There are no ordinary people.

From The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 by Colin Morris. An interesting argument, effectively stated though I suspect it is overstated.

In Christian tradition, this confidence in the individual's value has been expressed in the belief in his continued life after death. The implications of this were vividly stated by C.S. Lewis: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as a gnat." In ethics there has been a similar tendency to assert the supreme value of of the individual. This conviction lies behind Kant's famous dictum that a man must be treated as an end and never as a means, and it has recently been argued to be the corner-stone of European ethics: "The idea of the individual person as of supreme worth is fundamental to the moral, political and religious ideals in our society."

Well. Yes. Perhaps.

My hesitancy is two-fold. I love Lewis's articulation "There are no ordinary people." I agree philosophically. And I do love the thrill of discovering an individual's stories. But my mind is almost always equally drawn to the stories of nations, cultures, arts and civilizations.

On the other hand, I am allergic to the notion that this might be solely a western thing. I wish to believe that respect for individuals is a fundamentally universal thing, often not observed in the breach but none-the-less true. I know the evidence to the contrary but I also am familiar with some of the Marxist cant from developing nation philosophers in the sixties and seventies advocating that there was an Asian way of Mathematics and an African way of Science. They rejected universalism and their peoples have suffered the consequences of those pernicious philosophical by-waters.

If we accept Morris's contention that individualism is a distinctly western thing, it seems to me that we are also abandoning the humanist principle of universalism and I am reluctant to give that credence.