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The Human Experience

Love Letter

Nigel Rapport steps towards a cosmopolitan love.

“We are all human and should treat each other decently and with respect”, Ernest Gellner counselled: “Don’t take more specific classifications [eg ethnicity, nationality, religiosity, class, caste] seriously” (Times Literary Supplement, 1993). Or again, from Bertrand Russell: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest” (The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). Sadly, more usually we assess others by virtue of a group or class to which they happen to belong. This is a situation that Primo Levi, in the light of his experience of the Holocaust, deemed unconscionable. It is not to be tolerated, Levi insisted, that any human being should find themselves in a situation where definition and evaluation are being made on the basis not of an essential humanity and intrinsic individuality, but due to being assigned to a collective type – possibly with fatal consequences (The Drowned and The Saved, 1996).

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