Universe of Obligation

How can learning about the choices people made during past episodes of injustice, mass violence, or genocide help guide our choices today?

• How do we learn which differences between people matter and which do not?
• How do we respond to difference?
• What factors influence the extent to which we feel an obligation to help others?
• How does the way we view others influence our feelings of responsibility toward them?

• Students will categorize the many ways in which humans respond when encountering difference and use this information to write creatively in response to the question, “What do we do with a difference?”
• Students will apply a new concept of human behavior—universe of obligation—to analyze how individuals and societies determine who is deserving of respect and whose rights are worthy of protection.
• Students will recognize that a society’s universe of obligation often changes, expanding or shrinking depending on circumstances such as peace and prosperity or war and economic depression.

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-min class period and includes:

• 2 readings, in English and Spanish
• 2 handouts, in English and Spanish

Collecting ourselves into groups is a natural behavior. Being part of a group helps to meet our most basic needs: we share culture, values, and beliefs, and we satisfy our yearning to belong.

Like individuals, groups have identities. How a group defines itself determines who is entitled to its benefits and who is not. Sometimes the consequences of being excluded from a group are minor or harmless. For example, someone who does not enjoy running is unlikely to be affected by not being a member of a track club. But sometimes the consequences can be substantial, even dire. If someone is denied citizenship by a country, his or her freedom, livelihood, or safety may be at risk. Moreover, a society’s universe of obligation can change. Individuals and groups that are respected and protected members of a society at one time may find themselves outside the universe of obligation when circumstances are different.

Societies with governments dedicated to democratic values and human rights tend to define their universes of obligation in a more expansive and inclusive manner than other societies do. Yet, even within democratic countries, political movements and ideologies such as nationalism, racism, or antisemitism can take hold and lead to a more narrow definition of whose rights and privileges deserve protection and whose do not. In times of crisis—such as war or economic depression—societies also tend to define more narrowly who is “one of us” and whose loyalty is now under suspicion, making them undeserving of protection and respect. Individuals or groups who fall outside a nation’s universe of obligation become vulnerable not only to being deprived of the rights, privileges, and economic benefits afforded to citizens but also to expulsion, physical harm, and, in the most extreme cases, genocide (as Helen Fein warned when she articulated this concept in the 1970s).

Although Fein conceived of the term to describe the way nations determine membership, we can also recognize that individuals have a universe of obligation—the circle of individuals a person feels a responsibility to care for and protect. This concept helps us recognize the internalized hierarchies that influence how we think about and respond to the needs of others. While it is neither practical nor possible that one’s universe of obligation could include everyone in its center (the position of most importance), acknowledging the way we think about and prioritize our obligations toward others can help us act in a more thoughtful, compassionate manner.

During this lesson, students will examine their universe of obligation, as well as those of groups and nations to which they belong. By investigating the “us and them” dynamic that so often plays out in all of our lives and throughout history, students will be better prepared to analyze and understand the histories of the Armenian Genocide, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust.

This lesson’s third activity on Day 1 requires some preparation in advance, the steps of which are explained in the directions on the handout What Do We Do With a Variation? Question Sort. If you do not want to prepare the question strips in advance, you could distribute the handout and ask each group to cut one apart along the dotted lines for the sorting activity.

The following are key vocabulary terms used in this lesson:

• universe of obligation: how we define the people we are responsible for helping and protecting
• responsibility: one’s duty or obligation
• membership: belonging to a group

Add these words to your Word Wall, if you are using one for this course, and provide necessary support to help students learn these words as you teach the lesson.

Some of the activities in this lesson require students to record what may be sensitive or personal information. Note that students may feel uncomfortable sharing their completed handouts for Activity 2 of Day 2, and we do not recommend requiring them to do so. Instead, we encourage students to share their thought processes as they complete the exercise rather than divulging the personal reflections they make about who is included (or excluded) in their universes of obligation.

If your students are writing the final essay assessment for this course, after you complete this lesson, proceed to Introducing and Dissecting the Writing Prompt.

• Ask students to respond in their journals to the following prompt and then respond to the accompanying questions. You can project and reveal the prompt and then the questions one at a time to allow students to focus on each one.
  • Think about a group you belong to. It might be your family, a team, a faith community, a club, a classroom, an online community, or some other type of group.
    • How did you become a member of that group?
    • Did you choose to be a member, or are you one automatically?
    • What do you gain by belonging to that group?
    • What, if anything, do you have to give up or hide about yourself to be a member?
• Briefly debrief the prompt by asking students to share some of the things they gain by belonging to groups and some of the things they give up in order to belong. Honor student privacy and refrain from requiring all students to share their responses in detail.
• Then pose a new question to students: 
  • Why do humans so often divide themselves into groups? When is this a good thing? When is it harmful?
• Give students a few minutes to respond in their journals, and then discuss the question using the Think, Pair, Share strategy.

• Tell students that they will now read a poem by James Berry about the many ways we respond when we encounter a difference. While Berry was born in rural Jamaica in 1924, he moved to Britain in 1948, where he lived until his death in 2017.
• Pass out and read aloud What Do We Do with a Difference? Try reading it a few different ways. You might read it out loud the first time so that students get a sense of the rhythm of the poem. Then, using the “popcorn” or “wraparound” approach explained on the Read Aloud teaching strategy page, have students read the poem out loud sentence by sentence, and then a third time line by line. 
• Finally, have students continue using the Think, Pair, Share strategy to discuss what they think the poem is about based on their first impressions of the text.

• Next, divide the class into groups and pass out the envelopes with What Do We Do With a Variation? Question Sort sentence strips and some sticky notes or index cards. Tell students that they should sort the strips into categories of similar kinds of responses. They should create a label for each category and write it on a sticky note or index card (for example, “Fear,” “Indifference”). They might start by creating piles of responses to differences and then labeling them. Or they might create their categories first and then organize their strips into those categories. Regardless of their process, students should work together with their group members to complete this task.

• After the groups have organized the lines of the poem into categories of responses, ask them to discuss the following questions:
  • Which lines of the poem were easiest to categorize and which ones were the most difficult? Why do you think some responses to differences were easier or harder than others to place in a category?
  • Which of your categories had the most and the fewest examples from the poem? What might you attribute to this difference?
  • Can you think of any specific examples (in your school, your local community, or the world) of the different ways that Berry says humans respond to differences? Why do you think people respond in these ways?
  • What are other ways that humans respond to differences that Berry does not acknowledge in his poem?
  • What is the message of Berry’s poem? What does he want his reader to understand about humans and human behavior when responding to difference?
• After groups have finished their discussions, ask them to share one interesting takeaway from the activity and their discussion. You might also choose to facilitate a class discussion about one or more of the questions.

• Ask students to take a moment to envision how they would like their school community to respond to the differences between its members. You might ask them to close their eyes and visualize the response they would like to see (rather than what they perhaps have seen or experienced).
• Then tell students that they will end the lesson by writing an additional three-line stanza that describes their vision for how they would like their school community or local community to respond to a difference today. They can follow the pattern of Berry’s poem by starting the first line of their stanza with “Do we . . . ,” finishing the question in line two, and then adding an additional question in line three. You might choose to have pairs work on this task or ask students to create their own stanzas.
• Students can share their stanzas using one of the following teaching strategies: Wraparound or Gallery Walk.

• Introduce the concept of universe of obligation to students, and explain that it is one way to consider the benefits of belonging to groups and the consequences of being excluded. An individual’s or group’s universe of obligation represents the extent to which they feel responsible for others. We often feel a greater sense of responsibility for those who belong to the same groups that we do.
• Pass out the reading Universe of Obligation and read it aloud. 
• This reading includes quotations that feature the perspectives of three people: David Hume, Chuck Collins, and William Graham Sumner (connection question 4). Reread the quotations from each of these people to the class, and then discuss with students the following questions:
  • In what ways do these three people agree? In what ways do they disagree?
  • Which of these people seems to have the most inclusive universe of obligation? Which seems to have the most exclusive?
  • Is it possible for everyone in the world to be included in a person’s or a country’s universe of obligation? If not, how should we prioritize?

• Finally, ask students to illustrate their own universes of obligation using the graphic organizer on the handout Universe of Obligation. The concentric circles on this handout can help students visualize and diagram what an individual, group, or country’s universe of obligation might look like. 
• Give students time to follow the instructions and complete the activity on the handout. It might be helpful first to quickly brainstorm a variety of types of individuals and groups that might appear on one’s graphic organizer, including family, friends, neighbors, classmates, strangers in one’s town, and others. 
• Have students meet in groups of two or three to discuss their experience of trying to illustrate their universes of obligation. In their discussions, students should address some of the following questions:
  • What was the experience of diagramming your universe of obligation like? What did you think about when deciding where to place certain groups in your universe of obligation? Which decisions were difficult? Which were easy? 
  • Under what conditions might your universe of obligation shift? What might cause you to move some groups to the center and others to the outside?
  • What is the difference between an individual’s universe of obligation and that of a community or nation?

• End the lesson by discussing the following questions as a class so students can start to think about the ideas they will explore as they begin to look at histories involving exclusion, discrimination, and violence in the lessons that follow:
  • What factors influence the way a society defines its universe of obligation?
  • In what ways might a nation or community signal who is part of its universe of obligation and who is not?
  • What do you think might be some of the consequences for those who are not within a society’s universe of obligation?

• Due to their personal nature, we do not recommend using students’ individual universe of obligation graphic organizers for assessment. Instead, gauge their understanding of the concept by asking each student to complete a separate Handout: Universe of Obligation, this time illustrating a group to which they belong, such as a school, neighborhood, or country.
• Observe the group discussions at the end of the lesson to understand how students are responding to the moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in attempting to explicitly define one’s universe of obligation.

You might deepen the discussion of groups and belonging in this lesson by introducing additional readings from Chapter 2 of Holocaust and Human Behavior for student discussion and reflection. In the reading Understanding Strangers, journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski discusses the ways the earliest humans likely responded to “the Other” and suggests models for how we can constructively respond to unfamiliar groups of people today. This reading and its related connection questions can help support a larger class discussion about the human behavior of dividing ourselves into groups. You might use the following questions to guide the discussion:

• Why do humans so often divide themselves into “we” and “they”? When does it become a problem? 
• What historical examples help you answer this question? 
• What examples from the world today help you answer the question?