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The dissolution of shared identity

This is an essay rather than a verdict, but I have tried to anchor it in numbers. The claim underneath it is simple to state and surprisingly easy to document: the large frameworks that used to tell people who they were — the nation, the church, the class you were born into, the town you never left, the handful of newspapers and channels everyone read and watched — have all weakened at roughly the same time, and nothing of comparable scale has replaced them. We have not stopped having identities. We have stopped sharing them.

The instinct that something has come loose is old. In 1887 the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies named the shift he saw coming as the move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft — from community, the dense web of inherited bonds, to society, the looser association of individuals pursuing their own ends. A decade later Émile Durkheim gave the pathology of that shift a name that has never gone away — anomie, the normlessness that sets in when the collective frameworks that once gave conduct its meaning lose their grip. What was a premonition in the nineteenth century is, in the twenty-first, a measurable trend. Below I want to set out the evidence, the thinkers who anticipated it, what rushed into the gap, and — trying to be fair rather than nostalgic — what that costs and what it frees.

What a shared identity framework actually is

By a “shared identity framework” I mean a story large enough, and held widely enough, that it answers the question who are we for millions of people at once — and, by answering it, tells each person a good deal about who they are without their having to decide. These frameworks have a few features in common. They are inherited more than chosen: you were born into a faith, a country, a class, a region. They are thick: they come bundled with obligations, rituals, a calendar, a vocabulary, a set of people you owe something to. And they are overlapping but ranked: a mid-century factory worker in the English Midlands might be, in rough order of weight, working-class, English, chapel or church or nothing-much, a union man, a father — and those layers mostly reinforced rather than contradicted each other.

The crucial thing is that none of it was an individual project. The framework did the work of meaning-making in advance, collectively, and handed you the result. That is exactly the part that has dissolved.

The evidence, framework by framework

It helps to take them one at a time, because they did not weaken for a single reason and they did not weaken evenly — but the direction is strikingly consistent.

Religion

Start with the clearest case. In the United States, the religiously unaffiliated — the “nones” — rose from 16% of adults in 2007 to roughly 28% by 2024, on Pew Research Center figures, becoming the single largest group in the American religious landscape. In Britain the collapse is sharper still: the share saying they belong to no religion climbed from 31% in 1983 to around half the population by the 2010s, on the British Social Attitudes series, and among the under-35s non-religion is now simply the norm. The change isn't only that fewer people believe; it is that the parish, the congregation and the shared calendar — the communal machinery of belief — have thinned even where some private spirituality survives.

60% 45% 30% 15% 0 1983 2000 2024 UK — no religion US — “nones”
Share of adults reporting no religious affiliation. UK figures from the British Social Attitudes survey (31% in 1983 to roughly half by the late 2010s); US figures from Pew Research Center (16% in 2007 to about 28% in 2024). Both have plateaued recently, at far higher levels than a generation ago.

But here the story has just taken an unexpected turn, and intellectual honesty demands I report it. After two decades of near-unbroken decline, the slide has stalled: Pew finds the Christian share of US adults roughly flat since about 2020, and at the youngest edge it may even be reversing — church membership among American Gen Z ticked up from 45% to 51% between 2023 and 2024. The striking part is the kind of faith people are returning to. Young men in particular are drawn not to the thin, “spiritual but not religious” mood of recent decades but to its opposite: old, demanding, high-commitment traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy and traditionalist Catholicism. The picture is genuinely unsettled — a loudly-trumpeted UK “Quiet Revival” turned out to rest on flawed data and was retracted in 2026, and the 18–24s remain the least religious cohort by far — but “the institutions are gone for good” is no longer a safe thing to say. Something is stirring, and it is reaching for groundedness rather than novelty.

Class and the institutions of solidarity

Class has not disappeared — inequality is, if anything, sharper — but class as a conscious, organising identity has thinned, and the clearest proxy is the union. In the United States, union membership fell from 20.1% of workers in 1983, the first year of comparable data, to 9.9% in 2024 — a halving in four decades, on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone remains the definitive map of this terrain, traced the same line further back: the unionised share of the non-agricultural workforce had already fallen from 32.5% in 1953 to 15.8% by 1992. The institutions that turned an economic position into a culture and a politics — the union hall, the working men's club, the single big employer that defined a whole town — have largely gone. People can be objectively in the same economic boat and feel no shared identity about it at all.

Place, kin and the household

The assumption that you would live, work and die near where you were born, surrounded by extended family and the same neighbours, held for most of human history and broke within living memory. One number captures it. The share of US households consisting of a single person rose from 7.7% in 1940 to 27.6% in 2020, reaching roughly 29% by 2023 — more than a quarter of all households are now one person, on Census Bureau figures. We are, more than ever before, living alone.

The common information space

This is the quiet one, and I think the most consequential. For a few decades in the twentieth century a whole country could plausibly read the same few papers and watch the same two or three channels; the evening news drew tens of millions to the same half-hour. That fact has been dismantled. By 2024, 54% of US adults said they at least sometimes got their news from social media, and the share of TikTok users getting news there leapt from 22% in 2020 to 52% in 2024, on Pew figures. Meanwhile the old shared hearth has cooled: the CBS Evening News, once a national institution, now averages around four million viewers. The fragmentation of media into infinite niches, and then into algorithmic feeds personalised to the individual, dissolved the common reference points that the older frameworks had quietly relied on to reproduce themselves.

Trust, the thing underneath

All of this shows up in the one number that arguably matters most. Asked whether “most people can be trusted,” the share of Americans saying yes fell from 46% in 1972 to 34% by 2018, where it has roughly stayed — and Putnam's earlier reading put it higher still, at 58% in 1960. Generalised social trust, the lubricant that lets strangers cooperate, has drained away in lockstep with the frameworks that used to generate it.

60% 40% 20% 0 1960 1990 2024 58 34
Share of US adults agreeing “most people can be trusted.” The 58% reading is Putnam's for 1960; the 46%–34% line is the General Social Survey, 1972–2018, confirmed at 34% in a 2023–24 Pew poll. See also Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone” (1995).

Read together, the pattern is the point: these are not five separate stories so much as one. Each framework leaned on the others — the nation borrowed the church's calendar, class borrowed the factory town, all of them borrowed the common media to keep retelling themselves. Pull enough threads and the weave loosens everywhere at once. The chart below lines four of these measures up side by side: two of the things that fell, and two that rose in their place.

50% 25% 0 20 10 Union members 46 34 Social trust 16 28 No religion 8 29 Living alone then now
Four US measures, “then” versus “now,” as a share of the relevant population. Union membership 1983–2024 (BLS); social trust 1972–2024 (GSS/Pew); religious “nones” 2007–2024 (Pew); one-person households 1940–2023 (US Census). The two on the left measure belonging and fell; the two on the right measure its absence and rose.

Why now — the deeper causes

It would be too easy to blame the smartphone and stop. The phone matters, but it landed on ground that had been shifting for a long time. A few forces seem to me to be doing most of the work.

The first is the long rise of the autonomous individual as the moral centre of modern life. The philosopher Charles Taylor calls our era the “age of authenticity”: the diffusion, since roughly the 1960s, of an ethic of expressive individualism in which the authentic self is something you discover and express rather than a role you are assigned. Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart caught the religious form of this perfectly in a young woman the authors called Sheila, who described her own faith as “Sheilaism — just my own little voice.” This is one of the genuine moral achievements of modernity: it underwrites the freedom to leave a faith, a marriage, a class or a country that doesn't fit. But the same move that frees the individual from inherited frameworks also, by construction, demotes those frameworks from destiny to preference. Once identity is something you author, a shared identity is just a coincidence of authorship.

The second is affluence and mobility. Thick inherited frameworks were partly answers to scarcity and risk: you needed the village, the extended family, the church's charity and the union's solidarity because the alternative was ruin. A wealthier, more mobile, more state-insured society loosens the practical grip of those bonds. You can, for the first time in history, afford to be unattached — and the household data shows that many people, given the option, take it.

The third is the technology of attention. Earlier media fragmented the audience; recommender systems went further and fragmented the self's informational world into something unique to each person. A shared identity needs a shared input; an algorithmic feed is, almost by definition, the opposite of a shared input. The same machinery is brilliant at assembling micro-identities — finely-sorted communities of taste, grievance or hobby — which is why it can feel, paradoxically, as though identity is everywhere even as the big shared ones recede.

“In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change.” — Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (2000)

Bauman's phrase for our condition was liquid modernity, and his sharpest observation was about what it does to selfhood: individualisation, he wrote, consists of transforming human identity “from a given into a task” — and then handing each person the bill for performing it. Hold that thought, because the cost of that transfer is where the ledger turns.

What rushed into the gap

People do not tolerate an identity vacuum for long. The interesting question is not whether something replaced the old frameworks but what, and whether the replacements can do the same work.

The most obvious successor is identity as consumption and brand — the self curated through what you buy, wear, listen to and post. The second is the chosen micro-community: the subreddit, the fandom, the Discord, the diaspora group, the wellness or fitness tribe — elective, interest-based, often globe-spanning, frequently intense. The third, and most politically loaded, is what gets called identity politics in the broad sense: the rise of group identities — around ethnicity, gender, sexuality, generation, even diagnosis — as primary frames through which people understand themselves and make claims. I want to be even-handed here: this last development is, in large part, a reasonable response to the dissolution. When the universal frameworks that were supposed to include everyone turn out to have excluded or flattened many people, building identity around a more specific shared experience is an understandable way to reclaim solidarity and recognition.

But notice what the replacements share. They are almost all chosen, narrower and thinner than what they replace. A brand identity asks nothing of you on a wet Tuesday. A fandom can be left without consequence. Even the more demanding group identities tend to be narrower than the old nation-or-faith frame — they bind you tightly to people like you and can leave you with less in common with the person across the street. The new frameworks are good at belonging and less good at the older trick of shared belonging across difference — the bit where the duke and the docker were, however unequally, supposed to be members of the same thing.

Capital as religion

There is one replacement so large that it deserves its own section, because it has quietly become the universal frame the others used to be. As faith, nation, class and place receded, the market did not just expand into the economy; it expanded into the space where a shared horizon of meaning used to sit. Let me say the fair thing first and mean it: market capitalism is the most powerful engine of material progress ever built, and it has lifted more people out of absolute poverty than any system in history. That is not a small good, and I am not romantic about the alternatives. But a system can be an extraordinary servant and a ruinous master, and what concerns me here is what happens when it stops being one institution among many and becomes the thing everything else is measured against.

A century ago two thinkers saw the shape of it. Max Weber argued that the Protestant faith which first fired capitalism had burned away, leaving the machinery running without the spirit that lit it — an “iron cage” of rational acquisition that we are born into and cannot easily leave. Walter Benjamin went further, in a startling 1921 fragment: capitalism, he wrote, is not merely shaped by religion, it is one — a purely cultic religion “without dogma,” demanding worship every waking hour, with no sabbath and no day off. Its peculiar cruelty, he noticed, is built into the German word Schuld, which means both debt and guilt: this is a faith that generates endless indebtedness but offers no atonement, no forgiveness, no final rest. You can always owe more, be more, optimise more. You can never arrive.

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved.” — Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), on the inhabitants of the iron cage

Our own age has refined the cage into something subtler. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we no longer need an overseer, because the market has moved inside: each of us has become an enterprise of one, a personal brand to be grown, a CV to be optimised, an attention-economy account to be tended. “We are,” he writes, “master and slave in one” — auto-exploiting, and mistaking the exploitation for freedom. That is why the resulting exhaustion is so hard to name. There is no boss to blame, no obvious chain. The pain reads, from the inside, as personal failure rather than the predictable output of a system that has made the self its last and most efficient factory. The characteristic suffering of the age — burnout, a low background anxiety, a flat and nameless emptiness — is just what you would expect from a religion that promises meaning through endless accumulation and then, structurally, never delivers it. It hollows people into husks who have everything to consume and nothing to consume it for.

And it hollows societies the same way. When the market becomes the measure of all things, the bonds that used to be ends in themselves — the friendship, the neighbourhood, the congregation, the family meal — get quietly repriced as means, as inputs to productivity or as products to be bought back at a premium (connection, now available by subscription). The shared horizon is replaced by the metric. A society can grow richer every year on these terms and feel, year on year, a little more like a marketplace and a little less like a home.

This, I think, is why the instinctive modern cure so rarely works. Sensing the emptiness but unable to name it, people reach for an escape: touch grass, get out to the countryside, take the sabbatical, move abroad, do the retreat. The impulse is sound — there is real medicine in silence, nature and distance. But it tends to fail for two reasons. First, you carry the cage with you; the restlessness was never in the city, it was in the self the system trained, and it boards the plane in your hand luggage. Second, the escape itself has usually already been captured and sold back to you — the wellness weekend, the curated village, the aesthetic of “slow living,” the nomad visa — so the very act of fleeing the market is routed straight back through it. The retreat soothes the symptom and leaves the cause untouched, which is why you so often come home rested for a fortnight and hollow again by the second month. The problem was never the location. It was the missing horizon, and no amount of geography can supply one.

The ledger — what is lost

Here is where I'll give a view rather than report a trend. I think the dissolution carries real and underrated costs, and that it is possible to name them without wishing the old order back.

The first cost is to social trust and the possibility of collective action. Shared identity is the substrate that lets strangers cooperate — pay taxes for people they will never meet, accept an election they lost, sacrifice in a crisis. The trust line above is not an abstraction; it is the measurable thinning of the circle of people we instinctively count as “us.” Putnam catalogued the consequences across seven separate measures of civic life, from voting to volunteering, and gave the book its indelible image: between 1980 and 1993 the number of Americans who bowled rose by about 10% while league bowling fell by 40%. We were still bowling. We had stopped bowling together.

“More than a quarter of all American households are now a single person.” — US Census Bureau, on the 2020 count (7.7% in 1940)

The second cost is to the individual carrying the load. A framework that hands you a ready-made answer to who am I is, among other things, a labour-saving device. When the frameworks recede, the work of constructing a coherent, durable self falls on each person, continuously, alone — Bauman's identity-as-task. That is liberating for the confident and well-resourced and quietly crushing for many who would have been steadied by an inherited place to stand. The clinical signal is hard to ignore: in 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” reporting that about half of US adults had experienced loneliness, that its mortality risk rivals smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and that heavy social-media users were roughly twice as likely to feel socially isolated. Durkheim would have recognised the shape of it immediately.

~50%
of US adults report experiencing loneliness (US Surgeon General, 2023)
15
cigarettes a day — the mortality risk loneliness is judged to rival
2×
the odds of feeling isolated among heavy social-media users
54%
of US adults at least sometimes get news from social media (Pew, 2024)

The third cost is brittleness. Chosen, thin identities are easy to enter and easy to abandon, which means they don't hold a person through hardship the way a thick inherited bond once did, and they sort people into ever-finer groups that have less and less reason to compromise with one another. Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism that mass loneliness — the experience of not belonging to the world at all — is the soil in which the strongest, simplest, most total identities take root. A society of strong micro-identities and weak shared ones is unusually prone to fracture along every available line, and unusually vulnerable to whoever offers a cohesive “us” for sale.

The ledger — what is gained

It would be dishonest to leave it there, because the gains are large and real, and a great many people are alive, free and themselves because the old frameworks loosened.

The plainest gain is freedom from the tyranny of the given. The thick inherited frameworks that produced solidarity also produced conformity, exclusion and a great deal of quiet suffering: the person who didn't fit the village, the faith, the class or the gender role they were born into often had nowhere to go. Their dissolution is precisely what lets a gay teenager, a woman who wants a different life than her mother's, a believer who has lost the faith, or anyone who simply doesn't fit, build a life on their own terms. That is not a small thing to set against the costs; for millions it is the whole game.

The second gain is the chance of wider, more honest solidarities. Some inherited identities were narrow and hostile by design. The ability to form bonds across the old boundaries — with people on the other side of the world who share your situation, your work, your condition or your conviction — is genuinely new, and good. A shared identity that you arrive at by choice rather than by birth can be more honest, even if it is harder to sustain.

And the third is simply pluralism: a society no longer organised around one master story has room for more kinds of person and more kinds of life than any of the old frameworks allowed. That is messy and anxiety-inducing and, I think, on balance a more humane place to live than the cohesive monocultures it replaced.

The hardest case: multiculturalism

I want to dwell on the hardest case, because it is where this whole argument gets tested — and because it is personal. I came to this country at the age of one, with Indian parents, and I love it: its institutions, its humour, its instinct for fair play, the particular freedom of it. I am a product of immigration and a believer in it, and I am grateful in a way that is hard to put into a sentence. So nothing here is an argument against multiculturalism as such. It can be a real strength, and it gave someone like me a place, a welcome and a chance I don't take for granted. But it isn't an automatic or unmixed good either, and it can go wrong — most often when it curdles into an over-correction, embraced as a reaction against monoculturalism rather than weighed on its own terms. The trouble is not diversity itself. The trouble is what happens when you add many cultures to a centre that has already thinned.

Recall the sequence. The shared frameworks were weakening anyway — faith, class, place, a common media. Layer rapid demographic change on top of an already-loosened centre and you can get confusion and division, not because any incoming culture is deficient but because there is less and less of a common thing to cohere around. The evidence here is uncomfortable and worth facing squarely. Robert Putnam — no conservative, and by his own account reluctant to publish the result — found in a major 2007 study that in the short to medium term, ethnic diversity tends to lower social trust: in more diverse neighbourhoods, people of every background “hunker down,” trusting even their own kind less. But he found something just as important: this is not permanent. Successful societies overcome it by building new, cross-cutting identities — a bigger “us” that newcomer and native alike can join. Diversity isn't the problem. Failing to build the larger shared identity is.

Amartya Sen — an Indian, and one of the great liberal minds — named the failure precisely. The danger, he argued, is not multiculturalism but what he called plural monoculturalism: a society that contains many cultures but traps each person inside a single inherited box, sorted by religion or ethnicity, communities living in parallel rather than together. That is the worst of both worlds — the friction of difference without the enrichment of exchange — and, Sen warned, well-meaning policy can entrench it, funding communities to stay separate in the very name of respecting them. Genuine pluralism is the opposite: people free to draw on many affiliations at once, meeting as fellow citizens on shared ground.

But shared ground has to come from somewhere, and here is the part that is hard to say and harder to resolve. Tolerance, civility, fair play, the rule of law, the everyday assumption that a stranger will deal honestly with you — these are not culturally neutral defaults that switch themselves on. They are the downstream values of a particular inheritance: the moral capital Tocqueville said free institutions spend but cannot themselves manufacture. A confident host culture is what sets the boundaries inside which difference can safely flourish — these norms are the floor; everything above it is yours. That sounds uncomfortable in an age trained to flinch at the idea of a culture having a centre at all. The discomfort doesn't make it untrue. Integration requires something to integrate into.

And this is where the dissolution and the diversity meet, and can compound into something worse than either alone. If the dominant culture, out of guilt or exhaustion or sheer drift, stops believing it has anything worth asking others to share — if it dilutes its own centre and hands the job of defining the common good to a proceduralist machinery of committees, compliance officers and consultants — you do not get a neutral, fair settlement. You get a vacuum. And vacuums are not filled democratically. No culture, host or incoming, actually had a say; instead the space is filled by whoever is best organised to exploit it — unaccountable bureaucracies that manage fragmentation as a permanent condition, or bad actors and identity entrepreneurs who profit from keeping the silos sealed. That is the genuine worst of all worlds: not unity, and not even a vibrant plurality, but a managed, suspicious separateness in which nobody is quite at home.

I don't think there is a clever institutional fix for this, which is why it is the hardest case. It comes down, in the end, to two unglamorous things: clear boundaries and ordinary civility — and to a host culture secure enough to be generous and confident enough to be clear. Generous at the edges: warmly welcoming, glad of what newcomers bring, slow to take offence. Firm at the core: honest that a few things are not up for negotiation, because they are the floor that makes the welcome possible at all. A culture too proud to share is ugly; but a culture too unsure of itself to ask anything of anyone is not kind, it is merely absent — and its absence gets filled by something worse. The generous, confident version is the one I have been lucky enough to grow up inside. It is worth defending — and it cannot be defended if we are too embarrassed to admit that it is a particular thing, with a centre worth keeping.

The awkward cases: Japan and the Nordics

If the argument so far has a control case — a place that kept what the West let go — it is Japan, and it is worth pausing on, because it cuts against the easy conclusions in both directions. Japan is about as close to a continuous, homogeneous, thickly shared culture as a modern rich country gets: minimal immigration, a dense web of inherited manners and obligation, and a remarkable social continuity. If cohesion alone were the answer, Japan ought to be the healthiest society on earth.

And in some respects it visibly is. The thick culture delivers, in abundance, the very goods this essay has tied to shared identity: Japan has one of the lowest homicide rates of any large country, extraordinary public order and honesty, streets you can walk at any hour, lost wallets returned with the cash still inside. This is what high social trust feels like from the inside, and it is no small thing — it is, day to day, a kind of civic grace the dissolving West increasingly lacks. Cohesion buys real peace, and anyone tempted to wave it away should spend a week in Tokyo. None of which is to idealise it — that same cohesion has, in living memory, worn a far darker face, which I will come to.

And yet the picture has a second half, and it pays to be precise rather than sweeping. The trust does not collapse — that is exactly the point, and it is easy to miss. What fails in Japan sits on a different axis from trust altogether: not cohesion but connection, not order but vitality. Alongside its civic peace, Japan carries the sharpest crisis of loneliness, social withdrawal and demographic decline of any developed nation.

76,020
people died alone at home (kodokushi) in Japan in 2024; thousands undiscovered for over a month
~1.5m
working-age hikikomori — acute social recluses withdrawn from the world (Cabinet Office, 2023)
1.15
fertility rate in 2024, a record low; Tokyo has slipped below 1.0
<700k
births in 2024 — the first time ever below that line

In 2024 some 76,000 people died alone at home — kodokushi, the “lonely death” — thousands of them undiscovered for over a month. An estimated 1.5 million working-age people are hikikomori, acute recluses who have withdrawn from society, sometimes for years. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.15, births have dropped below 700,000 for the first time, and Tokyo's rate has slipped under 1.0 — a society, in the aggregate, quietly declining to continue. Japan was the second country in the world, after Britain, to appoint a government minister for loneliness. It also gave the language the word karōshi: death by overwork.

That juxtaposition is the lesson, and it is double-edged. It rebukes, first, the lazy idea that diversity is the root of the disease: Japan has almost none and suffers the symptoms more sharply than many of the multicultural societies it is sometimes held up to shame. But it equally rebukes the opposite hope — that simply preserving a homogeneous, cohesive culture is the cure. Japan kept the outer forms of shared identity intact while the inner horizon drained away. It secularised, and it became perhaps the purest achievement society on earth — Han's burnout and Benjamin's tireless cult turned all the way up — so the hollowing proceeded anyway, behind a facade of perfect order. You can keep the culture and still lose the centre.

Which is why the Nordics are the strongest objection to everything I have argued, and I should meet them head-on rather than tuck them away. Finland has topped the World Happiness Report for eight years running, with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway close behind — and these are among the most secular societies on earth. They are high-trust, low-corruption, generous and kind, and they have largely let go of institutional religion. If a society can be that good and that godless, perhaps the transcendent horizon is a crutch the well-organised can simply set down.

It is a real challenge and I won't wave it off, but two things complicate it. First, what those rankings mostly capture — the Cantril ladder — is life satisfaction: health, freedom, security, social support, the confidence that a stranger would hand back your wallet. The Nordics are, deservedly, the world champions of just that, and it is a magnificent achievement. But satisfaction is not the same as meaning or vitality, and on that second axis even these societies flash the same warning light as Japan: fertility has fallen to record lows across the region — Finland to 1.25, its lowest in nearly 250 years. The happiest, safest, best-run societies in human history are, very gently, declining to continue themselves; and a life-satisfaction survey is built not to notice. Second, the Nordic model rests on a deep inherited substrate — centuries of Lutheran moral formation and dense civic habit, a trust built up long before the churches emptied. The honest open question is whether that is self-renewing, or whether the present generation is spending down a moral capital it has stopped replenishing — living, in Tocqueville's sense, off an inheritance. They may prove that institutions and a residue of shared decency can carry a society indefinitely; or they may be the most graceful, slowest draw-down of all. On the present evidence I genuinely don't know, and anyone who claims certainty is overreaching.

There is, though, an older and more bracing test for this kind of doubt: by their fruits you shall know them. Set the satisfaction surveys aside for a moment and look at what these societies actually build — and the picture turns, and not only for the Nordics but for Europe as a whole. European labour productivity climbed from a fifth of the American level in 1945 to about 95% by the mid-1990s, and has since slipped back below 80%; real disposable income has grown almost twice as fast in the United States as in the EU since 2000. No European company worth more than €100bn has been built from scratch in the past fifty years. A single American chipmaker is now worth more than the entire German economy; the five largest US firms outweigh the combined output of Europe's five largest nations; the seven biggest American tech companies are some twenty times the size of Europe's seven biggest. The frontier — software, AI, advanced manufacturing — has moved decisively to the United States and China, and Europe, for all its comfort, increasingly consumes what others invent. Mario Draghi's 2024 report called it what it is: an existential challenge, a slow decline unless the continent changes course.

It would be unfair to push this too far. Europe still makes real excellence — the Dutch lithography the whole AI boom runs on, the Danish medicine now reshaping how the world eats, a quality of ordinary life much of America might envy — and measured per hour worked, the gap is narrower than the headlines suggest. But the direction is not seriously in doubt, and it rhymes with the fertility numbers. A civilisation can be a wonderful place to live and, at the very same time, be quietly ceasing to build, to risk and to make the new. Comfort, increasingly, is a fruit of the past — an inheritance being drawn down. Dynamism is the fruit of the present, and it is ripening on other shores. That is what the works reveal that the surveys cannot.

So what can we learn from these cases? Two things, pulling gently against each other. The first is hopeful: Japan and the Nordics together prove that a high-trust, civil, orderly — even joyful — society is achievable and wonderful to inhabit, and that cohesion is a real and defensible good rather than a nostalgic fantasy. The second is quieter, but hard to dismiss: high trust, and even high measured happiness, can coexist with a deep failure of vitality — the will to connect, to commit, to build, to continue — of which the near-universal collapse in fertility, and Europe's quiet industrial fade, are the plainest signs. Trust, it turns out, buys peace, but not by itself a reason to go on. Tellingly, where Japan still finds ballast is in the old folk-sources of meaning the West discarded faster — ikigai, the everyday reason to get up; the dignity of craft and mastery; ritual, season and aesthetic attention; obligation to others held as a structure rather than resented as a burden. These are real, and worth borrowing. But the deeper pattern across all of these societies points where the rest of this essay has: what goes missing, even amid plenty and peace, is a horizon beyond the self and beyond the society — something to give the order, and even the comfort, a reason to be for.

The root beneath the fruit

There is a way to reconcile all of this — the trust and the emptiness, the comfort and the fade — and it runs through heritage, because the fruits we have been weighing did not grow from nowhere. They grew from roots, and the roots were, more often than not, the very frameworks this essay says are dissolving.

Take the institution whose absence in modern Europe we were just lamenting: the dynamic, knowledge-creating university. It is a medieval Christian invention. Through the wreckage of the post-Roman centuries it was the Benedictine monasteries, under their rule of ora et labora — prayer and work — that kept literacy alive at all, their scriptoria patiently copying Cicero and Virgil by hand. From those monastic and cathedral schools grew the first universities: Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century and, in England, Oxford (teaching from around 1096, swelling after an English ban on studying in Paris in 1167) and Cambridge (1209). These were church foundations to their bones — established to form clergy, their fellows in holy orders, theology the queen of their sciences, the very architecture of chapel, cloister, common table and gown borrowed straight from the monastery. The disinterested pursuit of truth as a vocation — the idea that to know is itself a kind of devotion — was a religious inheritance before it was ever a secular one. The science, and ultimately the prosperity, that the modern world treats as self-evidently its own are, genealogically, fruit from that root.

Japan tells the same story in a different key, which is part of why it is so instructive. Its famed order, discipline and aesthetic restraint — the craft, the ritual, the ikigai we wanted to borrow — were formed over centuries by Buddhism and Confucianism: Zen's discipline and attention, and the Neo-Confucian ethic of duty, loyalty and learning that the Tokugawa shoguns made the spine of social order. That is the root of the cohesion we admired. But the twentieth-century dynamism — the economic miracle — was largely a graft from outside. After 1947 the United States, now wanting a strong and free Japan against communism, helped rebuild it on American-backed capitalism; the Korean War then poured some $3.5bn of procurement into Japanese industry between 1950 and 1955 — more than a quarter of its exports — reviving firms like Toyota almost overnight, under an American security umbrella and with access to American markets. Japan, in other words, set borrowed economic dynamism on top of an inherited Buddhist–Confucian moral order. What we are watching now is both giving way at once: the grafted engine has stalled into decades of stagnation, while the ancient root quietly thins into loneliness and demographic winter.

Seen this way, the paradox of the fruits test dissolves. Knowledge, order, prosperity, even comfort were never self-generating; they were downstream of formative roots that were, overwhelmingly, transcendent ones. A civilisation can keep eating the fruit for a long while after cutting the root — which is precisely what “spending down inherited capital” means, made concrete. The two failures we have seen are really one mistake from opposite ends: the West harvesting from a root it has severed, and Japan grafting dynamism on from outside while its own root withers. Neither holds for long. Heritage, then, is not nostalgia and not decoration; it is the root system — and what this essay has been groping toward is not a return to the past but a re-rooting: recovering, in a form fit for now, the formative horizon that grew the goods in the first place.

Beyond the tribe

But here I have to double back and guard against a reading I would hate to invite, because it is the most dangerous mistake in this whole territory. Nothing above should be taken as a hymn to cohesion as such, and we should certainly not idealise Japan's. Cohesion is morally neutral; everything depends on what it is cohesion around. The same Japanese social unity I praised had, within living memory, a monstrous face: in the name of the emperor and an absolutised national essence, imperial Japan carried out the Rape of Nanjing, the human experiments of Unit 731, and the mass enslavement of “comfort women.” And the definitive case is Germany — the most thoroughly organised, high-trust, cohesive society of its day, its Volksgemeinschaft or “people's community,” which produced the Holocaust. This is where Arendt's warning, earlier in this essay, arrives at its terminus: tribal cohesion, fused to a total identity and sharpened against an enemy, is not the cure for our atomisation but its most lethal counterfeit. “More cohesion” is not the answer. The only question that matters is: cohesion around what?

For there are two utterly different kinds of unity, and the essay's whole argument turns on telling them apart. The first is tribal: we are one because we are the same — same blood, same race, same nation. We are whites; we are Japanese; we are Indian. It is thick and it is potent, but it draws its energy from a boundary, an us defined against a them, and pushed to its limit it is the logic that built the camps. The second is transcendent: we are one because we are all children of something above all of us — a unity that does not run on sameness, does not need an enemy, and can in principle take in everyone. Only the second is safe to build a plural society on, and it is the only kind that has ever actually dissolved a tribal boundary rather than merely drawing a bigger one.

The deepest and most world-shaping form of that second kind is the Abrahamic. The promise to Abraham was not that his tribe would prevail over the others but that “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3); he was renamed precisely to be “the father of many nations” (Genesis 17:4–5). Roughly half the human race — Jews, Christians and Muslims alike — now traces its spiritual lineage to him, an inheritance reckoned not by blood but by faith. The New Testament drove the logic to its conclusion: in this family “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), all alike “Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise.” It is hard to overstate how strange that was against the tribal world that bore it, or how much of what we now call universal — human dignity, the equal worth of every person, the very notion that all people are one family — grew from that root rather than from any nation's self-assertion.

This is the unity the whole essay has been circling, and it resolves the knots the earlier sections left tied. It answers the multicultural problem without the danger: the binding centre need not be a dominant blood or race that newcomers must dissolve into, but can be a transcendent covenant open, in principle, to every nation — which is the belonging I called for before, “chosen rather than coerced,” “open at the edges,” able to “bind across difference.” It explains why ethnic cohesion — Japan's, the old monocultures' — buys real trust yet curdles so readily, and why the trans-tribal horizon is at once safer and deeper. And it sharpens the word transcendent I have leaned on so heavily: the horizon that can actually hold a plural people together is not one more tribe written large, but one that stands above every tribe and calls all of them children. The hope, if there is one, is not that we recover the unity of blood — God forbid, given where that has led — but the harder, higher unity of an inheritance that no nation owns and every nation can enter.

Where this leaves us

Let me end with a view rather than a finding. I used to assume the old frameworks simply weren't coming back. I'm no longer sure that's right — the stirrings in the religion data are a reminder that these things move in long swings, not straight lines, and we may be living through the turn of one. What I don't think we should want is the old order back on its old terms; the cohesion it offered was paid for in coercion and exclusion that we were right to refuse. But the thin, chosen, fast-churning identities that replaced it are plainly not enough on their own: the data says they are good at belonging and bad at the wider, harder solidarity a society needs to function. The interesting question — the one I think the next few decades are really about — is whether we can find forms of belonging that are chosen rather than coerced but still thick enough to hold: voluntary, plural, open at the edges, yet able to steady a person through hardship and bind them across difference.

Underneath the sociology there is a simpler human fact, and the thinker who saw it most clearly was Kierkegaard. In a remarkable 1949 essay, Peter Drucker drew out his central claim: that human existence is only possible in tension — between our life as an individual in the spirit and our life as a citizen in society — and that when a culture lets the inner pole wither, it does not become free so much as unmoored.

“Human existence is possible only in tension — in tension between man's simultaneous life as an individual in the spirit and as a citizen in society.” — Peter Drucker on Søren Kierkegaard, “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard” (1949)

Kierkegaard's answer to the despair this produces, Drucker wrote, was not virtue but faith: “The opposite of Sin (to use the traditional term for existence purely in society) is not Virtue; it is Faith.” And though “Kierkegaard's faith cannot overcome the awful loneliness, the isolation and dissonance of human existence, it can make it bearable by making it meaningful.” You need not share his theology to take the structural point: a person, and a society, needs something steady at the centre. And this is where the argument turns from conviction to observation, because at both scales the evidence keeps pointing the same way.

Take the individual first. The protective effect of a thick, shared frame is now well documented. Tracking tens of thousands of people for decades, Harvard's Tyler VanderWeele found that those attending religious services weekly had sharply lower rates of the “deaths of despair” — suicide, overdose, alcohol — about a third lower for men and two-thirds lower for women, with women's suicide rate roughly five times lower than non-attenders'. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, mapping that same despair from the other direction, traced its rise among working-class Americans to what they called “the destruction of a way of life”: the slow withdrawal of secure work, marriage, union and church. The bonds were never decoration. They were load-bearing.

Now the society. The pattern repeats at scale. The nations that are both peaceful and prosperous are, with striking regularity, the high-trust ones — and the link runs through the bonds, not around them. Francis Fukuyama's comparative work makes social trust, cooperation grounded in shared norms, a direct input to prosperity, because it is what lets strangers build large institutions cheaply; Putnam's social capital is the same finding in another key. And two centuries ago Tocqueville, trying to explain why American self-government worked where others had collapsed, concluded that religion “must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.” It governed nothing, yet it furnished the shared horizon of meaning and restraint on which the free institutions quietly drew — a moral capital they spend but cannot themselves manufacture.

Put the two scales together and the conclusion is hard to avoid, and it is an observation rather than a wish: trust is what lets a society be peaceful and prosperous, and that trust has, historically, been generated and renewed by shared frameworks carrying — at their centre — a horizon beyond the self. That is the deepest reason the thin replacements struggle. They can organise belonging; they cannot supply the horizon. Drucker said as much about why he wrote on Kierkegaard at all: the essay, he explained, was written “to assert that society is not enough — not even for society,” and “to affirm hope.” A healthy individual and a healthy society alike appear, in the end, to rest on a hope of that order — in the older sense of the word, transcendent. We have proven, decisively, that we can dismantle the frameworks we inherited. Whether we can re-learn how to carry that hope, each in our own way, is the real task of the age; and the long swing of the evidence, for all its noise, looks to me less like the death of that hope than like a people who, having tried most of the alternatives, are beginning to feel for the ground again.

Sources & notes

A note on how this page was made: I researched and drafted it with the help of AI tools and then checked the specifics against the sources below and edited it into the argument I actually wanted to make. It is a personal essay — a point of view rather than a settled account — and the framing and the opinions are my own. Figures are rounded and drawn from the cited surveys; where two sources phrase a measure differently I have said so. Any mistakes are mine. If you spot one, please let me know.

Some of the figures in the charts on this page were compiled with the help of AI tools and may contain errors or be out of date. They are shared in good faith for general interest only — not as professional, financial, investment or purchasing advice — and should be checked against the cited primary sources before you rely on them.