Is contemporary atheism sufficient to sustain a civilisation?

[Anomalocaris]

Most of human history has been unfair especially in theocracies so it is doing at least as good as those.

Sorry, but that's a shit argument and often heard before. Others did it too, so it's OK then. It's not doing good for the population at large and that's the only thing I take offence with. Presenting it as an example of a working society. In fact, China represents the worst of both worlds. Unchained capitalism and an oppressive political system.

In China, which has living memory of famine and mideval standard of living, optimality is indicated by the speed of improvement to economic security and the general standard of living, not the asthetics of political and capitalist systems.   So what they have would hardly seem like an unsatisfactory world, and certainly a far better world than one in which well tamed capitalism is further embellished by free elections held between famines, and colossal and unrelieved natural disasters against a background of general poverty.

It is the fact that western political opinion maker finds it inconvenient to register the fact that the first criteria of any successful system to the developing world is the ability to deliver rapid improvements to standard of living, and not to please western political and economic asthetics sensibilities, that made the western world so tone deaf and unable to anticipate why what it advocates so often fail elsewhere.