Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, a character in a play by the ancient Roman playwright Terence famously said: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” For centuries, this humanist tradition was especially cherished on the left. But of late, a big part of the left—and, increasingly, much of the mainstream—has turned on universalism. The (admittedly kitsch) insistence in “We Are the World” that we are “all a part of God’s great big family” is gradually being supplanted by an emphasis on the way in which the members of privileged groups, like straight white men, are incapable of
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