Not Hezbollah now, thank you
What’s all this about liberal education then? Does it have to do with the free discussion of ideas and a more cosmopolitan sense of the world maybe, as opposed to whatever green-and-slimy thing Bill O’Reilly thought he saw under the bed one day? Michael Bérubé offers some thoughts:
I’ve given up on trying to come up with formulations about the goal of liberal education that everyone would agree with, but I think cosmopolitanism beats the alternatives…What I’m offering, simply, is the much broader stroke of opposing cosmopolitanism to parochialism…I look at how it was, from Clifford Geertz onwards, that the idea of “local knowledges” took such hold of us. Why would the local be taken as a good in itself?…[I]t struck me as strange that the fetishization of the local would become so entrenched…[C]osmopolitanism…still gets a bad rap in quarters where it’s understood to entail rootlessness and a lack of grounding or commitment…Not only do I disagree – I think cultivating the idea of “world citizens,” to take Martha Nussbaum’s phrase from Cultivating Humanity, now more than ever beats every alternative I can think of. It offers a rebuke to certain pragmatic nationalisms – and I also think the talk of supersession of the nation-state is running well ahead of the actual facts. Finally, I would much rather be associated with an internationalist left than with a so-called patriotic left, and I think cosmopolitanism works toward that end.
Same here. With considerable emphasis. Cosmopolitanism, internationalism, world citizenship over the parochial, local and patriotic every time. Hand me my tiny patchwork flag, would you? I want to wave it.
The university is perhaps ‘one of the more genuine public spheres, in contrast to the kind of politics that we get on TV,’ the interviewer suggests.
There is always (and often for good reasons) suspicion of anyone launching a critique of Chomsky because he is so iconic; and all criticism is considered apostasy. So this week on the blog I said, let me try to explain what the difference is between the “democratic” and the “anti-imperialist” left, because the anti-imperialist left these days, I think, is leading itself right off the cliff to – well, the phrase this month is “we are all Hezbollah now.” I’m not Hezbollah, thank you, and I’m also not part of the Iraqi resistance…You don’t want to be in the position of saying, well, the repression and the homophobia of such and such a regime—at least they’re at least anti-imperialist, revolutionary homophobia and repression, as opposed to reactionary, imperialist homophobia and repression. In the last ten years or so, I have not only come around, as I argue in Liberal Arts, to a kind of re-appreciation of what the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was trying to do, but I’ve gotten increasingly impatient with that wing of the left that will cut some slack to whoever is the enemy of my enemy at the moment.
Yeah.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
Good article.
Interesting he chose the words ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘parochial’, because they are already two of the names for the modern class values in tension, the ‘educated’ values vs the ‘others’, sneered at as rednecks. It’s like he is saying ‘We are not like rednecks, and we are very proud of that’.
Well, no doubt. There is a lot to be proud of, for the carriers of western civilization. By ditching the fever swamp left, the liberals may give civilization a future as.
What’s the name of the rule that says if you mention Adolf, you automatically lose the argument (I’ve forgotten)??
But, both Joe (Stalin) & Adolf were very strongly against “cosmopolitanism” – there was actually a late-40’s early 50’s campaign against it in the SovUnion, and the Nazis were always in favour of Völkish/Deutsch values.
Dangerous, dangerous foreign influences, that might give you a fresh insight into a problem ……
The other part of the argument, about the “anti-imperialst” left is also an old one.
It is no suprise to me that some say “we are all Hizbollah”, not after the Nazi-Soviet pact. After all, what they really want is their own very special version of an absolutist regime – lets call it “The dictatorship of the Proleteriat”, shall we?
Godwin’s Law.
And when Uncle Joe said ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, he meant Jew.
And Bérubé’s point may be an old one, but unfortunately it is as apposite, and as contested by self-righteous morons, as ever.
“It’s like he is saying ‘We are not like rednecks, and we are very proud of that’.”
Excuse me?
Ah, the flower of Western civilisation …
Like this?
Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh,
in allen Wipfeln
spürest du
kaum einen Hauch;
die Vögelein schweigen im Walde,
warte nur, balde
ruhest du auch!
If cosmopolitan versus parochial is a true dichotomy, methinks the choice should be simple :-)
I would however think various issues related to cooperation (contractualism, basically) to some extent are dependent of perceived “closeness” and even “localness”.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
I can think of 3 universalist (as opposed to localist) political philosophies that have been put into effect. (By universalist I mean an ideology that speaks directly about people without reference to national or ethnic identity and that consequently can be applied everywhere).
On the one hand there are the ideas of Communism and the French Revolution and on the other hand there is the founding ideology of the USA.
To put it simply, the advocates of the former tried to implement their universalist ideas universally, while the advocates of the latter did not.
Ironically the non-Soviets and non-French who came under the rule of those particular adherents found them to be rather chauvinistic, with all power ultimately returning to Moscow/Paris and other countries being run for the benefit of those in the ideological homeland.
Meanwhile the USA has mostly not exported its own founding ideology and when it even comes close to it is accused of the same sort of thing (often, again ironically, by adherents of the other two ideologies above who see nothing wrong when their own side does it).
So on the evidence of experience, we cannot treat this argument about the merits of cosmopolitanism as wholly philosophical.
I can think of a universalist philosophy that really works, every time, without fail.
It is called: “the Natural Sciences”
When applied to the real world, in physical expression of the knowledge obtained by this philosophy, it is called “Engineering” or “technology”.
Do I detect a faint whiff of PoMo here?
I hope not.
Is it possible that academics’ views on the nature of left-wing politics are affected by over-exposure to the lunatic fringe on campus? I seldom meet anyone who subscribes to the views described under the catch-all “anti-imperialist” banner. It is like those weird UK “Euston” people who talk as though “Respect” was the mainstream and the views of most Labour MPs were the fringe. I’m not seeing I disagree with Berube, but isn’t talking up the lunatic fringe a bit like saying “I would be more sympathetic to geographers if so many of them didn’t believe the earth was flat”?
to G.Tingey:
No PoMo, rather the opposite: there’s a real world out there from which we can learn lessons. I think it was Descartes who said that if you want to know what people really think then look at what they do and not at what they say. I hope it was, because he is a major pomo hate-figure.
I contrasted the US story with the others to show that it is possible to have a universalist ideology without the extremely bad behaviour of the French Revolution and Soviet Communism.
At a general level, I think we are discussing mentalities more than ideologies. So we must pay attention to historical experience and psychology.
FYI, Paul Power, the USA exported its founding ideology over far more square miles than the French Revolution did, and every bit as much at the point of bayonets, or Bowie knives, ceteris paribus…
And it took the French Revolution a whole 5 years to abolish slavery, the American one a mere ninety or so…
Dave:
I think you are being a little unfair.
1) How many people were affected in each expansion over a similar number of years? In other words, compare the worst 20 years of the conquest of “the West” to the 20 years of French revolutionary imperialism .
Also, in all the territories of the US the same standards apply. This was the exact opposite of the situation with the French revolutionary empire.
2) As regards slavery, the ease with which it was abolished in France compared with the slaughter involved in the US Civil War suggests the relative difficulty of getting rid of it in the US. This is not a defense of the practice but it does show what people who wanted it gone had to do to get rid of it.
Also: how much slavery was there in France itself compared with in the US? Would France have done exactly the same if so much of the country had an economic system based on it ?
Interesting that Paul Power asks “what do people do” echoing Descartes.
Because that’s one of my reasons for saying communists are religious believers – they behave as if their system was a theocracy.
And, of course, the universalist system I mentioned does get results.
It is a system for doing things – gaining knowledge, to be precise, and then, usually applying that knowledge in the world.
Like I said.
It works.
Other example: – slavery.
Look at the British experience, where the campaign took about 25 years, but the W. Indian slave-owners were allowed their localised get-out between 1807 and 1832 (or was it 1831?). They were despised at the time (that is 1807) but they were a big vested interest, with huge amounts of money from sugar – think big tobacco/oil, now for comparison. So they were allowed a their get-out. There wasn’t even a whimper when it was finally abolished in 1831/2.
[What’s the world coming to? G. Tingey actually has something very interesting to say and even manages to avoid the L-word for once. Have my prayers been efficacious?]
As to ‘cosmopolitanism’ – ChrisPer has hit the nail on the head. Bérubé tells us he is nice, well-educated and sensitive guy who isn’t into hurrah patriotism of the ‘my country right or wrong’ variety and reassures us that Hezbollah sucks. Thanks a lot, just that Emmanuel Kant said much the same two hundred years ago.
So first question: what’s Bérubé’s added value in terms of a contribution to human knowledge?
Second question: What are the practical implications of Bérubé’s cosmopolitan morality (apart from ‘saying no to imperialism’, etc.)? Does it involve (say) dismantling the National Health System and replacing it by an International Health System? Does it mean that we open UK citizenship to the entire world? Or does it just mean that we try to convert other people to the cosmopolitan faith? And how is this to be done? What if 99% of the population just like being mulish parochialists and won’t budge? I am perplexed.
It all sounds a bit like the Sermon on the Mount minus Jesus Christ and the supernatural.
People said lots of things two hundred years ago. Ever heard of education? It tends to involve a lot of recycling of things that people have already said, two or two hundred or two thousand years ago, because no one is born knowing all that, no one can read everything, people forget stuff, ideas compete with each other, and so on. You yourself say things on here that people have said before – what’s your added value? You say them partly or perhaps mostly to show off and annoy, but you probably say them also because you think they’re worth saying, despite the fact that they have been said before.
If you could only cut back on the note of self-satisfaction, people might actually pay attention. As it is, the signal to noise ratio is wrong.
Indeed, but people do have a tendency to get nailed to trees for asking why we can’t all be nice to each other for a change, so it’s evidently a question worth asking.
[With apologies to Douglas Adams.]
Paul, no, I think you are being a little unfair, in assuming that a nation whose territory was, within the span of contemporary history, obtained in large part by campaigns of genocidal war and vile, conniving double-dealing is a beacon to the world *by its very nature*. I yield to no person in my admiration of the finer features of the ‘American Dream’, and in particular to the ‘New Dealer’ expression thereof, but it isn’t the whole story, not by a long and very bloody chalk. Saying slavery was hard to get rid of because it was hard to get rid of won’t help you much, either. It was one of the fundamental motors of the French economy in the C18, but still the radical revolutionaries abolished it. That bastard Napoleon earned himself a place in the halls of infamy for formally reinstating it, which is one of the many reasons I deny your inclusion of his megalomaniacal reign in any accounting of the impact of ‘revolutionary ideology’.
Hobby-horse being ridden here. You can tell, can’t you?
Ophelia, points taken. Perhaps I have been a bit too smug about Bérubé – though reading him I can’t help thinking that he is overly optimistic about what can be achieved by education and I think that’s what really bugged be rather than the Kantian déja-vu experience. I hope I am not doing Bérubé an injustice (I haven’t read his ‘collected works’), but he seems to believe that virtually everybody is ‘educable’ if you just try hard enough. Yet that is a very questionable assumption. I just happened to come across an op-ed by Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute in today’s WSJ ( Intelligence in the Classroom ) which might be of interest to readers in this connection.
I’m sure Bérubé would also benefit from familiarizing himself with Murray’s writings in the field of differential psychology: at any rate it would appear that only a minority of the human race can aspire to be ‘cosmopolitans’ like you and me and all the other N&C readers. Pretty pessimistic stuff — but more in tune with the real existing parochial world. That’s not to say one should do nothing, of course, but at least one should try to avoid illusions as to the limits of the possible.
Cathal,
If by cosmopolitan you mean a multilingual person steeped in several of the world’s cultures then IQ will be a barrier. But can’t a person with a low IQ be taught the simple lesson that people are people wherever they are?
That was the artcle of a policy maker, not a psychologist or an educationalist. Nothing of substance, but a distict whiff of an agenda.
Children will reach their cognitive limits at different places and education can only help them find these limits? Stunning insight, lots of percentiles to demonstrate a truism. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut. We knew that already. I’m not aware of any suggestion to the contrary.
If someone is in the twentieth percentile of whatever assessment you have chosen to use, you set realistic targets, but the bland assertion that such a child can only ever comprehend simple written information is meaningless. The purpose of education is not to improve a score from epsilon plus to delta minus so someone can run an elevator. So what is his point? It’s left unstated, but it certainly wasn’t a contribution to education.
Interesting that people mention the French revolution and the megalomainac Bonaparte ….
And peopple STILL go on about theat revolution, as if it really changed anything.
Well, Boney was born in1769 and died in 1821.
Someone else was born, in quite obscure and humble circumstances 12 years later, in 1781, and died, a very wealthy man in 1848.
He changed the world, permanently, and for the better, much more than any political leader. Quite possibly any political leader, ever (?) – Dicuss.
Oh, his name?
George Stephenson.
Forward to now – what is the world-changing role of Tim Breners-Lee, compared to all the arrogant and posturing politicians? Discuss.
Do you know how many people have been killed by those iron-horse abominations? And as for what you can be exposed to via the http://www…...
But to be serious, the trouble with politicians is you can’t ignore them, because when they f*ck up, you die. And indeed, sometimes when they’re on a roll, you also die. Personally I think they ought to be banned.
Dave:
Two apologies:
1)
For responding late, I spent 7.5 hours travelling on a journey that should have been a 90 minute flight yesterday
2) My first response above has taken off in the wrong direction. I was trying originally to compare and contrast thae universalist founding doctrine of the US with the doctrines of Communism and the French revolution. Manifest Destiny is definitely not part of that doctrine. It might even be considered the opposite, since it is by intention very particular to the US. Both Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union had the idea of spreading their ideologies all over the world – indeed their ideologies required this expansion.
By contrast the US was never thinking of invading France, Britain, Russia, Germany etc to replace their political systems with its own.
I’ll still disagree with you about the importance of slavery to France. For one thing, there were not hordes of slaves working as the base of the economy in France itself, as was the case in the old South. But, regardless of this question, what has it to do with my original argument?
I am a bit late joining the debate here but (and leaving aside the question of the French Revolution and Empire and the expansion of the US) I have a question:
How can you call your ideology “universalist” and not actively try to spread it to all of humankind?
Arnaud:
I used the word “universalist” to describe a common quality of the ideologies in question. Nothing about any of them suggested any geographical/ethnic/national limit to how they could be applied. But there is a great difference between “could be” and “should be”. An ideology can be spread by example.
The founders of the US noted the fragility of other republics in history and this did not encourage them to think they could conquer the world.