By Paul Wallis
EDITOR AT LARGE
DIGITAL JOURNAL
April 17, 2026
Before his death, Professor Stephen Hawking called on the world to avoid the risks of artificial intelligence, warning it could be the worst event in the history of civilization - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Jemal Countess
Please note: This article is largely intended to raise the subject of whether civilization exists. You get to guess.
Western civilization wasn’t always a contradiction in terms. Gandhi was famously asked what he thought of Western civilization, and he said he thought it’d be a good idea. You can even see Western civilization in the news occasionally.
This isn’t a civilization in the strict definition of the term. This is the AI definition; praise be to the LLM, hosanna, and who’s Anna?
A civilization is a complex, organized human society featuring cities, a central government, job specialization, and social classes. It represents a high level of cultural, technological, and social development, often characterized by written language, monumental architecture, and art.
Complex, yes. To the point of utterly counterproductive and self-destructive insanity. Cities, you probably mean antiquated, disorganized, badly maintained hellholes. Government, maybe/not very/hardly. Looks more like a boys’ club for corrupt geriatric proven idiots.
Social classes, there are two: obscenely rich and anyone else who can afford to pretend to exist. Cultural development, rehashed garbage. Social development has been going backward since about 2016. Technology, we know, and more often than not wish we didn’t.
The default image of Western civilization usually trudges back to something that looks like the Parthenon, Rome, or anything else 2000 years old. Money, the apparent sole reason for Western civilization, traces back to the Lydian civilization, those nice people who invented it. That society went extinct quite quickly.
These images of long-gone societies are what we call “civilized”. They weren’t. Their physical reality was brutal at best. They fought endless wars as bad in proportion to the much smaller populations of the time as modern wars. Despotism was the norm, backed up by rich sycophants. These despotic regimes regularly failed dismally. Crime was the default way of life for people who couldn’t afford to live. Cue Generations Z, A, and B.
The modern take on Western civilization isn’t as grandiose and inspiring as it looks from this idyllic description.
It’s just considerably more stupid, and there’s a lot more of it.
Even stupider, somehow, is the stomping ground our invaluable rhetoricians have made out of the subject of Western civilization. Everyone’s apparently trying to save it.
Sooner or later, someone’s going to figure out what they’re trying to save it from, which is largely itself. The noises, however, are hilarious.
Let’s start with the Heritage Foundation, that invaluable supplier of conservative clichés with footnotes. Apparently, Western society can only be saved by abolishing the EU. They think the EU is a hotbed of socialism. The EU and European history in general is more like a very large Chamber of Commerce meeting with occasional wars. It’s about as socialist as Goldman Sachs in practice.
In conservative circles, you win Brownie points for fearlessly agreeing with anyone and everyone. Listening to an American talking about socialism is like listening to a nun explaining the fine nuances of brothel franchising. It’s a case of Margaret Thatcher’s children’s children, those ridiculous paragons of altruistic greed, pretending they can understand anything after about the year 1600.
Then there’s the other side. Dissent Magazine is a good one-stop for this opposing argument, whether you entirely agree with them or not. “How Liberalism Failed” is a nicely structured take on the current issues of plutocracy, populism, and the failure of democracies to deal with things like immigration. Citing Putin stooge Viktor Orban saying, “The era of liberal democracy is over,” was a nice touch. He wasn’t gone when he made that statement, but it reads well now.
These polar opposites deliver one message in total. Western civilization is talking itself to death and taking the global economy and future generations with it.
There’s a reason for that. The real future is effectively a no-go topic. You can have any number of fictional futures, though. Maybe even something really imaginative like a dysfunctional society, a post-apocalyptic world, zombies, bleak, uninspiring landscapes, or whatever.
You could hardly hope for a more dysfunctional society. It barely exists even in theory. The apocalypse was late, so economics did it for you, and now you don’t need World War 3. If the current political situation isn’t enough like the Attack of the Living Dead, you just haven’t been paying attention. The urban deserts could be said to be self-explanatory.
As for “whatever”, it’s pretty obvious nobody has a clue or is trying to have a clue. The collapse of Western civilization is apparently a good go-to for all that self-important media that people used to take seriously. Now, it’s barely a weather report.
Where did the future go? It was the big sparkling prize of the 1950s and 60s. Things would be incredible in 2000. It’d be The Jetsons, and everyone would have flying cars. Science was the real story.
Ah, um, no. What we got was pure mediocrity. Progress was replaced by Process, where virile, meaningless, instantly forgettable bastards in meetings turned everything into an in-house bitching session about individual words. The means became the end. No thought or sensory processes required. The future? When was that? Was it on the agenda? If not, it didn’t and doesn’t matter.
So here’s the question, folks:
Do you want a future?
Because you can’t have one doing things like this.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
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