Are mere beliefs sustenance enough? Are moral practices superfluous? Can we espouse love but practice prejudice without even noticing the incongruity? What prismed spectacles must be donned by extremists at the far edges of the politico-religious spectrum to blind themselves to such hypocrisy? Understanding prejudice seemed like a moral imperative after World War II. As a species, we could not let the Nazi slaughter of the Jews pass us by without understanding it, and preventing a recurrence. It was all too easy to blame the inhuman Germans, the Nazi enemy, and more recently, the Muslim jihadists, the despicable “other.” But is there something in the general human condition that ferments these atrocities? The key, perhaps, is to understand us-against-them, ingroup/outgroup thinking, and the danger of focusing on our differences, rather than our similarities to others, when the others also have nuclear toys.

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