Weigel Room: Being 'Cosmo' Girls—And Boys

Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah begins his newest book “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” not unpredictably, with a chapter on “making conversation.”

My own example: “Excuse me, what’s that? I only have a minute. You see, I spent half the afternoon on a phone call to Berlin. Well, to the Kolkata cell phone of a friend there. And now I’ll hardly have time to finish this French novel before my boyfriend from Zimbabwe, who also happens to be white and Jewish, comes to pick me up for our Valentine’s Day Dim Sum.”

It is almost too easy to caricature the giddy, self-congratulatory multiculturalism that Americans of our generation learned to love early on in forms as various as school “international fairs” and Disney movies. Almost as easy as it is to parody certain species of academic journal articles.

So where were all my veil-bedecked and sinuous-bellied fellow second graders who so enthusiastically danced along to the tune of “Prince Ali! Fabulous he! Ali Ababwa!”—where were these beacons of hope for the new, tolerant and interdependent century when the CIA needed proficient Arabic speakers after 9/11?

(Not that I would criticize my classmates. This particular “Crazy Hakim”—as the film credits identify the crackpot Scheherazade-cum-shopkeeper figure I played—is wasting her time with poetry and European languages. Not exactly among those things President Bush has recently announced to be “critical” to national interests.)

But Appiah’s book, one of the first in a new “Issues and Ideas” series being printed by Norton and edited by Dubois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is emphatically not about that kind of discourse. Nor is it about promoting multiculturalism in the vapid, “Aladdin” sense. Nor “globalization,” exactly—“a term that,” in Appiah’s words, “once referred to a marketing strategy, and then came to designate a macroeconomic thesis, and now can seem to encompass everything, and nothing.”

Rather, Appiah’s subject is the citizen (“polites”) of the cosmos: that is, the citizen who conceives of him or herself not as belonging to the “polis,” a city to which he or she would owe loyalty, but to the universe or the world in a broader sense. The conversation is one above and across cultures—a conversation in which the very idea of essentially distinct cultures cannot be heard over, say, the Iranian shopkeepers of Appiah’s native town of Kumasi in Ghana, any more than it can be heard over a Vietnamese student of classical literature at the Sorbonne.

In the history this book traces, Appiah tells us that cosmopolitan is an idea as old as the Cynics of the fourth century B.C. who coined the expression (if not as old as the first enterprising “australopithici” who stretched and wandered out of Africa). Imported by the Stoics to Rome, where it greatly influenced the forefathers of modern Christianity, it lies close at the heart of Western history.

And, Appiah argues, cosmopolitanism is the form of ethical subjectivity to which we, strangers in the world of the twentieth century, must aspire.

Not so that “we” can understand “them” or the “West” win over the “Rest,” but so that we can attempt to emancipate discussions of values from fundamentalism and floundering, inescapable relativism. Not because cultural difference is a myth, but because the vision of the world that would make it insurmountable is, Appiah insists, exaggerated.

En route to our utopic cosmopolis, Appiah suggests, we will also save the arts—in the cosmopolitan model of constant intercourse and “contamination” over authenticity, great works of art are restored to being objects of common worth, the inheritance of all.

Will we ever get there? How plausible is this vision?

Although “Cosmopolitanism” is not as academically ambitious or rigorous as some of Appiah’s previous work (for instance, his “Ethics of Identity” published last year), he provides a thorough and compelling argument. Full of anecdotes and humor, as well as his typically lucid writing, it is a pleasure to read.

And, although the call for recognition of what is common to all may seem at times a bit too much like an authorization for “moderns’” strong-arming “locals” into endorsing whatever floodtide of products and practices has overwhelmed them, for my taste, it is hard not to be compelled by Appiah’s final appeal: “The people of the richest nations can do better. This is a demand of simple morality. But it is one that will resonate more widely if we make our civilization more cosmopolitan.”

—Staff writer Moira G. Weigel can be reached at weigel@fas.harvard.edu.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
W.W. Norton
Out Now