When the situation on the planet, or on the particular small patch were we have chosen to pitch our tent, gets tangled up and we can’t seem to find a peaceful way to get unsnarled, you will hear talk of going back to “the wisdom of the ancients”. This wisdom is supposedly contained in the scrolls and codexes and books that are stashed away in musty libraries, often in churches since religions have a large stake in defending their versions of history against the versions of other religions. We think that if we can only dig it out and decipher it properly, think we can find “the answer”. Why do we fall for such a stupid idea?

If the ancients were all so all-fired smart why are we in this mess in the first place? Why didn’t they apply their fabled wisdom and solve our problems before they reached us? What could there possibly be in the mumbo jumbo passed down from generation to generation in the name of ritual or gospel or “national narrative” that we have been overlooking for these thousands of years while our precarious toehold on the planet grows ever more tenuous? And what leads us to believe that in our ongoing search for ever more knowledge we have learned nothing useful about confronting our daily problems — something new that was not known to the ancients but that we moderns have discovered and might prove useful?

Did Aristotle dream of frozen shrimp in a refrigerator in every home, ready to be thawed out and consumed (with a properly tasty dip) on a moment’s notice? That would be one example of something we have learned since the ancients passed into history — painfully acquired smarts built on a long train of discovery and invention. We wouldn’t turn to the wisdom of the ancients to help us deal with an electrical outage that threatened our frozen shrimp supply. We would want the latest information we could get about what went wrong with the circuits in the freezer — the coolant, the electrical relays, the thermostat. Modern knowledge. So when Donald pulls his Julius Caesar act and tries to make everyone cower before his glory and majesty why do we imagine that there is some magic formula in old documents that will help us cope? If there were any formulas to help us then, they apparently didn’t work, and they are not likely to help us now. What we need is a new way of looking at things that will let us see not Rubicons and red lines but a new understanding that in the Age of Pollution and Global Warming we will all sink or swim together.

The wisdom of the ancients may have been good for the ancients (or not, that’s a matter of opinion, they did leave us a pretty screwed up world after all) but it won’t stack up against the skill of the refrigerator repairman with his modern knowledge and his new tools. Are we really supposed to believe that all the experience we have painfully acquired over the centuries has been just so much distraction from the real issues?

What are the real issues anyhow? Aren’t they life and death? What else really matters? If the current recommendations for discovering a peaceful rapprochement between Islam and Christianity (or between Shi’ism and Sunnism, or between North and South Korea, or between Kurds and Turks) involve the deaths of millions of people who want nothing more than to be left alone in their everyday struggle to make a living and feed their families isn’t this sufficient evidence that the wisdom of the ancients has been a flat out failure? We have been studying and polishing and extolling that wisdom in academia and our daily newspapers for thousands of years by now, and a today a photograph shows a 12-year-old Yemeni girl with every bone in her body starkly visible is slowly starving to death because two groups of well-fed “diplomats” don’t want to look in her direction. They want to look underground at black pools of oil. You would think by now we would have been able to ferret out whatever wisdom there was in the ancient scrolls and apply it to save one poor innocent girl’s life.

The ancients didn’t have any more brains or wisdom than we have. They impaled helpless babies on their spears and raped helpless women to satisfy their gods or their land-hunger or their desire for loot or status and sexual satisfaction. We do exactly the same things today, using barrel bombs, gas canisters, and drones, calling it “diplomacy” or “sanctions” or “revenge”, just as the ancients did. No progress. No signs that we are ready for new approaches. No indications that over thousands of years we have learned anything about controlling our evil impulses. Admit it. We are stupid, shortsighted, blind, unreasoning, and proud of it. Ask Donald. He says he was well educated at Fordham and Wharton. He brags about it. How come he kept his ears stoppered? Did his father’s money so bedazzle the school administrators that they couldn’t admit they were dealing with a moron? It took Rex Tillerson only two days to figure that out. Anyway, if there is any wisdom that will save us it will not come from anyone’s musty archives, it will have to come from the realization that we are bound together by our mortality more tightly than we are separated by the color of our skins or the details of the ritual words we mumble in front of our altars.

If there is any wisdom it will have to be found in the best most up-to-date thinking of our best minds in the face of all the incontrovertible facts we have managed to discover during our long trek from the African Rift Valley to Brussels. Forget the ancients. They had their shot and they blew it. It’s long past time for a new crowd to take over.

According to the old spiritual it was a “wheel within a wheel”. According to modern economics, it is God’s command, written in blazing golden letters on a cloud bank :

“Steal whatever you can from one another.”

No, of course it isn’t. I am trying to provoke you into reading some subversive thoughts of mine. They follow. If they get too ridiculous, simply stop reading.

Our planet has limited supplies of

• Air

• Water

• Land

In the immortal words of your local realtor, “They ain’t makin’ any more.”

This being so, our increasing numbers are becoming a growing burden on all three, and we are in need of a common agreement as to who is entitled to how big a share of them, and how they should be allocated. Richard Branson may come to our rescue with his rockets and give us access to other planets worth plundering.

Or maybe not.

In the event he doesn’t come to our rescue in time, we need to face some basic facts in organizing our approach to the question of what to do. (Pace, Donald, such things as facts do exist.)

First, the gods (From the Greeks to the Buddhists to the Confucians, to the Zoroastrians to the Krishnans to the Mayans to the Jews to the Christians and all the rest) have proved themselves unreliable as mentors, since their recipes have differed from Day One. (Even about the date of Day One.)

Second, there is not a pre-religious source to turn to. Each religion has had to improvise from scratch or build on a predecessor’s gospel.

Third, we are so entangled in our nationalistic histories that it is hard to believe we will ever be able to reach any sort of international consensus.

Still, we must try. Our survival will depend on our ability to find one.

So the time is ripe for a new perspective — some fresh vantage point from which a new set of interrelations can be discerned before :

• The air becomes unbreathable,

• The water becomes hopelessly polluted,

• The land has been totally either raped or paved over and rendered useless for producing the food we need,

and we discover that our planet is no longer inhabitable, whether we live in a palm-frond hut on the banks of the Amazon or in a Fifth Avenue tower. We risk being the choking, retching, starving relics of an experiment gone sour. Some other race, with better survival mechanisms and (perhaps) more intelligence will have to take over. Or our pretty blue planet will become just another space rock.

Where to begin a serious search?

I suggest the question of personal entitlement. What, if anything, entitles Donald Trump to claim ownership of a spread of landscaped acres punctuated with eighteen little holes in which he can shoot little white balls to amuse himself, while a member of an Amazon tribe has to content himself with a fire-hardened wooden tool with which to fight to make a tiny open space in the jungle big enough for a taro root garden and his shack and his family?

I know. Mr Trump bought his acres and paid for them (unless he just stiffed the previous owner, as his record might suggest). The Amazon tribesman just found himself where he happened to be born, and never heard of such things as deeds and titles and lawyers and government bureaucrats and tax evasion. But whom did Mr Trump pay, and how did that previous owner acquire his ownership, and so on and so on, all the way back? Back to what? “It’s turtles all the way down” won’t satisfy me as an answer. I want a narrative that tells me why Donald’s claim is any more firm than the tribesman’s. Who “owned” everything to start with?

Adam and Eve, in their metaphoric sense, will do for an answer. They “found themselves” in Eden, just as the tribesman did. But when Cain started casting envious glances at Abel’s garden (or maybe at Adam’s wife, who knows?), evil was born. Thievery began. It hasn’t stopped since. The fact (again pace, Donald) that thieves have over the millennia developed elaborate stories to promote the impression that their “legal” claims stem from anything other than force doesn’t change the fact that it was all simply appropriated. And nobody “gave” it to Abel, either. If one of the gods gave it to a chosen people, he failed to convince the un-chosen, because we are still arguing about it.

So throw all that history out. We now happen to find ourselves here. The situation is tenable, but tenuous. We happen to have developed the smarts to keep it functioning — so far. We are running out of exploitation time. We need a new approach. Bedminster is not the answer. All its official deeds cannot guarantee clean air, clean water, and clean soil, and without clean air and clean water and clean soil all those deeds are just worthless bits of paper. Ever try eating a deed?

What is the answer, if there is one?

You will find my suggestions far-fetched. I will agree that they are far-fetched. Our predicament would have seemed far-fetched a couple of hundred years ago, before we started testing the atmosphere for pollution, before we discovered the Texas-sized plastic-filled gyre in the North Pacific Ocean, before we realized that our paving and concrete-pouring and coal-digging and fracking was doing irreparable damage to our ability to use the energy available from our nearest friend, the sun. So our answer will have to be equally far-fetched to have any chance to be effective.

We have tried the idealists : Jesus, Moses, and Marx; and we have tried the conquerors : Alexander, Caesar, Hitler — and none of them turned out to be the solution. Cain still covets and Abel still suffers the consequences. We all suffer the consequences. Abstract justice is a fragile intellectual web spun by intellectual spiders. So now we come down to the realists.

What if there were no owners? What if there were only the Commons? What if everything on earth were recognized as common property, to be used for the common welfare instead of personal enrichment? Could we then think of getting together to devise sensible steps to protect it equitably for the benefit of everyone?

Yes, and pigs could fly if they had wings, yes?

Presumably yes. If there was air to breathe when they got winded and water to drink when they got thirsty and soil to hold the great oaks that dropped the little acorns that fed them. If they had the wings and the brains to refrain from killing each other and would simply concentrate on the welfare of the race of pigs. (That wouldn’t be of much help to, say, rattlesnakes for example, but we can’t know why rattlesnakes or athletes’ foot fungus were in the original mix in the first place, and we are not gods. One thing at a time.)

There have been other proposals. I shall start mine with the desired outcome and get to the difficulties of achieving it afterwards.

The outcome would be a world in which individual ownership — of anything — is limited to a “fair share” of the world’s wealth. How do we determine that fair share? We set a monetary value (we have not yet been clever enough to develop a better sort of measuring tool) on everything, from gold to radishes and add it all up to give us a number representing the wealth of our whole planet. Then we count heads and come up with the total number of current inhabitants of our planet. By dividing the second number into the first we can come up with a figure we can call each person’s birth entitlement. Each of us is entitled simply by having been born here (I am getting tired of saying pace, Donald), simply because we are alive. This figure would become the basis for determining what responsibility each of us has for maintaining this place as a habitat.

If we have more than the correct amount, we shall have to take steps to reduce our share; if we have less, whoever’s in charge will have to take steps to increase our allocation. The objective is not to level out ownership or income or opportunity — the objective is to level out responsibility. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Ring a bell? There has never been a better definition of fairness. Prejudiced courts and bureaucracies have come up with every kind of twisted rationale to justify their selfishness, but no one has yet improved on Messrs Marx and Engels’ formulation.

So how do we proceed?

1. Perform that long division and come up with a number.

2. Using it as a standard, establish an open-ended time scale on which we can fix things. Five generations? Four? Ten? How many years will we need to level things out, a little at a time? As painlessly as possible.

3. Establish a Commons Fund. Into it every year the rich will deposit a fraction of their wealth, and the poor will withdraw enough to make a dent in their poverty, the amount to be determined by their distance from the Magic Number and the number of years assigned to the correction process. Call it taxation, sharing, desperation, whatever you like. It is our last-chance at recognizing humanity as a common inheritance.

4. If Branson wants out, and has the rockets, wave him a good-luck goodbye. The rest of us will inherit a rededicated blue planet. He can make do with the red one.

Obviously this is a pipe dream. As Nancy Pelosi has observed, you don’t get power by asking for it; you have to take it from them. Who is “them”? She didn’t say, but in this case Pogo had it right. Them is us. If it takes Madame Guillotine’s intervention to convince us, then call it the Law of the Swamp. Lord Donald of the Fiery Tress promised to drain the swamp — let him come forth from his cave and make good on his promise or suffer the consequences.

All a far-out impossible dream. Right. You got a better one?