In Afghanistan, a young girl greets a stranger traveling along her road. The stranger is filming the scenic route, peacefully enjoying his good fortune in the opportunity to admire the stark beauty of God’s earth. He greets the girl politely as he passes by, hiking up a mountain. “Uncle,” the child says, in what is likely Pashto. “Come have dinner with us.”

The man declines dutifully, expressing gratitude toward the child’s generosity. She asks twice more, because she’s cultured, and so is he. She does not need to check with her family, as it is a certainty that they would enthusiastically accept the stranger as a guest in their home. In many nonwhite cultures, hospitability, even and especially toward a complete stranger, is not just the highest mark of civility—it is widespread, expected, and accompanied by norms surrounding decorum for all parties.

It is a characteristic that is, devastatingly, increasingly vanishing from the face of the earth as a result of colonialism, which introduces new suspicions and paranoia. The colonized today have every reason not to trust passing travelers, and the colonizers, forever projecting as they were never benevolent in the first place, have created and contributed to a culture where individual robbery, murder, and assault hang in the air as open questions.

The child, and this aspect of her culture, in this way are more precious than gold—and even rarer. The child is a living, postcolonial continuation of a quickly vanishing precolonial virtue. In this virtue, the mere humanity of a stranger is recognized so plainly that it does not even matter what qualities the stranger has, much less what material. Wealth? Irrelevant. Intelligence? Irrelevant. These days even that is objectified. Deservingness? He’s a human being. Generosity? They have little to part with themselves, yet she expects nothing in return.

When after the meal he attempts to repay the family, they will refuse as ardently as he first refused their child’s offer. To express his unending gratitude, he will leave the gift—money, a valued item, whatever he can part with—hidden under a table or chair for them to find long after he’s gone, because they otherwise will not take it from him. He will leave quickly, stay a night at most, as to not overstay and burden them.

He will certainly not think to claim their belongings, home, or resources for himself. The thought is so absurd, so inconceivable, introducing it would be like lightning to the heart.

This is, unfortunately, how the colonized received the colonizers, who did not speak the same virtue, who did not return the same decorum toward those who were unlike them. A university professor once mentioned in a lecture that in Ancient Greece, a traveling stranger would be housed and fed for three days before it was considered polite for the host to even inquire about personal questions, like, so what’s your name?

Now imagine, centuries ago, that this was not a virtue that was quickly vanishing off the face of the earth. That it was widespread—that you could travel the world and rest assured that your humanity was acknowledged, and you would have a place, in the weary night, to lay your head. We say sister and brother now to other believes. We once recognized this in practice on a planetary level.

It makes sense, sheds much more light then, on how whatever sin committed by the people of Sodom was so unprecedented, how it tore to shreds the fabric of humanity itself, when you realize that once, it was enough to be a human being to be included in a sense of community.