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Examines symbolic ethnic politics: the politics of place names, group names, national symbols, official apologies, and other matters that do not affect the rights or resources of any particular persons. Such symbolism is important in ethnic politics, and a theory with nothing to say about it is unsatisfactory. Disputes over symbolic issues, however, are poorly suited to compromise and easily escalate into rallying points for wider conflicts. In addition, it is often impossible to meet the symbolic demands of all groups simultaneously. The chief constraint on symbolic politics should be non‐humiliation and the avoidance of the celebration of past injustices and violence, a standard that can be met for all groups simultaneously. Official apologies in particular are considered at length; they are defended against the charges of collective guilt and anachronism, but are found to be limited by considerations including the passage of time and institutional discontinuities.

Daniel Callahan addresses special concerns at the opposite end of the spectrum. He invites the reader into a discussion of grief and of Alzheimer’s dementia, of the moral problems facing individual caretakers, and of the broader question of intergenerational responsibility of children to care for their parents. Callahan makes use of personal narrative to provide practical guidelines for the use of life-sustaining treatment for advanced dementia. His conclusions, like so many in this volume, are limited and cautiously optimistic, and he underscores themes articulated in chapter 7 by Ridenour and Cahill pertaining to the role of community in continuing to meet the needs of the dying.

This chapter constructs a conceptual grammar for untimely democracy by pairing Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Jefferson’s vision of an ever-progressing polity rests on his principle of generational autonomy: the notion that each cohort of citizens is free from the burdens of its ancestors. Slavery stands as the limit for such a model. For Jefferson, blackness signifies a future haunted by bondage; thus Africans can have no place in American democracy. Jefferson’s future is what Du Bois terms the “present-past.” With this phrase, Du Bois reorders linear time—positioning the past after, not before, the present—and posits intergenerational responsibility as a democratic value alongside equality and liberty. And yet, even as he advocates a temporal double consciousness that blurs past and present, Du Bois worries that emphasizing slavery’s seemingly eternal return might paralyze political action.

Many Civilizations Have Come and gone over the past 6,000 years; some declined rapidly, some lingered, and a few renewed and rebuilt. These rise- and-fall cycles have been variously attributed to the typical increase in complexity of a society over time as procedural solutions to successive layers of problems accumulate and eventually stifle purpose and productivity, or to heightened social stratification, inequality, and consequent uprisings. But beyond the city walls are other explanations. Many societies have overexploited and degraded their natural environmental base; in other cases, natural changes in regional climates and environments have impaired harvests, caused water shortages, mobilized epidemics, or fomented political disorder. In the twenty-first century, populations around the world face unprecedented but broadly foreseeable changes in climate on a global scale, with impacts compounded by other environmental and demographic pressures. We cannot predict the consequences for human populations, but they may be dire— especially if runaway climate change occurs. The modest warming that has occurred since the mid-1970s, associated with increased severity of weather disasters, is already affecting human health and safety, via heat waves and other extreme weather events, physical injury, child undernutrition, changes in infectious disease ranges and seasonality, mental trauma and depression, and population displace-ment and lost livelihoods. Can we find another, safer way forward? Our elaborate primate brain with its unique higher-cognition planning capacity enables us, when pushed, to imagine alternative futures and to behave flexibly and seek transformative changes. But other human foibles and frailties inter-vene. These include the widespread assumption of unlimited economic growth, an instinct to retain current social and cultural structures, and the limitations of rapid-turnover democratic government. Structural impediments also persist: the continuing poverty and illiteracy of several billion people; the heterogeneity of cultures, beliefs, and political systems; and modes of scientific research not yet well suited to studying complex environmental and social systems. These make the task ahead more complex, but not impossible. To make headway will depend on people and communities under-standing climate change in terms closer to home. Talk of emissions, trajectories, scenarios, ocean acidification, targets, and timetables does not connect with daily lives.