On the twenty-seventh of October, in a nation that likes to sell itself to the world as a start-up, several million of us will vote by the most obsolete method modernity still tolerates, sliding into a blue envelope a scrap of paper bearing a few printed letters. There is no screen, no touch, no app. There is a slip, a booth, and an envelope one licks and seals. Onto that scrap, however, we load far more than a party’s initials. We load the only question that matters, which is what country we wish to find when we wake the following morning.

Before we answer it, a detour of two hundred thousand years is in order. That is roughly when a woman lived, in the savanna of East Africa, her skin very dark, shielded from the equatorial sun by a pigment we have since learned to call eumelanin. She founded nothing and prophesied nothing, and she is the ancestor of every person now drawing breath. We are all of us, with no awkward exceptions, close relatives busily pretending otherwise. Upon that one detail of the body, which on the scale of the species is shallow and of recent vintage, we erected laws, walls, and empires, and there were men who claimed to read a person’s character in the shape of his skull. The science of the past two decades has only completed the embarrassment, demonstrating that European pallor is itself a very late arrival and that the same genes shuffle themselves, without asking permission, among peoples convinced they share nothing.

Here, on........

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