Deep Cosmopolis

Rethinking World Politics and Globalisation

Adam K. Webb

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138891326
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317486732
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Too often, observers of globalization take for granted that the common ground across cultures is a thin layer of consumerism and perhaps human rights. If so, then anything deeper and more traditional would be placebound, and probably destined for the dustbin of history. But must this be so? Must we assume--as both liberals and traditionalists now tend to do--that one cannot be a cosmopolitan and take traditions seriously at the same time? This book offers a radically different argument about how traditions and global citizenship can meet, and suggests some important lessons for the contours of globalization in our own time.

Adam K. Webb argues that if we look back before modernity, we find a very different line of thinking about what it means to take the whole world as one's horizon. Digging into some fascinating currents of thought and practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, across all major civilizations, Webb is able to reveal patterns of "deep cosmopolitanism", with its logic quite unlike that of liberal globalization today. In their more cosmopolitan moments, everyone from clerics to pilgrims to empire-builders was inclined to look for deep ethical parallels—points of contact—among civilizations and traditions. Once modernity swept aside the old civilizations, however, that promise was largely forgotten. We now have an impoverished view of what it means to embrace a tradition and even what kinds of conversations across traditions are possible. In part two, Webb draws out the lessons of deep cosmopolitanism for our own time. If revived, it has something to say about everything from the rise of new non-Western powers like China and India and what they offer the world, to religious tolerance, to global civil society, to cross-border migration.

Deep Cosmopolis traces an alternative strand of cosmopolitan thinking that cuts across centuries and civilizations. It advances a new perspective on world history, and a distinctive vision of globalization for this century which has the real potential to resonate with us all.

1 Circuits of the Sacred

DOI: 10.4324/9781315709703-1

The monk Xuan Zang returning from India. Dunhuang mural, Cave 103. High Tang period (ad 712–765).

In the year 629, a monk named Xuanzang set out from the Tang dynasty capital at Chang’an, bound for India. The young man had been born into a distinguished family of Chinese officials, but his attraction to Buddhism had led him to join a monastery and seek ordination at the tender age of thirteen. Then, years of learning Sanskrit and devoted study of the Buddhist scriptures had made him long for better translations, which could only come from the religion’s birthplace. Buddhism had entered China from India several centuries earlier, but the distance from its origins, both geographic and mental, was formidable.

Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India was no easy matter. It took over a year via central Asia and the Himalayas, during which he ‘crossed trackless wastes tenanted only by fierce ghost-demons … [and] climbed fabled mountains high beyond conjecture, rugged and barren, ever chilled by icy wind and cold with eternal snow’. During some fifteen years in India, he meandered the width of the subcontinent from Kashmir to Bengal, worshipping at hundreds of monasteries and meeting thousands of monks. He recorded the peculiarities of Indian life in striking detail. The Indian Buddhists welcomed him as one of their own, and a local ruler even convoked a debate about the finer points of religious doctrine, over which Xuanzang was invited to preside. Some monks urged him to stay permanently in India. ‘What greater happiness can you have than spending the rest of your life visiting the holy sites?’ they asked him. Xuanzang replied that he had to return to his homeland to take back ‘the hidden meanings of the different schools’ that he had learned. And return he did, arriving back in Chang’an in 645 to a festive welcome and an audience with a curious emperor. He brought with him twenty horses laden with a collection of 657 Buddhist texts and 150 relics. ¹

Nearly fourteen centuries later, a year to cross the Himalayas has shrunk to three hours. Hundreds of thousands of people per year travel between China and India. Rather than trudging through snow and gasping thin air like Xuanzang, you can sit in the comfort of an airline seat and survey the curve of the horizon. When you land at either end, the welcome is different than it was for Xuanzang. You stride through a shiny new climate-controlled airport. Your visa is scanned perfunctorily by passport control officers who, despite their different features and complexions, are clad in the uniforms and manners of the modern state. These two states happen to be aiming missiles at one another across the mountains, but that does not stop the flow of latter-day pilgrims.

But who are these pilgrims? A handful of them still follow the same circuits of the sacred as did Xuanzang. The first time I ever heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent was when I came across a couple of dozen Buddhist pilgrims at the holy site of Sarnath, not far from the Ganges in northern India. They had come from China and were being escorted by an Indian guide speaking to them in their own tongue. His voice carried through the drizzle of a cool winter afternoon. Sarnath was the site of the Buddha’s first sermon and has long been a key pilgrimage site for Buddhists from across Asia. Xuanzang himself found some 1500 monks there when he visited. Today, most of the large complex lies in ruins, with low clusters of red sandstone, streaked with black here and there, and interspersed with neatly trimmed green grass.

Visiting Sarnath is certainly easier now than in Xuanzang’s time. The short flight from China and India updates the manner, but not the essence, of this circuit of the sacred. It is a circuit that long predates, and will surely outlast, any Ozymandian power of the moment. While states try to manage pilgrims’ movements, the spirit of the pilgrimage is beyond the state’s reach and beyond much of the flux of history. The Chinese I saw at Sarnath wore modern clothing, and one later brought out an iPad for a photograph, but their hushed tones and the reverence with which they prostrated themselves and then walked around the site’s circular tower bespoke a deeply, timelessly religious motive for coming.

Yet while some things remain the same, other have changed dramatically. People such as the Chinese Buddhists walking around Sarnath are rare compared to the more usual pilgrims of our time. For today, merchants, rather than monks, are treading out their own circuits of the sacred. They do not venture abroad to bring back scriptures in Sanskrit. Instead, today’s eager go-getters brandish mobile phones and business cards in English. In their own way, they do break down some of the barriers between countries. Trade between China and India has grown in leaps and bounds in recent years, as new webs of interest link the two giant economies. Perhaps the old saying is right, that there is no force in history so powerful as a low price. Profit promises to warm even the chilliest of relations. A thousand kilometres west from Sarnath, the Attari–Wagah border crossing into Pakistan has a mere trickle of travellers, despite huge car parks and shiny new facilities, obviously built in expectation that numbers will grow. And in January 2014, a few days before I passed through the eerily quiet inspection hall, the Indian and Pakistani trade ministers had announced new measures aiming to expand the flow of goods through that crossing.

Both the religious pilgrims of old and today’s seekers of profit can be considered cosmopolitans. The word comes from ancient Greek and literally means a citizen of the universe, or a citizen of the whole known world. But the cosmos has changed. It has little room for monks walking from Chang’an to Sarnath seeking truth; and Chinese emperors no longer welcome them and the scriptures they bear. Our global rituals have quite another imagery now. In the new spirit, the organisers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics adopted the motto, ‘One World, One Dream’. They proclaimed that ‘We belong to the same world and we share the same aspirations and dreams.’ ² The global dream apparently had required the razing of Beijing’s old neighbourhoods to make way for more skyscrapers to impress those in attendance. Global metropolis links to global metropolis, in a sanitised prosperity that strives to keep up with the future. In this new cosmos, the stars have descended from the heavens to glitter from the shop-fronts.

Much of this shift has obviously been driven by the upsurge of globalisation, especially over the last two decades. The new circuits of trade bind countries together in a certain way. As the Japanese journalist Funabashi Yoichi put it, the Asian Pacific Rim has become a ‘hotbed of middle-class globalism’, ‘animated by workaday pragmatism, the social awakening of a flourishing middle class and the moxie of technocrats’. Such energy extends far beyond Asia. Thus we hear breathless commentators pronounce the world ‘flat’, bound together by ever tighter networks of communication and trade, all countries squeezed into the lucrative ‘Golden Straitjacket’ of capitalism. Globalisation has also been called ‘the second bourgeois revolution’. If the first stage was the nineteenth-century breakthrough within Western countries, setting entrepreneurial energy free from feudalism, then today’s second stage is capital’s escape from the constraints of national regulation. Global business thrives on so-called ‘flexible accumulation’. Rather than a stable workforce in one place, it needs leeway to adapt to ever shifting opportunities across the planet. ³

While much of the energy of today’s globalisation does come from such profit-seeking, we cannot understand it only in mercenary terms. To do so would be too dismissive and would miss much of the magic in it that attracts people. For many observers, liberal globalisation holds out the promise not only of prosperity but above all of freedom. The more wide-ranging the flows of resources and people, the looser the controls that placebound authorities such as governments can exert over individuals. As Manuel Castells, prophet of the globalised ‘network society’, put it, ‘The power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power.’ ⁴ Room for choice and questioning is opened up. In this vein, Nobel-Prize-winning author V S Naipaul—of Indian ethnicity and Trinidadian birth, and long based in London—has welcomed the ‘awakened spirit’ that comes from ‘our universal civilisation’. This new civilisation, he explains, is different from all earlier ones and ‘a long time in the making’. ‘It is an elastic idea; it fits all men.’ Unlike the old traditions that offered an idea of truth, this universal civilisation disturbs people with doubt and forces them to make their own way in the world. Experience it long enough, and ‘other more rigid systems in the end blow away’. ⁵

Today’s cosmopolis is transforming how hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people think about their lives. Opportunity and uprooting are two sides of the same coin, the currency of liberal modernity. Modernity creates a kind of ‘homelessness’. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes it as a transition from ‘agrarian patriotism’ to ‘the global self’. The old bonds of home undone, the world turns into a series of ‘deserts’ with ‘nomads’ wandering across them. ⁶

On this new landscape in which place matters ever less, people are finding common ground of a kind across longer distances. A few years ago, one of my Chinese postgraduate students in Nanjing remarked that he felt more in common with his roommate from New York than with his own grandparents in a Chinese village. During his months in my class he had shown a knack for getting to the point, as well as a certain tough-mindedness from his experience working in the global business world. On more than one occasion, he tried to convince his classmates that they, too, should appreciate this brave new world more because it served their personal interests better than they acknowledged.

Yet for everyone who sees liberal globalisation as an arena for ambition, there is someone else who sees it as a potential moral breakthrough. Alongside the business classes are the many liberal and educated people—academics, journalists, NGO managers, and the like—who make up the so-called ‘new class’ of the progressive and reform-minded. They certainly see themselves as public-spirited rather than mercenary, as global citizens rather than just global investors and consumers. ⁷ In short, the link between the global market and consumer culture, on the one hand, and liberal ideas, on the other, is tricky. Ideas often do gain currency because they fit the economic realities of the time. But many sincere liberals will also insist that something essentially human is being set free by today’s globalisation. Profit and sentimentality can go together in ways that capture the cultural moment. Thus the former CEO of Disney suggested that ‘Disney characters strike a universal chord with children, all of whom share an innocence and openness before they become completely moulded by their respective societies.’ ⁸

As this book will argue, there is much that is problematic about liberal globalisation. There are also plenty of resources for thinking about what might come after it. But to be fair we first must understand, on its own terms, exactly what the liberal cosmopolitan vision offers. What is the best foot it can put forward?

Take an influential book from a few years ago. Perhaps it does not put forth anything wholly new, but it does flesh out a liberal line of thinking that represents the aspirations of many educated people. It is Cosmopolitanism_ Ethics in a World of Strangers, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. ⁹ Appiah has his own cosmopolitan bona fides beyond doubt, as a Ghanaian-English-American philosopher whose career has spanned three continents. He tells us that the task of our time is to abandon habits of mind that were formed ‘over the long millennia of living in local troops’, if we are to learn to ‘live together as the global tribe we have become’. Global citizenship demands respect for people distant and different from ourselves, a respect based simply on our common humanity. Sometimes such ‘kindness, generosity, and compassion’ will mean aiding people in dire need anywhere in the world.

Appiah does not stop at our duty to help distant strangers. He also insists that the true cosmopolitan will be curious about cultural differences. Such appreciation need not mean trying to preserve ways of life that people in them want to abandon. He ultimately gives only individuals, not cultures, moral standing. He says that clinging to supposed authenticity is a lost cause anyway given the ‘inevitably mongrel, hybrid nature of living cultures’. Rather, he hopes for plenty of ‘cosmopolitan contamination’ across the inhabitants of the ‘global village’. They should mix and match, broadening their horizons in ways that only the modern world has made possible. According to this line of thinking, liberal modernity holds out the best hope of human dignity and fulfilment. To many sincere liberals, this promise of liberty and enlightenment means far more than the gaudy consumer culture that happens to have come at the same time. Appiah also offers an important disclaimer, namely that people like him are not hostile to any truths that tradition might contain. ‘We cosmopolitans believe in universal truth, too’, he writes.

It is not scepticism about the very idea of truth that guides us; it is realism about how hard the truth is to find. … Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism—the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.

Here we see what liberal cosmopolitans like Appiah believe to be the crux of the issue. They do not set their vision in contrast to truth, and virtue, and all the other things that today’s world might plausibly be accused of neglecting. Rather, they set liberalism in contrast to insularity, intolerance, and overconfidence. Boundaries need breaking down, on liberal terms, because the sort of people who take boundaries too seriously do things to crush the human spirit.

This theme runs through much liberal writing, not only among such philosophers as Appiah but also among the culturally uprooted literati. Take the Bulgarian-French psychiatrist and social critic Julia Kristeva. She says that having had to create herself from nothing as an international migrant, she has crafted a cosmopolitan identity ‘at the crossing of boundaries’. It is liberating to choose who one is. She mocks the ‘weird primal paradise’ that people of a nationalistic temper want to preserve or revive. ¹⁰ Similarly, the Chinese essayist Liu Zaifu, long in exile after 1989, has described himself as a ‘crevice person’. The cultural ideals of each society build to a peak, but at their edges are the crevices where those like him can sit, taking nothing too seriously. ¹¹

Sometimes it is not enough to take pride in one’s own position at the cultural margins; one also has to shake up the complacent. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa declared in a 1967 speech that the purpose of literature is ‘to arouse, to disturb, to alarm’. More recently, he welcomed globalisation because it loosens up national loyalties and frees people to choose their own identity. ¹² In the same spirit, the Jamaican philosopher Jason Hill celebrates those who live as ‘the moral antithesis of tribalism’ in violating the taboos of complacent peoples and places. ‘Hybridisation is a moral goal’, he affirms, ‘because it destabilises zones of purity and privilege.’ Living this way ‘stands as an affront to the images codified and made sacred by the culture at large. I become in essence an offence at large.’ Therein lies freedom. ¹³

On one level, even those of us with deep misgivings about the tone of today’s globalisation have to acknowledge some underlying motives of these writers. It is understandable that liberal cosmopolitans feel obliged to wage war on overconfident traditionalists. We all know those who invoke one or another tradition and who are convinced, in the narrowest of ways, that they know the whole truth and that it gives them a licence to impose themselves on others, or at least to lash out in all directions. Much bloodletting around the world is done in the name of tradition. The militants who cut off heads in front of the camera address the global village in the name of truth, not openness. Appiah is not wholly misguided when he indicts the so-called ‘counter-cosmopolitans’. The religious fundamentalists are universalists like himself, he says, but their universalism would flatten all diversity except a few details like what fabric to use for women’s obligatory scarves. Liberals see resistance to their vision of the world coming from two directions, both of which are unappealing. One is a rear-guard battle being fought by insular people, blind to the magic of the ‘universal civilisation’ that will set people free. Another is a strident backlash by young fundamentalists, the sort of malcontents who start riots and plant bombs. If that is what one sees of tradition, then it must be tempting to set one’s vision of the global future in contrast to it.

Yet, as I shall argue in coming chapters, such a way of framing the issue is misleading. It rests on a false choice that urges us to accept, more or less by default, some unsettling tendencies in the world’s present trajectory.

To understand where the problem lies, we have to dig more deeply into some key assumptions that cosmopolitans of the liberal sort are making. Their mode of openness and tolerance has a distinctive flavour. Indeed, we might call it the cosmopolitanism of spicery and getting along. It savours diversity and the cultural flows of our time because it holds that variety is the spice of life. With the internet, travel, and trade, diverse people now encounter one another much more often than their ancestors did. When they meet, they are supposed to respect one another but also to appreciate the sheer variety of the global landscape. The differences they bring to their encounters are rather like colourful accessories: enough to savour but not enough to get worked up about. This is globalisation as a convivial dinner party.

Liberals will insist, of course, that they have nothing against truth, merely against the sort of people who invoke truth to bludgeon others. We have already seen Appiah’s remarks along those lines. But quite beyond fears of persecution, the liberal imagination does tend to see truth in a way that is rather unusual in any world-historical perspective. As the philosopher of religion William James put it o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Circuits of the Sacred
• 2 Civilisation with a Capital C
• 3 Beyond the Frontiers
• 4 The World Religions
• 5 Mediæval Mirrors and the Virtuous Outsider
• 6 Strutting on the Stage of Empires
• 7 Missionaries, Mystics, and the Melding of Faiths
• 8 Modernity’s Derailments
• 9 Globalisation and New Landscapes of Power
• 10 Relearning How to Talk Across Traditions
• 11 Interreligious Dialogue and Its Limits
• 12 Homelands and Hospitality
• 13 World Citizens in the Making
• 14 Void or Cosmos?
• Notes
• Index