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...