His premise is that civilizations have “life spans,” and the Western civilization that produced America and Europe has been replaced, in our lifetime, and before our very eyes. To people whose minds were made by the West, the civilization we now find ourselves in often feels wrong, evil even, but we also find ourselves feeling oddly affectionate toward this strange new world. And the more time that passes, the more “normal” the New Civ gets to feel. We sometimes have to “pinch” ourselves to remember that society once had roots in a universe that knew something of moral absolutes, where the horrible behaviors we now read about in every morning newspaper were so rare that one such event in a year would have felt like the world is just about to end. But these things are what passes for “normalcy” today. We are still able to be reminded of what we know in our bones, although it gets harder all the time: something has gone terribly wrong. That’s what this book is about.