Whatever Happened to the Good Old Boring News?
THE WORLD NEWSREEL · FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2026
An Exercise in Elegant Irresponsibility
Or how war rescued Western civilisation from having to discuss itself quite so incessantly.
There was a time, not very long ago, when Western civilisation appeared to have exhausted the possibilities of history.
Its great ideological conflicts were over, its empires had disappeared, and its intellectuals were left with the disagreeable prospect of having to invent something to worry about.
Fortunately, they proved equal to the task.
Immigration became an inexhaustible source of moral indignation. Every boat crossing the Channel was either the beginning of the collapse of civilisation or the foundation of a better one. It depended largely on which newspaper one read, although both agreed that civilisation was unlikely to survive the weekend.
Then there was puberty.
For several thousand years, puberty had been one of those disagreeable natural occurrences which society endured with a mixture of embarrassment and resignation.
The modern world discovered that it might also be a matter for legislation, clinical research, parliamentary debate and judicial review.
Indeed, only yesterday, the British House of Lords was scheduled to discuss the appropriate age of consent for puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormone treatments. In New Zealand, the High Court struck down restrictions on puberty blockers.
One cannot accuse modern civilisation of neglecting adolescence.
It has transformed it into a constitutional question.
In the nineteenth century, a young man was expected to become an adult, acquire a profession and perhaps die for his country.
In the twenty-first, the state has become sufficiently sophisticated to debate the precise conditions under which he may become an adult in the first place.
This is undoubtedly progress.
Whether it is progress in the right direction is the sort of question that requires a government commission, preferably one that will report after the next election.
And then, quite unexpectedly, history returned.
Russia invaded Ukraine. The Middle East resumed its ancient habit of reminding the West that geography cannot be abolished by international conferences. European governments rediscovered military expenditure, strategic interests and the regrettable necessity of producing actual ammunition.
The newspapers suddenly had something else to discuss.
The transformation was remarkable.
Yesterday's existential crisis had concerned the language permitted in a university seminar.
Today's concerns whether a tanker can pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
The university seminar has not disappeared, of course. It has merely been temporarily displaced by the possibility that the lights may go out.
Even the newspapers appear faintly relieved.
An editor who once required six columnists to explain why a particular adjective constituted an assault upon human dignity can now devote the same space to the possible destruction of a European capital.
War has the advantage of being comparatively easy to recognise.
One may disagree about its causes, consequences and moral justification, but a burning oil tanker seldom requires an expert in discourse analysis to establish that something has happened.
During the pandemic, we experienced a similar liberation.
For two glorious years, almost every human activity was reduced to a single subject. One no longer had to pretend to be interested in the latest philosophical controversy concerning the moral significance of breakfast cereals.
One merely had to discuss the virus.
Admittedly, the virus was an expensive conversational convenience.
War is considerably more so.
And this raises an uncomfortable possibility.
Perhaps modern societies do not suffer from an excess of crises.
Perhaps they suffer from an inability to live without them.
When genuine catastrophes are absent, we manufacture symbolic ones. When genuine catastrophes return, the symbolic ones do not disappear. They simply wait patiently for their next opportunity.
The modern intellectual has thus achieved something remarkable.
He has abolished boredom by making everything a matter of life and death.
Unfortunately, life and death have now returned to reclaim their original meaning.
One should not misunderstand the argument.
War is a catastrophe, not a cure. Pandemics are tragedies, not editorial improvements. And the medical treatment of young people deserves rather more seriousness than the political theatre that so often surrounds it.
But the absurdity remains.
A civilisation capable of splitting the atom, mapping the human genome and sending machines to Mars had somehow reached the conclusion that every disagreement about manners, vocabulary and identity required the moral intensity once reserved for the fall of empires.
Now the empires are threatening to fall again.
And we are discovering, with some embarrassment, that the fall of an empire is a rather different thing from an argument about pronouns.
Perhaps peace will eventually return.
The missiles will stop. The tankers will sail. The diplomats will declare victory, or at least announce that further consultations have been constructive.
And the newspapers will once again confront the terrifying emptiness of a world in which nothing sufficiently dreadful has happened before breakfast.
There will be only one solution.
We shall have to resume discussing puberty.
For the great tragedy of modern civilisation is not that history keeps repeating itself.
It is that, whenever history stops, we insist on repeating ourselves.
THE WILDE SIDE — A satirical column. All opinions are exaggerated, all paradoxes intentional, and any resemblance to common sense entirely coincidental.
The World Newsreel — Know today the truths of tomorrow.
