TWO TESTS
We all know that life is a series of tests: toddling, speaking, reading, dating, marriage, raising kids, and so on. The old age of an individual (I'm 84) and the society bring new challenges. Personally, one has to manage infirmities. Collectively, there are, now, several doozies:
1) The colossal threat from radical Islam and the usual milder, but un-heroic go-alongs (as in Nazi Germany). Its "endemic" (Pew survey of Muslim sentiment) hatred for the Jews, not just Israel, going back, probably, to their not being "chosen," but officially, descendents of Abraham and Hagar via Ishmael, the "wild man," and not the mainstream seeds of Isaac; also, resentment at their impotence since about 1500 vs. Jewish achievement and successful power play in Palestine. Most folks everywhere were at one time or another similarly outdone, coerced, pushed back, but managed to live and let live with that, as in our South, Ireland, wherenot. Fat (or Arafat) chance in the Middle East!
So Christians and Jews, etc., allied, are forced, as over the centuries with them, to use military muscle.
Most Americans accept that now.
Our biggest present test, as before World War II, is to recognize that we are being colossally tested. The temptation of denial, scapegoating, and other bad-faith (Freud's "displacement") is enormous, as we also saw in Nazi Germany and see again worldwide.
2) Globalization: Again, the temptation is to go along with what can easily appear to be an irresistible dynamism of rational and manipulative scientific, technological, industrial and economic Progress. The organs of expression, academia and the filial media, are themselves part of the tsunami, to the extent that the voices of concern are drowned out, including practically all of our greatest thinkers and writers in the past (Biblical, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Goethe...). One of the purest was Baudelaire: "The only true progress is of the human heart."
Some Europeans (French, Dutch, Danish) recently showed their misgivings by voting "no" to the European Union, its stultifying and unlovely standardization and promiscuity.
Is that a sign of, at least, some checks and balances, some idealistic and moderating bump-in-the-road damming of the runaway traffic-tide of hogwild, "metonymic," digitizing brain and greedy will? Hmmm.