Walls, Borders, a Dome and Refugees

This is the title of an article by Thomas Friedman in yesterday's NYTimes (LINK) which I submitted a comment on, which however wasn't approved and published, so I'm posting it here.

First a quote from the article:

"You haven’t seen this play before, which is why we have some hard new thinking and hard choices ahead."  

I couldn't agree more. The trouble is, you can think about a situation you don't understand as hard and long as you want, with no positive outcome, while in the meantime the situation goes on getting worse.

Bringing  democracy to Iraq and the Middle East was a great idea, but clearly those who sought to implement it through western intervention had no understanding of the actual situation. Thus, the terrible mess we have helped create.

Politicians, like most people, look to academics as authorities on just about everything, only social and political science academics have about as good a grasp of social and political reality, both abroad and at home, as Ptolemaic astronomers, alchemists and Galenic doctors once did of their disciplines.

Like Galileo, I'm asking academics to look through my telescope, metaphorically speaking, so that they can see for themselves what I can see.

My telescope is a human-evolutionary view of society, which their predecessors made a taboo of, in overreaction to initial attempts, which went horribly wrong (as first attempts at anything new and difficult often do), especially when the Nazis misused the half-baked ideas of "social Darwinists" to justify their criminally insane racial ideology, eugenics program and wars of aggression.

My telescope: LINK