It's worth keeping in mind also that while perhaps some of the new normal that we all grew up with is turning out to have been temporary, a lot of it appears permanent. Collins is right that we should have our eyes wide open, and that cuts both ways.

There are prosaic examples -- as noted above we're not about to go back to not having electricity -- and in some ways those things have very human (and humane) permanent impacts. (E.g. we're not going to forget all the medical science and other knowledge that has driven infant mortality rates down, and life expectancies up, to levels never even imagined by the Romans or the Egyptians.) There are many examples of permanent change in basic social morays too, e.g. our major powers today unlike the Romans and Egyptians do not consider slavery to be a normal building block of a national economy. And etc.

All of those things and many more which are not being un-done, large and small, are relevant in ways large and small to the growth of the nonprofit arts sector since WWII. Collins is seeing only some of the trees in an enormous forest of long-term changes in human society. Some 50-year-old trees have fallen, no question, or have been chopped down due to our own short-sightedness; that doesn't mean the forest as a whole is dying off.

There's also the question of the nuclear family, which in its isolation and mobility in modern culture is an aberration of history (at least up to now).

Much of the old normal lacks things like lights and heat and electricity, so I wonder how far back we can go.

And, hence, our conversations at Project Audience that veered off into subjects like Slow Food and New Urbanism.

I'd encourage you, if you're the reading type, to check out a few books by Jane Jacobs -- if you're feeling brave, start with her last book, "Dark Age Ahead." But for something more relevant, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations."

I am more hopeful than she was in her last book. She felt that our civilization is forgetting those things that made it truly great. I feel we're only beginning to remember what the modernists of the 20th century tried to eradicate.

In any case, as one other blogger pointed out, there is a lot of work to do in the face of the 20th century systems that refuse to change.

Many of the younger people I know who are designers and planners don't seem to see solutions as being "pure." In other words, while modernists tended to try to completely throw away the past, there's a trend to try to meld what we once knew before the modernists, and what we've learned from the modernists and adapt it all to more sustainable models.

And it all leads back to Slow Food and New Urbanism, both of which try to apply older ideas to 20th century modernist concepts.

That was my very long-winded way of acknowledging that yes, post-war western society was an aberration; but no, I do not believe we're necessarily looking at a dark age coming, either.