Can Modernity Be Renewed? Social Selection, Institutional Renewal and the Limits of Closure

Can the crisis of modernity be overcome? This article does not claim that the crisis reduces to the closure of social selection. It makes a narrower and more testable claim: the mechanisms of selection on which the self-correction of modern societies depends have been renewed repeatedly, usually after a shock and not always without violence. Renewal is conditional, not permanent and not guaranteed. The article combines four strands of evidence. First, a panel of 179 countries for 1990 to 2025, with country and year fixed effects, in which closure of selection is statistically significantly associated with higher polarization and with more dissemination of false information by parties, in the full sample and among democracies, while temporal precedence is not established. Second, a panel of 529 country-shock observations for the crises of 1997, 2008 and 2020, in which pre-shock closure predicts coup attempts but not later polarization, and not specifically in shock years. Third, historical precedents and failures of renewal, from the reform of the American civil service to the collapse of the Weimar Republic, a paired comparison of North and South Korea, Ukraine as a priority case of research, and a count of all 102 openings of selection in the data, of which 58 percent lasted ten years and 20 percent were reversed. Fourth, the demographic cost of violent transitions, for which Ukraine offers the best documented case: by the estimate of Romaniuk and Gladun (2015), the shortfall of the population in 1990 is about 38 percent of the hypothetical figure (author’s calculation). Among the instruments by which selection has been reopened, only the independence of courts is followed by later reopening in the data. Reported confidence in institutions, by contrast, is not lower where closure is higher. The article argues that violent and peaceful transitions differ in cost less in size than in reversibility: lost output recovers when peace lasts and institutions are open, whereas lost lives and lost generations do not. The claim that the crisis of modernity reduces to closure of selection is stated as a hypothesis for further research.