THE YEAR OUR CIVILIZATION BEGAN TO DIE (AND NOBODY CARED)

WARRIOR SACRIFICING RAM, FRAGMENT, GREEK

I. THE YEAR THINGS BEGAN TO IMPLODE

You can feel it in everything around you. Headlines. People. Events. The fatalism, nihilism, nothingness, deafening silence. The crumbling. The unravelling. The fascists, authoritarians, psychopaths. The wars, violence, conflict.

The flame of human consciousness dimming. This is the shadow of Thanatos, the death impulse, his wings covering the globe.

Our civilization is beginning to die.

II. WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR CIVILIZATION TO DIE

LOL…these are the kinds of words that get me in trouble. Let’s dissect the nature of the problem.

To people like me, and you, that is to say, thoughtful, it’s self-evident that our civilization is beginning to die. We can see it in the unravelling of everything that we think of as civilization.

Science. Democracy. Peace. Justice. Truth. Reason. The fatalism that these noblest of aspirations even matter anymore. It took human beings five millennia to develop these greatest of breakthroughs.

Now we have “tech.” Go ahead and chuckle. The age we live in, I often say, is…

Our civilization is beginning to die. Everything that we think of as civilized is being demolished around us. Can we say that out loud? Aren’t we all thinking it? Even, LOL, Trump? Is it still “alarmism” and “hyperbole” to talk about this yet?

I don’t know, guys. Should we even bother?

III. THERE WAS AN OCEAN HERE ONCE, OR, THE RECEDING OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

People like you and me are now anachronisms. We are out of time. The world is now going backwards. But we are still where we were, which is forwards. So we are like voyagers stranded in a place that used to be an ocean, but is now a desert. And we are sitting here trying to tell people that there was an ocean here once. Are they capable of understanding what we’re saying?

Tell me if you think the following three statements are true, even halfway.

1. The average person does not think our civilization is dying.

2. The average person doesn’t care if our civilization is dying.

3. The average person doesn’t know how to think about whether or not our civilization is dying.

That’s why I gave you a simple enough way to understand it. Civilization is the sum, union, set, transcendent figure, of these institutions or accomplishments, a way of cohering, a project undertaken together. Now we are not going anywhere together but nowhere at all.

Consciousness is many things. It is love, it is unity, it is universal truth, at its highest. At its lowest, it’s just perception, understanding, crude awareness. We are failing catastrophically at all these things, even the lowest.

The average person has no consciousness of this whatsoever. And that is because the flame of human consciousness is dimming. It has dimmed so far in many people that it barely flickers at all. That isn’t an insult. Is it? Maybe it is. Maybe it deserves to be. We’ll come back to that.

It’s easy to observe that many people around us have scant consciousness now. They appear to be unaware of much at all. History, futurity, what might have been. Who they are, who they should be, why their lives suddenly seem so futile and miserable and frightening. That their moral concerns are limited to themselves, and in the narrowest senses. Please me, desire me, like me, want me, fuck me, seduce me. That is because they have been enslaved by the algorithm and the model. Every choice they imagine they’re making is in fact made for them, social, psychological, cultural, relational, economic.

The expansion of human consciousness is breaking down everywhere around us now. In this consciousness itself is now ill, sick, malade, as we say in French, a word with no good English translation, “made bad,” which implies an absence and a cause both.

Hey, should we ask ChatGPT what it “thinks”? Kill me, I’m already making an UmairGPT. These are the depths to which we’ve all sunk. Sorry, UmAIr.

IV. THE BROKEN DIALECTIC OF CIVILIZATION

The trouble begins here. For many people now, “civilization” is precisely the absence of any or all of the following things:

—Democracy
—Peace
—Justice
—Truth
—Reason
—Knowledge
—Decency

As with so many things in our age, the very meaning of the thing to be understood has itself been not just perverted, but inverted. Perverted is to be lopsided, a misshapen caricature. But this inversion of the fundamental ideas inside things is a hallmark of our age. We still don’t have a good word for it, and not even Orwell himself could scale these intellectual heights.

The point though is that for many people “civilization” has come to mean the precise opposite of what it is. So: education is bad, science doesn’t exist, truth has no veracity, reason is to be mocked, knowledge is to be denied, and decency is weakness.

I don’t need to point out that this movement, this social current, this way of thinking, is ascendant. It is not a battle or a contest. We have already lost. Too many people think of “civilization” as something practically medieval for modernity to have much hold on our world anymore.

And of course that is because you can hear now from billionaires everyday who tell kids that science is a no-no, don’t get an education, democracy is bad for you, knowledge is worthless, and decency is obscene. They’re joined in this by a chorus of demagogues.

So. Let us try to summarize what “civilization” means to many people. It appears to mean a thing where authoritarianism prevails over democracy, where truth is given from the top down, rendering science and art both meaningless, where peace and justice are liabilities, and therefore, decency between people is something laughable.

This I’ve called a “broken dialectic.” Dialectic just means: a thing and its opposite. In classical ways of thinking, thesis and antithesis yielded synthesis. But here we have a breakdown. Civilization and anti-civilization aren’t going to yield a synthesis. They’re yielding less than zero already.

Let me put that in a simpler way. There aren’t “two sides” here, and this isn’t a “debate.” Civilization, in the way we think of it today, and should think of it, in the way the Athenians thought of it, in the way Sophocles wrote of it, means something. And yet here we are. Both-sidesing civilization itself. Chuckle with me.

V. POWER NOW WANTS THE ABSENCE OF CIVILIZATION

We live in a relativistic time, and this is a great sin of the left. The left will always say that two ways of thinking about a thing, which are diametrically opposed, are both “valid.”

But are they?

Can we say that civilization and anti-civilization are both “valid” ways of thinking about the subject or idea?

Of course not.

If I say to you that “civilization” is a thing without science, democracy, art, literature, freedom, truth, justice, peace, and so on, what am I really saying, and what discussion are we really having?

It’s true that may be “a” civilization. But it would be, LOL, a contradiction in terms. An “uncivilized” one, at least in terms of modernity. It’d be something, like I said, earlier, medieval, imbued with the spirit of the Dark Ages, a thing which hadn’t yet discovered liberation after liberation, political, economic, social, cultural, empirical.

Powers now wants the absence of civilization, at least in any thoughtful sense of the word. All forms of power: political, technological, financial, cultural. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

VI. LET THEM EAT TECHNOSLAVERY

Power wants the absence of civilization now. And it is conditioning people to want it too.

So let’s think about “civilization” in a still more sophisticated, yet even simpler, way.

“Civilization” is, as the word, implies, a process. It is dynamic, not just static. It suggests a certain motion and momentum. It’s clear subtext is if not a goal, then at least an orientation, note the ending of both words.

So when we say that “civilization” is a value-free idea, we are incorrect. The value inherent in the idea of civilization is precisely that of progress. Otherwise we might as well just say kingdom, empire, or realm. It would be incorrect, by the way, to say that every civilization before ours was “uncivilized” for precisely the same reason.

Our civilization is dying now in the sense that we no longer make progress towards shared goals of any kind. And what’s fatal about our trajectory is that nobody seems to care. Because power wants that, and more than that, power wants them not to care.

And to this, the average person has happily acceded. Let them eat Netflix, the algorithm, technoslavery, and nobody gives the faintest fuck about civilization.

VII. THE LAST TABOO, OR WHY NOBODY CARES THAT NOBODY CARES ABOUT ANYTHING ANYMORE

So. Nobody much cares about the fact that this is the year our civilization began to die in disturbing and critical ways, because that is what power wants them to want. It is manufacturing fatalism, not just consent now. But fatalism to what? Civilization as we think of it beginning to end also means this average dumb shit of a person doesn’t exactly have a rosy future, after all.

Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares that civilization is beginning to die. If I write about it, my friends groan. My lovely wife says: why bother. Even I think: LOL, are you a fucking idiot, Umair, not this again.

Because now norms have set in. We’re supposed to be…content…with the end of everything decent and interesting and thoughtful and sane. Just let it fade away and not make too much of a fuss. We’re supposed to gush over the scenery while the ship sinks and pretend.

And most of us aren’t even pretending anymore. Because nobody’s supposed to care that nobody cares, nobody is allowed to, encouraged to, will much admit to, has time to, care.

We’re just math now, did you know? And because we are…

A taboo has been carefully constructed for us. Nobody is supposed to care that nobody cares about anything fucking real anymore. That anybody much thinks, learns, grows, matures, uses their mind, tends to their responsibilities, takes the world and themselves seriously. We’re all just atoms of indifference now. You Do You! I’ll Do Me! Then…who the fuck is doing civilization? This taboo is what power wants. Fatal indifference is what we have become. And in it, we’ve surrendered being in the world in mature, adult, and healthy ways.

We’re just mathematics of the crudest kind. I’m one, and you’re one, and we add and subtract. Like, heart, follow. Smash that subscribe button! Do we interact, intersect, form a union, become a transcendent number? Nope. And so…

Caring about civilization—are you kidding me? What the fuck, isn’t there another Amazon Prime movie to watch? Hey, I heard so-and-so just made a rock album! Wow! Ever noticed how none of this idiotic shit is about anything that matters anymore? So we accept the taboo. Nobody cares that nobody cares. Fuck civilization. Just give me technoslavery. But one way to think about civilization is: I care that you care. This is the job of people like us, by the way, artists, musicians, intellectuals, writers, journalists, scientists, teachers, just normal decent people, etcetera.

Americans might struggle with the way I’ve put it. “And nobody cares.” That’s because when they read, or think, they tend to do so narcissistically. I care, they’ll think, therefore, the proposition’s invalid. But of course this isn’t the way I mean it, or a correct way to think, at all.

It’s true that there are those of us who care. Care very much indeed. The little town I grew up in outside Washington DC is full of thoughtful and learned people discussing this every evening, deeply troubled by it. But it’s also a place with one of the highest education rates in the world.

When I say that “nobody cares,” it’s not a quantitive statement meant to be interpreted individualistically. I care, therefore, I exist. Wrong. You may care, 10/10, but that makes you (and I) very much the exception(s). It’s hardly a topic of discussion or import or weight. Except when a demagogue or billionaire says it, and they mean it in the inverted sense.

So we’re speaking in qualitative and collective senses, which is a European way to think. In French, we say “tout le monde” to mean everyone, which doesn’t literally mean every single person in Paris or the world, but just a current, atmosphere, sensibility.

VIII. THE ABDICATION OF EXISTENTIAL RESPONSIBILITY

…and nobody cares.

Do they?

Isn’t it true, what I said at the beginning?

The average person is more interested in whatever dumb shit is on Netflix, whatever AI garbage Spotify will serve up to them, whatever influencers YouTube et al are going to smack them in the face with, than anything remotely real. True. Worthy.

Anything that shapes or impacts their lives.

And this part is a condemnation and a jeremiad. Because in this, we see an abdication of responsibility. It is every person’s responsibility to learn, to be moral, to try to reason, to use their intellects, to infer what is best for them, and for everyone. This is adulthood’s hallmark. It’s never easily attained.

Do you see people doing that anymore? I don’t. I see technoslaves and algorithm zombies. I see people so defeated and broken inside that to remind them is their responsibility will immediately be to told that I’m asking too much from them. But I’m not the one asking.

IX. THIS IS THE YEAR OUR CIVILIZATION BEGAN TO DIE, AND…

So here we are. Our civilization is dying. This is the year it began to, in serious, grave, and irreversible ways. And nobody cares. We’re just sort of…resigned…drained…exhausted…weary.

You can be clever and say, but Umair, it really began to die that year, that day, that month. That’s fine. We are intelligent people. We don’t nitpick. We think synthetically.

Where does that leave people like us? People who a) can’t accept the inversion of civilization as something emptied of science, democracy, literature, music, art, truth, reason, justice, peace, and b) also can’t be fucking stupid and pathetic enough to just shrug and Netflix away our lives, because we take our responsibilities a little bit seriously, since we’re adults?

It leaves us in a great deal of pain. We’re anachronisms now. The world has no use for us. It is only counting down the days to its own self-destruction now, by way of pretending that Everything’s Fine, Dude!

And I think it also leaves us with a task.

Which is to remind people of what civilization is and means. Just that much. Not even defend it, or champion it. Just set the definition of the damned thing straight. After that, the responsibility is theirs, not ours. No, “civilization” isn’t just the Dark Ages falling again while technoslavery throws Netflix and Spotify at you, you poor hopeless moron. No, this isn’t a “debate” with “two sides.” There is a there here. Maybe that way the “nobody cares” part begins to…change. Can it? Will it?

I don’t know. What I do know is this. Perhaps if we do that much, we can at least stop them, in a small way, from becoming the wretched, pathetic, embarrassing things they’ve become. And in that, perhaps, we will recover some small semblance of the dignity an age like this has stolen from us, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)