An attitude shared by academics and policy-makers, one that has bounced around the world over the past several decades, posits that the future is now. People demand that the future be immediate. They want instant gratification of their hopes for the future, an immediate, bold new world, and so they ignore the fact that the human race mostly changes very slowly.
Just because some people ride on electric scooters, drink coffee grown in one nation, processed in another and sold in a third, and trade electronic crypto-currency doesn’t mean that there aren't other people who gather firewood, herd goats, and sling stones at strangers who get too close.
The world does not move fast. We as Jews are acutely aware of this; our history is a constant, preserved to guide us for generations. But to gentile societies, it is sometimes a surprise when well-established, long-standing trends and traditions simply fail to fall apart even though it’s now the “Modern Era”. The ways of a nation are not morning dew that evaporates after dawn. They are like rivers, cut deep and hardly ever ceasing their flow.
Should the world have been shocked when Russia, as it used to, invaded one of her neighbors, yet again? Of course not. People only fooled themselves into thinking that this was a new age, without these barbaric relics of the past, and that all of a sudden everyone was working on a fresh new slate.
Remember The End of History and the Last Man, the 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argued that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in1991—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." What naivete!
So should we be surprised when a Catholic- an Irish Catholic, in fact -is no great friend to the Jewish nation? Should anyone at all so much as bat an eye when Arabs, as they have done since Islam was born in the 7th centurey, raid the towns of the “infidels” to slaughter, rape and loot?
The democratic sphere is possessed by progress fever. Every old ethos, from monarchy to merely believing in the existence and validity of national borders, has to be discarded. These countries fail to understand that this frenzied quest after modernization is not universal at all. Did tribesmen in Afghanistan want the United States to give them 21st-century infrastructure? Did the people of Iran appreciate a modern, Western-style government, or did they revolt and install a fundamentalist theocracy instead?
It is our prerogative to resist this modernity craze. We can’t simply declare that the future is now, that all people are absolutely equal, and that everyone in the world there is a democracy-loving, diversity-embracing, responsible citizen just waiting to be led down the right path. The nature of a nation must be taken into account when we look at the world, or we will forever be trying to cram square pegs into round holes.