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“At any rate, I don’t think anybody ever dreaded hell as much as most of us dread the contempt of our fellowmen. Under our new and heartfelt moral code, we might be able to horrify would-be evildoers with just that: the contempt of their fellowmen.

“For that contempt to be effective, though, we would need cohesive communities, which are about as common as bald eagles these days. And it is curious that such communities should be so rare, since human beings are genetically such gregarious creatures. They need plenty of like-minded friends and relatives almost as much as they need B-complex vitamins and a heartfelt moral code.

“I know Sargent Shriver slightly. When he was campaigning for vice-president, he asked me if I had any ideas. You remember that there was plenty of money around, but as far as ideas went, both parties were in a state of destitution. So I told him, and I am afraid he didn’t listen, that the number one American killer wasn’t cardiovascular disease, but loneliness. I told him that he and McGovern could swamp the Republicans if they would promise to cure that disease. I even gave him a slogan to put on buttons and bumpers and flags and billboards: Lonesome No More!

“The rest is history.

“I was in Biafra several years ago, at the bitter end of the Nigerian civil war. The Biafrans had nothing to eat, you’ll remember. They were blockaded, so no food got in. They had almost nothing to fight with, except for some Mauser rifles which were a good deal older than I was. And still they fought on. They had no recruiting program. There was no governmental scheme for the relief of refugees, and none was needed. The government did nothing to look out for the old, the sick, either. Biafra, for the short time it lasted, could be admired simultaneously by both anarchists and conservatives.

“The people could look out for each other, without any help from the central government, because every Biafran was a member of an extended family. He had hundreds of relatives he knew by name and reputation. Some Biafrans had thousands of relatives or more.

“Those families took care of their own wounded, their own lunatics, their own refugees. They shared equally whatever they had. The government didn’t have to send a policeman to make sure the food was divided fairly. When the government needed new soldiers, it told each family how many recruits it was expected to send. The family decided then who was to go.

“And this admirable scheme was far from being an invention by the Biafrans. They were simply continuing to live as most human beings have lived until recently.

“I have seen the past, and it works.

“We should return to extended families as quickly as we can, and be lonesome no more, lonesome no more.

“Some of you will become leaders, although that is now thought to be a grungy destiny. Nobody wants to be Papa anymore. If you do have to lead, you may imagine that your mission is to help us find an amazing future. You should consider the possibility that you could serve the people better if you were to lead them intelligently and imaginatively back to some of the more humane and comforting institutions of the past.

“It seems certain that you will face plenty of social unrest in the future, and demands will continue to be made for economic justice. You will be very shrewd leaders indeed if you recognize that the people are in fact crying out not so much for money as for relief from loneliness.

“Let me beguile you just a little bit more about extended families. Let us talk about divorce, and the fact that one out of every three of us here has been or will be divorced. When we do it, we will very likely wrangle and wail and weep formlessly about money and sex, about treachery, about outgrowing one another, about how close love is to hate, and so on. Nobody ever gets anywhere near close to the truth, which is this: The nuclear family doesn’t provide nearly enough companionship.

“I am going to write a play about the breakup of a marriage, and at the end of the play I am going to have