Embracing Our Common Humanity: A Personal Journey

But how many of us are influenced enough by the idea of our common humanity to have it actually shape our personal life choices? Looking back on my own professional and public life – as a long serving Australian politician and international NGO head, and occasional academic, I think I can reasonably claim that this concept is at the heart of everything I have believed, and how I have tried to act over the course of my career. But how did I come to embrace this view, and have it influence so many of my own life choices? It was not, I have to admit, through any particular process of abstract intellectual reasoning, despite my philosophical training at Melbourne and Oxford Universities. And I don’t think it was through anything I was specifically taught at school, or Sunday school, or heard through sermons, or lectures. Rather what most influenced me, and my life choices – and I suspect this is true for most people – was a series of formative experiences in my early life, most of them concentrated in my university student years.