Cosmopolitanism, 4th Day of Research

I found 4 more papers. I wrote in my last entry that I would quit searching and read the articles I already have. I will start that after today, promise!

Reimers, F. (2006). Citizenship, identity and education: Examining the public purposes of schools in an age of globalization. Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This paper discusses the importance of educational institutions to teach individuals global values and help them develop the quality of citizenship.


Gunesch, K. (2004). Education for cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitanism as a personal cultural identity model for and within international education. Journal of Research in International Education, 3 (3), 251-275.

This paper investigates the role of cosmopolitanism as an emerging social force within the establishment of individuals identity and as educational curriculm.


McDonough, K. (1997). Cultural recognition, cosmopolitanism and
multicultural education. Retrieved, November 22, 2006, from
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PES-yearbook/97_docs/mcdonough.html

This paper is pasted here:


Much of the recent research on multicultural education supports a variety of programs designed to reinforce and sustain the survival of particular cultural identities in public schools. As Michael Olneck has argued recently, in an impressively erudite review of the recent multicultural education literature, a variety of recent programs and policies share an ideal of multicultural education that "would require that the explicit affirmation of minority identities...be permitted even within public schools."[1] These include bilingual and heritage language education programs that seek to reinforce and encourage the flourishing of local languages, and not simply to serve as temporary, transitional "bridges" designed to help minority language children assimilate to a larger English speaking public culture. As well, it includes recent attempts to reconfigure public school practices along multicultural lines (for example curricula) so that they adequately represent the cultural values, experiences and traditions of minority cultural groups. It also includes a variety of recent demands on the part of minority national and cultural groups - for example North American Indians, the Deaf, African- Americans - for publicly funded schools designed to reinforce particular cultural, racial, gendered or other identities.

The existing literature on multicultural educational research has tended to lament what is frequently at best the very limited success of such programs in achieving their aims, and at worst a betrayal of those aims.[2] Such sentiments presuppose that the aims of cultural survival that supposedly underly these multicultural education programs are desirable without offering justifications for those aims, and indeed without clarifying the nature of the aims at all. In this paper I seek to challenge the notion that multicultural education programs should foster cultural survival for particular groups by developing and criticizing an influential and philosophically sophisticated conception of cultural identity that might be adduced to justify them. I then outline an alternative conception of cultural identity, which I call cosmopolitanism, that suggests an alternative and morally attractive role for multicultural education.


THE CULTURAL RECOGNITION THESIS

Charles Taylor's recent account of multiculturalism is based on what I shall call the cultural recognition thesis, which claims that cultural recognition is an important and necessary constituent of the value of treating individuals with equal respect.[3] Taylor stresses the fact that cultural identities are things we negotiate through dialogue with others. Thus, he says, cultural recognition is important because its "refusal can inflict damage on those who are denied it, according to a widespread modern view...The projection of an inferior or demeaning image on another can actually distort or oppress, to the extent that the image is internalized." On this view, to withhold recognition from others, or to impose misrecognition on them, "can be a form of oppression."[4] For Taylor, socio-political and educational policies must evince cultural recognition because cultural misrecognition, or withholding recognition altogether, may prevent individuals from being capable of finding value in their identity. And when it does, cultural misrecognition constitutes a form of disrespect to the extent that it prevents others from being able to have a sense of self-respect. So respecting others requires that we recognize the cultural identity that constitutes them.

Significantly, Taylor thinks that genuine recognition, as opposed to misrecognition, requires an acknowledgment of the way in which another's identity is constituted within a single, distinct group cultural structure.[5] As Taylor says, the universal demand of equal respect "powers an acknowledgment of specificity," where specificity refers to the distinct nature of different, specific cultural groups as the basis for individual identity.[6] Of course, individuals are capable of shaping their inherited group cultural identity in unique and idiosyncratic ways.[7] Taylor's view is not an argument for cultural conformism or mindless devotion to ancestral traditions. He stresses the language of authenticity and creative self-formation and reformation through interaction with others and our socio-cultural environment. Nevertheless, according to Taylor's account, respecting me means recognizing the way in which my identity is constituted by a specific group cultural identity. It follows from this view that a liberal society dedicated to the value of equal respect must also recognize the multiplicity of cultural sub-groups that constitute it. That is because multicultural societies are made up of a range of distinct cultural groups, whose members' identities are constituted by the particular groups to which they belong; and thus members of each sub-group require cultural recognition.

This discussion of Taylor's account of cultural identity is far from complete but it is sufficiently detailed to understand an important educational implication that he seeks to draw from it. According to Taylor the need for cultural recognition requires state support for multicultural education programs designed to foster cultural survival and flourishing. For example, he says that the aim of multicultural policies, including policies of multicultural education, is "to maintain and cherish distinctness, not just now but forever. After all, if we're concerned with identity, then what is more legitimate than one's aspiration that it never be lost."[8] It follows that Taylor's version of the cultural recognition requires support for cultural survival in a particularly strong sense. It entails the conclusion that the value of equal respect requires a state to preserve not just the cultural structure that is available for existing cultural members, in the way that a group of people might wish to have their local community swimming pool maintained as a facility for themselves. Rather, Taylor says that "[p]olicies aimed at [cultural] survival actively seek to create members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers. There is no way that these policies could be seen as just providing a facility to already existing people."[9] Thus, according to Taylor's view, the value of equal respect demands state support for multicultural education policies to the extent that those policies are effective and necessary means of assuring the ongoing survival of an existing group's cultural identity.

So far, I have tried to show that Taylor's version of the cultural recognition thesis is based on two claims. First, cultural misrecognition can be a form of oppression when it causes individuals to internalize a demeaning image of their ancestral cultural identity. Second, rectification of cultural misrecognition and its demeaning effects on personal identity require educational policies aimed at ensuring the survival and flourishing of the ancestral culture. But if this is what multicultural education must do in order to evince genuine cultural recognition then what exactly are such policies supposed to "recognize" and reinforce? It cannot simply be the children's own (demeaning) self-understanding of their ancestral identity. That is the problem that requires rectification in the first place. Nor can it be some purified, untainted version of the child's ancestral culture. Affirming this identity would not constitute genuine recognition of, and respect for, the child's own identity; it would constitute the imposition of some prior version of the child's identity that the teacher, or the educational policy maker, prefers. But an education that imposes a predetermined ancestral identity upon children who inhabit minority cultural communities is no more a form of genuine cultural recognition than is an education that imposes a dominant, majority cultural tradition.

An example will help to elaborate the implications of this point. Donna Deyhle and Karen Swisher describe the case of a teacher who once tried to engage her Pomo Indian students with an ancestral story about Slug Woman. The students, according to Deyhle and Swisher, "responded with either open hostility or stone silence." Furthermore, the authors attribute this response to the fact that "the students saw the event as one more attempt to set them up for failure by superficially "admitting" a limited and static view of their culture into the classroom.[10] Deyhle and Swisher portray the Slug Woman incident as a case of cultural misrecognition, although they do not elaborate on what makes it so. However, there are at least two ways in which the teacher's actions might constitute a form of cultural misrecognition. Both of these interpretations go against the cultural recognition thesis and its emphasis on the need for multicultural education practices aimed at promoting cultural integrity and survival.

First, as the massive literature on American Indian education deftly surveyed by Deyhle and Swisher shows, Indian children frequently grow up in a cultural context that may induce strongly conflicting feelings about the value of their ancestral cultural identity. For example, the story of Slug Woman might constitute a valuable part of the children's cultural inheritance because, whether the children like it or not, it is part of the identity they have inherited from those closest to them. Nonetheless, these children may find it extremely difficult to find value in this heritage in the face of a vastly more powerful, hegemonic western culture that threatens its survival. In short, the children's hostility and silence in response to the Slug Woman story may reflect an experience of deep ambivalence about their inherited ancestral culture. On the one hand, they have a strong attachment to the story of Slug Woman since they understand it as part of the cultural heritage of the people they love. On the other hand, they may be repelled and embarrassed by virtue of the fact that it represents the stigma of a failed or failing culture.[11]

A second interpretation explains the children's hostility and silence to the Slug Woman story not as a result of feelings of ambivalence about their ancestral culture, but quite simply as a result of the fact that the story is not genuinely part of their inherited identity at all. Thus, what we (for example teachers) take to be the children's ancestral culture may simply be irrelevant to their cultural identity.[12] To the extent that it is irrelevant, the teacher's behavior in this case is akin to treating the children as mere artifacts of a single cultural community to which she thinks they ought to belong, but which in fact they do not in fact belong at all.

These two accounts of the Slug Woman story are, of course, speculative; nevertheless, they illustrate the dangers of generalizing too much about the ways in which multicultural education might seek to rectify the damaging psychological effects of cultural misrecognition. Taylor regards the path to rectification as one geared towards fostering cultural survival and flourishing by reinforcing children's ancestral cultural identities. But the two accounts of the Slug Woman incident illustrate the potential for such an approach to foist its own kind of potentially damaging cultural misrecognition. In both cases, a teacher's attempt to "recognize" and affirm a single, coherent group identity goes awry because it ignores the ways in which children's identities are constituted by a complex mosaic of cultural fragments, perhaps but not necessarily including fragments of their ancestral one. Genuine cultural recognition would have to acknowledge that the identity of individual Pomo children is constituted not merely by a single, cultural framework inherited from their ancestors, but by the extremely complex and perhaps varied ways in which they have come to interpret that shared inherited identity in relation to other cultures (for example "western") that surround them. In this sense, the teacher fails to understand the Pomo children as having fundamentally multicultural identities that may or may not include, and certainly go well beyond, their ancestral one. Once we recognize this, it's clear that rectifying the demeaning self-identity that afflicts Pomo children might require, for example, enabling them to understand and critically evaluate the enormously complex processes by which their identities have become formed by the interaction between ancestral culture and the culture of western (post-) modernity. Of course, such an educational process need not, and probably cannot, require children to reject the latter culture wholescale in favor the former, ancestral one. Indeed, it might set children on a course that leads them to affirm certain elements of the larger, dominant western culture and to reject ancestral values and traditions. In short, the recognition of the multicultural nature of the Pomo children's identity might well lead them to forge and affirm an open-ended, evolving, complex, hybrid, cosmopolitan cultural identity which seeks to loosely weave together a variety of disparate cultural "fragments." But obviously an education designed to recognize and affirm this sort of multicultural identity cannot ensure the long-term survival, certainly not the survival "forever," of an existing cultural community as Taylor desires.

Taylor himself implies this when he avers a notion of authenticity that prizes the individual's ability to create and shape her own identity within a cultural community or through a process of intercultural reflection and examination that leads to a "fusion" of cultural horizons.[13] But he fails to acknowledge that a multicultural education designed to cultivate deeply "multicultural" identities at the individual level cannot also "ensure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language."[14] Nor can it seek to ensure that there will "forever" be a community of people who wish to avail themselves of the ancestral traditions of the Pomo Indians. Of course, cultural communities may persist in spite of the stresses and strains of cultural change. But an education designed to ensure the survival of existing cultures cannot also respect the fundamentally multicultural nature of individual identity.

The upshot of this discussion is that the cultural recognition approach to multicultural education does both too much and too little to uphold the value of equal respect for persons. It does too much when it seeks to foist an entire, homogenous group cultural identity upon children whose individual identities are only partially, or not at all, constituted by it. It does too little to the extent that it fails to recognize the ways in which children's identities may be partially constituted by substantial fragments of cultural traditions that are different from, and alien to, their ancestral traditions. Clearly, the damage that cultural misrecognition inflicts on individuals must be rectified; but it does not follow that the necessary rectification involves multicultural education programs designed to reinforce the integrity of a group cultural identity as Taylor claims. Indeed, as the two interpretations of the Slug Woman incident shows, such programs might (and indeed are likely to) themselves impose forms of cultural misrecognition of the kind Taylor deplores.

Thus, we cannot assume that multicultural programs aimed at promoting cultural integrity and survival are required by the value of equal respect. As Jeremy Waldron has recently said, "We need a notion of respect for persons that is sensitive to...the fact that each individual's identity is multicultural and that individuals can no longer be regarded in the modern world (if indeed they ever could be) as mere artifacts of the culture of the one community to which we think they ought to belong."[15]


COSMOPOLITANISM AND MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

There is another view of cultural identity that offers a powerful challenge the cultural recognition thesis. I shall call this view, following Jeremy Waldron, the cosmopolitan alternative.[16] Waldron argues that individual identity should not be conceived in terms of its relationship to a single, distinct cultural structure as the cultural recognition thesis assumes; rather, it should be conceived in cosmopolitan terms as a kind of "melange" of commitments, affiliations and roles that reflect disparate cultural influences.[17] Although Waldron acknowledges that different roles, narratives and commitments must acquire a cultural meaning if they are to provide real options to actual flesh and blood individuals, "it does not follow that there must be one cultural framework within which each available option is assigned a meaning. Meaningful options come to us as items or fragments from a variety of cultural sources."[18] According to the cosmopolitan view articulated by Waldron, individuals typically make meaningful choices in a cultural context that is much more heterogeneous, open-ended and fragmented than something we can call "our own" cultural structure.

It is important to specify more precisely how Waldron's cosmopolitan view both converges and contrasts with the cultural recognition thesis. Significantly, both views share a commitment to the value of equal respect and both share the view that the value of equal respect is closely connected to cultural recognition. However, the supporter of cosmopolitanism simply disagrees with the cultural recognition advocate about what genuine cultural recognition entails. According to the cosmopolitan view, individuals who at first glance appear to belong to a single cultural community which confers a shared cultural identity may on closer examination turn out to have very differently constituted, transcultural identities. On this view, the value of equal respect still requires the state to recognize specific cultural identities. And it follows that morally acceptable multicultural education policies must do so as well. However, according to Waldron, the sort of recognition required by cosmopolitanism demands a much finer grained attention to the multicultural nature of each individual's identity and not to the specific group identities that allegedly constitute an individual's identity.

In order to see what Waldron has in mind here, it is useful to examine the words of Salman Rushdie. Significantly, Waldron regards Rushdie as exemplifying the kind of cultural identity that illustrates the cosmopolitan multicultural educational ideal.[19] Rushdie, an accomplished novelist born in India, having lived in England for the past several decades, speaks aggressively of the value of having forged an identity out of various, disparate cultures. For example, in one passage he says:

The Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. (I am of course, once more talking about myself.) I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated...and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, when we seem, to ourselves, post-lapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result - as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates - we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. Or it may be that it is simply what we must think in order to do our work.[20]

According to the cosmopolitan thesis, there is no overarching, pre-determined "cultural structure" that we can identify which gives us a "window" into what counts as treating a given individual with respect, and what counts as the basis of their sense of self-respect. These values will be constituted by the particular ways in which individuals have come to acquire their various, diverse cultural affiliations and not by some prior, favored version of a cultural structure. Thus, to treat someone like Rushdie as merely an Indian (or as merely a Muslim, or English) writer would be to misrecognize, distort and insult, not to show respect. To show respect and recognition in this case would require acknowledging the ways in which Rushdie's identity as a novelist incorporates a great diversity of cultural traditions; it would also require the recognition of the fact that his Indian identity is not "whole," but consists rather of a "fragmented" vision which leaves him "obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost."[21]In other words, it requires a recognition that Rushdie's identity is constituted by both more and less than a "whole" Indian cultural identity.[22] And multicultural education practices should be founded on educational aims designed to show equal respect for persons that account for this complexity. For the proponent of the cosmopolitan thesis, what is true of Rushdie is presumably also true of children such as those in Pomo communities. And multicultural education practices designed to show respect for such children should recognize their cultural identity not by trying to ensure the survival of an existing cultural community, as Taylor desires, but by trying to create cultural "mongrels" such as Rushdie.[23]

However, the educational implications of the cosmopolitan thesis, as in the case of the cultural recognition thesis, are somewhat elusive.[24] The feasibility of constructing a cosmopolitan identity á la Rushdie presumes that sensibilities and intellectual capacities are established- for example capacities of what the novelist Anita Desai has called, referring to Rushdie, "the unconfined imagination and dangerous fantasy."[25] But the same sensibilities and capacities might be extremely difficult to establish in some children's lives - that is children of disadvantaged communities whose very survival is threatened by outsiders such as those inhabited by the Pomo children in the example discussed earlier. For example, in the case of an artist like Rushdie, exercising an unconfined imagination frequently entails challenging established cultural traditions and orthodoxies and to establish new or revised, often conflicting, cultural meanings in their places. The "danger" here, then, might refer to the threats that "fantasy" may pose for those like the proponent of cultural recognition who wish to preserve established cultures and commitments. For the cosmopolitan artist, unlike for the guardian of cultural survival, this sense of danger is coupled with the confidence and excitement that new meaning can be found in the "melange" of cultural fragments available for examination and reflection.

But for children such as those in the Slug Woman example discussed earlier both the excitement and confidence that are supposed to go with the exercise of imagination may be decidedly lacking when the sense of value in ancestral cultural traditions is so deeply tainted from the outset. For the child trying to forge an identity in a highly volatile, unstable, disadvantaged, "failing" cultural community the value of one's initial cultural beliefs are going to be extremely difficult to establish in the first place. Thus, educational practices that ask children to imaginatively explore these cultural values á la Rushdie may be akin to demanding that they contribute to the destruction of their ancestors' culture. Here the identity of the teacher in the example, which is not clarified by Deyhle and Swisher, can be important; if the teacher is a cultural outsider then Pomo children may feel they are being asked to finish off a job of cultural destruction and degradation that is already well underway as a result of ways of life that were developed by other outsiders. In this case, what the teacher-outsider takes to be an attempt to engage in imaginative exploration and fantasy may appear more like racism when viewed from the perspective of the children.

This suggests one argument for providing state support for multicultural policies designed to affirm the identities of particular cultural groups - such as bilingual education programs and separate schools that cater to specific groups. Developing a cosmopolitan cultural identity requires that one be capable of subjecting one's inherited cultural commitments to critical scrutiny. But this itself presupposes that one is capable of finding value in one's ancestral commitments. The problem raised above suggests that, at least in some cases, children whose ancestral cultures are threatened by ways of life developed by outsiders may have trouble developing the preconditions for a cosmopolitan identity - especially when the education that is supposed to help them form such an identity is guided by the same outsiders. A cosmopolitan identity can only flourish when children first have the opportunity to develop a sense of pride in their inherited cultural traditions. And developing this sense of pride may, at least in some cases, require separate schools or classes with teachers who share the culture of their students.[26] The point here is not that the educational ideal of cosmopolitan cultural identity is itself flawed or dangerous. Rather, the point is once again to point out the moral hazards of generalizing too much about the ways in which such an identity might be forged.


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR
MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS

In this paper, I first argued that a widely influential view of cultural identity would, if persuasive, support goals of cultural survival. However, I argued that this conception of identity is not persuasive because it construes the relationship between individual and group cultural identities too closely and thus neglects the cultural complexity and diversity of individual cultural identities. Thus, the major conclusion of this part of my argument is that the cultural recognition thesis cannot provide moral grounds - based on the value of equal respect - for supporting multicultural education programs designed to foster cultural survival. Secondly, I developed and supported what I take to be a more persuasive conception of cultural identity based on the ideal of cosmopolitanism. This ideal construes individual identity as a hodgepodge of cultural fragments and parts, which provide the opportunity for an individual to imaginatively forge unique and evolving cultural identity. The upshot of this conception of identity is that multicultural programs designed affirm the cultural identity of groups may themselves be disrespectful in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, in some cases multicultural education programs designed to affirm the identity of a particular group may be necessary in order to develop the attitudes and capacities that are prerequisites for having a cosmopolitan identity. In short, while the cosmopolitan conception of cultural identity does not suggest any unifying rationale for providing state support to multicultural education programs it does help us to see that the nature of such programs, their aims, and the reasons for providing or withholding state funding are complex and various. And those who support multicultural education programs must pay attention to the complex situational factors of particular and unique cases in order to ensure that the value of equal respect is supported rather than violated by those programs.


***For a response to this essay, see Duarte.

[1] Michael Olneck, "Terms of Inclusion: Has Multiculturalism Redefined Equality in American Education?" American Journal of Education 101 (May 1993): 244.

[2] Ibid., throughout.

[3] In this paper I focus on Taylor's work. However, the position I attribute to Taylor and my criticisms of it also apply to such influential thinkers as Will Kymlicka, Yael Tamir, and David Miller.

[4] Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 36.

[5] Ibid., 30-1.

[6] Ibid., 39.

[7] Ibid., see especially 30-44.

[8] Ibid., 40.

[9] Ibid., 58-9.

[10] Donna Deyhle and Karen Swisher, "Research in American Indian and Alaska Native Education: from Assimilation to Self-determination", Review of Research in Education 22 (in press), 71. The authors do not specify whether the teacher in the example is Pomo or not. The answer to this question raises important issues that do not affect my discussion here.

[11] Eamonn Callan suggested something like this reading of the example to me in his comments on a longer version of this paper.

[12] Or, at least substantial chunks of it may be irrelevant.

[13] Taylor, Multiculturalism, 67.

[14] Taylor, Multiculturalism , p. 58.

[15] Jeremy Waldron, "Multiculturalism and Melange," in Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique, ed. Robert K. Fullinwider (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114.

[16] Jeremy Waldron, "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative," in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93-119.

[17] Waldron, "Multiculturalism and Melange"

[18] Ibid., 106.

[19] Waldron, "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative," 93.

[20] Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands," in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, 15.

[21] Ibid., 10-11.

[22] Waldron, "Multiculturalism and Melange," 113

[23] The term "mongrel" in this context comes from a different passage of Rushdie's cited by Waldron in "Multiculturalism and Melange," 105.

[24] Once again, I am grateful to Eamonn Callan for pointing this out to me. For much of what I say in this paragraph, I am indebted to a detailed commentary from him on an earlier version of this paper.

[25] Anita Desai, "Sitting Pretty," New York Review of Books , 27 May 27 1993, 26.

[26] Thus, Waldron is perhaps somewhat insensitive to the concerns about the failure of authenticity that underly Taylor's arguments for cultural survival. Nevertheless, I've argued here that someone who shares Waldron's cosmopolitan conception of identity can still take account of those concerns.

©1996-2004 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION SOCIETY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED





Nussbaum, M. (1994). Patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Retrieved, November 22, 2006, from
http://www.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Kapitan/nussbaum1.html


This paper is pasted here:


Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
Martha Nussbaum
From The Boston Review 1994

Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism
Martha Nussbaum
When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."
Diogenes Laertius, Life of Diogenes the Cynic
I
In Rabindranath Tagore's novel, The Home and the World, the young wife Bimala, entranced by the patriotic rhetoric of her husband's friend Sandip, becomes an eager devotee of the Swadeshi movement, which has organized a boycott of foreign goods. The slogan of the movement is Bande Mataram, "Hail Motherland." Bimala complains that her husband, the cosmopolitan Hindu landlord Nikhil, is cool in his devotion to the cause:

And yet it was not that my husband refused to support Swadeshi, or was in any way against the Cause. Only he had not been able whole-heartedly to accept the spirit of Bande Mataram.

'I am willing,' he said, to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.'

Americans have frequently supported the principle of Bande Mataram, giving the fact of being American a special salience in moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specifically American identity and a specifically American citizenship a special power among the motivations to political action. I believe, with Tagore and his character Nikhil, that this emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve -- for example, the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality. These goals, I shall argue, would be better served by an ideal that is in any case more adequate to our situation in the contemporary world, namely the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.
My articulation of these issues is motivated, in part, by my experience working on international quality-of-life issues in an institute for development economics connected with the United Nations. It is motivated, as well, by the renewal of appeals to the nation, and national pride, in some recent discussions of American character and American education. In a by now well-known op-ed piece in The New York Times (13 February 1994), philosopher Richard Rorty urges Americans, especially the American left, not to disdain patriotism as a value, and indeed to give central importance to "the emotion of national pride" and "a sense of shared national identity." Rorty argues that we cannot even criticize ourselves well unless we also "rejoice" in our American identity and define ourselves fundamentally in terms of that identity. Rorty seems to hold that the primary alternative to a politics based on patriotism and national identity is what he calls a "politics of difference," one based on internal divisions among America's ethnic, racial, religious, and other sub-groups. He nowhere considers the possibility of a more international basis for political emotion and concern.
This is no isolated case. Rorty's piece responds to and defends Sheldon Hackney's recent call for a "national conversation"1 to discuss American identity. As a participant in an early phase of that project, I was made vividly aware that the project, as initially conceived,2 proposed an inward-looking task, bounded by the borders of the nation, rather than considering ties of obligation and commitment that join America to the rest of the world. As with Rorty's piece, the primary contrast drawn in the project was between a politics based on ethnic and racial and religious difference and a politics based on a shared national identity. What we share as both rational and mutually dependent human beings was simply not on the agenda.

One might wonder, however, how far the politics of nationalism really is from the "politics of difference." The Home and the World (better known, perhaps, in Satyajit Ray's haunting film of the same title) is a tragic story of the defeat of a reasonable and principled cosmopolitanism by the forces of nationalism and ethnocentrism. I believe that Tagore sees deeply when he sees that at bottom nationalism and ethnocentric particularism are not alien to one another, but akin -- that to give support to nationalist sentiments subverts, ultimately, even the values that hold a nation together, because it substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal values of justice and right. Once one has said, "I am an Indian first, a citizen of the world second," once one has made that morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrelevant characteristic, then what, indeed, will stop one from saying, as Tagore's characters so quickly learn to say, "I am a Hindu first, and an Indian second," "I am an upper-caste landlord first, and a Hindu second." Only the cosmopolitan stance of the landlord Nikhil -- so boringly flat in the eyes of his young wife Bimala and his passionate nationalist friend Sandip -- has the promise of transcending these divisions, because only this stance asks us to give our first allegiance to what is morally good -- and that which, being good, I can commend as such to all human beings. Or so I shall argue.

Proponents of nationalism in politics and in education frequently make a thin concession to cosmopolitanism. They may argue, for example, that although nations should in general base education and political deliberation on shared national values, a commitment to basic human rights should be part of any national educational system, and that this commitment will in a sense serve to hold many nations together.3 This seems to be a fair comment on practical reality; and the emphasis on human rights is certainly necessary for a world in which nations interact all the time on terms, let us hope, of justice and mutual respect.

But is it sufficient? As students here grow up, is it sufficient for them to learn that they are above all citizens of the United States, but that they ought to respect the basic human rights of citizens of India, Bolivia, Nigeria, and Norway? Or should they, as I think -- in addition to giving special attention to the history and current situation of their own nation -- learn a good deal more than is frequently the case about the rest of the world in which they live, about India and Bolivia and Nigeria and Norway and their histories, problems, and comparative successes? Should they learn only that citizens of India have equal basic human rights, or should they also learn about the problems of hunger and pollution in India, and the implications of these problems for larger problems of global hunger and global ecology? Most important, should they be taught that they are above all citizens of the United States, or should they instead be taught that they are above all citizens of a world of human beings, and that, while they themselves happen to be situated in the United States, they have to share this world of human beings with the citizens of other countries? I shall shortly suggest four arguments for the second conception of education, which I shall call cosmopolitan education. But first I introduce a historical digression, which will trace cosmopolitanism to its origins, in the process recovering some excellent arguments that originally motivated it as an educational project.
II
Asked where he came from, the ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes replied, "I am a citizen of the world." He meant by this, it appears, that he refused to be defined by his local origins and local group memberships, so central to the self-image of a conventional Greek male; he insisted on defining himself in terms of more universal aspirations and concerns. The Stoics who followed his lead developed his image of the kosmou politês or world citizen more fully, arguing that each of us dwells, in effect, in two communities -- the local community of our birth, and the community of human argument and aspiration that "is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun" (Seneca, De Otio). It is this community that is, most fundamentally, the source of our moral obligations. With respect to the most basic moral values such as justice, "we should regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors" (Plutarch, On the Fortunes of Alexander). We should regard our deliberations as, first and foremost, deliberations about human problems of people in particular concrete situations, not problems growing out of a national identity that is altogether unlike that of others. Diogenes knew that the invitation to think as a world citizen was, in a sense, an invitation to be an exile from the comfort of patriotism and its easy sentiments, to see our own ways of life from the point of view of justice and the good. The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, his Stoic successors held, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity wherever it occurs, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.
This clearly did not mean that the Stoics were proposing the abolition of local and national forms of political organization and the creation of a world state. The point was more radical still: that we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings. The idea of the world citizen is in this way the ancestor and source of Kant's idea of the "kingdom of ends," and has a similar function in inspiring and regulating moral and political conduct. One should always behave so as to treat with equal respect the dignity of reason and moral choice in every human being. It is this conception, as well, that inspires Tagore's novel, as the cosmopolitan landlord struggles to stem the tide of nationalism and factionalism by appeals to universal moral norms. Many of the speeches of the character Nikhil were drawn from Tagore's own cosmopolitan political writings.

Stoics who hold that good civic education is education for world citizenship recommend this attitude on three grounds. First, they hold that the study of humanity as it is realized in the whole world is valuable for self-knowledge: we see ourselves more clearly when we see our ways in relation to those of other reasonable people.

Second, they argue, as does Tagore, that we will be better able to solve our problems if we face them in this way. No theme is deeper in Stoicism than the damage done by faction and local allegiances to the political life of a group. Political deliberation, they argue, is sabotaged again and again by partisan loyalties, whether to one's team at the Circus or to one's nation. Only by making our fundamental allegiance that to the world community of justice and reason do we avoid these dangers.

Finally, they insist that the stance of the kosmou politês is intrinsically valuable. For it recognizes in persons what is especially fundamental about them, most worthy of respect and acknowledgment: their aspirations to justice and goodness and their capacities for reasoning in this connection. This aspect may be less colorful than local or national traditions and identities -- and it is on this basis that the young wife in Tagore's novel spurns it in favor of qualities in the nationalist orator Sandip that she later comes to see as superficial; it is, the Stoics argue, both lasting and deep.

The Stoics stress that to be a citizen of the world one does not need to give up local identifications, which can frequently be a source of great richness in life. They suggest that we think of ourselves not as devoid of local affiliations, but as surrounded by a series of concentric circles. The first one is drawn around the self; the next takes in one's immediate family; then follows the extended family; then, in order, one's neighbors or local group, one's fellow city-dwellers, one's fellow countrymen -- and we can easily add to this list groupings based on ethnic, linguistic, historical, professional, gender and sexual identities. Outside all these circles is the largest one, that of humanity as a whole. Our task as citizens of the world will be to "draw the circles somehow toward the center" (Stoic philosopher Hierocles, 1st 2nd CE), making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so on. In other words, we need not give up our special affections and identifications, whether ethnic or gender-based or religious. We need not think of them as superficial, and we may think of our identity as in part constituted by them. We may and should devote special attention to them in education. But we should work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern, base our political deliberations on that interlocking commonality, and give the circle that defines our humanity a special attention and respect.

This means, in educational terms, that the student in the United States, for example, may continue to regard herself as in part defined by her particular loves -- for her family, her religious and/or ethnic and/or racial community or communities, even for her country. But she must also, and centrally, learn to recognize humanity wherever she encounters it, undeterred by traits that are strange to her, and be eager to understand humanity in its "strange" guises. She must learn enough about the different to recognize common aims, aspirations, and values, and enough about these common ends to see how variously they are instantiated in the many cultures and many histories. Stoic writers insist that the vivid imagining of the different is an essential task of education; and that requires in turn, of course, a mastery of many facts about the different. Marcus Aurelius gives himself the following advice, which might be called the basis for cosmopolitan education: "Accustom yourself not to be inattentive to what another person says, and as far as possible enter into that person's mind" (VI.53). "Generally," he concludes, "one must first learn many things before one can judge another's action with understanding."

A favored exercise, in this process of world thinking, is to conceive of the entire world of human beings as a single body, its many people as so many limbs. Referring to the fact that it takes only the change of a single letter in Greek to convert the word "limb" (melos) into the word "[detached] part" (meros), Marcus concludes: "If, changing the word, you call yourself merely a [detached] part rather than a limb, you do not yet love your fellow men from the heart, nor derive complete joy from doing good; you will do it merely as a duty, not as doing good to yourself" (VII.13). It is important to recall that, as Emperor, he gives himself this advice in connection with daily duties that require coming to grips with the cultures of remote and initially strange civilizations such as those of Parthia and Sarmatia.

I would like to see education adopt this cosmopolitan Stoic stance. The organic model could of course be abused -- if, for example, it were to be taken to deny the fundamental importance of the separateness of persons and of fundamental personal liberties. Stoics were not always sufficiently attentive to these values and to their political salience; in that sense their thought is not always a good basis for a scheme of democratic deliberation and education. But as the image is primarily intended -- as a reminder of the interdependence of all human beings and communities -- it has fundamental significance. There is clearly a huge amount to be said about how such ideas might be realized in curricula at many levels. Instead of beginning that more concrete task, however, I shall now return to the present day and offer four arguments for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, education's central focus. (The first two are modern versions of my first two Stoic arguments; the third develops one part of my Stoic argument about intrinsic moral value; the fourth is more local, directed at the pro-patriotism arguments I am criticizing.)
III

1. Through cosmopolitan education, we learn more about ourselves. One of the greatest barriers to rational deliberation in politics is the unexamined feeling that one's own current preferences and ways are neutral and natural. An education that takes national boundaries as morally salient too often reinforces this kind of irrationality, by lending to what is an accident of history a false air of moral weight and glory. By looking at ourselves in the lens of the other, we come to see what in our practices is local and non-necessary, what more broadly or deeply shared. Our nation is appallingly ignorant of most of the rest of the world. I think that this means that it is also, in many crucial ways, ignorant of itself.


To give just one example of this -- since 1994 is the United Nations' International Year of the Family -- if we want to understand our own history and our choices where the structure of the family and of child-rearing are involved, we are immeasurably assisted by looking around the world to see in what configurations families exist, and through what strategies children are in fact being cared for. (This would include a study of the history of the family, both in our own and in other traditions.) Such a study can show us, for example, that the two-parent nuclear family, in which the mother is the primary homemaker and the father the primary breadwinner is by no means a pervasive style of child-rearing in today's world. The extended family, clusters of families, the village, women's associations -- all these groups and still others are in various places regarded as having major child-rearing responsibilities. Seeing this, we can begin to ask questions -- for example, how much child abuse there is in a family that involves grandparents and other relatives in child-rearing, as compared with the relatively isolated Western-style nuclear family; how many different structures of child care have been found to support women's work, and how well each of these is functioning.4 If we do not undertake this kind of educational project, we risk assuming that the options familiar to us are the only ones there are, and that they are somehow "normal" and "natural" for the human species as such. Much the same can be said about conceptions of gender and sexuality, about conceptions of work and its division, about schemes of property holding, about the treatment of childhood and old age.

2. We make headway solving problems that require international cooperation. The air does not obey national boundaries. This simple fact can be, for children, the beginning of the recognition that, like it or not, we live in a world in which the destinies of nations are closely intertwined with respect to basic goods and survival itself. The pollution of third-world nations who are attempting to attain our high standard of living will, in some cases, end up in our air. No matter what account of these matters we will finally adopt, any intelligent deliberation about ecology -- as, also, about the food supply and population -- requires global planning, global knowledge, and the recognition of a shared future.


To conduct this sort of global dialogue, we need not only knowledge of the geography and ecology of other nations -- something that would already entail much revision in our curricula -- but also a great deal about the people with whom we shall be talking, so that in talking with them we may be capable of respecting their traditions and commitments. Cosmopolitan education would supply the background necessary for this type of deliberation.

3. We recognize moral obligations to the rest of the world that are real, and that otherwise would go unrecognized. What are Americans to make of the fact that the high living standard we enjoy is one that very likely cannot be universalized, at least given the present costs of pollution controls and the present economic situation of developing nations, without ecological disaster? If we take Kantian morality at all seriously, as we should, we need to educate our children to be troubled by this fact. Otherwise we are educating a nation of moral hypocrites, who talk the language of universalizability but whose universe has a selfservingly narrow scope.


This point may appear to presuppose universalism, rather than being an argument in its favor. But here one may note that the values on which Americans may most justly pride themselves are, in a deep sense, Stoic values: respect for human dignity and the opportunity for each person to pursue happiness. If we really do believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, we are morally required to think about what that conception requires us to do with and for the rest of the world.

Once again, that does not mean that one may not permissibly give one's own sphere a special degree of concern. Politics, like child care, will be poorly done if each thinks herself equally responsible for all, rather than giving the immediate surroundings special attention and care. To give one's own sphere special care is justifiable in universalist terms, and I think that this is its most compelling justification. To take one example, we do not really think that our own children are morally more important than other people's children, even though almost all of us who have children would give our own children far more love and care than we give other people's children. It is good for children, on the whole, that things should work out this way, and that is why our special care is good rather than selfish. Education may and should reflect those special concerns -- spending more time, for example, within a given nation, on that nation's history and politics. But my argument does entail that we should not confine our thinking to our own sphere -- that in making choices in both political and economic matters we should most seriously consider the right of other human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and work to acquire the knowledge that will enable us to deliberate well about those rights. I believe that this sort of thinking will have large-scale economic and political consequences.

4. We make a consistent and coherent argument based on distinctions we are really prepared to defend. Let me now return to the defense of shared values in Richard Rorty's article and Sheldon Hackney's project. In these eloquent appeals to the common there is something that makes me very uneasy. On the one hand Rorty and Hackney seem to argue well when they insist on the centrality to democratic deliberation of certain values that bind all citizens together. But why should these values, which instruct us to join hands across boundaries of ethnicity and class and gender and race, lose steam when they get to the borders of the nation? By conceding that a morally arbitrary boundary such as the boundary of the nation has a deep and formative role in our deliberations, we seem to be depriving ourselves of any principled way of arguing to citizens that they should in fact join hands across these other barriers.


For one thing, the very same groups exist both outside and inside. Why should we think of people from China as our fellows the minute they dwell in a certain place, namely the United States, but not when they dwell in a certain other place, namely China? What is it about the national boundary that magically converts people toward whom our education is both incurious and indifferent into people to whom we have duties of mutual respect? I think, in short, that we undercut the very case for multicultural respect within a nation by failing to make a broader world respect central to education. Richard Rorty's patriotism may be a way of bringing all Americans together; but patriotism is very close to jingoism, and I'm afraid I don't see in Rorty's argument any proposal for coping with this very obvious danger.

Furthermore, the defense of shared national values in both Rorty and Hackney, as I understand it, requires appealing to certain basic features of human personhood that obviously also transcend national boundaries. So if we fail to educate children to cross those boundaries in their minds and imaginations, we are tacitly giving them the message that we don't really mean what we say. We say that respect should be accorded to humanity as such, but we really mean that Americans as such are worthy of special respect. And that, I think, is a story that Americans have told for far too long.

IV
Becoming a citizen of the world is often a lonely business. It is, in effect, as Diogenes said, a kind of exile -- from the comfort of local truths, from the warm nestling feeling of patriotism, from the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one's own. In the writings of Marcus Aurelius (as in those of his American followers Emerson and Thoreau) one sometimes feels a boundless loneliness, as if the removal of the props of habit and local boundaries had left life bereft of a certain sort of warmth and security. If one begins life as a child who loves and trusts its parents, it is tempting to want to reconstruct citizenship along the same lines, finding in an idealized image of a nation a surrogate parent who will do one's thinking for one. Cosmopolitanism offers no such refuge; it offers only reason and the love of humanity, which may seem at times less colorful than other sources of belonging.

In Tagore's novel, the appeal to world citizenship fails -- fails because patriotism is full of color and intensity and passion, whereas cosmopolitanism seems to have a hard time gripping the imagination. And yet in its very failure, Tagore shows, it succeeds. For the novel is a story of education for world citizenship, since the entire tragic story is told by the widowed Bimala, who understands, if too late, that Nikhil's morality was vastly superior to Sandip's empty symbol-mongering, that what looked like passion in Sandip was egocentric self-exaltation, and that what looked like lack of passion in Nikhil contained a truly loving perception of her as a person. If one goes today to Santiniketan, a town several hours by train from Calcutta, the town where Tagore founded his cosmopolitan university Vishvabharati -- whose name means "all the world" -- one feels the tragedy once more. For all-the-world university has not achieved the anticipated influence or distinction within India, and the ideals of the cosmopolitan community of Santiniketan are increasingly under siege from militant forces of ethnocentric particularism and Hindu-fundamentalist nationalism. And yet, in the very decline of Tagore's ideal -- which now threatens the very existence of the secular and tolerant Indian state -- the observer sees its worth. To worship one's country as a god is indeed to bring a curse upon it. Recent electoral reactions against Hindu nationalism give some grounds for optimism that this recognition of worth is widespread and may prove efficacious, averting a tragic ending of the sort that Tagore describes.

And since I am in fact optimistic that Tagore's ideal can be successfully realized in schools and universities in democracies around the world, and in the formation of public policy, let me conclude with a story of cosmopolitanism that has a happy ending. It is told by Diogenes Laertius about the courtship and marriage of the Cynic cosmopolitan philosophers Crates and Hipparchia (one of the most eminent female philosophers of antiquity) -- in order, presumably, to show that casting off the symbols of status and nation can sometimes be a way to succeed in love. The background is that Hipparchia is from a good family, attached, as most Greek families were, to social status and pedigree. They resent the cosmopolitan philosopher Crates, with his strange ideas of world citizenship and his strange disdain for rank and boundaries.

[Hipparchia] fell in love with Crates' arguments and his way of life and paid no attention to any of her suitors nor to wealth or high birth or good looks. Crates, though, was everything to her. Moreover, she told her parents that she would kill herself if she were not married off to him. So Crates was called on by her parents to talk their daughter out of it; he did all he could, but in the end he didn't persuade her. So he stood up and threw off his clothes in front of her and said, "Here is your bridegroom; these are his possessions; make your decision accordingly--for you cannot be my companion unless you undertake the same way of life." The girl chose him. Adopting the same clothing and style of life she went around with her husband and they copulated in public and they went off together to dinner parties. And once she went to a dinner party at the house of Lysimachus and there refuted Theodorus the Atheist, with a sophism like this: "If it wouldn't be judged wrong for Theodorus to do something, then it wouldn't be judged wrong for Hipparchia to do it either; but Theodorus does no wrong if he beats himself; so Hipparchia too does no wrong if she beats Theodorus." And when Theodorus could not reply to her argument, he ripped off her cloak. But Hipparchia was not upset or distraught as a woman would normally be. (DL 6.96-8)5

I am not exactly recommending Crates and Hipparchia as the marital ideal for students in my hypothetical cosmopolitan schools (or Theodorus the Atheist as their logic teacher).6 But the story does reveal this: that the life of the cosmopolitan, who puts right before country, and universal reason before the symbols of national belonging, need not be boring, flat, or lacking in love.


5 I am grateful to Brad Inwood for permission to use his unpublished translation of this section.

6 I exempt Hipparchia, since she was clearly trying to show him up, and she did not endorse the fallacious inference seriously.