To be a cosmopolitan—i.e., a citizen of the world first and only secondarily a member of a particular nation—is an ideal that has a long history. It dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope in the third century BCE. If someone asked him where he came from, he would only reply, "I am a citizen of the world."
In this overview of the cosmopolitan ideal, philosopher Peter Kemp argues that in the twenty-first century cosmopolitanism is more relevant than ever before. In fact, he insists that it is the only viable guiding ideal for politics and education in an increasingly interdependent world.
Kemp begins with an analysis of our current situation. Financial globalization, intercultural coexistence, and our joint responsibility to sustain world resources and preserve the climate are significant, unprecedented challenges that call for a cosmopolitan perspective. Small groups of individuals or nations cannot manage these problems alone.
He next traces the history of the cosmopolitan ideal from the Stoic philosophers of the classical period through the development of canon law in Christian medieval Europe to the Enlightenment of Immanuel Kant, who infused his legal philosophy with a cosmopolitan viewpoint.
Kemp concludes with a thorough analysis of the tasks of our contemporary era. To tackle our enormous common problems today, we need new ideas about learning and cultivation in order to enhance a cosmopolitan ideal in both education and politics.
Since the end of the 1990s, globalization has been a great theme for political debate. In the best sense and—since the great economic crisis hit the world in 2008—in the worst, globalization is thought to be, above all, an economic concept. One thinks of the global economy, of the global market in which the importance of local, regional, and even national political authority is challenged by the success and failure of transnational financial forces. It is this globalization that primarily gives the idea of the cosmopolitan new actuality. But it takes time for most teachers in the school system to recognize this development. Moreover, it takes time for its global impact on political and cultural life to be recognized. Its importance has been repressed for long time.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBALIZATION
Globalization Both Alarms and Allures
There may be a variety of reasons for this repression. It may be an escape from a reality that is not exactly pleasant to behold. It may be a difficulty in understanding the very phenomenon of globalization. Therefore, we should look more closely at the phenomenon.
Since the end of the 1990s, there have been violent protests against globalization, particularly the globalization represented at economic and political summits between the leaders of the world's richest countries. They have protested against the unchecked globalization of financial markets, which means that their function and what the English economist Susan Strange called "Casino Capitalism" takes precedence over anything else: social progress, better healthcare, environmental protection and sustainable development, which provide better living conditions for future generations. Moreover, the global financial crisis has diminished the faith of leading politicians around the world in the global market's self-regulating nature, and it looks as though there will be a struggle between states and economic non-state actors at the global level. One might be tempted to ask, therefore: Isn't globalization something we should fight, because it threatens our lives?
By contrast, many have seen globalization in the context of a world-spanning exchange of ideas and products thanks to material and immaterial methods of communication, i.e., the means of transportation that bring goods and people to every corner of the world and TV, radio, e-mail and the Internet, which allow us to communicate globally. So, globalization means the global exchange of goods and services for the benefit of many, insight into the richness of cultural differences, the rapid spread of new ideas and inventions, which many people can use, etc.
In short, globalization appears to be ambiguous: for some—such as Jean Baudrillard, globalization has been described as a systematic process to oppress or eradicate any opportunity for individual human beings to have an independent life (everything is determined somewhere else). This, in turn, provokes suicide bombers: the immoral attack on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, becomes the answer to this immoral globalization. For others, it fosters to an extent never before known in history the individual's opportunity for development and mutual enrichment with contacts and goods—as Anthony Giddens has emphasized.
The ambiguity of globalization can be summarized in one question: Is it a closed, cybernetic system from which some individuals may profit but which oppresses most, or is it an open system that can be brought under democratic control by authorities that allow most people to benefit from it?
The Concept of Globalization
Even Immanuel Kant noted that human beings were forced to live together, because the earth has a "spherical surface," i.e., the world is a globe. However, in our time, the Canadian Marshall McLuhan proposed a conception of the world as a global society or "global village," a result of media (especially television) that allowed us to apprehend the entire world. The decisive event that inspired this idea of a worldwide society was the funeral of President John F. Kennedy, which McLuhan followed along with the entire world on a television screen. The beginning of the Vietnam War, shown live on television, also played a role in this new view of the world. It is remarkable that this first conception of globalization issued from a reflection on the importance of technology, not from an argument about the economy. Later, television networks such as the BBC and CNN fully realized McLuhan's vision of an electronic world that united humanity in one global point of view of reality. He saw a crucial precondition for the economic globalization we talk about today: information technology—at that time, TV but later the whole IT dimension.
This conception of globalization as a technological creation has been around for a long time. In 1969, Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a professor at Columbia University and the future advisor of President Jimmy Carter, spoke of the American superpower as the "first global society in history" because it was created through the advent of the IT revolution. This society, according to Brzezinski, was able to provide other nations with a "global model of modernity," which impresses the same normativity over the entire planet.
Later, Theodore Lewitt, in a 1983 article in the Harvard Business Review, first spoke of financial globalization using the expression the globalization of markets, which signifies that, by selling the same things in the same manner everywhere, the markets of the world were converging. Lewitt contrasts this globalization with the way the markets of rich countries relate to those of less advanced countries, according to which multinationals sold to poor countries products that had become obsolete in rich countries.
However, the word globalization had still not acquired its ultimate significance. This occurs when Kenichi Ohmae published his 1990 work, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. In this book, he extends the notion of globalization to every link in the chain for the creation of economic value, whether it be research and development (R&D), engineering, production, marketing, service, or finance. This process results in global integration, whereby corporations belonging to the same group manage their R&D, finance their investments, and recruit their personnel on a global scale. Globalization thus specifies a form of management for large multinational corporations across all national boundaries.
The foundation is thus laid on which international business can establish its own economic rules and free itself from rules previously imposed by nation-states. As Serge Cordellier states in a book he edited on globalization, one "passes from micro- to macro-economy, from rules of good private management to the establishment of economic politics and the construction or redefinition of national institutions." The latter become more and more powerless in the face of the strategies of large corporations. It follows that, as consumers give in to the temptations of international producers who offer them standardized products at a good price, which they cannot consider to be an evil, and choose a mode of production beyond all democratic control, governments and national parliaments could lose any ability to influence national economic developments. Transactions now pass directly to the international level, where they also risk being disrupted by a casino economy that is capable of bringing about extreme losses of capital that can affect the whole world economy, as the recent economic crisis has brutally demonstrated.
Yet the development of this sort of globalization has transformed the notion of globalization itself. The world is no longer a global village in which everyone has the same experience at the same time in worldwide transparency. Rather, it has become an opaque network of economic and technological manipulations. This means that globalization does not entail a more robust or more profound common life among people but an increase in segregation and an exclusion of society's most vulnerable. The abolition of borders has not resulted in liberation but in new divisions, cutting across ancient associations, between the dominating and the dominated.
The market for food has become particularly suspect, since products lose quality through standardization, and the risks of more and more geneticized production are less and less controllable.
It is true that globalization also carries with it positive aspects, accelerating the production of certain works of quality and, above all, increasing the exchange of information and innovations that encourage the increased circulation of ideas and the proliferation of inventions. Not everything must be rejected. But without political control of globalization, priority is given to the functioning of the market as opposed to all other matters: social progress, improved health, cultural education, environmental protection, and sustainable and viable development.
The consequences of globalization are never purely economic, because the global economy is conditioned today by technological development and, above all, by the development of the means of communication—especially by rapid transportation, email, and the Internet.
The economy, or the symbolic exchange of product and service values, is in fact nothing without the technologies of communication. Even pure economic speculation does not intervene in the market without being conveyed by the ICT system. And even if this system does not render the world transparent, as McLuhan believed, the theorist of the "technological extensions of man" had reason to conceive of globalization as an effect of electronic communication. The universal aspect of such technologies is no longer merely the fact that a tool can become universally usable or that the combination of science and techné that fundamentally constitutes modern technology is the precondition for the project of a worldwide technological civilization but also the fact that communication between people is capable of integrating all members of humanity and transforming the individual of the "dwelling" into the individual of the world.
That economic-technological globalization encourages us to understand ourselves as global beings is a promising development but one that also constitutes a great danger.
REPRESSED GLOBALIZATION IN SCHOOLS
The Village School in the Big City
Has this whole problem seeped into our schools? There is serious doubt about it.
Today's primary schools are often like a village school in many respects; the public dimension is repressed by an environment of proximity in which everything is supposed to be cosy, friendly, edifying and transparent. But outside school or outside the small social environment it represents is an incomprehensible, alien world to which one has no idea how to relate.
In this "village school in the big city," local everybody-get-along values repress all universally valid values. But these two types of values are very different.
There may be one particular person whom I can't stand and do not get along with; I really think this individual is an unpleasant person. Yet I can attribute to this person an absolute value as an irreplaceable individual; he or she has an integrity that must not be violated, and I must respect a number of rights belonging to him or her.
By contrast, you can imagine a relationship to another human being in which you enjoy the other person—for example, an erotic relationship or one from which you benefit—but, afterward, you may hold that person in contempt and would have no scruples about murdering that person, if you could get away with it.
In the schools, many teachers still believe that they are displaying educational care for children and young people when they teach them to cultivate themselves. Through their own self-esteem, children are to discover themselves and all the wonderful things that are within them. Children are to learn to say I and focus on themselves and their inner self (aggression against others should thereby be averted, and girls should become less interested in their clothes). Finally, the teacher must not stand for something in the eyes of the child. Therefore, the teacher is not to display but hide any value assessments from the child; each individual child is to have the opportunity to evaluate things and actions and thus learn that everyone is different and can assess things differently. In short, you must not learn to distinguish between good and bad; you are to learn that we are all different and that this is good.
We are living in the "epoch of self-Bildung [selvdannelse]," writes the Danish philosopher Lars-Henrik Schmidt in his great work Diagnosis. However, this same philosopher had previously written a book of almost four hundred pages about Det sociale selv [The Social Self], which analyzes the social community of meaning he calls "commonness" [gemenheden]. And isn't it this social community that provides everyone a social self, which the school is supposed to cultivate?
However, the primary school lives as though such extreme individual self-Bildung was possible. This self-Bildung is so extremely individualistic that it does not cultivate a social self. Rather, it is a contemporary form of pietism that takes all its meaning from the child's own inner life. The teacher must not stand for anything, must not become a role model that is to be imitated in any way. The teacher's knowledge and experience of the world must not be pushed onto the student. This would be "indoctrination." Instead, the student must learn to find his or her own way. And the teacher's only task is to point this out.
History, the tale of the human past, is learned as little as possible, because they are convinced that we can learn nothing from history. There is no cultural experience of life in a common world to pass along. The child need hardly become a responsible citizen, much less a citizen of the world. Rather, the child should be a happy Robinson Crusoe, who can use virtually nothing of what he has learned and must find his own unique lifestyle and take care of himself. School is a cosy home for the conditionless human being who invents the whole world, his culture and his social life anew.
Do We Live in a Knowledge Society?
People say that we live today in a knowledge society. But do children and young people normally have knowledge about what is important for the world—including themselves—to survive? Do they have the geographic, historical and legal knowledge of where and how we each can contribute to the establishment of a peaceful world order? It is doubtful. The knowledge to which they are introduced is knowledge about how you find the right expert (a specialist whom others use) to solve a specific problem, if you do not have the necessary knowledge yourself.
Moreover, it has to do with becoming an expert on something, because otherwise society has no need for you. Thus, you learn much about doing well in the world but very little about doing good for the world. So, in a certain sense, young people today are more ignorant than ever about how they should live. If knowledge is supposed to be human wisdom about the good life, it is not a knowledge society but an ignorance society we are in the process of developing today. And if knowledge is to be the knowledge of the expert, and it is as a rule this people think of, all human beings are in most respects ignorant, and many are in every respect. So, for this reason, too, there is reason to say that we live in an ignorance society. Most people in most cases and in their own eyes lack knowledge about what they are supposed to do, and only few possess the knowledge the rest of us are to use.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CITIZEN OF THE WORLD by PETER KEMP Copyright © 2011 by Peter Kemp. Excerpted by permission of Humanity Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Overview
To be a cosmopolitan—i.e., a citizen of the world first and only secondarily a member of a particular nation—is an ideal that has a long history. It dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope in the third century BCE. If someone asked him where he came from, he would only reply, "I am a citizen of the world."
In this overview of the cosmopolitan ideal, philosopher Peter Kemp argues that in the twenty-first century cosmopolitanism is more relevant than ever ...