The wretched of the Earth

            So here is the present state of the wretched of the Earth: We have some seven billion human individuals, a group which we can, if we wish, try to subdivide into disparate groups along what are the quite clearly discredited and discreditable lines of ethnicities, cultures, genders, classes, languages, races, literatures, good and bad, right and wrong, us and them; and indeed, when we try to do that, as our farmers have instructed us we must, we speedily discover that each of these groupings is impossible, at the boundaries, to define. What, then, is there left to say, when we stand outside these false, artificial fences of prejudice, and look at humanity as a whole? Is there anything we can say?

I would argue that there is. To be human is, at least some of the time, to act instinctively for kindness, equality, justice, freedom, and universal love. These ideas are, of course, culturally dependent, at least in terms of the words I have used here. Yet is there not something beneath the words, beyond them? Something limited neither by language, nor any of the other false boundaries we have discussed? Surely there is.