If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble. . . But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.