Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

Nativity is the accident Paul Harris wants us to treat like a moral fact. In one clean turn, he takes birth - usually a quiet source of pride, chauvinism, or shame - and reframes it as evidence for humility. You did not earn your passport or your mother tongue, so you do not get to use them as a cudgel. The line works because it doesn’t merely ask for tolerance; it undercuts the psychological logic of superiority at the root.

Harris was a lawyer and civic organizer in an era when nations were hardening into brands: mass immigration to the U.S., the racialized hierarchy of empire, and the memory (and looming repetition) of industrial war. His diction is deliberately legalistic: "entitled to respect" sounds like a right, not a favor. That matters. Rights language shifts the argument from personal sentiment to civic obligation, the kind of baseline you can build institutions on.

The "world's family" metaphor is doing diplomatic work. Family implies proximity and duty; you cannot pretend other people’s fates are none of your business. It’s also a subtle rebuke to both isolationism and colonial paternalism. Harris isn’t saying some nations should be guided by others; he’s assigning "honorable place" to all, flattening the hierarchy without pretending differences don’t exist.

There’s an optimism here that feels earned rather than naive: cosmopolitanism pitched not as a dreamy ideal, but as etiquette for a crowded, interdependent century.