The Universalist

Abstract

In Joshua Logan’s 1957 film Sayonara, the beautiful Matsu-Bayashi performer Hana-ogi whispers to her American suitor: “I have hated Americans. I have thought they were savages.” It is as if, in the aftermath of World War II, someone held a mirror up to America and passed judgment on her actions and principles. With this mirror, Logan suggests, Americans are forced to realize the fears they share with their enemies, and to question their own tendencies to denigrate those who look different and represent different values.

If the universalism of the World War II era served to deracinate and to efface the varieties of humankind through the use of too parochial a construction of our common humanity, and if this universalism served further to mask a cultural imperialism by which the NATO powers spread throughout the world their own peculiar standards for truth, justice, and spiritual perfection, then universalism itself, we are told, is too dangerous an ideal.

—David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’?”