The Right is Lost to Uncompromising Rigidity. The Left must be moved to save the remnants of a Constitutional Republic in the US.

My hope for productive discourse is waning after decades of working hard to keep channels open.

I am reminded of that poignant moment in The Chosen when, toward the end of World War II when Jews around the world are hearing unrelenting news of horrors in the Camps, the Orthodox boy turns to the Zionist and says, shockingly, "You are worse than Hitler. He killed the body of the Jews but you kill the soul."

The second boy has already enlisted to fight Hitler and later dies in the War. Chaim Potok treats both sides gently and generously, but having the boy die fighting Hitler makes his point clearly enough.

A first impulse is to be repelled by the Orthodox boy's egregious characterization of the Jews who wish to protect Jews in the disapora from another Holocaust by establishing a Jewish state. To say they are worse than Hitler is so outlandish as to seem insane.

But that's where my memory gets traction this morning. That Orthodox boy, for all his vitriol and hyperbole, was not insane -- at least not at the individual and clinical level. What he said would appear insane on an individual level, but it actually made sense GIVEN HIS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. For the Orthodox believe that a Jewish state must await a Messiah, and rushing it to avert a Holocaust is, in their sacred texts, an insult to God -- and thus harmful to the souls of the patient sufferers awaiting God's intervention.

Is productive discourse possible when people are made "insane" by religious upbringings? I am not naive and neither am I uneducated. I am also not so wedded to one political affiliation that I live in an information ghetto; nor am I so wedded to personalistic analyses that I reject good thinking done by imperfect people -- casting aspersions on good arguments because the author once kicked his dog, cheated on his wife, or even supported an immoral war. So I have no problem recalling that the young Henry Kissinger, when still a teacher at Harvard, published his work on the Congress of Vienna and noted that international and intercultural negotiations broke down terribly when religion was brought to the negotiating table. For Kissinger, the ongoing instability of 19th and 20th century Europe -- and the brutal catastrophes caused by that instability -- was in large part caused by the introduction of uncompromising religious beliefs to the negotiations for peace.

We see this in the Christo-Fascist influence on the Tea Party. They proudly (and ignorantly -- but not insanely, at least not clinically) tout their unwillingness to compromise. When they think God whispered something in their ear, they are willing to take us all to oblivion rather than compromise on it. Of course, negotiations fail when agents on both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table. I have negotiated for companies and countries in my consulting career, and I know that when the other side is uncompromising on something, they will pay too much to get it -- so my side does not object. But when both sides bring uncompromising positions to the table -- specifically, when those two positions directly conflict with one another -- there is no peaceful, stable resolution.

Religious beliefs do just this. Hence they must stay out of the negotiation. They must stay out of the policy discourse. They must remain in the private sphere.

The Founding Fathers in the US were brilliant. They Churches around them pressured them to create a State Church -- and Churchmen to this day compile mountains of falsified history to advance their greedy case to make their own sect the State Religion. Yet the Founding Fathers wished to permanently resist a State Church, separating them from the political sphere, insisting on freedom of religious belief as a foundation stone in the American Republic. Too bad they did not anticipate the centuries long struggle among the illiterati to misconstrue the First Amendment. For if they did, they would have written in no uncertain terms: freedom of PRIVATE religious belief, not the "freedom" to impose one's religious beliefs on others -- which is ludicrous on the face of it, but consistent with the behavior of perhaps half of American Christians.

These lessons sadly must be hard fought and learned slowly. It took until the 1960s for the Civil Rights movement to FINALLY gain enough momentum for the Supreme Court to articulate that prejudices (a subset of beliefs) are private matters -- you can be a racist and never invite a black family to your home, but in the public sphere, you must respect the civil rights of all human beings, and seat anyone who wishes at your lunch counter. If your "club" is a place where business (public sphere) is conducted, it is not private and thus not free from the obligation to behave decently.

Of course, these lessons are being unlearned by the uprising of Tea Party/ Christo-Fascists -- key: uncompromising -- movements which have provided tools to their evil child -- the White Supremacist/Neo-Nazis -- and the newly engaged cousin, the Putin/Russian Eurasianist Fascists -- who never apparently imagined that so many Americans would so foolishly invite them into the Oval Office and defend them so feverishly.

If you thought the ultimate sacrifice by our fathers and grandfathers to stop the Fascists in the 30s and 40s would be enough, you were wrong. If you spent a lifetime wondering how so many Germans allowed the Nazis to commit such horrors, you were as naive as was I.

Fascism at one extreme and statist Communism at the other have something in common and that something -- strongmen doing the bidding of the zealots against the rest -- is natural to humankind. Do you still believe that serfs were all oppressed by brutal Lords and would have voted them out if they had the chance? You may be watching too much Braveheart. Think that Patriots fight over monarchical or dictatorial overtures with life-sacrificing courage? Now I think you are a Mel Gibson fan.

Some thoughtful Libertarians may have once supported Trump when they imagined he would dismantle inefficient regulatory frameworks, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of statism their patron saints, Von Mises and Hayek, warned them about.

Some thoughtful Conservatives may have once supported Trump because they imagined that HRC represented too much of a challenge to their core beliefs, but they can no longer in good conscience support precisely the sort of Constitution-burning that the Founding Fathers warned them about.

Yet some continue to defend this takeover from within, this impeding Coup. Why?

Ah, yes. You have failed, as did I, to learn this lesson: once the UNCOMPROMISING values are interjected into the negotiation, it is all over. Christo-Fascists (and their even more dangerous cousins, the Russian Eurasianists) have infiltrated the Conservative and Libertarian movements and polluted what were once well-reasoned camps with UNCOMPROMISING talking points and values. Once the reasonable conservatives abandoned reason for the "insanity" of compromise-free, religious dogma, only the best and brightest and most reflective Conservatives and Libertarians abandoned that toxic platform. Many have, of course, to their credit. But others, like Rand Paul, who apparently adopted without sufficient reflection his father's Libertarianism, have jumped on board the Putin train.

Just because people mimic rational discourse, it does not mean that they are reasoning. I know I have been as naive as any, so this warning may merely be an apologia for taking so long to acknowledge that our country will be saved from the Coup not by reasoning with the Center (especially given the theft of about 8% of the vote by GOP gerrymandering), but by uniting the Left and the disenchanted to believe that the American Experiment, despite all its flaws, is worth saving. It is essential for old, liberal Patriots to keep in mind that for many on the Left, the American Experiment has NOT been good to them, so exhorting them to help us save it will not be an easy task. But Putin's plan for destabilizing the EU, NATO, and the US, and installing a permanent kleptocracy that impoverishes us all is a far worse scenario, even for the youngster with college loans and a minimum wage job, so we must make the case -- well and soon.

Memo to Trump supporters in the summer of 2018

For most of our lives, ignorance was a personal matter. You believe hogwash because you want to believe it? That's your business. You never read a serious non-fiction book because it strains your limited capacities? That's your business. You subscribe to no serious national and foreign affairs journals? That's your business. You don't believe in science or even expertise -- for you, every story is a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, your only heroes are men who match common sense and decency against the experts who in your annals care little about the little guy, and none of your repertoire includes men like Jonas Salk who stopped polio and gave away the vaccine to anyone willing to believe in knowledge and decency, or well-trained doctors risking and sometimes losing their lives in medecins sans frontieres, or the researcher who spent five years learning that the most effective way to reduce abortion is not right wing rhetoric about family values but access to sex education, contraception and good family planning -- but it was still your business. You know absolutely nothing about the rest of the world because being an Ugly American suits you? That was your business.

You are so astonishingly ignorant that when Fox and Friends says we defeated a "communist" Japan in WW2, or that Denmark's gentle and civilized social democracy is the equivalent of Venezuela (whose circumstances you don't understand, anyway), you blithely watch them anyway. But it is still your business.

We don't have to like you and we certainly cannot respect you, but it's still your own damn business if you wish to live life as a fool.

But now that your ignorance means you have invited a Russian agent into the Oval Office and your stubbornness means you persist in defending an accelerating Coup (and voting for Trump is not remotely the problem of supporting him now) -- and the damage you will do is horrifying and well-known (as millions of citizens of fascist and communist nations have endured -- if they were not killed outright at home, in camps, or in the gulag) -- your ignorance is our business. Now that many of us will have to soon close down our social media accounts and make plans to move our families overseas because we do not want to be as naive as the Jews of mid-30s Germany, your ignorance is our business. Now that you have not rebuked but encouraged attacks on the media, attacks on dissent, the firing of all those professionals providing the checks and balances we so badly need, the lies, lies, and more lies, the kleptocracy that threatens the livelihood of every American who must count on social security and medicare in old age, vile attacks on the safety and security of school children, or on exhausted children carried to our border by frightened parents running from violence, or against clean air and water because you are blithely and inexplicably craven -- your ignorance is our business.

The incoherence makes no difference to you because ideas no longer matter. Some of you turned on the American icon Harley Davidson because they were not prepared to support your delusions. You have yet to figure out that NFL players are kneeling about racial injustice and not because they want to spoil your Sunday afternoon. Your team is the red team, and that's all that seems to matter to you. Some of you are bright enough to know better, but the game has assumed more importance than the reality -- that Trump/Putin may soon be killing journalists, silencing all critics, immiserating all those whose pockets can be picked, and doing what every dictator does -- just what Putin did -- end term limits by fiat (as he did in 2008 implicitly and then in 2012 explicitly) and carry on looting national resources until the oligarchs are engorged with trillions of dollars taken from us and our children and our grandchildren.

When Benjamin Franklin was asked on the steps of Independence Hall whether he had given us a monarchy or something else, he presciently replied (and I am paraphrasing) "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

The remarkable story of the American experiment is that we kept it so long. Especially shocking in that one third of us were secret fans of dictatorships all along, and we only learned it recently. (And it is not just the Christo-Fascists who share so much with Putin, but so many others.) But now that your ignorance threatens to end the Republic with a Russian-assisted Coup -- one Putin has been completely open and frank about since 2012 -- your ignorance is our business.

No one ever said you should toss out your conservative values, but we all know Trump/Putin have nothing to do with that. You could have pressured your corrupt Congressional leaders to restrain or impeach Trump and replace him with a sane and honest conservative. You could have demanded they honor their oaths to the Constitution and put country over party. But you did not. So it is our business.

And you should not be surprised that some of us are taking it personally.

Our incapacity to distinguish fantasy from reality will be our death

Samuel Eliot Morison famously said that English North America was colonized by people who believed in the Reformation but not the Renaissance. If the Admiral and historian cared less for alliteration, he might have said that early Americans rejected the Enlightenment.

Just to be clear: Americans have in their DNA a rejection of rational and scientific ways of knowing. We embrace fantasies that we prefer with less than the usual caution and skepticism.

This is the condition that will be the end of the American Empire. But it is not actually uniquely American. It was, after all, nearly universal before the 15th century. If you were well educated, somewhere along the way a professor or two had you read Francis Bacon -- a man who took a giant step forward into the rational world. If very well educated, that professor had you read between the lines in Descartes, discerning Rene's truth from his clever but false hand-waving for the Church, a powerful institution that could not be directly confronted.

Epistemological defect, what I now believe is better described in many as epistemological psychosis, is a widespread disease. It is only partially about insufficient mental capacity. It is in part about the transmission of contagious memes that reflect myths many find impossible to resist.

Surely it is the contagious element, more than the defects in mental capacity, that make some nations in some times more prone to epistemological psychosis than others.

For many -- possibly the majority -- plagued by this brand of irrationality, ideas don't really matter. (Snyder delivers a substantial and subtle proof of the latter in The Road to Unfreedom, but I wish to go elsewhere.). This makes the current paradox possible: Putin's obsession with a unique branch of kleptocratic, Christian Fascism -- one imbued with a powerful view of Russian exceptionalism that must be advanced by the destruction of everything in its way -- is being served by a different American form of kleptocratic, Christo-Fascism that believes in American exceptionalism.

But in this chess game, we are being horribly outplayed. Putin is destroying us. Not only is Trump not remotely up to the match, he's not on our side.

For the rational processing events as they unfold, it is clear that Putin's long stated goals of destabilizing the EU, NATO, the US, and the global economy while re-establishing control over former Iron Curtain and Soviet peoples, are being achieved at an astonishingly high rate.

No one wins one chess game after another like this on merit alone. US Intelligence, diplomatic and military functioning are being short-circuited by alternative, probably treasonous, channels, turning over to Putin this extraordinary series of victories.

Trump's allegiance is to his wealth and power. No use bemoaning now the disloyalty of a five-time draft dodger. What has kept the Trojan doors open to the giant, stuffed bear is a strangely corrupted GOP who abandoned their sworn duty to Constitution, Law, and Country.

And what has made GOP treason possible is the extraordinary and probably lethal level of epistemological psychosis in the American voting population.

We can stare at a Russian Bear and see an Eagle. It's hard to defend yourself when nearly half your countrymen are throwing confetti at the invaders.

The Democratic Party must successfully embrace the populist uprising against Trumpism, and the hijacked-GOP will not allow that to happen without a fight

If a populist swell rises up in 2018 -- one whose ranks are increased by many first-time young voters -- you can be absolutely sure that the craven brains behind the kidnapped-GOP will do everything in their power to steer that populist wave away from the DNC and toward 3rd party candidates.

THIS WILL BE THE DEFINING BATTLE AT THE END OF AMERICAN EMPIRE.

We survive if the DNC successfully embraces the populist uprising against fascism and corruption, incompetence and inhumanity.

We do not survive if the GOP fools even a few hundred thousand of them in key places to imagine -- ludicrously -- that the GOP (a veritable existential threat to the human species, soon to invite massive global coordination against our trade, nuclear and environmental policies, as well as a damning force for plutocracy and the death knell for Constitutional democracy) and the Democrats are "the same."

The GOP's task is made much easier by how very easily the disenchanted leftist skeptics fell prey to this damning logic before.

The DNC must do more than they did in 2016. I said at the time that HRC needed to invite Sanders to run with her -- and even that may not have been enough as many Sanders supporters (we don't know how many were Russian bots) appeared to think like radical rightists who are quick to call Republicans with a conscience RINOs, and freaked out about Sanders supporting Hillary over Trump -- the only rational and ethical course of action available to anyone in his position.

Righteous indignation and passion have their place, even more so when those in control of government threaten to tear children from the arms of their mothers, when corporations are let loose to destroy the air we breathe and the water we drink, when environmental and nuclear proliferation treaties are abandoned with narcissistic caprice.

BUT unbridled passion -- the kind we see on the radical right (1/3 of Americans, shockingly) and the radical left (perhaps 1/10 of us) -- the sort that cannot stop to reason, learn something new, COMPROMISE -- will kill us all.

Those of us who have not yet descended into the primordial ooze of American ignorance -- fueled by blinding anger -- must remember Yeats.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION; WHILE THE WORST

ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Compromise between the DNC and the populist uprising against the evils of Trumpism must happen or we are all lost. Set aside your passions long enough to think through what must be done. The GOP will be fueling divisions on the left from now through the elections.

Stand together. Don't be fooled. Don't be a fool. There is too much at stake.

Market Fundamentalists are an Existential Threat

I did not know when I was a young man that my field of study, economics, would some day become the basis of a religion, one powerful enough to threaten the very existence of human beings.

Neoclassical economics was rightly proud of one of the more brilliant proofs in the history of the world. The proof began with clear and focused inspiration by Adam Smith, carried on through the 19th century, especially with Ricardo, the Austrian marginalists, and Walras; was modified critically by Pareto; and was parsed and formalized by the modern general equilibrium theorists and greats such as Arrow and Debreu.

That proof said something extraordinary. It said that if certain exacting conditions could be fully met, a free market system is provably the best economic system imaginable, best meeting the needs of individuals in a society that embraces it.

This is not merely an ideological assertion. Not rhetorical. Not a point of view. This is the product of a massive compilation of mathematical and logical argument. It is not to be dismissed merely as a matter of politics -- at least, not by the rational.

Many took this quite seriously, as they should. Many argued very forcefully that capitalism must be assertively advanced at the expense of other, lesser, systems. The belief in markets, the belief in capitalism, took on a religious fervor. In its extreme form, it took on the form of faith-based dogma, a body of belief best described as market fundamentalism.

Good economists understood that the proof, nifty and clever as it was, is subject to those "exacting conditions." Good economists understood that the proof says IF those conditions are met perfectly THEN the case is made.

Unfortunately, two things are undoubtedly true, and all good economists know both.

One, those conditions are never met, and have never been met. That is, the proof in favor of capitalism is a proof in favor of one economic system over another in a fictitious world of theory only.  A world that does not and has never existed.

Two, and it took another profound proof to understand this, economists discovered the second best theorem that says, in short, that if you do not meet all those exacting conditions perfectly (say you meet them all approximately) there is no guarantee that the results will resemble the results of perfect competition at all. In other words, economic systems are subject to a form of chaos such that 100% of the conditions lead to something optimal, yet 99% of the conditions may lead to something awful. Catastrophe theory in action.

As the conditions are never met, there is no economic theory that says that in the real world there is actually a general case for capitalism. The case for capitalism must be made on a case-by-case basis, examining the well being of people before and after they move to and from capitalism to and from other economic systems.

None of this has stopped the Market Fundamentalists from carrying on, quite dishonestly, as if economists have provided them with a sacred text that says that unfettered markets are good for all of us. They fill the Congress, think tanks, and other places of influence, pushing for the interests of the few (capitalism does remarkably well for the 1%) but pushing for them disingenuously in the name of a political-economic system that they claim, feverishly, is good for everyone. But the evidence says this is palpably untrue. Some forms of capitalism in many places have done the poor grave harm; life-and-death harm is exceedingly common.

And it is not just about inequality. It is also about human survival, as capitalism allows powerful parties who are grossly enriched by unfettered environmental regulation to destroy our air and water and biosphere broadly for profit. They do so in the name of market fundamentalism, literally mocking those who would ask, can we not do better by collectively acting as if we all matter? If extinction by environmental devastation is the outcome on the one hand, we must surely consider alternatives to a system that is killing us (and many innocents who have neither say nor profit in our system).

As Naomi Klein says, "this changes everything." Political economic discourse must admit that capitalism, at least in its current form, may be lethal. Reasonable people examining alternatives may disagree. E.g., is Sanders' social democracy, what he calls democratic socialism, nearly enough?  But those who would trot out their market fundamentalism, and deny most of the scientific and other evidence before our eyes, in order to continue to profit from their special place in the system, are guilty of negligent homicide -- of entire species, homo sapiens, and many others. This is a hanging offense, but if we do not stop them, there will be no one left to hang them when we reach what the Cambridge University Center of Catastrophe Studies considers the limit beyond which the last 100,000 human beings, living in a stone age of sorts, can never be expect to bounce back. This tragic end to humankind may take place in the next century.

When the last woman standing pounds her fist into the earth and curses the rest of us, it will be far too late to say "I told you so."  Can the market fundamentalists be defeated in time?  We may have already run out of time, but our only hope is to RESIST today.  Even without our withdrawal from the Paris Accords we are behind the eight ball. The fate of humankind may well hang in the balance of the Congressional elections of 2018. 

**This is a gentle re-write of an earlier posting.

Tolerate the intolerant but not their intolerance

An important issue not well resolved (and it won't be here, although I wish to advance it a step or two) is the matter of the ethical demands on us to:

1) tolerate the intolerant;
2) tolerate intolerance.

They are quite distinct.

The three ethical traditions are, in their simplest form, about ethical judgment based upon (1) character (2) intention (3) outcome. I take this brief moment to be didactic for this reason: the third ethical tradition -- the one in which utilitarianism, for example, is situated -- says the ethical value of an action must account for its outcomes, its effects.

Tolerate the intolerant:

For a host of reasons, we can never be sure that our evaluation of others is not biased and distorted. So those we view as intolerant may not be in any objective sense. Further, the world changes and most of us understand this (except for religious fundamentalists) so what may be a very unpopular opinion today may actually be acceptable, even essential to our survival, tomorrow.

An argument can be made that a free society must tolerate the intolerant. We must make room for religious fanatics, racists, sexists, zealots of all sorts. We must protect their voice. (We must protect their right to speak -- we must not force anyone to listen to them -- a confusion of the radical right.) To tolerate the intolerant -- to give them a seat at the table, a plate of food, a vote -- seems to pass the character test (we give the same dignity to others as we wish for ourselves). It passes the intention test -- we intend to offer equality of opportunity to all. I has a tougher time against the oucomes test (by giving the KKK a parade permit, we may do harm to someone.)  By passing two and potentially failing one ethical tradition's test, we give tentative approval to the principle that we must tolerate the intolerant.

Tolerate intolerance:

It is very important to distinguish tolerating the intolerant from tolerating intolerance. To tolerate is to advance the social value that tolerance must take place even when the costs to the tolerater is higher than the benefit. (Even when I am repulsed by theocrats who would say terrible things about my gay family and friends, I must not oppress the intolerant theocrats.)

But must I tolerate their intolerance? On the face of it, and I think once we probe more deeply, no. Tolerating the intolerant -- giving them voice and a place at the table -- is not at all the same thing as tolerating their intolerance. If the social value is that I must tolerate them, the reciprocal is true: they must tolerate me. I must grant the religious fundamentalist the right to say his scripture criticizes sexuality or mixed fabrics or shaving or whatever else Ecclesiastes might offer up (and there is plenty -- much of it fodder for the modern secularist) -- but that fundamentalist is out of line when he tries to invade the civic sphere and impose his beliefs on me (seeks to regulate my behavior).

What of so-called intolerance toward intolerance? There is really no legitimate logical category here, although many seem to think so. The university, with special obligations to open discourse, is often criticized for showing intolerance to intolerance -- but that is in fact its job: promote tolerance while promoting critical and skeptical reception for all new (non-disproved) ideas. What the university must not do is (1) above -- show intolerance to the intolerant. That is, to their person, or to their rights as people. This includes the right to speak out. Universities must protect the right of minority views to be expressed, but not in any way condone the views, expressed, especially if they are themselves intolerant.

Note that no one is obliged to listen to the intolerant -- or to anyone -- speak. Leave the speaking hall empty, if you please. But don't block his right to speak.

But even here there is a caveat. When is it ethical to block a speaker? By the third tradition, it is ethically compelling to block a speaker who may cause harm: say one who advocates violence against some identifiable group in the university or surrounding community. This has to be exercised with great care, but this ethical duty does exist.

It is slightly outside this discussion, but universities have one more obligation: to allocate their scarce resources most effectively. Their scarce speaker monies and scarce university facilities need to be managed to best advance the mission of the university. Discourse in the university is supposed to meet a higher standard of evidence and rhetoric and respectfulness than in ordinary civic discourse. A university should not fall prey to inviting the most popular or most exciting speakers -- but those who have met the highest standards of scholarship and can raise the level of discourse on their campuses. Universities have the right and obligation, both, to turn away speakers who are popular because of their political positions but who have not demonstrated scholarly capacity and discipline. Those speakers have plenty of other outlets in our fact-free and logic-free society.

Of course, universities should protect the right of unpopular but scholarly speakers from speaking when vocal student groups are intolerant of them or even their point of view (separate, as above). But if the speaker is himself espousing intolerance, it is a judgment call, as the outcomes (ethics) argument gives them at least one ethical leg of the stool to sit on. This is the grey area that has so many incensed and confused. There is no iron clad rule -- and certainly none following directly from the First Amendment, as much as the lazy would like -- to resolve this conflict.

Bottom line:

It is arguable that we should try to tolerate the intolerant (as people), but we must decline to tolerate intolerance in all people who wish to participate in our society, especially when the form of that intolerance could do harm.  

Universities have no faux First Amendment obligation to allow anyone to speak on their campuses.  In the civic sphere, everyone not inciting violence or espousing intolerance has the right to speak (but not necessarily to be heard.)  In academic life, a higher standard holds. Universities have the right and indeed the obligation to raise the level of discourse and encourage their students to engage with the highest levels of public intellectualism or scholarship they can attract.  A political litmus test on those potential speakers who meet those higher standards is not appropriate, however;  insuring that quality ideas and arguments advanced and received with tolerance and without violence can be heard by those who wish to hear them is a duty, however, that should be fulfilled. 

Ecclesiastes

I had a coffee today in one of those places that keeps perhaps one hundred old books on their shelves. I suppose it is not uncommon for someone to pull one off the shelf and leaf through the volume, reading a page or two before an overly loud couple gossiping unkindly catch one's attention, but as most books that end up like this were never very good and are now wildly out of style or out of date, that is not remotely their purpose in this reincarnation. Like a lace doily or an unremarkable painting of a fox hunting scene painted by a dowager who never saw one, they are there for theatrical reasons: they say "this is the set of a cafe in which our clients reflect on the classics as they sip."

But I saw a copy of H.G. Wells' The Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man on the shelf and I pulled it off. I consider Wells one of the last polymaths who could actually imagine he "knew it all." (The world changed too quickly after his generation.) Clearly, H.G. Wells agreed (re-read the subtitle if you have doubts).

As there was no gossip to distract me and I am a fast reader, I made some progress but then I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. On page 65, a map that Wells entitled (modestly): "Possible Outline of Europe and Western Asia at the Maximum of the 4th Ice Age." When the ice caps had frozen, the oceans fell -- not trivially, but so much so that Italy was connected by land to Croatia, to Sicily, to Corsica and Sardinia, Africa to Saudi Arabia, India to Ceylon; all that Adriatic and Mediterranean and Red Sea and Indian Ocean had shrunk away revealing and drying their sea and ocean bottoms for the thousands of years before the warming began.

Planet cools, water freezes, oceans recede. So much so that the world we know like the back of our hand is invisible. One giant block of Italy and Southern Europe and the islands of the Mediterranean. One giant block of Africa and the Arabian peninsula. One giant block of India and Ceylon.

It did not fail to strike me as poignant that I was looking at this old map by this long-gone genius, in a book published in 1920, on the day that the president of the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Accords.

Planet cools, water freezes, oceans recede.

Planet warms, ice melts, oceans rise.

That's not so hard to understand, is it?

In 50,000 BCE the ice age was surely tragic for many. It culled our own species, and in fact created a niche for the Neandertals in France (too cold for your Cro-Magnon ancestors -- I figure I'm Neandertal). But the scale of the tragedy was small.

This time -- this warming, this melting, this rising of the oceans -- and hundreds of millions of people living on the coasts of every continent but Antarctica, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of islands and their inhabitants, will be driven out of their homes, losing trillions of dollars of value and many, many lives. Bangladesh alone will lose land that is home to one hundred million or more.  As if that is not enough, the dessication of barely arable land in Africa will lead to enormous crop losses by 2060.

To every thing there is a season, and we will soon find that it is the season to lose, and to mourn -- our unwillingness to embrace the family of man, and our refusal to gather stones together when we could.

***

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8King James Version (KJV)

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.