The way we personally measure each other

The ground of human rights, the recognition and appreciation of some irreducible quality that is inalienable in all of us, the basis of personal dignity that is the essence of the lesser identity – "The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, 'Volo ut sis (I want you to be),' without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 300) – the way in which we personally measure each other operates through the experiences and the urges of desert. 

• Desert lies at the core of the friendships and the sympathies and the grace of love that governs the private sphere. 
• Desert allows us to move those private sentiments into civil society and human rights. 
• Desert is how God safeguards all those seemingly inarticulable values.