But it emphasises also the limit of empathy, explaining why both the wounds of our past and their enactments in the present will continue to haunt us. The affective tone that must colour our strivings, therefore, is neither untrammelled optimism nor hopeless despair: it involves, instead, a tempered liminal space in which we, as citizens, commit ourselves to an unfolding process of searching for moments of meeting where recognition of our shared humanity becomes possible.

The so-called Golden Rule is as old as civilisation itself. In its positive form, it calls for right action, that is, treating others as one would hope to be treated oneself. In its negative form, it calls for right inaction, or, not doing to others what one would not have done for oneself. Both iterations call for imaginative acts of deep empathy and, for this, one could do worse than look to the great world teachers for instruction.

Then there is the pantheism characteristic of Native American religion, with its belief in an immanent god that cannot be separated from reality as we know it. The point, however, is this: the universality of the Golden Rule did not come about because all was right in the world of humans.

The appetite for psychological knowledge is growing all the time and, while there are complex sociological explanations for this, my imminent concern is to think through the connections that bind modern psychological thinking to the humanist legacy that is Golden Rule thinking.

Golden Rule thinking is exactly that: it, too, encourages us, through empathetic acts of imagination, to recognise in others the humanity in which we all unarguably share.