{"id":35234,"date":"2016-07-11T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T05:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35234"},"modified":"2021-05-27T09:13:34","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:13:34","slug":"qotd-cosmopolitanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/07\/11\/qotd-cosmopolitanism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Cosmopolitanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one\u2019s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright\u2019s line that \u201cnothing human is alien to me,\u201d and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds.<\/p>\n

The people who consider themselves \u201ccosmopolitan\u201d in today\u2019s West, by contrast, are part of a meritocratic order<\/a> that transforms difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call \u201cglobal citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

This species is racially diverse (within limits) and eager to assimilate the fun-seeming bits of foreign cultures \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> \u2014 for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic), and of course their own outgroups<\/a> (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 \u201cglobal city\u201d (like each \u201cglobal university\u201d) is increasingly interchangeable, so that wherever the citizen of the world travels he already feels at home.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.)<\/p>\n

Ross Douthat, “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism”, New York Times<\/em><\/a>, 2016-07-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one\u2019s own. It takes its cue from a Roman playwright\u2019s line that \u201cnothing human is alien to me,\u201d and goes outward ready to be transformed by what it finds. The people who consider […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,41,13],"tags":[1420,262,907],"class_list":["post-35234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-classism","tag-culture","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9ai","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65996,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35234\/revisions\/65996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}