For a people that have multiplied in the earth to the tune of seven and a half billion — and still growing — we humans seem to need a lot of fresh starts. Perhaps this is one reason why the story of a worldwide flood survived by only a few — a story found among many different peoples across the world — has such staying power. In each story, the old world is ended, and a new life begins among just a few. Perhaps we universally recognize that we sometimes need a brand new start.
The Rise and Fall of Empires
Many empires have existed over the years. Some — like the ancient Hittites or the Mongolian Empire of Genghis Khan — faded away and left little mark behind. Others had lasting impact. Yet all are gone, leading many to wonder how long an empire can last before collapsing or being forcibly replaced. The Romans of course, built a great civilization that spread throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, and yet it collapsed. Europe fell into the Dark Ages, North Africa fell to the Muslim empire, and only the eastern half of the Roman Empire survived — in a much weakened form — until the collapse of the Byzantine Empire during the late Middle Ages.
Before the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire held sway for a few hundred years, until the Romans conquered them. Of course, the Greek Empire came after the Empire of the Medes and Persians, which came after the Babylonian Empire. No matter how great the empire, none lasted for all that long.
The Rise and Fall of Learning
But more than the rise and fall of empires, there is the rise and fall of learning. After the fall of Rome, learning so collapsed in Europe that we call that time period “the Dark Ages” to this day. Even the famed empire of Charlemagne, and of the Anglo-Saxons in East Anglia just before them were primitive compared to the advancements of the ancient world.
Nor was this the first or only “Dark Age” of history. There was in fact a Dark Age in Greece itself, between the fall of the Mycenean Empire and the rise of the Greek city-states, when the Greeks themselves lost the ability to read and write. It was not until the introduction of the alphabet to the Greek people that they were able to once again read and write, but only by starting over. The original pre-alphabet Greek script, known as Linear B, was not deciphered until 1952. All previous learning was gone. The mighty Greek civilization effectively had to start completely over in its learning. The Iliad, one of the first works of the new learning, simply put to writing oral histories from the time when the Greeks could no longer read and write.
The Rise and Fall of Populations
Ironically, for all the modern obsessions with race and racism, any two individuals in the human race are more genetically similar to each other than chimpanzees are to each other. This is at least partly because the human race has gone through several population bottlenecks in the past. In fact, it’s been proven through tracing mitochondrial DNA that every human being on the face of the earth came from one woman, who scientists named Eve, sometimes called “Mitochondrial Eve.” This was not at all what evolution had predicted or expected to be true, and the current explanation is that the entire human race went through a population bottleneck so severe that only the descendants of one woman survived.
But it also turns out that Y-chromosome DNA can be traced back in a similar way to one man. That is, the entire human race is descended from a single male and a single female. Naturally, scientists designated this man Adam, sometimes referred to as “Y-Chromosome Adam.” Presumably, this was also due to the same bottleneck or a similar one.
In the Bible, of course, Adam and Eve are the first man and woman, and are married. The genetic evidence in itself does not go so far as to prove that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam were married, or even contemporary, and the initial reaction of many scientists was to argue they were possibly hundreds of thousands of years apart. But more recent evidence suggests they could not have been that far apart after all, and so science seems to be getting closer to the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve, though with considerable reluctance.
It was at one time popular among skeptics of Christianity to ask the question, “where did Cain get his wife” in an attempt to prove that the whole story of Adam and Eve was just a myth. It now appears skeptics arguing that the story of creation is a myth would have to struggle with the same question, because all of humanity clearly began with a man and a woman.
Western Civilization and American Values
When the Pilgrims made their perilous journey to a new land, they decided it would be a good time to start over. Even though they were the product of European and British civilization up to this point, they saw a good chance to leave behind the negatives of the past — the wars between Protestants and Catholics, the old class system of kings and peasants, the constant warfare, etc. — and start over in a new land with a shared value system. The Puritans who later joined them in the new land shared much the same vision. And while other colonists, such as the Jamestown colony in Virginia, were not motivated by a search for religious freedom, they also seemed to appreciate the value of a fresh start.
The most famous fresh start came, of course, with the writing of the Declaration of Independence, where the Founding Fathers asserted that all men are created equal, in sharp contrast to the “Divine Right” proclaimed by kings and rulers. As Abraham Lincoln put it eloquently 87 years later, they “brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
We now live in an age that questions the worth of American values. To the founding principle that all men are created equal, they sneer, “but what about slavery?” Speak of the importance of the freedom of speech, and they will insist that free speech allows hate speech and misinformation. The promises of freedom of religion mean little to them, because they have no respect for religion or deeply held beliefs, unless they comport with progressive values. Instead, they seem to suspect that all religion is just superstition and an excuse for bigotry.
In short, a new generation has been taught to despise American values and history, smugly confident that what is old is of little value, and what is new is necessarily better, and convinced that “science” is on their side.
Ironically, the new generation does not seem to appreciate that their “modern thinking” is just a warmed-up rehash of old Marxist thinking that has failed every time it has been tried. It is, in fact, barely distinguishable from rejected Soviet propaganda from half a century ago.
Nor should we be surprised. The failed Marxist revolutionaries of the 1960’s didn’t give up their dreams of revolution. They just funneled their energy into the indoctrination of the youth, and bided their time.
Will the United States survive a new generation that increasingly rejects the values that made the United States the supreme superpower of the World?
Not unless we do a much better job of remembering and communicating our values, especially to those who have been indoctrinated by the haters of American values.
At the very end of the Old Testament, we read, “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
The United States is not Israel, and we have no expectation of an Elijah, but the sentiment is sound: We need to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers if we want to recover the nation. Take careful note that the modern-day Marxists have been busy for years fostering the belief that older generations are both out of touch and paranoid. Division is their way.
Our way is E Pluribus Unum.