The West Is Lost
Oct 5 2025 The New York Times
By Andreas Reckwitz; a sociologist and the author of a book on loss and modernity. He wrote from Berlin.
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.
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To face truth with open eyes, to accept fragility and to incorporate loss into the democratic imagination could, in fact, be the precondition of its vitality. If we once dreamed of abolishing loss, we must now learn how to live with it. Should we succeed, it would mark a step toward maturity. And that could become a deeper form of progress.
