The word “cosmopolitan” means, literally, “cosmos-citizen.”
Its first recorded use was by Diogenes the Cynic in the late fifth century
B.C.E. Upon being asked his citizenship he answered, “I am kosmopolites”—“a citizen of the whole world.”
To the Greeks of the classical period, who lived in poleis, or “city-states,” it was obvious
that each man existed in the whole
world, but that context was too broad to give him any useful identity. What
mattered was civic identity, which
was defined by one’s community of origin. Each city had its peculiar laws and
institutions that shaped its citizens’ collective character. Sparta with its strict caste system and its
warrior ethos was the most famous example, but all of the major poleis were known for certain distinctive
traits. If other Greeks knew your city, they had some sense of your interests,
your personal standards and tastes, and your political predispositions. To have
no city was a most unfortunate condition, because it usually meant either that
you had been banished from your city or that your city had ceased to exist
through war or natural disaster.
Yet, by Diogenes’ time, it was intellectually and morally
possible for a Greek philosopher voluntarily to abjure local citizenship and to
ask other men to view him, for all purposes, in a much broader context. This
implied that he did not regard himself as strictly bound by any local customs
or rules of behavior, including those of his own birth-city. He might obey local laws out of convenience or
by way of courtesy, but only to the extent that they accorded with his
individual sense of universal right
and wrong.
This was a reversal of the traditional understanding, according to
which the individual had no moral authority to judge the standards he was born
into; he owed his existence to his community, and therefore he owed that community’s
laws an unwavering loyalty. Another implication of world-citizenship was that
all men are in a fundamental sense equal regardless of their origins, customs
and beliefs. That idea was disturbing to a society in which wars with nearby
peoples were frequent and slavery was deemed natural. It is hard to maintain an
effective state of martial tension, or even to own slaves, unless you view
enemies and potential enemies as inferior and deserving of suppression or
death.
The decline of the poleis
after the Peloponnesian War—the cultural period now called “Hellenistic”—and
later the rise of Rome’s empire did much to attenuate local patriotism and to
promote universalism. During the last centuries B.C.E., both schools of
philosophy, such as Stoicism, and literary figures, such as Terence (“Homo sum, humani nil a me
alienum puto”—“I am a man; I consider nothing human to be alien
to me”), articulated the viewpoint we now, sometimes, call “cosmopolitanism.”
The
Hellenistic and Roman cosmopolitans were acutely aware that men differ greatly
in culture. They considered such cultural differences superficial when compared
to human essentials, and they believed it a sign of superiority for a man to be
knowledgeable about and comfortable with many different customs besides his
own. Holding blindly to the superiority of one’s own ways didn’t prove anything
about those ways, it only demonstrated that one was ignorant of the world.
At a deeper level, the Stoics argued that no
particular laws or customs could be said to be better than any others without
some universal and unchanging standard against which all could be measured.
This they considered to be “nature.” Since no human authority can legislate
nature, then all such authority—including political and religious authority—and
its pronouncements must be judged in the light of nature. But since nature has
endowed all men with a faculty—reason—by which nature itself is known, all men
are qualified to discern nature’s law; this was the origin of the concept of
“natural law” that is still vital in philosophy. Of course, not all men will do
so with equal success, but where right and wrong, good and evil, are concerned,
reason must be, in principle, the court of last resort, because it is the only universal
standard. The implications of this were revolutionary indeed in a world which
had for centuries assumed that authority, and the laws authority promulgated,
were somehow divinely ordained.
Yet for all its philosophical good sense, Western
cosmopolitanism has forever been tainted by its origins in the breakdown of
classical Hellenic society and its later flourishing in the religiously and
culturally syncretistic and politically often chaotic centuries of the decline
of Rome.
Cosmopolitanism is associated with decay.
The unspoken assumption seems to be that a man wants to be a citizen of
the whole world only when his own particular community can no longer inspire
him. The citizens of a young, virile
community on the make are preoccupied with their own destiny. They believe in their ability to compete with
other communities—in all ways, but above all in war. They do not care what
other peoples may value, since those communities are regarded as at least
potential competitors. If a rising community
succeeds against its competitors—which usually means victory in war—that is
taken to prove that its values are the “right” ones, and everybody else is
wrong, inferior, or far enough away to be irrelevant.
Fear of and antipathy to cosmopolitanism is a
recurrent theme in at least Western history. Though we don’t often think of it
this way, the German Reformation was an anti-cosmopolitan movement. Unquestionably,
the Renaissance Catholic church, certainly in Italy, was both cosmopolitan, in
the sense of embracing cultural material from many different sources, and
corrupt. The German princes resented its political dominance in Germany, and Luther
resented the theological and artistic innovations such a church fostered. Luther’s
theology was a rejection of such novelties and an attempted return, under the
name of a return to purportedly scriptural norms, to older medieval German notions
of both individual and community piety. Scholastic (Aristotelian) theology and
philosophy, then widely taught within the Roman church, were among Luther’s
prime targets. He detested scholastic rationalism, since he could detect no
trace of it in the Bible, and it had never had much following in Germany anyway.
He likewise detested Renaissance humanism, which drew heavily on classical
pagan models and motifs. He saw all of this Romish influence as sapping and
impurifying the doctrine and practice of the gospels and the early Christian
church.
Earlier in his life, Luther had preached tolerance of the Jews and even
intimated some admiration for aspects of Jewish life. But after he rose to
fame, for reasons unknown he became virulently anti-Semitic. It was as if, now
committed to a much more fundamentalist Christianity than Rome’s, he felt he had to excoriate any
possible alien contamination.
All of the so-called totalitarian movements of the
twentieth century (which were all at bottom extreme nationalist movements) were
stridently anti-cosmopolitan. Ittihadism, responsible for the Armenian genocide
in Turkey, had the motto “Turkey for Turks!” and strove to purify the
nation of ethnically and religiously “alien” elements, even though they had
been present in Turkey for
many centuries and had been thoroughly integrated into the Ottoman
Empire.
The Nazis went even further with their racial doctrines;
they monotonously used the language of “contamination” and “disease” to
describe undesirable races and their supposedly pernicious influence. Not just
Jews, but Jewish art, music, literature, and even “Jewish physics” (!) were not
compatible with the young, virile Nazi Germany, then very confident of its
ability to compete (especially militarily) with other countries.
Communism was supposedly a “scientific” ideology,
interested only in the historical dialectic of the class struggle and not in crude
“non-historical” concepts like race or ethnicity, but in fact anti-cosmopolitanism
was a noted feature of communist governments.
To Stalin we owe the phrase “rootless cosmopolitans,” hostile code for
“Jews.” (Hitler had given anti-Semitism a bad name; hence hostility toward Jews
as such had to be disguised.) After World War II, Stalin and others began
perceived Soviet Jews as insufficiently patriotic Russians, which now designated an
ethnic and cultural category, not a citizenship. The fact that Jews had been
disproportionately prominent in the early Bolshevik Party and had fought Nazi
Germany as enthusiastically as any other Russians was not enough to prove their
nationalism. In Stalin’s mind, Jews, as supposedly culturally distinct from
Russians, necessarily represented a different and therefore suspect set of
interests. Jews were concerned about the Holocaust (a non-event in Soviet
versions of the Great Patriotic War), and they allegedly had connections with
Zionists and other foreign Jewish organizations. Thus, they could serve as a
conduit of ideological “contamination” of correct Soviet views.
Mao was the great anti-cosmopolitan of the Chinese
communist movement. The Cultural Revolution was fiercely anti-cosmopolitan. The
Red Guards destroyed almost anything in China that it identified as either
Western or, if it was indisputably Chinese, as ideologically “backward.” (Who
could be more Chinese than Confucius?—whose supposed grave was desecrated
during the Cultural Revolution.) Any Chinese who could appreciate foreign or
ancient things, even just for historical reasons, had a “bourgeois cosmopolitan”
frame of reference: he valued things that were, officially, of no value
whatsoever to the revolutionary, i.e., peasant, class. This was forbidden.
The ironic thing about all anti-cosmopolitanism is
that it confuses effect with cause. To be sure, cosmopolitanism, historically, has
been associated with the decline of what was perceived as a highly successful, if
parochial, endeavor. But cosmopolitan views do not cause the end of the earlier
endeavor, nor can eradication of cosmopolitanism restore it. Other conditions cause
a notable moment in history to end; cosmopolitanism is an effect that follows
as men switch their investment of attention and energy from a once-successful, now-failed
enterprise to an attempt to make sense of the broader world that caused it to
end.
After Sparta defeated Athens, the world of the polis started
to disappear. The causes were not ideological or cultural, they were primarily
demographic, economic, geopolitical, and technological. The glory of classical Athens never returned. The
many efforts of later centuries to recapture it couldn’t bring back Pericles or
Socrates or Euripides, they could only make Athens a prestigious debating forum where, a
thousand years later, the last pagans were still vainly trying to recreate the
classical spirit. But classical Athens,
great as it was, would never have given rise to that characteristically
Hellenistic philosopher and encyclopedist, Aristotle. Just as Socrates is
inconceivable without fifth-century Athens,
so Aristotle is inconceivable without Alexander.
In an integrated world, we have no choice but to be cosmopolitan. Those who reserve not just their loyalty but their human interest in and sympathy for those of their own kind are increasingly isolated islands in a world of spreading global global interaction at all levels. They risk ending up like Jochen Peiper, an unrepentant SS officer, who said in 1967, "I was a Nazi and I remain one...The Germany of today is no longer a great nation, it has become a province of Europe." Ironically, not even his contemporaries in Germany then thought such sentiments served their parochial interests.
