Perhaps, the predisposition we have to group people into “us” and “them” is itself genetic. My understanding of our ancestors is that “them” was the group that posed an existential threat to “us,” because their lives depended upon it (more food for “them” meant less food for “us”). Besides this survival purpose, a consideration of the rationale of our passions seems to me very necessary, because our awareness is objective and physical, whereas our consciousness is not. And at the same time, there is a seemingly inevitable chain that leads to hostility, which is entangled in incomprehensibilities on both sides. We are filled with countless cases of group differences—in skin pigmentation, or obscure theological belief, or manner of dress—being the cause of harassment, enslavement, and murder. The idea that our sense of self-worth comes, not from anything we have done, not from anything worthy, but by an accident of birth, and that all those alternative ways of being human are somehow less central, less important than we are, is where the crux of the humiliation lies.

From my perspective, it is not so much a matter of what the understanding sees but of what the feeling is sensitive to. Understanding is sublime, kindness is beautiful. Integrity is sublime and dignifying, civility is the beauty of virtue. True virtue alone is sublime—it is the feeling of the beauty and the dignity of human nature, which grounds “universal affection” and “universal respect” for human beings. Beautiful qualities inspire esteem, but sublime ones inspire love. In my opinion, tragedy is differentiated from comedy mainly in the fact that in the first it is the feeling for the sublime while in the second it is the feeling for the beautiful that is touched.