perhaps unintentionally) fight against it.
This is somewhat like Josef Schumpeter’s theory that the economics of capitalism then to create political conditions that undermine capitalism. Ironically, this is also somewhat similar to Karl Marx.
If that is true, it is pretty demoralizing. We need to get to a place like the 1950s where believe that material progress actually occurring, it is a good thing, and we should work hard to keep it going. I truly believe it is possible, but perhaps I am too optimistic.
Is the final destination of material progress Cat memes and political arguments with strangers on the internet? I hope not.
Yes, I agree — that explanation is a bit demoralizing. But I see it more as an uphill battle: difficult and demoralizing, yes, but still possible to win. In the grand scheme of things, belief in progress is of course a historical anomaly. Most civilizations have glorified a Golden Age in the past and viewed history as either cyclical or in decline. A collective belief in progress can arise when the evidence is overwhelming, but there are strong countervailing forces — mostly psychological — that pull people toward declinism and nostalgia. One mental exercise I do for myself is to stop and reflect how astonishing it is that you can simply turn a tap in the morning and get hot water, and to try to imagine how awful my life would be without this simple comfort. It’s easy to take these things for granted, even if you try very hard NOT to (You know Rosling’s story about the elevator? https://researcheditors.co.uk/a-young-swedish-student-ran-to-catch-a-lift/). I wonder if there’s a way to cultivate that same awareness collectively — through education and writing, of course, but also through firsthand experience. I’m thinking of TV shows that place participants in historical settings where they must live with only the tools and conditions of the past, like the BBC’s Tales from the Green Valley. Schools could organize excursions like that too, to give children a tangible sense of what life was once like — washing clothes by hand, carrying water, using a gristmill, working by candlelight.
I am a big fan of the entire BBC series that includes Tales from Green Valley. I think it is a very compelling method to teach how people once lived, especially typical peasants. Unfortunately, I think the big take-away that most viewers will have is how relaxed, slow-paced, and community-oriented the good old days were.
The problem with the realism of these programs is that they do not include wars, much shorter life expectancy, children dying before age 5, harsh winters, droughts, plagues, poor harvests, serious sickness, and children growing up in harsh environments. During most times, the life of the peasant wa not that bad, but during bad times it was really bad, ending with an early death.
A more realistic portrayal of the bad times might kill off viewership and even the hosts.
I agree with you that constantly publicizing how much better material conditions are compared to the past is essential to the Progress movement, but it will do little by itself. Too many members of the Progress movement fall into this assumption.
I think the best method to convince people is to point to the key foundations of material progress today and in the past and show why many of today’s seemingly compelling world views actually make the problem much worse. That is why I spend 20% of my time writing about ideology and 20% about proven public policy solutions.
Good points! Even with our best efforts, we can only give people the faintest glimpse of how truly horrible life once was. They’ll still come away underestimating the horrors of the past. You can’t exactly pull someone’s tooth without anesthetics just to make a point — it reminds me of when Christopher Hitchens voluntarily underwent waterboarding and lasted only about ten seconds.
Still, what else can we do than catching that glimpse once in a while, and trying to extrapolate from there? Stubbing your toe is a stark reminder of your body’s immense capacity for suffering (“phew, and that was just a little toe!”), which you can turn into a moment of gratitude for all the blessings of modernity.
I love the Grim Old Days series on Human Progress. https://newsletter.humanprogress.org/p/grim-old-days-a-brief-history-of Even though I've been reading about progress for years, every time I discover some new way in which the past was horrible that I had never considered. Eliezer Yudowksy once wrote a piece about "mundane magic". Rendering the mundane magical is a great mental exercise to cultivate gratitude.
Again, you leave me astonished in your exaggerated, peculiar negativism about life in the past.
How can I make my point?
Well, try to find and read a few of the books by Fred Bruemmer. He went for several decades to live with the Inuit in the North from his place in Canada, in the holidays.
These people are happier than most city dwellers!
And be sure, in those times their life was that of a hunter, living in tents, even in temps of below 40 degrees.
(the traditional Unakrit seal lamp/stove was occasionally helped by a stove, in those seventies, eighties, ninteties).
I corresponded with that wonderful man; his books are well written and wonderfully illustrated.
A universe will open itself to you, I presume.
Titles: "Seasons of the Eskimo"
"Leven met de Inuit"; "The Narwhal"; World of the Polar Bear"
Deze mensen leefden op diverse plekken: Noord, Oost Canada; de Eilanden in de Bering straat; Groenland; het Noordpoolgebied.
Be assured: your abhorring minus fourthy is enterely personal :-)
I interviewed the Inuit Father Kees Verspeek omi, before he died, and wrote about his 22 years in Labrador with these "natural people" in Tertio magazine. He confirmed the reports by Bruemer.
Interesting, but you follow a very strange line of thought to me, about the not-pleasures of "spring water in the morning near the tent"!
For you, the tap seems the pinacle of joy...
Did you never go out camping in the hills or woods?
Can you not imagine how great the pleasures are there to be found?
See the great succes in recent decades of the Bush Craft movement.
(I have participated in five Weekends in the forest of Meerdaal near Louvain, and guided trips there, using elements of fauna & flora to give stories about spiritual truths).
I wrote a short piece this week arguing that in recent decades progress has been sold (at least in Romania) as the result of sacrifice: the current generations need to sacrifice for a better future for the next ones. This discourse manifests itself especially in times of economic hardship and austerity measures. Which is more or less what we have seen in this part of the world since the early '80s. Therefore, we need to be more pragmatic as to what we define as progress and what portion of the population has access to it. Also: I did not dance when Pfizer announced their vaccines but I specifically chose that version of it because of its innovative character. As such, I understand people who were not ready to be 'early adopters' of a medical breakthrough and chose the 'tried and tested' options.
Maybe part of the reason, at least here in America, is that for the majority life hasn't in fact been getting materially better over the last several decades—at least in the way that it did in the post World War II decades. Whereas in th 1950's and 60's it was possible to dream of a house in the suburbs with a full-time Mom who stayed at home with the kids, that is not longer the case. Notwithstanding a never ending stream of new labor-saving technologies, American families must now work more hours, not fewer, in order to afford a house in the suburbs in a safe neighborhood with decent public schools. The fact that we now have smartphones does not compensate for that sea change in family life, at least not once the novelty of those devices begins to wear off.
The two-income trap is a real thing. It represents a failure to take advantage of the new possibilities made possible by ongoing technological progress for reasons that no one seems quite able to understand.
A riveting, interesting read again, this well done piece.
Congrats on the thinking and the illustrations, they are fitting very well the line of thoughts.
Yet basically, I disagree with the “artificial optimism” of sorts the author holds and broadcasts with perseverance and visual pleasure.
Maybe experiences during my years as a volunteer helper with depressed, anxious and suicidal people tell me he is fundamentally wrong about wellbeing and optimism.
Man is the most paradoxical being; it seems we unevitably need to go through waiting and toil to be able to really enjoy success.
Like in the fitness, we go for heavy workouts. Nobody would be as pleased with nice muscles when they were given to him/her on a (techno or chemo) plate.
In my view, the brilliant remarks are somewhat futile, especially in the end paragraph, just because he does not (yet) grapple with the very Psychological aspects of… happyness, the sence of wellbeing, hope, contentment and more.
The end tune is not the best part. The ideas around the scheme/graph in which Asian inhabitants are more positive in their expectations about the good future receive a poor analysis.
What seems to be happening in reality?
In recent hours, while reviewing the famous mini series "War and Remembrance", I spontaneously developed an overall perspective on the future of civilizations, based on the "historic conscience" that our studies in Modern History gave us.
When we overlook the longer term history, the century before WW 2 and the period up to the present, it is crystal clear that the British Empire (on it's top deployment 3/5ths of the world, held by a very small number of British Civil Servants and Military men!) has been the pinnacle of western power and glory. Churchill's mighty aim was, when Hitler and the revenge seeking German Reich rose, to preserve that Reign; he failed.
We, Europeans, are still in that slow but grand phase of gentle decline, basically.
The second world war can be read a a first grand trial to overturn white world power: the Japanese had suffered direly under western rule and racism (British naval cannons bombarded cities successfully in order to open up the Nippon economy under prince/emperor Meiji for English products!), now they tried to become masters of the Eastern hemisphere (as I saw in a flash when viewing the chapter on the Japanese attack on British Singapore; war history tought us about the infamous surrender by general Parcifal; Churchill sent the man home in North Scotland after the war and would never meet him, he died in isolation).
Now, in 2025, we're one stage further in the grand history scheme: China (and India) are the new pretenders ready for the changing of the guard with the Western Powers (that is now mainly the USA, following Great Britain after the convincing military Victory in 1945, let us just for now not talk about Russia).
When we agree to accept this grand scheme, it is clear that Maarten Boudry is - adequate for a thinker, a bit unfamiliar with the effects of practical power or work in society - is missing a more adequate interpretation about the path humanity, civilization, will follow: he is choosing the tale less talented psycho therapists sometimes cling to:
"Feelings are steered by your words and your thoughts.
You can heal yourselves by the words you allow your tongue to speak!".
The author thinks it is possible to bring us, westerners, out of the pit we are in, by positive thoughts.
A bit like the character of baron of Münchhausen, who told the story that at the battlefield, he hauled himself out of the deep mud by... tearing his own scalp upwards...
Reality is more densely structured, more weighty than the world of idea's. Economy puts more weight in the balance of Fate then optimism, I presume.
The long term dynamics, connected to centuries of political and economic labour and struggle, and to factors like sheer demography, seem to me to dictate the future of the world: China is on the rise, a growing giant, every day more powerful and big and heavy.
Words and enthusiasms will turn out to be mere puffs of wind against that, I take it.
In this context, I remember a mentor in my earliest years mentioning the words Bismarck would have said on his leaving office:
"Und jetzt, fleissich Kinesisch studieren!" ;-)
2. On a deeper, embodied, incarnated level, I would argue that the wave of discontentment that we see rising in the west - since several centuries - is connected to a lack of maternal (or parental, or villager's ) care and skin contact we offer our babies. Africa is the stronghold in this. Mothers carry their infants for years, and see: the African is in general very content with his life and even with the regime.
To summarize: the "depression" of the West, in more than one sense, is Real.
It is rooted in the history of centuries, in the colonial era and in the rise of new races and people, who have showed themselves adequate pupils to the master in science and technology that the white man has been.
Ok, but where I live there maybe wasn't dancing in the streets when the Pfizer vaccine for COVID was discovered, but there was pretty close to that when Our Dutch Overlords announced that they'd be providing vaccines (in our case, Moderna) to everyone who wanted one in January 2021. (Of course, we *could* dance in the streets because Saba didn't really do lockdowns or social distancing, because we only had 5 cases of COVID between January 2020 and December 2021. It was a good time.) But I think we may have been better able to appreciate this gift because we live closer to nature, and thus are more aware of the blessings of progress than those who live in the US or Europe.
To use another vaccine example, several years back there was a chickenpox epidemic on our island. According to Dutch immunization protocols, varicella is a "normal childhood illness" and thus vaccines aren't recommended. Now, being an island, we don't get exposed to a lot of diseases in the rest of the world (that's why we were so safe during COVID), so in general kids on Saba had not gotten varicella before--and neither had their parents or grandparents. So this was pretty ugly, because while varicella is not typically a severe disease if you initially get it as a kid, it can be very severe if your first encounter with this virus is as an adult, or especially in old age. So, you know who celebrates the provision of a new vaccine? A population that has first-hand seen the depredations of a different vaccine-preventable disease when we could not access that vaccine a few years back. (See footnote comment.)
I think a similar dynamic explains the dancing in the streets and the ringing of the church bells when the polio vaccine first came out: the public knew the terrors the vaccine was defeating. Now, however, things are so posh for most westerners it's easy to imagine that in the golden age of "natural immunity" and unpasteurized dairy and, uh, a bucolic pastoral lifestyle of, um, churning butter or something would be better. But you can only think that when you have not endured those vaccine-preventable diseases, and when you have not churned butter.
In the golden age of optimism sci-fi, the horrors of unchecked nature were fresh in everyone's memory, and the promise of progress was thus very clear. Technological progress is now more subtle, in part because many major problems have been solved so our everyday backdrop doesn't shine as bright a light on our successes, and also because as we pick the low-hanging fruit of progress the new advancements we have are not immediately obvious to everyone.
I yammer further about vaccines being a victim of their own success here:
My current vaccine-related fussing with Our Dutch Overlords regards the vaccine against dengue fever, which is "a tropical disease so we don't have to worry about it" (so, the Caribbean part of the Kingdom is in the tropics) and "a disease that humans have lived with for centuries" (technically true, like it was for smallpox) and combined with weirdness about how new the vaccine is, so can we know it's safe?!?!?!
Speaking on behalf of me, a person who is familiar with and has a strong preference against getting dengue hemorrhagic fever, I would really like the pro-progress faction win the day on this. But our decision makers do not share my familiarity with or risk from this disease.
This is a fascinating cultural transformation. Right when a positive view of material progress seemed to have more evidence to back it up than ever before, cultural and academic elites turned against it.
I do not have a complete explanation for the pivot, but I think some important factors were:
1) The coming of age of the Baby Boomers: the first generation that could take a materially comfortable life for granted.
2) The rise of Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies, particularly among college-educated baby boomers. This was concentrated among academics, teachers, entertainers and artists.
3) The decline of traditional religion as a moral foundation, particularly among the group above. Post-Modern Left-of-Center ideologies essentially filled the role of religion in being a moral foundation for many people.
4) The fundamental conflict between the reality of material progress and the assumptions of those ideologies, so people felt a moral need to explain away material progress as either a bad thing or not important.
I do not think all of the above were inevitable, but they might be a negative side-effect of widespread affluence.
Thanks, Michael! I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and while my views are still evolving, I'm leaning most towards your first explanation. If you've never experienced real adversity, poverty, or lack of freedom, you tend to take those things for granted—and start acting like a spoiled brat. So the first generation to be born on a plateau will tend to exhibit this scepticism about progress. There are signs this is starting to happen in China now, with young people losing belief in progress and becoming nostalgic for the optimism of the 1990s.
By contrast, I'm starting to put less weight on specifically Western factors like postmodernism or secularization. I agree that postmodernism is a proximate cause of the current skepticism about progress, but that only raises a deeper question: why did postmodernism take hold in the first place? Ungrateful attitudes toward freedom and prosperity long predate it—just look at what Orwell was writing in the 1930s. And one of the most prominent advocates of degrowth today is Japanese, not Western.
As for the decline of religion, I think it’s plausible that these ideologies are filling a God-shaped hole. But interestingly, many of their core beliefs—about a lost paradise, the intrinsic goodness of nature, and the moral corruption of humanity—mirror Christian ideas more than they reject them. And some of the haters of modernity (like Bruno Latour) were actually Catholic.
Yes, I don’t disagree with you on any of those points, but it leaves a serious conundrum for Progress supporters: the more material progress that we get, the more we take it for granted and even (perhaps unintentionally) fight against it.
This is somewhat like Josef Schumpeter’s theory that the economics of capitalism then to create political conditions that undermine capitalism. Ironically, this is also somewhat similar to Karl Marx.
If that is true, it is pretty demoralizing. We need to get to a place like the 1950s where believe that material progress actually occurring, it is a good thing, and we should work hard to keep it going. I truly believe it is possible, but perhaps I am too optimistic.
Is the final destination of material progress Cat memes and political arguments with strangers on the internet? I hope not.
Yes, I agree — that explanation is a bit demoralizing. But I see it more as an uphill battle: difficult and demoralizing, yes, but still possible to win. In the grand scheme of things, belief in progress is of course a historical anomaly. Most civilizations have glorified a Golden Age in the past and viewed history as either cyclical or in decline. A collective belief in progress can arise when the evidence is overwhelming, but there are strong countervailing forces — mostly psychological — that pull people toward declinism and nostalgia. One mental exercise I do for myself is to stop and reflect how astonishing it is that you can simply turn a tap in the morning and get hot water, and to try to imagine how awful my life would be without this simple comfort. It’s easy to take these things for granted, even if you try very hard NOT to (You know Rosling’s story about the elevator? https://researcheditors.co.uk/a-young-swedish-student-ran-to-catch-a-lift/). I wonder if there’s a way to cultivate that same awareness collectively — through education and writing, of course, but also through firsthand experience. I’m thinking of TV shows that place participants in historical settings where they must live with only the tools and conditions of the past, like the BBC’s Tales from the Green Valley. Schools could organize excursions like that too, to give children a tangible sense of what life was once like — washing clothes by hand, carrying water, using a gristmill, working by candlelight.
Any thoughts? I might write a piece about this.
I am a big fan of the entire BBC series that includes Tales from Green Valley. I think it is a very compelling method to teach how people once lived, especially typical peasants. Unfortunately, I think the big take-away that most viewers will have is how relaxed, slow-paced, and community-oriented the good old days were.
The problem with the realism of these programs is that they do not include wars, much shorter life expectancy, children dying before age 5, harsh winters, droughts, plagues, poor harvests, serious sickness, and children growing up in harsh environments. During most times, the life of the peasant wa not that bad, but during bad times it was really bad, ending with an early death.
A more realistic portrayal of the bad times might kill off viewership and even the hosts.
I agree with you that constantly publicizing how much better material conditions are compared to the past is essential to the Progress movement, but it will do little by itself. Too many members of the Progress movement fall into this assumption.
I think the best method to convince people is to point to the key foundations of material progress today and in the past and show why many of today’s seemingly compelling world views actually make the problem much worse. That is why I spend 20% of my time writing about ideology and 20% about proven public policy solutions.
Good points! Even with our best efforts, we can only give people the faintest glimpse of how truly horrible life once was. They’ll still come away underestimating the horrors of the past. You can’t exactly pull someone’s tooth without anesthetics just to make a point — it reminds me of when Christopher Hitchens voluntarily underwent waterboarding and lasted only about ten seconds.
Still, what else can we do than catching that glimpse once in a while, and trying to extrapolate from there? Stubbing your toe is a stark reminder of your body’s immense capacity for suffering (“phew, and that was just a little toe!”), which you can turn into a moment of gratitude for all the blessings of modernity.
I love the Grim Old Days series on Human Progress. https://newsletter.humanprogress.org/p/grim-old-days-a-brief-history-of Even though I've been reading about progress for years, every time I discover some new way in which the past was horrible that I had never considered. Eliezer Yudowksy once wrote a piece about "mundane magic". Rendering the mundane magical is a great mental exercise to cultivate gratitude.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXK87NgEPszhWkvQm/mundane-magic
Again, you leave me astonished in your exaggerated, peculiar negativism about life in the past.
How can I make my point?
Well, try to find and read a few of the books by Fred Bruemmer. He went for several decades to live with the Inuit in the North from his place in Canada, in the holidays.
These people are happier than most city dwellers!
And be sure, in those times their life was that of a hunter, living in tents, even in temps of below 40 degrees.
(the traditional Unakrit seal lamp/stove was occasionally helped by a stove, in those seventies, eighties, ninteties).
I corresponded with that wonderful man; his books are well written and wonderfully illustrated.
A universe will open itself to you, I presume.
Titles: "Seasons of the Eskimo"
"Leven met de Inuit"; "The Narwhal"; World of the Polar Bear"
Deze mensen leefden op diverse plekken: Noord, Oost Canada; de Eilanden in de Bering straat; Groenland; het Noordpoolgebied.
Be assured: your abhorring minus fourthy is enterely personal :-)
I interviewed the Inuit Father Kees Verspeek omi, before he died, and wrote about his 22 years in Labrador with these "natural people" in Tertio magazine. He confirmed the reports by Bruemer.
Interesting, but you follow a very strange line of thought to me, about the not-pleasures of "spring water in the morning near the tent"!
For you, the tap seems the pinacle of joy...
Did you never go out camping in the hills or woods?
Can you not imagine how great the pleasures are there to be found?
See the great succes in recent decades of the Bush Craft movement.
(I have participated in five Weekends in the forest of Meerdaal near Louvain, and guided trips there, using elements of fauna & flora to give stories about spiritual truths).
I wrote a short piece this week arguing that in recent decades progress has been sold (at least in Romania) as the result of sacrifice: the current generations need to sacrifice for a better future for the next ones. This discourse manifests itself especially in times of economic hardship and austerity measures. Which is more or less what we have seen in this part of the world since the early '80s. Therefore, we need to be more pragmatic as to what we define as progress and what portion of the population has access to it. Also: I did not dance when Pfizer announced their vaccines but I specifically chose that version of it because of its innovative character. As such, I understand people who were not ready to be 'early adopters' of a medical breakthrough and chose the 'tried and tested' options.
Maybe part of the reason, at least here in America, is that for the majority life hasn't in fact been getting materially better over the last several decades—at least in the way that it did in the post World War II decades. Whereas in th 1950's and 60's it was possible to dream of a house in the suburbs with a full-time Mom who stayed at home with the kids, that is not longer the case. Notwithstanding a never ending stream of new labor-saving technologies, American families must now work more hours, not fewer, in order to afford a house in the suburbs in a safe neighborhood with decent public schools. The fact that we now have smartphones does not compensate for that sea change in family life, at least not once the novelty of those devices begins to wear off.
The two-income trap is a real thing. It represents a failure to take advantage of the new possibilities made possible by ongoing technological progress for reasons that no one seems quite able to understand.
A riveting, interesting read again, this well done piece.
Congrats on the thinking and the illustrations, they are fitting very well the line of thoughts.
Yet basically, I disagree with the “artificial optimism” of sorts the author holds and broadcasts with perseverance and visual pleasure.
Maybe experiences during my years as a volunteer helper with depressed, anxious and suicidal people tell me he is fundamentally wrong about wellbeing and optimism.
Man is the most paradoxical being; it seems we unevitably need to go through waiting and toil to be able to really enjoy success.
Like in the fitness, we go for heavy workouts. Nobody would be as pleased with nice muscles when they were given to him/her on a (techno or chemo) plate.
In my view, the brilliant remarks are somewhat futile, especially in the end paragraph, just because he does not (yet) grapple with the very Psychological aspects of… happyness, the sence of wellbeing, hope, contentment and more.
The end tune is not the best part. The ideas around the scheme/graph in which Asian inhabitants are more positive in their expectations about the good future receive a poor analysis.
What seems to be happening in reality?
In recent hours, while reviewing the famous mini series "War and Remembrance", I spontaneously developed an overall perspective on the future of civilizations, based on the "historic conscience" that our studies in Modern History gave us.
When we overlook the longer term history, the century before WW 2 and the period up to the present, it is crystal clear that the British Empire (on it's top deployment 3/5ths of the world, held by a very small number of British Civil Servants and Military men!) has been the pinnacle of western power and glory. Churchill's mighty aim was, when Hitler and the revenge seeking German Reich rose, to preserve that Reign; he failed.
We, Europeans, are still in that slow but grand phase of gentle decline, basically.
The second world war can be read a a first grand trial to overturn white world power: the Japanese had suffered direly under western rule and racism (British naval cannons bombarded cities successfully in order to open up the Nippon economy under prince/emperor Meiji for English products!), now they tried to become masters of the Eastern hemisphere (as I saw in a flash when viewing the chapter on the Japanese attack on British Singapore; war history tought us about the infamous surrender by general Parcifal; Churchill sent the man home in North Scotland after the war and would never meet him, he died in isolation).
Now, in 2025, we're one stage further in the grand history scheme: China (and India) are the new pretenders ready for the changing of the guard with the Western Powers (that is now mainly the USA, following Great Britain after the convincing military Victory in 1945, let us just for now not talk about Russia).
When we agree to accept this grand scheme, it is clear that Maarten Boudry is - adequate for a thinker, a bit unfamiliar with the effects of practical power or work in society - is missing a more adequate interpretation about the path humanity, civilization, will follow: he is choosing the tale less talented psycho therapists sometimes cling to:
"Feelings are steered by your words and your thoughts.
You can heal yourselves by the words you allow your tongue to speak!".
The author thinks it is possible to bring us, westerners, out of the pit we are in, by positive thoughts.
A bit like the character of baron of Münchhausen, who told the story that at the battlefield, he hauled himself out of the deep mud by... tearing his own scalp upwards...
Reality is more densely structured, more weighty than the world of idea's. Economy puts more weight in the balance of Fate then optimism, I presume.
The long term dynamics, connected to centuries of political and economic labour and struggle, and to factors like sheer demography, seem to me to dictate the future of the world: China is on the rise, a growing giant, every day more powerful and big and heavy.
Words and enthusiasms will turn out to be mere puffs of wind against that, I take it.
In this context, I remember a mentor in my earliest years mentioning the words Bismarck would have said on his leaving office:
"Und jetzt, fleissich Kinesisch studieren!" ;-)
2. On a deeper, embodied, incarnated level, I would argue that the wave of discontentment that we see rising in the west - since several centuries - is connected to a lack of maternal (or parental, or villager's ) care and skin contact we offer our babies. Africa is the stronghold in this. Mothers carry their infants for years, and see: the African is in general very content with his life and even with the regime.
To summarize: the "depression" of the West, in more than one sense, is Real.
It is rooted in the history of centuries, in the colonial era and in the rise of new races and people, who have showed themselves adequate pupils to the master in science and technology that the white man has been.
Ok, but where I live there maybe wasn't dancing in the streets when the Pfizer vaccine for COVID was discovered, but there was pretty close to that when Our Dutch Overlords announced that they'd be providing vaccines (in our case, Moderna) to everyone who wanted one in January 2021. (Of course, we *could* dance in the streets because Saba didn't really do lockdowns or social distancing, because we only had 5 cases of COVID between January 2020 and December 2021. It was a good time.) But I think we may have been better able to appreciate this gift because we live closer to nature, and thus are more aware of the blessings of progress than those who live in the US or Europe.
To use another vaccine example, several years back there was a chickenpox epidemic on our island. According to Dutch immunization protocols, varicella is a "normal childhood illness" and thus vaccines aren't recommended. Now, being an island, we don't get exposed to a lot of diseases in the rest of the world (that's why we were so safe during COVID), so in general kids on Saba had not gotten varicella before--and neither had their parents or grandparents. So this was pretty ugly, because while varicella is not typically a severe disease if you initially get it as a kid, it can be very severe if your first encounter with this virus is as an adult, or especially in old age. So, you know who celebrates the provision of a new vaccine? A population that has first-hand seen the depredations of a different vaccine-preventable disease when we could not access that vaccine a few years back. (See footnote comment.)
I think a similar dynamic explains the dancing in the streets and the ringing of the church bells when the polio vaccine first came out: the public knew the terrors the vaccine was defeating. Now, however, things are so posh for most westerners it's easy to imagine that in the golden age of "natural immunity" and unpasteurized dairy and, uh, a bucolic pastoral lifestyle of, um, churning butter or something would be better. But you can only think that when you have not endured those vaccine-preventable diseases, and when you have not churned butter.
In the golden age of optimism sci-fi, the horrors of unchecked nature were fresh in everyone's memory, and the promise of progress was thus very clear. Technological progress is now more subtle, in part because many major problems have been solved so our everyday backdrop doesn't shine as bright a light on our successes, and also because as we pick the low-hanging fruit of progress the new advancements we have are not immediately obvious to everyone.
I yammer further about vaccines being a victim of their own success here:
https://doctrixperiwinkle.substack.com/p/inoculated
Footnote:
My current vaccine-related fussing with Our Dutch Overlords regards the vaccine against dengue fever, which is "a tropical disease so we don't have to worry about it" (so, the Caribbean part of the Kingdom is in the tropics) and "a disease that humans have lived with for centuries" (technically true, like it was for smallpox) and combined with weirdness about how new the vaccine is, so can we know it's safe?!?!?!
Speaking on behalf of me, a person who is familiar with and has a strong preference against getting dengue hemorrhagic fever, I would really like the pro-progress faction win the day on this. But our decision makers do not share my familiarity with or risk from this disease.