Everything depends on good teachers. Everything.


I went to a very good high school. It had good teachers. I benefited very much from those teachers, though I did not use all the skills I learned there later. Mr Smart the music teacher was just one example. But I remember the other teachers who were dedicated, and very talented. My only frustration was that I wanted to be able to concentrate on just a few things. But today I can say going to a good school I think is very important.
I had lots of good examples around me of people that were motivated and hard working. Both students and teachers.


[Maybe good teachers can do only so much, but from what I saw, they can make a tremendous amount of difference.]

And later I saw this in yeshiva also. Going to a good school  is of utmost importance to be able to get anywhere.

I am not in yeshiva now, but I can say without having a great learning partner ,I would today not have been able to get anywhere in Gemara.

One trouble I did have was in recognizing what really is a good yeshiva. Shar Yashuv was and still is a Baal Teshuva Yeshiva. And I had trouble recognizing that Reb Naphtali Yeager and the other roshei yeshiva were really learning at the top level. So I admit sometimes you can find exceptions to the rule. Reputation is not everything.  Later, I was at the Mir with who was then the deepest thinker in the yeshiva world besides Rav Shach --Reb Shmuel Berenbaum And there I saw the reputation of being the top place was well deserved.

Musar [Ethics] of Torah does not deal with philosophical issues. And that I think is a flaw.

But if one would want to understand the philosophy of Torah there would be a problem. That is the major works about the world view of Torah are great works but don't deal with issues that are in most people's mind all that relevant. And my own education in these areas is zero.

I read a drop of the Guide. And I read a few times the first chapter of the Duties of the Heart which is neo Platonic. I did a good deal of work on the Ari and the Nahar Shalom of Shalom Sharabi but those later sources are dealing more with the mystic aspects of Torah more than the world view aspects.

If I could I would plow through the philosophical works of Torah, Saadia Gaon's Emunot VeDeot, the Guide, Joseph Albo, Crescas, Abravenel. Ibn Gavirol.
The point of this is simple.One does not need to be knowledgeable nor smart at all to be a decent human being. But one's actions invariably follow ones "deot" opinions. And with crooked opinions ones actions will be crooked. Without getting the right opinions about Torah from people that understood Torah fairly well like the Rambam and Saadia Gaon one invariably gets his or her opinions from people that do not understand Torah very well.  And thus one's actions will not reflect the Torah but rather the cruddy opinions of charlatans.

There is a lot of stuff going on in mediaeval Jewish philosophy but it takes effort to get to it.
The surface level is, well,..mediaeval. But under that level there are important insights



To sum up. Musar along with השקפה is important. In yeshiva what is needed is  a separate session for learning the philosophical approach of Torah. Without this people absorb their world views from the street but think well of themselves as being kosher because they do rituals. The rituals however have no effect if the inner center of their minds is filled with nonsense.


Some people others were not happy with the philosophical works of Torah. The result is that when people learn the world view of Saadia Gaon or the Rambam they think it is heresy. This can only mean one thing. That without the books of the Rishonim on the world view of Torah people fall into such mistakes that when they hear the truth they reject it.

Two songs for the glory of the God of Israel

q93   q93 midi q93 nwc

 q98  q98 midi  98nwc

religious teachers

Religious teachers that are psychopaths cause perverted desires fall from the Divine Chariot.  I think this explains the reason why sodomy is so pervasive in the USA.

My thinking is that we find in the Talmud some serious criticism about religious teachers. But furthermore we also find that what happens in Israel is reflected in the larger world. So when our own house is not in order this is seen in the large in the general events of the world.

Now it is a good question about how to tell the difference between good and bad religious teachers. It is important to know that there do exist bad religious teachers and that because of them there are problems because of people that follow them naively thinking they are teaching Torah.


Now this problem does beg for a solution. The only possible solution I can see is individual. That is it is up to each individual to learn Torah on their own and thus not to be dependent on others to know what it says. And if it is too much to ask everyone to know the whole Oral and Written Law then at least Musar--the books of Jewish ethics written during the Middle Ages tell us in a practical sense what the essence of Torah is. [Musar is a well known set of books. I do not need to list them here. Mainly they are divided between books from the middle ages and the later books of the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter that went into more detail in how to apply the lessons of Musar in a practical sense. ] [In my non humble opinion the חובות לבבות Duties of the Heart is the best one.]

I should add that the problem about evil religious teachers is not just in that Torah lesson but begins in the LM from Vol I ch 8 and goes through the entire two volumes. This theme does come up in the Talmud also and even the Mishna. אם אתה רואה דור שפורעניות באות אליו צא ובדוק בדייני ישראל שכל פורעניות שבאות לעולם אינן באות אלא בגלל דייני ישראל I forgot where that particular Gemara is. It is somewhere near the end of Tractate Shabat but I forgot the page number.

So who then can decide a halacha issue? In monetary cases where there are two opposing parties we do know who can decide--מומחה לרבים. someone who has been tested by experts in the Talmud and been found never to make a mistake. But in other cases?

The irony is that the people we would hope and expect to teach us morality and true principles of how to guide our lives are often the source of the most damage. In fact, I think this is so in the majority of cases.

I should mention that none of this is meant to disparage the sincere people who are sitting and learning Torah whether privately or in straight Lithuanian yeshivas.

People of intellect and morality are disqualified and  attacked when the religious  world  is under the control of a tyranny backed by the mob.  Don’t ask where all of the smart people are.  Don’t ask where all of the leaders of men are.  The religious world wants to be ruled by psychopaths and imbeciles. 

The best solution would be to fire all religious teachers. Save the money or give it to yeshivas where real Torah is learned [Lithuanian Yeshivas].

Introduction
I wanted to discuss something that is bothering me about a Tosphot in Shavuot 43a and Bava Metzia 81b. In short, Tosphot is asking two questions on Rabbainu Hananel that could be applied to Rashi. But Tosphot does not want to ask on Rashi. Then the Maharsha gives an answer why one question might be more applicable to Rabbainu Hananel. But if you think about it, the idea of the Maharsha applies just as well to Rashi.

The basic idea is this. Shmuel says if a lender takes a pledge  and loses it, he loses the whole loan. The Gemara asks that this does not seem like Rabbi Eliezer nor Rabbi Akiva. R. Eliezer says the lender takes an oath and loses nothing. R. Akiva says he loses the worth of the pledge. The Gemara answers Shmuel is when he did not explain (that the pledge is for the loan), and the argument between RA and RE is when he did explain. R Hananel reverses this. Shmuel is when he explained and the argument of RE and RA is when he did not.

The Gemara in Bava Metzia, on a relevant note, is trying to get a Mishna there is be like both RE and RA and can't do so. The Mishna there says a lender is a paid guard with respect to the pledge. This is good to RA, but not to RE. Tosphot asks if R Hananel is right then the Mishna in BM is everyone's opinion, and it is when he explained (like Shmuel). The question of the Maharsha is this same question applies to Rashi when he did not explain (like Shmuel).

Another question of Tosphot on RH is RE takes too great a leap from nothing (when he is does not explain) to everything (when he does). The Maharsha says this last point of Tosphot is why Tosphot did not ask their first question on Rashi. My question is the same exact point applies to Rashi.

That is: The Maharsha suggested that Tosphot is thinking that if the right version is like Rashi then RE might make just one step from nothing (when the lender does explain) to the exact amount of the loan when he does not. My question is this same answer works even better to Rabbainu Hananel. He loses nothing when he does not explain and only against the loan when he does.

In more detail my question is this:  The Maharsha says we might says when the Gemara says Re and RA agree with Shmuel it means each makes one step from their starting position up one more step. My question is this works well to Rabbanu Chananel. That is when he explains then RE goes up one step to say the pledge is parallel only to its own value of the loan. and when he does not explain then it is not tied to the loan at all. But to Rashi this would not work. When he does not explain it is  parallel to its own value of the loan but when he does explain it is not tied to the loan at all.

I do not say there is no answer to this. I assume there must be an  answer. But I don't happen to know what it is right now. The Maharsha is probably answering this, but I do not see how.

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Introduction
I wanted to discuss something that is bothering me about a תוספות in שבועות מ''ג ע''ב and ב''מ פ''א ע''ב . In short, תוספות is asking two questions on רבינו חננאל that could be applied to רש''י. But תוספות does not want to ask on רש''י. Then the מהרש''א gives an answer why one question might be more applicable to רבינו חננאל. But if you think about it the idea of the מהרש''א applies just as well to רש''י.

The basic idea is this. שמואל says if a מלווה takes a משכון  and loses it he loses the whole loan. The גמרא asks this does not seem like רבי אליעזר not רבי עקיבא. The מחלוקת is thus: רבי אליעזר says he takes an oath and loses nothing. רבי עקיבא says he loses the worth of the pledge. In our גרסה  and the גרסה  of רש''י the גמרא answers שמואל is when מלווה did not מפרש, and the  מחלוקת between רבי עקיבא and רבי אליעזר is when he did מפרש. And רבינו חננאל reverse this. שמואל is when he מפרש and רבי אליעזר and רבי עקיבא is when he did not.

The גמרא בבא מציעא פא: on a relevant note is trying to get a משנה there is be like both רבי אליעזר and רבי עקיבא and can't do so. The משנה there says a מלווה is a שומר שכר with respect to the משכון. This is good to רבי עקיבא but not to רבי אליעזר. Then תוספות asks if רבינו חננאל is right then the משנה in בבא מציעא is everyone's opinion and it is when he מפרש like שמואל. The question I had  was this same question applies to רש''י when he did not explain like שמואל. Theמהרש''א asks this same question.
Another question of תוספות on רבינו חננאל is רבי אליעזר takes too great a leap from nothing when מלווה is does not explain to everything when he does. The מהרש''א says this last point of תוספות is why תוספות did not ask their first question on רש''י. My question is the same exact point applies to רש''י.

That is: The מהרש''א suggested that תוספות is thinking that if the right גרסה is like רש''י then רבי אליעזר might make just one step from nothing when does explain to the exact amount of the loan when he does not. My question is this same answer works even better to רבינו חננאל. He loses nothing when he does not מפרש and only against the loan when he does.
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שבועות מ''ג ע''ב וב''מ פ''א ע''ב. קושיה על תוספות בשבועות מ''ג ע''ב וב''מ פ''א ע''ב. בקיצור, תוספות הוא שואל שתי שאלות על רבינו חננאל שיכול להיות מיושמות על רש''י. אבל תוספות לא רוצה לשאול על רש''י. אז המהרש''א נותן תשובה מדוע שאלה אחת יכולה להיות יותר רלוונטית לרבינו חננאל. אבל הרעיון של מהרש''א חל באותה המידה לרש''י. הרעיון הבסיסי הוא זה. שמואל אומר שאם מלווה לוקח משכון ומאבד אותו הוא מאבד את כל ההלוואה. הגמרא שואלת זה לא נראה כמו רבי אליעזר ולא רבי עקיבא. המחלוקת היא כך: רבי אליעזר אומר שהוא לוקח שבועה ומאבד שום דבר. רבי עקיבא אומר שהוא מאבד את השווי של המשכון. בגרסה שלנו והגרסה של רש''י הגמרא עונה שמואל הוא כאשר המלווה לא מפרש, והמחלוקת בין רבי עקיבא והרבי אליעזר היא כאשר הוא  מפרש. ורבינו חננאל מהפך את זה. שמואל הוא כאשר הוא מפרש, ורבי אליעזר והרבי עקיבא הם כאשר הוא לא עשה זאת. הגמרא בבבא מציעא פא: בנימה רלוונטית מנסה לקבל תוצאה שהמשנה שם יכולה להיות כמו שניהם, רבי אליעזר ורבי עקיבא, ולא יכולה לעשות את זאת. המשנה שם אומרת המלווה הוא שומר שכר ביחס למשכון. זה טוב לרבי עקיבא, אבל לא לרבי אליעזר. אז תוספות שואלים אם רבינו חננאל נכון, אז המשנה בבבא מציעא היא דעת של כולם וזה כאשר הוא מפרש כמו שמואל. השאלה של המהרש''א היה שאותה שאלה חלה על רש''י כשהוא לא הסביר כמו שמואל. שאלה נוספת של תוספות על רבינו חננאל.  רבי אליעזר לוקח זינוק יותר מדאי גדול. כאשר המלווה לא מסביר את הכל אז הוא מפסיד את כל החוב וכאשר ביא אינו מסביר הוא אינו מפסיד כלום . מהרש''א אומר הנקודה האחרונה של תוספות זו הסיבה התוספות לא שואלים את השאלה הראשונה שלהם ברש''י.  השאלה שלי היא אותה הנקודה המדויקת חלה על רש''י כלומר: מהרש''א הציע כי תוספות חושב שאם נכון שהגרסה הוא כמו רש''י, אז רבי אליעזר עשוי לעשות רק צעד. אם המלווה מפרש אינו מפסיד כלום, וכאשר הוא אינו מסביר  אז המשכון כנגד שיוווי ההלוואה המדויק. השאלה שלי היא אותה תשובה שזה עובד אפילו טובה יותר לרבינו חננאל. הוא לא מאבד שום דבר כשהוא לא מפרש, ורק כנגד ההלוואה כשהוא מפרש.


Talmud Bava Metzia 81b Shavuot 43B

In more detail my question on Tosphot and the Maharsha is this:  The Maharsha says we might says when the Gemara says RE and RA agree with Shmuel it means each makes one step from their starting position up one more step. My question is this works well to Rabbanu Chananel. That is when he explains then RE goes up one step to say the pledge is parallel only to its own value of the loan. and when he does not explain then it is not tied to the loan at all. But to Rashi this would not work. When he does not explain it is  parallel to its own value of the loan but when he does explain it is not tied to the loan at all.
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In more detail my question on תוספות and the מהרש'א is this:  The  מהרש'א says we might say when the גמרא says רבי אליעזר and רבי עקיבא agree with שמואל it means each makes one step from their starting position up one more step. My question is this works well to רבינו חננאל. That is when he explains then רבי אליעזר goes up one step to say the משכון is parallel only to its own value of the loan. and when he does not explain then it is not tied to the loan at all. But to רש''י this would not work. When he does not explain it is  parallel to its own value of the loan but when he does explain it is not tied to the loan at all.
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 השאלה שלי על תוספות ומהרש''א היא זאת: המהרש''א אומר שאנחנו יכולים לומר מתי הגמרא אומרת שרבי אליעזר ורבי עקיבא מסכימים עם שמואל שזה אומר שכל אחד עושה צעד אחד מעמדת המוצא שלהם צעד אחד יותר קדימה. השאלה שלי היא שזה עובד גם לרבינו חננאל. כלומר, כאשר הוא מסביר שרבי אליעזר עולה צעד אחד לומר שלגבי ההלוואה, המשכון מקביל רק לשוויו. וכשהוא לא מסביר ומפרש, אז המשכון לא קשור להלוואה בכלל. אבל לרש''י זה לא יעבוד. כשהוא לא מסביר ומפרש את זה, המשכון מקביל לשוויו, אבל כשהוא מסביר שהמשכון כנגד ההלוואה אז, הוא לא קשור להלוואה בכלל.

While Islam is focused on world conquest, the West is spending it energy on trying to figure out what or if there is a problem.

The question is what people focus on as being a problem and how much energy they are willing to spend on fixing it. Some might consider Islam as a mild problem, but it is no where near their top priority. The question is not even intellectual focus. It is emotional focus. To what end are all their emotions focused on?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Link to article of Mark Steyn


 Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. 

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.


The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.


We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy."

Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms.

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true.

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."

As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree."

That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.


 Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: ..... So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.

Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?

So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.



 One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's dying--its population is falling calamitously.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."


And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30 years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species. . . . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct . . ."

Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."

Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.


 It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.


 As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?