Humanity

From Approaches to Auschwitz:

The late Benjamin Nelson succinctly described the evolution of civilization as a journey from "tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood." Inherent in this predicament is the attrition of a sense of mutual obligation even among members of the same community. Insofar as the religions of the West have taught that all men and women are the children of one sovereign Creator, they have sought to reverse the process of depersonalization and to enlarge the human universe of moral obligation so that it includes all of humanity. As the Holocaust's victims and survivors testify, that ideal is far from realized. The Holocaust and the other manifestations of large-scale demographic violence in our time make realization of that ideal more urgent and more problematic.

I sent it to my close faculty friend, and he referred me to Kierkegaard:

Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.