Whenever discontent with globalization erupts, so does the myth of a world-dominating tribe that dare not say its name: the tribe sees itself as “elect” and deserving of world mastery, with a mission that is universal and thus not bound by the normal (territorial) rules of tribalism. In the past, Jews and Marxists took the hit-the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a key text. Currently, it can be some combination of Goldman Sachs, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, the Clinton Foundation, Google and Bill Gates. But in his attack on cosmopolitanism in today’s New York Times http://nyti.ms/29fH0sn, Ross Douthat targets people like myself-a supposed multicultural caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals that operates in global cities like London, New York, and Paris, supports cosmopolitanism and cultural openness, and is somehow in the pay of “multinational corporations.”
Douthat’s version of the global conspiracy differs from earlier iterations because instead of attacking cosmopolitanism as such he employs a distinction between “genuine” cosmopolitanism, which he claims to admire, and the supposed superficial or wimpy cosmopolitanism of the globalist tribe that thinks “it alone deserves to rule the world” but which it comfortable with cultural difference only at the most shallow and unthreatening level. Douthat tries to shame or expose the globalist tribe as being un-serious in their cosmopolitanism. The true cosmopolitan is a much rarer breed.
Although Douthat doesn’t acknowledge it, the notion of genuine versus superficial cosmopolitanism derives from a speech that the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Leo Strauss gave in the 1950s at the New School in New York eulogizing his late friend and former colleague Kurt Rizler. Rizler had been a German nationalist but one politically insightful enough to get off the bus when nationalism degenerated into fascism. Rizler the former high-ranking German official and Strauss the former researcher at Berlin’s Jewish Studies Institute both ended up as émigré philosophy teachers at the New School. (I address Strauss’s own relationship to nationalism, and internationalism, in my book Leo Strauss Man of Peace).
Strauss said of the young Rizler, “he was not [simply] a nationalist…He distinguished genuine cosmopolitanism from spurious or superficial cosmopolitanism, and discerned the root of the former in the depth of the individual.” As Strauss explained, the superficial cosmopolitans of Rizler’s youth tended to the view that one could dispense with the state in favor of a world state or world government. The superficial cosmopolitans took a noble individual human aspiration—to connect with others across the divides of culture, religion etc.—as the basis for a political project fraught with unseen or unacknowledged dangers and obstacles.
Strauss’s framing of the distinction between genuine and spurious cosmopolitanism helps in grasping the fallacy behind Douthat’s deployment of this dichotomy. For Douthat, genuine cosmopolitanism is not about affinities between individuals across cultures but the ability to enter deeply into someone else’s tribal experience- “disappear[ing] into someone else’s culture.” Douthat’s notion seems to be that there are pure or closed cultures, untouched or uncompromised by confrontation with the outside, and that a genuine cosmopolitan would have to be someone capable of reckoning with them. But of course this is itself is a myth, one of exoticism, the search for a pure collective reality unsullied by modernity or larger forces. The claim to parachute effortlessly, Zelig-like, into multiple tribal identities is hardly the core of today’s cosmopolitanism-rather it is a conception of the human, i.e. that there is something of worth, and perhaps of ultimate worth, in human beings that is not derivative from bounded tribal identities, and which can be experienced and shared by people across national and other boundaries. At the same time, a significant if not predominant group among today’s cosmopolitans recognizes that human security—physical, social and economic—can’t be guaranteed by any global structure. It requires a strong, legitimate state. The human orientation of cosmopolitanism is entirely compatible with criticizing those aspects of economic globalization that lead to weak and failed states, the destruction of social protection, and extreme economic inequality. True, there are serious scholars like Oxford’s David Miller, who argue that some strong form of tribalism may be needed to produce the social solidarity for redistributive institutions. In my country of origin, Canada, it is the ideology of conservative political elites (now thrown out of power) not multiculturalism that has threatened the commitment to social justice.
Is it so that the cosmopolitans Douthat despises merely retreat into comfortable and familiar neighborhoods in global cities? And isn’t the role of New York Times culture critic, feeding off what Saul Bellow called “the canned sauerkraut of Weimar intellectuals”, a pretty comfortable one? Compare that with working in a combat zone with Medicins sans frontiers; or persisting as a foreign correspondent in a country where journalists’ lives are threatened; or setting up a truth commission to heal wounds in a conflict-ridden nation; or soldiering as a social entrepreneur to empower women’s small business in an African village; or confronting traditional community leaders about female genital mutilation. These are all quintessentially cosmopolitan roles, which involve real risks, real sacrifice, and often wrenching encounters with otherness.