Solomon taught "there is nothing new under the sun." Today, after centuries of "new" ideas, cultures, paradigms, science, even gender relations, we see how true this is. Solomon knew that there would be new people, new inventions, new recipes, but fundamentals exist, too. Ultimately, the mighty forces that seek change lose their energies and things return to the old ways. We are seeing this now on a global scale. The re-emergence of the old, more than anything, guides us in understanding the next phase in foreign, national, even personal developments.
To understand our point, we must first identify the old, and then point to the mighty forces that sought change. Phase three is to see what happens when those mighty forces lose steam, or fail to deliver. Our point is that today, in many fields of endeavor, the hopes of a new and better world are cracking and as the eggshells part, the ancient problems and ways emerge, some for the better, but many for the worse. How we deal with this is the story of the present and next generation.
The old was religions controlling the state and forcing everyone to believe a certain way. This way lasted from the fourth century in Rome, when Constantine was converted to Christianity, until relatively recently. Islam began a few centuries after Constantine, and never had any force for change similar to the West. Therefore, the Moslem world is simply a continuum of the past, whereas the Christian world has surrendered, on a governmental level, all pretext of governing society in the policies of theology.
As we notice the Western world and its emergence from the thralls of religion into freedom, and the Moslem world with its religious intolerance, we see clearly the old and the new. Moslem government is based upon religion. Even those areas liberated by American arms will not concede any recognition of other religions. One senior judge in Afghanistan will not even be polite to an "infidel." Americans in Iraq are not just struggling with a strange culture and a different religion. Americans are fighting the old with the policies of the new. It is highly questionable if President Bush has the resources to either change the old in Iraq to the new, or even to be tolerated by it to any important degree.
The great difference between the West and Islam is that Islam never went through the constant upheavals and changes that characterize Christianity. From its inception, Christianity was a disputed theology. Wars followed the disputes. Protestants and Catholics battled to a draw in the worst blood lettering in world history, and had to introduce secularism to separate them. As religion declined in the West, family and morality had no strong foundation, and declined. Anyone who had to put up with what I put up this weekend, my grandchildren, would only do it as a religious fanatic. Most people in the West, however, are not religious fanatics, even with having children. Thus, the West is having a serious problem replacing itself. America will soon have a bankrupt Social Security system because few young people replace retiring parents.
The new, a secular West, is declining. The new, a powerful America, is slipping behind the Euro. The Chinese and Indians are powering forward with American money and are supplanting many American jobs and businesses. Furthermore, the fiscal and economic decline of America is powered by the apex of American success. Those technologies discovered by American businesses are now powering Chinese and Indian businesses, and threatening American fiscal survival. I knew that all of my office equipment and most of my clothing came from China, but I was shocked today to see that my frozen fish is also from China. How long can this go on and America not decline behind its supplier? The new destroys itself and others fatten off of its decline.
Europe, after the ravages of two world wars, decided to become a United Europe. The major politicians pushed for it. Gradually, it came together. But when push came to shove, and people realized that United Europe threatened their old ways, France, Holland and England voted not to go further, and the entire project is in jeopardy.
The weakness of the new ways is that people realize it is unnatural. People know intuitively that all of these high ideals can raise them morally but destroy them physically. The old taught people to protect themselves. The new says the majority and the powerful must surrender their achievements and power to the minority and the weak.
After the Second World War, in a backlash against the "old," with its hate and slaughter, the West entered a new phase of civil rights and globalism. When people began to suffer from giving others rights, and realized that those helpless people being helped are likely to toss bombs at their hosts, attitudes changed. The new is now declining, and the old is reasserting itself.
In America, every minority helped by the government was destroyed. Slaving and ghettos did not break the black family. The black family was moral, religious, and succeeded in finding the funds to improve its children. When government starting helping blacks, the blacks became destroyed. Government tried to help women. Women are today in a very unenviable position. They have been trained to be so successful that marriage and family is out for many of them, and don't they rue it. Government helped homosexuals, and so the rate of HIV is rising even after the government lowered funding for cancer research to make an HIV medicine.
As America the beautiful, the new, the idealistic, spends billions of dollars outside its borders for dubious purposes; yet, it can no longer sustain the medical expenses of its helpless and elderly. This is the new destroying the old, big time.
The new woman is something new. Nobody knows what it is, but nobody is happy about it. I saw the new woman coming thirty years ago. I took my children out of the world, especially my daughters. They appreciate what I did, when they look around at the alternative.
Thus, women of the world are splitting. Some are charging forward becoming men, and many of them are going back to the old, with a vengeance. These two women are as different as day and night. They thoroughly despise each other. The new and the old don't congregate so well together.
The Catholic Church tried the new, but very carefully. What it did was to hang out various facades, play the guitar at mass, etc., while increasing the conservative element of Cardinals, just in case. Just in case happened, so the Church pulled back the leash, and elected a thoroughly conservative Pope. Just to convey the message what it thought of the new world, the new Pope assigned an important part of the papal in vesture program to a person who left America over charges that he assigned molester priests to places where he knew they would molest children.
The Vatican will now increasingly align itself with Moslem interests, to protect the unborn, etc. The old will now join with the old, and both will march forth to battle the new. Of course, there are various segments of the old, the moderates, the radicals, etc., and each of these will form its own element.
I am an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and we Jews had the same old/new split, and I went with the old. Jews are streaming away from the new into our Haredi ultra-Orthodox community. There are people with long beards who have incredible pasts. The new has caused them such pain they want something else.
The new cannot replenish itself. Demographically, the new cannot compete with the old. When I was young, people scorned me as one whose paradigms had no future. They thought Orthodox Jewry was finished. But they were wrong. The same people, when I see them from time to time, have made a lot of money, but their large homes contain a child here and a child there, but my family blows them away.
My family is an army. Recently, somebody had a wonderful idea for me, and he was right. However, I was in the wrong mood, and didn't follow through. Finally, the person let me have it. Okay, I woke up, and agreed he was right. My children realized that the person had woken me up for the right reasons, and knew that only good things would come from his "waking me up." However, since he had "given it to me," they let him have it. I had to apologize to him. I pity anyone who starts up with me. Old fashioned people are for real. I gave my life for my children. I had no vacations, and no material comforts, just living for my children. When they grow up, they are not going to forget that. Secular man and woman barely have one or two children, and the children are often not number one on the list. Don't the children know it. That is some lovely family.
In my religion, the large and lovely temples of the non-Orthodox have plenty of seats. In my community there are not plenty of seats. People come to synagogue three times a day, and it is crowded. In one synagogue that begins prayer at sunrise, it is physically impossible for a new person to enter the room.
The new doesn't specialize in children. It specializes in pressuring the old and ignorant to accept what the new wants. It has no respect for religious and old-fashioned people, and thinks that religion is irrational and stupid.
For many years, the hazing I received as a child really bothered me. Was I irrational if I think the world is 6,000 years old? Once I interviewed Paul Erdos, the mighty mathematician who taught Einstein the theory of numbers. There was an audience of a mathematical genius and a professor of economics. They were shocked. "I didn't know he was so shallow," one told me.
Do you believe in evolution? Impossible. Science tells us that no system can evolve into a more complex system, but only go down and decline in complexity. This is a principle of physics known as entropy. Nobody can disagree with it, period.
Do you believe that the world came from a tiny speck and turned into the universe? Can't be. Science says that a tiny speck containing the matter of the universe cannot possibly expand. Even light cannot escape from it. This is the phenomena of black holes. Even one crushed star is a black hole, and certainly the entire universe as a speck is the mother of all black holes.
And yet all of these new thinkers believe that the world came from a speck and turned into complex cosmic systems and people. This denies physics. Can't do it, sorry. If you want to explain the universe, there is no way other than Creation.
If G-d created the universe, it would be ridiculous for Him to have to wait 15 billion years. It happened in a few days.
Even the great evolutionist Steven Gould of Harvard admitted that evolution was not a scientific process. After all, said Gould, nature is filled with simple structures with only a few complex ones. Surely, nature does not favor complexity. Therefore, he said, evolution did take place, but, as an accident! Come on, my eyeball is an accident? Are you serious?
And those kind English physicists who proved to everyone of their colleagues, even the atheist Steven Weinberg of Texas, that the world is designed for humans (the anthropic principle), do they still believe in evolution? It is the new fighting the old, with blind fanaticism. Now who is irrational?
Incidentally, all of those people who support teaching evolution in public school out of respect for science, because science only believes in what can be proven by experiment, may I ask you something? Do you believe in math? Do you realize that math is made from axioms, and that nobody ever proved an axiom? Do you know that physics is based upon math which is axiom oriented? Do you believe in chemistry which is based upon math and physics? Okay, so you believe in physics, math, and chemistry, but you won't be religious, right? But you can't explain yourself. So, you are irrational, right? At least, I am rational. I can explain all of my paradigms, not like Einstein who hid behind "mystery," like the philosopher Plato who invented "forms of apples" that are completely ridiculous, but are great for people who don't wear socks and want to teach "new" things to the masses, and can only do this by being a mystic. If you talk sense, they will blow you and your apples to the other side.
The new doesn't have much mystique left in it. People are tiring of the idiocy of Bush taking a 1.3 trillion dollar surplus and giving it back to the taxpayer, and then borrowing billions of dollars from the Chinese to sustain the budget. People are getting frightened of the new who are so self-confident, not a fear in sight, and just plow ahead in this country and that country while back at home the elderly are suffering, and so is the budget.
Soon enough, the US that earns about 2 trillion dollars a year, and has to borrow because it spends more than it earns, will have to shell out 50 trillion dollars when Social Security comes do. The new will destroy us. If only we had time to become old, have enough children, and provide assets for the retirees. Or else, we can be new, and do what they do in France. When the elderly want to retire, they raise the age of retirement! Then, the new, the young, go flocking to the beaches in the summer, while their aged parents sweat in the cities, until a heat wave comes along, and takes many people off of the pension payrolls.