The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

by Ross Douthat

And in the Western nations where it all began, it remains a central cultural assumption that unexplored frontiers and fresh discoveries and new worlds to conquer are not just desirable but the very point of life.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like.… It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.

And we hype the revolutionary character of our communications devices in order to persuade ourselves that our earlier, wider-ranging expectations were always unreasonable—that this progress is the only progress we could reasonably expect.

Meanwhile, we also hype the changes that are supposedly just around the corner: the alternative energy revolution that’s always poised for takeoff; the genetic engineering breakthrough that will deliver designer babies any day now; the dramatic artificial intelligence leap forward that will either usher in utopia or end with our extermination at the hands of some misanthropic Skynet; the radical life-extension hack that will either add fifty years to our lifespans or enable us to upload ourselves into virtual immortality; the “new study” that offers hope for curing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or cancer; the robots that are supposedly about to take over all our jobs.