Enough Patriotism, Already: Kwame Appiah's refreshing call to cosmopolitanism

Reason: Enough Patriotism, Already: Kwame Appiah's refreshing call to cosmopolitanism: "According to one popular narrative, the 9/11 attacks inaugurated a new era of global conflict between two groups (perhaps even Civilizations) with radically opposed worldviews: one thoroughly globalized, envisioning a world community cooperating according to universal principles; the other narrowly tribalist, animated by a prerational affection for the local and parochial, committed to the superiority of its own group mores.

It has not, alas, always been clear which group is which."

.../...

As important, Appiah pegs the radical Islamists who stand as the most obvious threat to that liberal cosmopolitan vision not as evidence of an anti-modern tribalist backlash—a view made popular by works such as Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld—but as "counter-cosmopolitans," not the leaders of a reaction against globalization and modernity, but offspring of those forces.

It has been observed that terrorists are often drawn from the most affluent, modern, and westernized classes of their societies. Appiah draws on the work of French sociologist Olivier Roy, whose insight-rich Globalized Islam explains that this is no coincidence, that Salafist doctrines, despite their veneration of the "pious ancestors" for which they're named, bear at their core the imprimatur of both modernity and globalization.

.../... [odd, but for later examination/jmj ==> ]

The late philosopher Robert Nozick once quipped that there was something faintly paradoxical about Timothy Leary's professed desire to be the "holiest" man alive. A genuine American patriotism is a similar sort of hot ice. Not, of course, because Americans can't indulge in familiar affection for place, history, and song, but because the content of those symbols points so resolutely away from the local and parochial. What we share as Americans, as opposed to as Manhattanites or Angelenos or Witchitans, are principles that trumpet our community with the rest of humanity.

.../...

In short, we needlessly encumber values whose very virtue is their "thinness": The strength of liberal values such as freedom of speech or religious toleration is that they gain support from so many (often contradictory) sources. I may value free speech out of regard for the dignity of an unfettered human mind; or because of a Millian faith in the power of unrestricted discourse to seek truth; or simply as a modus vivendi, because I lack confidence that I'll get to decide who's censored in a pluralist society. To bind those values too closely to any one people, or even to "the West," is to shrink and atrophy them.

Julian Sanchez is an assistant editor of Reason. He lives in Washington, D.C.