There is a scene in the book ‘How Green Was My Valley’ (I believe) in which the protagonist walks with a girl from another village and gets home late to find his male relatives sitting with their boots on waiting for trouble. The reason being that the girl comes from the next valley and they expect her menfolk to be after a fight to teach them a lesson for touching their women.
We live in a world where ‘globalisation’ may actually mean something, and yes it may generally be bad, but it is the first time in history we can look to visiting everywhere if we have the money. But there is that tension about the next valley still in our veins. There is that feeling that for all the harmonisation the county , State, province next to ours is different. We can go all over the world working but we may not stay in the countries other than ours without feeling we are alien to the culture.
And the reason for this is because we are educated into a narrow view of culture. In fact none of us should point fingers but all of us should know that we, being human, have been and are on a journey in which all cultures our our human heritage. My fellow humans sacrificed children to gods, built the pyramids, conquered empires, enslaved each other and created poverty. My fellow humans are today fighting to the death in unnecessary wars.
This planet is our inheritance and fighting over it as we do will only leave us poorer. To be truly intellectual we have to be wholly ethical because it is where we are the same, in the being human, that we are bonded together.