Ideas to Die For
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Ideas to Die For

The Cosmopolitan Challenge

Giles Gunn

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Ideas to Die For

The Cosmopolitan Challenge

Giles Gunn

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About This Book

Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents seeks to address the kinds of challenges that cosmopolitan perspectives and practices face in a world organized increasingly in relation to a proliferating series of global absolutisms – religious, political, social, and economic. While these challenges are often used to support the claim that cosmopolitanism is impotent to resist such totalizing ideologies because it is either a Western conceit or a globalist fiction, Gunn argues that cosmopolitanism is neither.

Situating his discussion in an emphatically global context, Gunn shows how cosmopolitanism has been effective in resisting such essentialisms and authoritarianisms precisely because it is more pragmatic than prescriptive, more self-critical than self-interested and finds several of its foremost recent expressions in the work of an Indian philosopher, a Palestinian writer, and South African story-tellers. This kind of cosmopolitanism offers a genuine ethical alternative to the politics of dogmatism and extremism because it is grounded on a new delineation of the human and opens toward a new, indeed, an "other, " humanism.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135915728

1

INTRODUCTION

Mapping and remapping the global
The temptation not only to put one’s own land in the center of the map, but one’s own people in the center of history, seems to be universal.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History
The terms “global” and “globalization” are fraught with so many complications and confusions that one almost wishes one could substitute others in their place. As now used, globalization conjures up in many minds a spectacle of instantaneous electronic financial transfers, the amoral operations of the capitalist free-market, the erasure of local cultural differences, and the expansion of Western, but most especially American, power. This is hardly an attractive prospect, and when it is coupled with increasing economic inequality throughout the world, continuing degradation of the environment, heightened rivalry among ethnic groups, spreading militarism, the expansion of religious and other nationalisms, normalization of the use of terror, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other ills, globalization has become associated in many minds with some of the most destructive forces on the planet. In the minds of many of its critics, from Zygmunt Bauman and John Gray to Joseph Stiglitz, Fredric Jameson, and Masao Miyoshi, it has led to the erasure of local differences as well as the integration of more and more of the world’s people, as indeed of entire states, into a geopolitical system that inevitably erodes the ability of all but the most privileged to have any influence on their own futures.1
In the face of such a prospect, it is small comfort to learn that globalizing trends since World War II have also, by some accounts, made possible a threefold increase in the world’s per capita income, reduced by half the number of people living in direst poverty, reinforced the desire to work for nuclear disarmament, helped expand the environmental movement, and encouraged the creation of literally thousands of international groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) devoted to addressing various social, political, and economic grievances and the relief of human suffering generally.2 Yet despite such developments (and sometimes, paradoxically, even because of them), the gap between rich and poor in the world is being widened still further by the forces of economic as well as political and cultural globalization, and these forces, largely but not exclusively reflecting until recently the dominance of the United States and its rich allies in the global North, will have to be addressed if the situation is not to reach catastrophic proportions. As long ago as 1999, the United Nations Development Program asserted that if such developments were not to produce increasing polarization that in the short term benefits only the US and other members mainly of the G7 or the G20, and in the long run virtually no one, the restructuration of “global governance,” as the report called it, would have to be accompanied by more massive and efficient debt relief for insolvent nations, the redirection of aid to the poorest countries, the reform of resource allocation of the world’s limited resources, the reduction of corruption in countries where economic mismanagement discourages foreign investment, and the redress of continual violations of human rights. But the restructuring of global governance will also have to include reforms far more subtle, such as an alteration of the lenses by and through which cultures perceive one another and an enhancement of opportunities for more and more of the world’s people, as well as sovereign states, to shape their own destinies.
However, before we venture too many generalizations about a worldwide process that in its latest phases is changing at a pace rapidly approaching what feels like warp speed, it is important to dispel a few myths about the words “globalization” and the “global” themselves. We can begin by conceding that the term “globalization” is commonly used to refer to the widening and deepening and speeding up of the interconnectedness of the world in many of its aspects, from the economic to the ecological, the cultural to the criminal, the social to the spiritual, the environmental to the pathogenic, but there are still vigorous disputes with very large consequences about just when globalization began, how it is best conceptualized, what its causal dynamics and structural features are, and whether it has, or has not, been good for the world and its peoples. About the only thing on which most students of the term “globalization” are agreed is that it refers to a set of processes by which the world is being threaded ever more tightly together, by which the world is becoming, if not a single place with systematic properties, then an interconnected system of localities whose fate is even more complexly, if also unpredictably, intertwined.3
Manfred Steger has combined something of both perspectives in what is probably the most economical definition of globalization as “the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space.”4 Comprised as much by patterns of transmission, dispersion, exchange, and interconnection that are political, economic, and social but also cultural and historical, globalization refers to a world whose elements and forms are frequently both concatenated, as in an erector set or a Ferris wheel, and polythetic, as in Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances that describe classes of things whose members are not identical but merely similar. Hence this is neither a system whose parts are all equal or whose movements are all coordinated. If it is a system whose components are multiple and often interactive in unforeseen ways, it is not a system whose components are all interdependent.
Part of this inequity within the global system itself is caused by the different but related system with which it exists in tension and which was created as a result of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian system, which came into being in the 150 years following the Peace, assumes instead that the world is less a structure of interrelated processes operating in different ways at all levels of experience—and whose constant formations, deformations, and reformations deepen and extend global interconnectivity and conflict—than an association of territorially bounded states claiming sovereignty within their own realm, which renders the system itself vulnerable to the assymetries of power. And with the rise of newer forms of coercive legitimacy, such as capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, liberalism, and democracy, not to say socialism, communism, and fascism, the Westphalian system has been rendered still more unstable by forces that were no longer exclusively political. Hence while globalization has not, as some of its most vocal apologists maintain,5 shattered, much less displaced, the Westphalian system, it has seriously challenged it through the global changes in ideological consciousness that have accompanied it.
But this in turn suggests that the corollary term “global” should not be assumed to represent some seamless whole or unified totality. The term “global” functions merely to suggest the reach and resonance of those processes by which the world is continuously being reconceived and remade as an almost infinitely intricate, but at the same time frequently disjunctive, organism that continues to remain a good deal more than the simple sum of its individual parts. The term “global” did not achieve its meteoric rise until the mid-1980s, when it began to displace cognate terms like “international” and “international relations.” Those earlier terms had come into usage toward the end of the eighteenth century to signal the emergence of what in retrospect appears to have been a new world order where territorial nation-states now began to assume responsibility for organizing socio-political and cultural processes and the path was laid for what some call the modern era. But now, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the ascendancy of the terms “global” and “globalization” seem to forecast the arrival of still another world order, and this time one marked by a reduction rather than expansion of the power of “nation-states” as individuals and communities gain access to sources of information and power that are globally disseminated and thus bypass many of the traditional controls of the political state.
Yet this implies—or at least could imply—that the process of world-making, or re-making, known as globalization, is of comparatively recent vintage, having accelerated to its present velocity only, perhaps, because of the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, or, earlier, with the emergence of postmodernism at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.6 But a number of thinkers push the date of this most recent and vigorous surge of globalization back a good many decades to the beginning of the modern era in the middle of the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism fueled the original expansion of European nation-states and those nation-states then undertook to acquire and consolidate colonial empires.7 Other scholars and theorists move the origins of what we call globalization back still further to the Early Modern period, when Europe commenced its initial exploration of the rest of the globe and embarked simultaneously on the development of early world trade.8
Those who associate the origins of globalization with this first European Age of Exploration and Discovery are also likely to assume that when the “modern world system,” as Immanuel Wallerstein has termed it, first took shape in the early 1600s, it was essentially an economic rather than political system and was built around a series of core states characterized by aggressive commercial growth, strong governmental structures, and a powerful sense of national identity, all of which permitted them to control, for their own benefit, the evolution of those weaker states and regions of the world that developed on their peripheries. Yet even then, in the seventeenth century, it was soon to become apparent that an emergent modern world system based on an extensive system of commodity exchange was also becoming linked as well by systems of exchange that were cultural and symbolic. Just as ideas and ideologies were being traded along with goods, so the new wealth thus accumulated was being defined not only by the size of capital reserves and sailing fleets but also by the production of commodities like buildings, monuments, and paintings reflective of new styles both of affluence and of taste. Commerce, in other words, was going cultural.
This is not, of course, how Wallerstein and other world systems analysts view the matter. While theorists like Roland Robertson, Malcolm Waters, Arjun Appadurai, Frederick Buell, and Manfred Steger have insisted that globalization has always involved interchanges that were symbolic as well as political, discursive as well as economic, Wallerstein has long maintained that even if cultural forms and practices have reinforced this system since it was created, they were only a subsidiary influence in its formation.9 There is, however, some indication that Wallerstein has begun to modify his position. In response to charges that this conception of the world system is too economistic, together with his more recent assessment that the system may well be on the verge of collapse in the next half century, Wallerstein now concedes that culture plays a much larger role in creating distinctions in cultures as well as between them, though in both these instances he maintains that culture retains its function of mystifying people about the operations of the system itself.10 For this reason, he maintains that all attempts to resist the system simply help to keep it in place.
The problem is that Wallerstein’s view of the way that globalization potentially co-opts even its own critics oversimplifies it by radically foreshortening and consequently misreading its history. Evidence of a world system linking commerce with culture can be found as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, according to Janet Abu-Lughod, and, more importantly, its origins and trajectory were not European at all but Chinese and Middle Eastern.11 Indeed, Amartya Sen traces the emergence of such an arc running from East to West rather than, as “world system’s theorists contend, West to East, as early as the year 1000.”12 And Joseph Needham has documented numerous inventions, besides the better known magnetic compass, gunpowder, and printing press, that made their way west from China between the first and eighth centuries, which include the crossbow, efficient harness, suspension bridge, cast iron, paper, porcelain, and stern-post rudder.13 But earliest evidence of cultural and symbolic as well as commercial exchanges spanning out in a global direction can be detected, as a matter of fact, nearly 3,000 years before the creation of any of the so-called modern world systems.
Historians William H. McNeill and Marshall G. S. Hodgson have demonstrated, for example, that an Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization first came into existence over a period of something like a thousand years beginning two millennia before the commencement of the Common Era.14 Organized initially around four central areas—the northern shores of the Mediterranean, the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, the Hindu-Kush Range and valleys of the Indus and Ganges rivers, and the Hoang-Ho and Yangtze valleys in China—this zone of civilization was eventually to stretch from the shores of the Atlantic to the waters of the Pacific and the China Sea. Propelled initially by little more than the accumulation of small developments in trade, warfare, governance, religion, and exploration that occasionally enabled people to overcome their natural suspicion of alien ways and begin to reach out toward one another, such contacts were eventually to facilitate not only the exchange of merchandise, services, and technologies but also the much slower, still more consequential transmission of ideas, institutions, customs, diets, rituals, and languages. Such transmissions were, of course, to a considerable degree dependent not simply on the material need for goods or the practical needs of security and survival, but also on the symbolic capacity to create and inhabit, as well as to challenge and revise, symbolic universes of shared, or, at any rate, sharable meaning.15 Whether such symbolic capacities were, as McNeill now thinks of them, first set in motion by the invention of rhythmic voicing and dance (the progenitors of poetry and perhaps other kinds of symbolic action),16 “contacts with strangers,” as he noted in a retrospective essay on The Rise of the West 25 years after its original publication, “is the major motor of social change.”17 This helps explain how cultural conflicts, interactions, and transformations during this long process of development were often to prove as, and sometimes more, fateful than economic or political ones—if only because the former have so frequently determined the way the latter could be understood and actualized. What was in play was not simply people’s understanding of others but their understanding of themselves.
As it happens, this history by which the world has, for several thousand years, been continuously woven and rewoven into an increasingly interlinked and often inter-reliant assemblage of life-systems is not one to which, until very recently, the humanities have paid much attention. For all of the relatively recent interest in, say, histories of slavery and racism, or imperialism, or colonialism, or ethnicity, or diasporas, or even sexism, or of our earlier disciplinary involvements in such fields as comparative literature, world history, and the history of religions, or, for that matter, our pedagogical commitment to language programs (the latter of which deserve credit for keeping the possibility of globalism alive even if they could not provide a model for its full conceptualization), globalization is still too often viewed merely as a temporary geopolitical and economic development or as a passing academic fad, and is consequently assessed chiefly in terms of what is taken to be its liabilities and banalities.
Thus despite questions about globalization’s evolution and subsequent historicization, or about its varied and complex form and function in different locales, or its association with other historical phenomena, globalization itself is clearly here to stay, no matter how much its contemporary expressions are certain to change. The intellectual challenge is not so much to decide whether globalization and the global deserve to be taken seriously but how best to engage them critically—how, in other words, to assess their implications and consequences, without in the process legitimating their most problematic features. The central questions to be asked, therefore, take a variety of different forms: What are the forces that have brought the world itself into being as an interactive, ever-changing structure of processes and practices? What forms has that densely concatenated, diversely elaborated structure taken over time? What fresh light do such forms, and the factors that bring them into being, throw on such issues as personal and cultural identity formation, mass migration, international terrorism, practices of child rearing, religious violence, human rights reform, the status of women and children, scientific and medical practice, the regulation of international stock markets, the digitalization of infor...

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