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Notes -
I'm the wrong person to ask, because insofar as I read fiction, it's mostly from before 1914, and all of it in recent years has been from before 2001. World War I and 9/11 mark important (though not overwhelming) points of decline in Western culture in my view.
However, I agree on your basic point. A certain minimum curiousity is required to explore beyond one's culture, and e.g. the Victorians are effectively an alien culture for people in the West today. However, it is reassuring that those few who have curiousity can often still read and enjoy e.g. Jane Austen or George Elliott, even when they are very woke.
Whenever I feel downhearted about it all, I remember the heroic Irish monks who worked so hard to preserve the glories of Antiquity, despite their inability to produce anything of equivalent value. If we can get through the next few centuries of self-imposed Darkness while preserving the glories of the past, I would consider that a great achievement, even if European civilization and its American/Oceanic offspring never produce a Dante's Inferno, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth, or The Brothers Karamazov again. The greatest challenge in such a Dark Age, apart from the swordpoints of barbarians, is convincing the next generation that such ideas are worth preserving. So many great works of the human race have been avoidably lost, because their value was not seen.
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