To close out the year, we’ve asked our contributors and staff to make a prediction about 2023. You would think, after last year, that we’d have learned our lesson about making predictions, but we couldn’t resist. Feel free to save these if you want to embarrass us with them later.
A series of bleak predictions about the future
By Howard Anglin
Cynics will say we live in the worst of times. We don’t. Optimists will say life has never been better. It has.
The consequences of three generations of dumbing down our education system will be increasingly apparent, and no province will do anything meaningful to improve it.
The pornographization of our culture will deepen and the commentariat will continue to laugh at anyone who suggests we do something about it.
We will continue to inflict brain damage on children by treating phones and tablets as electronic pacifiers, and to warp them emotionally by allowing them to access social media, and no party will even suggest imposing the age limits we take for granted for other addictions.
Our broken health-care system will reveal wider cracks, into which more desperate people will fall, and ideological interests will fight rabidly against even modest reform.
Housing prices will show that, if a problem gets bad enough, even Canadian politicians can be stirred to act. But we won’t address the demand side of the equation, and the new supply we build will be soulless glass “units” stacked anonymously on top of each other rather than pleasant homes in dense, thoughtfully-planned communities. We will end up with bigger and worse cities.
Global elites will continue to detach themselves from the people who work for them and to dismiss any resistance by the workers as dangerous populism and extremism.
Late liberalism will discredit itself in increasingly obvious ways, culturally and economically, and both right- and left-liberals will intensify their denunciation of anyone who points it out.
Traditional religion will be further marginalised and anathematised by people who continue to wonder why modern life feels confused and disordered.
We won’t be smarter, we won’t be kinder, we won’t learn from our mistakes.
2023 will be another of what future generations will remember as “the last good years.” The tattered civilizational order we inherited from our parents and grandparents will endure a little longer—perhaps a few decades, perhaps a century—but no new year will ever again be as good as the preceding year. Not in our lifetimes.
See! the tavern lights are low;
Black’s the night, and how you shrink!
God! and is it time to go?
Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think;
Sadly later than you think;
Far, far later than you think.
Happy New Year.
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
