History Running Backwards, and the Science of Flourishing

The things modernity has most aggressively dismantled — faith, intact families, thick communities, and shared moral purpose — are precisely what human beings need most in order to thrive.

In his May 2026 Atlantic essay “History Is Running Backwards,” David Brooks makes a compelling case that the modern Western experiment, built on the twin engines of material progress and radical individual freedom, has left something essential hollow in the human soul.

Across the globe, billions of people have lost faith in progress as a source of meaning and are flocking to its opposite, drawn toward tradition, spiritual authority, and communal belonging.

The post-war era’s expansion of personal and economic freedoms did not produce a nirvana of free individuals; instead, it led to a society in which social bonds were attenuated, grand purpose was lost, and people were left shopping to fill a spiritual void.

Brooks argues that this vacuum is not incidental, it is the predictable fruit of a civilization that traded transcendence for transaction, and community for autonomy. What people have lost, he writes, is a secure base: a stable home and community, solid emotional connections, financial security, a coherent culture, and an understanding that our lives are contained within a shared moral order.

The surge of reactionary traditionalism, religious revival, and nostalgia-driven politics sweeping the world is, in Brooks’ telling, less a political movement than a spiritual cry, the sound of human beings insisting, against all the promises of modernity, that they were made for something more.

Global Flourishing Study

Where Brooks diagnoses the disease, the Global Flourishing Study is systematically mapping the antidote.

This landmark $43 million longitudinal research initiative, led jointly by Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program and Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, in partnership with Gallup, surveys over 200,000 participants across 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, tracking individuals annually across six domains:

• happiness and life satisfaction
• mental and physical health
• meaning and purpose
• character and virtue
• close social relationships
• financial stability

Its first wave of findings, released in 2025, delivered a striking rebuke to the assumptions of secular modernity. Many middle-income developing countries were doing better in terms of meaning, purpose, and relationships than the richer developed world, directly challenging the idea that wealth and technological progress are the primary drivers of human wellbeing.

The study’s most consequential findings concern the institutions that traditional community life has always centered on. Attendance at religious services is associated with greater flourishing, and in most countries the positive relationship between flourishing and religious service attendance is stronger than between flourishing and participation in civil society activities, with effects strongest in the most secular Western nations.

The data on family is equally clear: good childhood relationships with mother and father were positively associated with adult flourishing, while having parents who were never married, divorced, or deceased, compared with having parents who were married, was associated with lower adult flourishing.

In short, for human flourishing, meaning, purpose, community, relationships, and religion count more than wealth and success — which comports with most wisdom and religious teaching.

Read together, Brooks’ cultural diagnosis in History Running Backwards and the Global Flourishing Study’s empirical findings tell the same story from different directions, one through history and philosophy, the other through rigorous longitudinal data. Both converge on a single conclusion: the things modernity has most aggressively dismantled — faith, intact families, thick communities, and shared moral purpose — are precisely what human beings need most in order to thrive.

The spiritual void Brooks describes is not a rhetorical device. It is a measurable phenomenon with measurable consequences, and the data points clearly toward its remedy.