Over the past 60 years the West has begun to shift away from the culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion, with economic growth slowing over the same period. The frequency of terms related to progress, improvement and the future has dropped by about 25 per cent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common.

That quote and this interesting chart come from the Financial Times, which used data from millions of books that have been digitised as part of the Google Ngram project, to look for terms describing progress versus those describing caution, risk and worry.

The writer argues that this an indicator of the growing scepticism around technology and the rise in zero-sum thinking in modern society, and although he doesn’t mention it, this post, from a couple of years ago, is related, The right sort of crazy people:

Invention has to be enabled by a culture that is willing to allow disruptive ideas to be heard and even implemented on a small scale, and what we’ve got now increasingly does the opposite, aided too often by government funding and control. In that post I liked to an essay, The Age of Decay, which made this comment about California

The California culture of the 1960s now looks like a fin-de-siècle blow-off top. The promise, fulfillment, and destruction of the American dream appears distilled in the Golden State, like an epic tragedy played out against a sunny landscape where the frontier ended. Around 1970, America entered into an age of decay, and California was in the vanguard.

Oh well, we’ve been here before.

Confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers……Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations have had a weight of energy behind them.

That’s British Art Historian, Kenneth Clark, speaking in the opening episode of his great, 1969 TV series, Civilisation.