Humans are intensely social creatures. The societies that we are born into shape us in ways that are invisible to us. From our earliest days, we breathe in the peculiar beliefs, manners, attachments, and hates of our community. Often we come to think of these as the only correct way, the best way, to be. This works well enough in a small slowly changing homogeneous society, where everyone shares the same beliefs and habits.
But our world is no longer small. Every day we rub up against those with a different upbringing, different habits, different beliefs. How we treat them and how we see them, depends on whether or not we unlearn the certainty that the ways of our people, of our ancestors, are somehow special, that we are somehow superior to the “others”.
