Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World
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MJ: Okay, so let's apply this frame to the row over these Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
KAA: Well, I think that representing the prophet Mohammed in the way that they did is genuinely insulting, and it's not the sort of thing that a person who cared about cross-cultural communication would do. It's perfectly fine to say that of course people have the right to do this—of course they do—but they shouldn't be surprised if it upsets people. And the corollary is that the upset people have a right to express their upset—again, so long as it doesn't cross that boundary I mentioned.
On the other hand, carefully phrased criticisms of, say, the fact that women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, seem to me very much on the agenda. And I don't think we should be troubled by the fact that some people in Saudi Arabia will say, What business is it of yours? A deep part of cosmopolitanism is an engagement with making the world a place in which everybody has, as a baseline, the resources to live a life of dignity and significance. It seems to me perfectly fair to point out that that standard is not met in Saudi Arabia, not only in respect to gender but in respect to lots of things, as of course it isn't fully met in the United States.
If we have a cosmopolitan conversation one of the things that will come out of it is, for instance, how many Europeans find it morally astonishing that the United States tolerate the level of racial inequality that it does, and that our prisons fall way below what anyone in Europe would take to be appropriate human rights minimums. The fact that, in the United States, the attitudes of white people and black people toward these questions is so different suggests that there isn't an adequate conversation going on. If it's a conversation, that's part of what we should expect to hear, and I would have thought we would be enriched by it as it will make us think about things we need to think about.
MJ: How does the cosmopolitan balance regard for the individual with consideration for the community?
KAA: Well, the deeply liberal view—and this has been the project of much of my recent work—takes the central question of ethics to be the shaping of the social world in order to give each person the chance to make a life of significance to himself or herself. And it takes things like identities and nations as valuable to the extent that they contribute to that, but not as valuable in themselves.
MJ: In light of that, how should we think about identity politics, which put such a high value on membership of a group?
KAA: Well, there are limits to identity politics, of course. Identity can be an instrument of individuality, but when it's invoked to constrain or resist individuality it's usually bad. But you can't responsibly talk about identity politics without taking into account that it arose in response to genuine injustices, and that it was helpful, in the first instance, in response to those injustices, around gender, race, sexual orientation, religion. It's a way of coming together as a way to establish a sense of self-respect. So, there's a good side to it.
Also, when people on the right criticize identity politics they tend to forget that one of the most vigorous and effective forms of identity politics by far is nationalism, and many people on the right are nationalist. Now, I've nothing against nationalism as such; I think there's good nationalism and bad nationalism. But to object to the very idea of caring about identity as a political matter would rule our nationalism.
However, if you're a cosmopolitan you understand that it's important not to be captured by any one identity and not to feel that because you don' t have identity as a basis for communicating with other people that you shouldn't communicate with them. We have lots to share and gain from one another, whether we have exchanges based on shared identity or based on the fact that we have different identities. Another problem is that often identity politics looks like asking for symbolic acknowledgments when what's actually needed is readjustments of power and money. Turns out, it's relatively easy to get a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, but much harder to abolish racial discrimination in employment.
