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2. Babel: Journeying toward Cosmopolis
- The University Press of Kentucky
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30 2. Cosmopolitanism In Search of Cosmos Who saves one person saves the entire world. —Babylonian Talmud The legacy of Western “modernity” is ambivalent. On the one hand, it has bequeathed to us the inspiring ideas of global brotherhood and universal justice. On the other hand, in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, it has launched the agenda of a compact, exclusivist nationalism or nation-state, an agenda often copied or supplemented by equally self-contained subnationalities. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nationalist agenda was steadily on the upsurge, engendering first a series of interstate wars and then the violent paroxysm of two World Wars. In the midst of these conflagrations , the broader civilizational vision was not extinguished, with its core often captured by the formula of “cosmopolitanism.” In the words of the poet Heinrich Heine, exclusive nationalism or chauvinism was a sign of backwardness, whereas brotherhood harbored a “greater future.” Excoriating in harsh terms the “shabby, coarse, unwashed” character of the former, Heine celebrated by contrast “a sentiment which is the most splendid and sacred thing Germany has produced,” namely, “humanity, the universal brotherhood of man, the cosmopolitanism to which our great minds—Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul and all educated people in Germany— have always paid homage.”1 In recent times, Heine’s cosmopolitan vision has come to be challenged again by all kinds of exclusivist backwardness. As a counter -move to social or cultural interaction and interdependence, we Cosmopolitanism 31 witness in many parts of the world the return of virulent forms of “identity politics,” where identity is defined in national or ethnic or religious terms (and sometimes in all these terms simultaneously). Exclusivism is manifest in the erection of new walls or fences between peoples and, on a legal level, in the imposition of new restrictions on immigration and citizenship. In this context, there is no doubt a great need to reaffirm and reenact Heine’s cosmopolitan agenda—and, fortunately, this need is widely felt and emphasized. As political philosopher Seyla Benhabib has stated, quite correctly : “Cosmopolitanism . . . has become one of the key words of our times”—something that is surely to be welcomed. Unhappily, the popularity of a term does not always help to clarify its meaning— which remains contested.2 In the following I shall take some steps in the direction of clarification by differentiating among some possible meanings of the term. In a first step, noting the close connection or affinity between the term and globalization, I turn attention to the global extension of markets and communications networks. Taken in this sense, cosmopolitanism refers to ongoing, empirically observable processes of border-crossing and hybridization—processes that are often accompanied by glaring ethical and psychological deficits. In a second step, I move from empirical description to the normative level, that is, to cosmopolitanism as a moral “vision”—whether this vision is formulated as the Kantian demand for global justice in a world confederation or the (linguistically nuanced) stress on the universal redemption of discursive validity claims. Construed in this sense, cosmopolitanism refers (in Benhabib’s words) to “the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations among individuals in a global civilsociety.”NotingthedilemmabesettingKantianandpost-Kantian formulations—the antinomy between “is” and “ought,” between vision and practice—I turn in a final step to cosmopolitanism seen as a practical experience and mode of ethical conduct. Viewed in this light, the term refers to the agenda of a global pedagogy fostering the cultivation of global civic “virtues,” such as the virtues of openness , generosity, service, and care. The same pedagogy animates the search for a viable “cosmos” reconciling the split between description and norm and also the gulf between global and local dimensions of public life.3 [54.163.62.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:39 GMT) 32 Being in the World Globalization Cosmopolitanism and globalization are closely connected and on some level overlapping; but they are not synonyms. Although capturing some features of the former, the second term appears limited to various empirical processes—which, to be sure, have gained great prominence in our time. In the view of David Held, one of the chief sponsors of “world order” studies, globalization denotes “a set of processes which are reshaping the organization of human activity , stretching political, economic, social and communicative networks across regions and continents.” Among these processes, Held gives pride of place to economic and financial transactions carried out under liberal or neoliberal auspices. “For the past two to...