Letter

In response to The city on a hill

Shining for me, but not for thee

To act with impunity as if the voices and needs of the other don’t matter, or don’t matter as much, seems to me to be at the heart of the mess we in the West now find ourselves in.

Two examples spring to mind, these being NATO’s eastward expansion and Israel’s absorption of Palestine. Both relied on the notion of exceptionalism to justify unilateral action. In neither case were the opinions of the other given equal weight. That light on the hill would seem to be shining for me, but not for thee.

To remove oneself from the collective unity of humanity, to claim to be exceptional, skirts perilously close to the original sin found in the parable of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise. Are we all really poorer without the city on the hill shining its light into our eyes and shoving its exceptionalism down our throats whenever it chooses to do so?

Or could it be that we would all be better off if that city on the hill would pull its head in and start acting like one of many in a multipolar, multifaceted world?

— Hal Duell from Alice Springs