I'm confused by this, Temi. I'm sorry that you felt I was inconsiderate to you, but the conversation we had was conducted with entire respect on both sides throughout, and you haven't said otherwise. You seem to be suggesting that my expression of an historical conjecture is itself an injurious thing to do, and I'm not sure why.

Let's put what I said and you accurately quoted into context. We had been talking about the absence of civil society in Nigeria, which you defined as the greatest obstacle to doing what you would most want to do in your life, namely working to improve the situation in one locality. We were talking about the problem of post-colonial social definition, when an empire withdraws and leaves behind a space that cannot be created into a nation state, because it is comprised by nations that acknowledge the force of imperial control, but have no political will to union. Under such conditions, corruption and other forces begin eating away at the post-imperial civil society, and eventually destroy it. In commenting on your essay I touched on the same issue, through the same comparison: with the dissolution of the Yugoslav post-imperial socialist republic that came out of the Second World War. I then said, as you quote, that it seemed to me quite possible that in fifty years the political entity Nigeria would not exist, and it wasn't obvious that the lives of people would be worse for the dissolution.

This is an opinion about the historical forces at work that you may not agree with. My political sociology may be wrong, or the post-imperial dynamic may be different in a thousand ways that would lead to different outcomes. I certainly wasn't making a firm prediction, but rather pointing to a possibility disclosed by historical comparison.

But why is the expression of such an idea "unproductive"? Let us suppose that the idea is "wrong." Is it therefore unproductive? I have been trying to teach the notion that ideas are valuable for where they lead. Asking the questions no one else will ask—I pointed out with respect to the profile of Richard Ravitch that I assigned—is not what politicians or diplomats do. But it is what the people who generate new ideas and create policy do.

Perhaps, to a patriot, indulging the possibility that one's country might dissolve into component societies seems shocking, unimaginable, and therefore an undiscussable "pontification." Contemplating the dissolution of the United States doesn't have that effect on me, but the US is a curious empire and I'm an untypical patriot. If the point you are making is that even the conjectural possibility of a post-Nigerian West Africa is somehow disrespectful to contemplate, I understand the strength of sentiment, but I think one might have to be willing to confront the possibility of disagreement.

The sign of creative thinking is the asking of questions that no one else has thought to ask. Learning to frame such questions means recognizing the limitations that the received wisdom puts on our thought processes. "Thinking outside the box" means breaking the corners that convention establishes around "common sense."

Perhaps this process is painful, because it means that we are pushed, or push ourselves, outside the zone of "comfortable" thought. I'm sorry for the discomfort I have caused you, and I hope that the larger value of what I am trying to communicate has not been entirely lost in consequence.