Everything is changing everywhere all at once, and bigly. Count the ways:
1. A “momentous demographic shift”
As Penn economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde has shown, fertility is dropping rapidly in many countries—down to 1.6 in the U.S. and less than 1.0 in Thailand and South Korea. Many country populations are shrinking, and the decline will pick up; the global total will max out around 2080. The population bomb turns out to be a deflating balloon. Even Elon Musk’s best efforts won’t be able to plug it.
A slight silver lining promises less pressure on resources, perhaps some slowdown in global warming. More likely, the shift will stifle growth and slow innovation. Smaller new generations will make welfare for seniors less sustainable. Many countries will grow old before they get rich.
2. The “end of modernity”
As Cambridge historian Christopher Clark suggests, in the new multipolar world the old story about “increasing prosperity linked to economic growth, about technological and scientific progress, about the universality of human rights and the indispensable advantages of a specific liberal-democratic model of society” is becoming ever less plausible. The old institutions of modernity are falling by the wayside: “[t]he national radio, television, and newspaper audience, the party as an anchor and a reference system for identities, growth as an axiom of our existence—all of this will soon be no more.”
Perhaps unintentionally, some of his obligatory gestures—swipes at Trump, calling modern growth “ecologically disastrous,” etc.—illustrate the “weak and shapeless center” he calls out for its ineptness. But the diagnosis rings true: old institutions linger only as functionless hulks of their old selves, and countries flail in stormy crosscurrents for lack of a unifying narrative.
3. “Religion went obsolete”
In a sobering recent book, Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith describes the “demise of traditional faith in America” (preceded by Europe). Pick an indicator, and it’s going down—attendance, belief in God, trust in religion, transcendent elements in religious expression, the public sense that religion helps us be “good people,” and so on. Just about everything that happened to organized religion since the 1990s weakened it—the rise of consumerism, a new stage in the sexual revolution, family breakdown, the legitimacy of being a “none,” religious scandals, and so on. Not just in the U.S.: with lots of data, Isabella Kasselstrand and colleagues declare global secularization Beyond Doubt.
So, what’s left? In the West, a deeply subjective zeitgeist that says everyone has a unique self worth discovering and expressing, not to be hemmed in by restrictive traditions or commitments. You do you. Bits of neopagan reenchantment (tarot cards and chakras anyone?) can’t quite substitute. As a result, again not just in the U.S., new generations face major cultural turmoil with minimal spiritual means.
4. The “borderless welfare state”
Dutch researcher Jan van de Beek and colleagues have found that the net costs of non-Western immigration to the Dutch public treasury are high—for example, about half a million euros per asylum seeker over a lifetime. Similar analyses in Denmark found high net annual costs for the same groups. At the same time, even the Economist, reliable conveyor of elite opinion, now concedes that the current asylum system that opened the doors to millions of claimants is being systematically abused and “falling apart.”
Denmark is trying to stem the tide (a bit “cruel,” judges the Economist author), as is the U.S. (also “cruel,” s/he avers). So far, results are mixed—even the Netherlands, where the immigration restriction party PVV has been the largest for some time, has not been able to stop the influx, still extends ample welfare to newcomers, and provides priority housing at a time of severe shortages. For now, in many countries the entry of illegal aliens and asylum seekers by the millions stresses already-stressed welfare states while undermining the solidarity that was their foundation.
5. A “system increasingly perceived as illegitimate”
As King’s College London war scholar David Betz has recently argued, “we have a system which is increasingly perceived as illegitimate . . . that isn't a functional way of solving collective action problems.” More people in more places don’t share “the sense of pre-political loyalty which they once did” and feel “the problems are now so severe that the political system is unable to cure itself.” He predicts civil war(s).
The tinder is there. In the U.K., a vote for Brexit independence resulted in elite resistance and more mass migration. In Germany, the political elite tries to freeze out a party representing about a fifth of voters. In the U.S., sparks already lit the tinder in Antifa and BLM post-Floyd riots and the J6 Capitol attack after Trump’s 2020 loss. Pre-political loyalty is dissipating by deliberate effort—in the U.S., that used to be a leftist specialty (Jeremiah Wright’s Amerikkka is for Ilhan Omar “one of the worst countries” in the world) but is taking hold on the right as well (if the U.S. under Trump is doing Israel’s bidding, is it still worth defending?). When the antisemitic ends of the political horseshoe touch, more sparks will fly.
6. “Total AI domination”
In one of the more dramatic prognostications about the impact of Artificial Intelligence, researcher Daniel Kotajlo and colleagues predict that “the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.” Not only will AI take over many advanced tasks, it will also begin to lead a life of its own, partly opaque to its creators, and get a turbo boost from China’s desire to outpace the West.
Even without becoming “super” intelligent, AI will be disruptive enough. In education, it already is: if LLM “cheating” becomes standard, what will students actually learn? For that matter, when AI has greater expertise than any individual instructor, and can foster more serious debate, what justifies the old business model and the traditional cost of high schools and colleges? And when AI can spit out reasonably good code, legal analysis, and marketing plans, what’s left for the average professional to do? Nursing, maybe. Regardless of the exact effects, some career expectations will implode. When a budding elite loses status, it gets anxious and resentful—a factor in the Great Awokening of the past decade. Anticipate worse: status decline of the credentialed may well rekindle their compensatory woke signaling, if not actual violence.
7. “All at once”
Each big change by itself delivers a shock to the system, and the entanglement of tremors magnifies the quake. The end of modernity boosts the perception of illegitimacy, which increases the strains caused by the borderless welfare state. Without faith in a collective future, faith in family will continue to atrophy, which further hollows out modern institutions—watch the “demographic cliff” ruin schools and colleges, already buffeted by the AI revolution. AI will do little for a common narrative or collective legitimacy while ushering in a kind of posthumanism not easily countered by obsolete religion. It is possible, of course, that the combined quake will drive demand for a new kind of religion, to make whole what is being rent (Islam has cards to play), but so far that dialectic seems stuck.
These intertwined changes don’t hit “everywhere” the same way. For example, South Korea doesn’t have a large welfare state and has traditionally limited immigration (for some reason, few seek asylum there), so it doesn’t literally grapple with “everything.” But it is a leader in collapsing fertility (TFR at 0.75) and is catching up in secularization (between 1982 and 2018, church attendance dropped from 48 to 23 percent, belief in God from 48.2 to 25 percent, and the percentage declaring themselves “a religious person” from 31 to 16.1 percent, according to Kasselstrand et al.). Its political divisions run deep. Combined with pressure from nasty regimes next door, the country therefore has plenty to worry about even without a troubled welfare state and booming Euro-American diversity.
But here’s the upshot for most of the West. Shrinking societies that lack the impulse of new life undergo wrenching technical change that upends prospects across classes at a time when populations fracture due to unchecked migration and many institutions of modernity no longer function as before, in cultures that lack consensus and collective confidence, while faced with newly significant external pressure in a world order being rearranged.
Who or what will untie those knots, short of a blowup?