Hollow Men?

Do you agree with T.S. Eliot (http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~evans/hollow.html) that the world ends "not with a bang but with a whimper?" Is our civilization coming to an end, has it reached stasis (a la Fukuyama), or is it basically the same as past ages? The other day I heard an interesting proposition that the extreme sarcasm and irony among the young is a sign of a declining civilization. That seems rather tenuous - Alexander Pope was the most civilized of men and was extremely sarcastic.