A though-provoking essay in The New York Times from Ross Douthat. I'll reproduce it in full because you folks are too lazy to follow a link. NOW that populist rebellions are taking Britain out of the European Union and the Republican Party out of contention for the presidency, perhaps we should speak no more of left and right, liberals and conservatives. From now on the great political battles will be fought between nationalists and internationalists, nativists and globalists. From now on the loyalties that matter will be narrowly tribal — Make America Great Again, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England — or multicultural and cosmopolitan. Well, maybe. But describing the division this way has one great flaw. It gives the elite side of the debate (the side that does most of the describing) too much credit for being truly cosmopolitan. Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright’s line that “nothing human is alien to me,” and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds. The people who consider themselves “cosmopolitan” in today’s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.” This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures — food, a touch of exotic spirituality. But no less than Brexit-voting Cornish villagers, our global citizens think and act as members of a tribe. They have their own distinctive worldview (basically liberal Christianity without Christ), their own common educational experience, their own shared values and assumptions (social psychologists call these WEIRD — for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups(evangelicals, Little Englanders) to fear, pity and despise. And like any tribal cohort they seek comfort and familiarity: From London to Paris to New York, each Western “global city” (like each “global university”) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home. Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.) It is still possible to disappear into someone else’s culture, to leave the global-citizen bubble behind. But in my experience the people who do are exceptional or eccentric or natural outsiders to begin with — like a young writer I knew who had traveled Africa and Asia more or less on foot for years, not for a book but just because, or the daughter of evangelical missionaries who grew up in South Asia and lived in Washington, D.C., as a way station before moving her own family to the Middle East. They are not the people who ascend to power, who become the insiders against whom populists revolt. In my own case — to speak as an insider for a moment — my cosmopolitanism probably peaked when I was about 11 years old, when I was simultaneously attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services, playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood, eating alongside aging hippies in macrobiotic restaurants on weekends, all the while attending a liberal Episcopalian parochial school. (It’s a long story.) Whereas once I began attending a global university, living in global cities, working and traveling and socializing with my fellow global citizens, my experience of genuine cultural difference became far more superficial. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with this. Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain. But it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them. They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.” They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools. They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world. Some of the comments are just as pointed: sfd - Lithuania Needs a second chapter. The new cosmopolitan tribe sees itself as "post-colonialist" but in fact exhibit the same absolute confidence in their rightness and superiority to unenlightened people as did their classic western colonialist predecessors. Carl Bereiter Mr. Douthat is right about the decline of cosmopolitanism, a personal trait that flourished in Rudyard Kipling's day, when it took some fortitude and openness to new experience to feel at home in distant lands. Today, if you are college educated you can go almost anywhere in the world and whether you stay in a 5-star hotel or a youth hostel you will find people like yourself, who even speak your own language--provided it's English. So cosmopolitanism has been replaced by globalism. That having been said, Mr. Douthat could said aside philosophizing about elite tribalism and focus on the problem all social analysts are talking about: the problem that in post-industrial societies the benefits of globalism accrue to the information-manipulating few and leave industrial workers behind. Ron Cohen - Waltham, MA It is a mistake to view this column through a partisan lens. It stands on its own, as the best commentary yet on Brexit. Douthat achieves an objectivity that eludes liberal commentators. Yes, the educated, mostly liberal, and mostly upwardly mobile of this world are tribal in every respect – just as tribal as the Trumpers or Leavers they revile. Most Times commenters belong to that Cosmopolitan tribe. Often, they will blame their elders for the problems, and pin the hated "neoliberal label on them. But that reflects an intergenerational conflict within the tribe. They're all part of the same tribe, regardless. Self-absorbed and self-justifying, these Cosmopolitans express only their own fears and concerns when they write about Brexit. Few ever touch on the anguish and distress of working class whites here in the US: the early deaths due to suicide and substance abuse, the family and community breakdown, the loss of jobs, income and status. Or the corresponding problems of the white, working class in England. There's certainly been enough publicity about this epidemic of despair, but the Cosmopolitans appear unmoved. These victims are outside the tribe, after all. They are expendable. But, since this is WF, I'll break it down to the obvious question. Is @Goldstein the Space Jew really more cosmopolitan than @Dayton3? Are they equally tribal?
"They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools." Well he sure nailed that! That said, society is indeed tribal. We just reorganize and categorize the tribes constantly.
This reminds me of the saying about the difference between white northerners and white southerners regarding how they deal with blacks. In the north, they'll vote for a black person but they don't want them living next door. In the south, they won't vote for a black person but they are okay with them living next door.
That is actually quite true in my experience! I've lived in the north & the south, and darned if this isn't an accurate.
Yep. In the South they don't care how close blacks are (even working as live-in nannies) as long as the social hierarchy didn't put them on top. In the North nobody cares if the mayor is black as long as he doesn't live in their neighborhood. But back to the article, it reminds me of the "jet set" from the 60's. The people who could afford to fly to the Swiss Alps for a ski vacation were effectively a single tribe drawn from around the globe. They were all more like each other in outlook, education, affluence, and interest than they were with non-elites in their home countries. Nowadays we might refer to them as the Twitterati as they post narcissistic selfies of their lavish lifestyles. They run in the same circles and seem alien to ordinary folks. What might be happening is that those ordinary folks are realizing that the elites are very good at representing themselves and while pretending to represent the rest of us, as is their anointed role as "the elite", they have nothing but disdain, if not contempt for us.
No. It is a combination of two Greek words created in French, but the term that is used in other languages was coined in Marxism, specifically Trotzkiism. It doesn't mean accepting every culture, but transforming every culture into one global citizenry. It's neither unaware of its own drive for homogeneity, nor is it at all "WEIRD"-like.
The family on the lot to the south of me is Philipino, the one to the east, Indian (subcontinent), north Vietnamese, across the street b/c of the way it lines up, there are two lots, one an apartment building with an old Cuban dude, a black family and a white couple (one unit vacant) and a house with another Vietnamese family (Vietnamese make up majority of the block). As for schools, this is a case where No Child Left Behind actually did a lot of good. Because for the first time schools were required to report scores by race and other demographics. Turns out 'good schools' are just schools without a lot of poor, minority, or English learners. And 'bad schools' just have a lot of those students. Hawthorne is one of the worst schools in Seattle overall, however whites there do just fine. My children will be going to public school. Tried to get my son in next year for K-4 but for that group only full subsidy families get in. On list for K-5 though.
From the OED: 1642 J. Howell The Vote 5 Every ground May be one's Countrey, for by birth each man Is in this World a Cosmopolitan.
Not for @gturner, but for everyone else reading along: Note how this proves the difference of the current and the original meaning of the term, as by the current meaning, simply being human and alive does not imply you're cosmopolitan at all.
Well, since I've been in more than one relationship with someone culturally different from me. Since I have different friends of various ethnicities, cultures and sexuality, since my work requires me to interact regularly with such people and since I am reasonably well traveled, yeah I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I am more cosmopolitan than the likes of Dayton. Given that evidence is part and partial of my daily life, my experiences have very much informed my opinions on things, rather than simply my coming to those views because I read them in a blog or a newspaper, or heard them from a politician. Of course, I wouldn't claim that's the case for everyone, even those who happen to have similar views to me on certain issues.
But have you ever dated someone outside of the upper-class tribe? Do you have friends in outlaw motorcycle gangs? What the piece is getting at is that the "cosmopolitan" tribe is itself very tribal. Jet setters can date other jet setters from any nationality, as long as they're well-educated, affluent, and "cosmopolitan". They only intermarry with themselves, in a manner of speaking. They don't care where the rich well-connected heiress is from, as long as she's a rich well-connected heiress. Other people look at that and realize that they're seeing a tribe that thinks like a tribe. It's much the way celebrities only seem to date other celebrities. You have to be admitted into their ranks to date one. So what the piece is getting at is that where these "cosmopolitan" people meet and claim to represent England, Belgium, France, Italy, and the US, other people look upon them and realize they only represent themselves and their cosmopolitan tribe of jet-setters who ski in the Alps and fly their friends thousands of miles on private jets to hear them talk about global warming.
Another good piece by Ross Douthat. Don't mind the fact that @gturner posted it. The relative moral standing of each group notwithstanding, the world is indeed divided between an over-class of cosmopolitans and an underclass of what I like to call "provincials." I run into this contrast quite frequently whenever I return to my hometown in Pennsylvania and have absolutely no common interests with my family and friends from high school.
This was a very interesting essay. Not sure that I agree with all of it, but it's one of those pieces that makes me rethink certain things, which is always valuable. As a white "northerner" who has both voted for black people and lived with black people, that saying is a crock of shit. I also live in one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the US--I couldn't even count on two hands the number of ethnicities in my immediate neighborhood. And it's not exactly a cosmopolitan city along the lines of London or New York.
So what @gturner is saying is that it's all about class rather than race and nationality. Interesting...
Totally agree public schools (in general) are just fine. Guarantee your kids aren't smarter or more experienced than the teachers. If they are, you better get them booked to perform in Vegas. Every time I hear "that school isn't teaching my kid anything" I just Maybe your kid isn't learning anything because that Asian kid sitting next to them is blowing your kid out of the water!
There's a kernel of truth here, but not much more than that. Not everybody opposed to Brexit, or Trump, is part of a jet-setting elite.
I'm from a working class background. I know many "bikers" (read blue collar). Perhaps I am a minority, but I still serve to prove that your stereotyping just doesn't hold up.
Definitely a big part, but parental encouraging can only go so far. Especially if the parents aren't around much b/c they have to work multiple low wage jobs. Or if the kid is with a grandmother and 6 other siblings and cousins running around it's hard to concentrate. Throw in having to help take care of younger siblings and it just gets worse.
Okay let me put it this way...when kids aren't allowed/encouraged to be kids, they are not actually getting the parental support they need. Now, I am completely understanding that not all parents can give their kids this ability, or grandparent, aunt, foster parent, whoever is raising the kid. But it is part of parental support. The only way it will get better is for our society to be able to live on a single parents income (so one can stay home, male or female it doesn't matter) and get rid of the war on drugs, a construct to tear apart the poor's family structure (rumor has it mainly the black family structure).
"and get rid of the war on drugs, a construct to tear apart the poor's family structure (rumor has it mainly the black family structure)" - Aenea to quote Bush - "Mission accomplished!" But us whites are hot on your heels! Pretty soon half the north east will be dead from a heroin overdose.
