FOR ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY there seem to have been people who didn’t quite fit, either because of poverty, or disability, or nationality, or age—those so beaten down by abuse, or struggle, or scorn that they seem paralyzed, without the will to change or be changed. We have come to think of them as outsiders—the hopeless homeless, the alcoholics, the aged, the single mothers, the chronically ill or crippled, whole families dying of famine on