As the historian Olmstead noted, when Cyrus entered Babylon in 539 BC, the world was already old. It’s older still now, and if we are aware of its antiquity and its history, we must surely be aware of the constant tension between pragmatism and ideology and not puzzle too much over the fact that humans individually or collectively are capable of wondrous and paradoxical things. Round and round they go, where they stop, nobody knows!
