Few of us disagree that we live in troubled times, and a powerful aspect of that trouble is that our society is divided in ways that feel nasty and raw. “Polarized” is a word often used to describe our current condition. It is a condition that leaves us anxious and uncertain about the future, America’s and our own.
America is suffering today, in very strident ways from a division which has always confronted human societies and certainly Western societies since the nineteen century. It is the division that is marked by those people who are committed to what we might call local values. I include among these people who center their lives, their identities – and their loyalties -- primarily around their ethnic group, their religious community, their nationality and now more perhaps than ever their deeply felt political ideologies, doctrines and positions. In centering their identities and loyalties in these ways, they may emphasize their differences from people other than themselves.
In contrast there are those people who are more disposed to embracing wider allegiances. They are more comfortable with differences and may in fact be intrigued by them. This outreach toward others may include a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others. Beyond their own – their loved ones, their family, ethnic groups, and political compeers - they may feel an obligation to strangers. Such a sense of wider obligation may be a component of their ethical philosophy. Let me for the moment define such people as “liberals” and their approach to those who are different or outside their own group may be characterized by greater tolerance.
I need to be clear: There has never been a Golden Age in America. We have always been divided between what I am calling localists and those whom I am tentatively calling “liberals.” There have always existed divisions as to what America and American society should look like. In the early nineteenth century, different visions of American society were in a sense precursors to what we experience now. The American statesman John C. Calhoun in 1848 argued against admitting Mexicans as citizens and declared “Ours is a government of the white man.” And leading up to the Civil War, the greatest divide in American history, in 1858, Stephen Douglas proclaimed “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis. It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”
The post-Civil War Amendments which granted birthright citizenship and voting rights to all citizens continued to unearth different visions of whom America was for. Opponents of the 15th Amendment found both African-American and Chinese citizenship scandalous. A Democratic senator from Kentucky, Garrett Davis declared, “I want no Negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.”
A contrary vision of America was articulated by one of its most eloquent spokesperson, the former slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. In defense of the 14th and 15th Amendments in speeches across the country Douglass spoke of America as a “composite nation,” a nation formed out of difference, Native American, African American, European, Asian and every possible mixture. As for the Chinese, he said, “Do you ask, if I would favor such immigration. I answer, I do. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would.” And then, looking to the American future, Douglass said, “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.” For Douglass for America to progress it needed to be a “composite nation.” Such was his vision and it was a vision of a harmonious society. But it was not to be.
In the 1880s, with the end of Reconstruction, we witnessed the creation of Jim Crow laws, the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the vile history of lynching in America.. We also had, in 1882, the Chinese exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which betrayed the Constitutional promises of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
While often forgotten, the Ku Klux Klan after World War I, in its second instantiation, was a huge and highly visible grass roots organization. By 1925, it claimed a membership of somewhere between two and five million with many more sympathizers. It was an era when Woodrow Wilson, who was extremely racist even for his time, and cleansed the federal government of all black employees, could bemoan ‘the lost cause of the confederacy,” a rubric which painted to the Confederacy in noble terms.
In the years before World War II, a father Charles Coughlin, a rabid anti-Semite and radio broadcaster with a huge audience, proclaimed his admiration for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party, and called on his audiences to form a new political party under the title of the Christian Front. In 1939, about 20,000 Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in Madison Square Garden, decorated with swastikas and American flags with posters declaring a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” where they denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Nazi propaganda was actually distributed in the South calling for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
The division between those of narrower nationalistic interpretations of what America should be and those of more expansive and liberal visions cuts in other ways as well.
Throughout its history until the late 1970s, the United States was unmistakably a Protestant-dominant society. Episcopalianism was closest to an established religion in American society. An aspect of Protestant dominance has been a vitriolic suspicion of Catholics, especially Irish and Italian immigrants, a hatred fueled by the Klan. The assumption was that Catholics could not be trusted because their highest allegiance was not to the US Constitution or the United States, but to the Pope in Rome. The canard was that American Catholics were a front for papal designs to take over the United States.
I well remember that when John Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, he had to bend over backwards, time and again, to tell his audiences that if elected, his highest allegiance would be to the US Constitution and not to the Pope in Rome, and that he believed in the absolute separation of Church and State.
American history and society have oscillated between these two tendencies, the local and the liberal throughout. The conservative entrenchment of the 1950s, was broken open with the advent of the 1960s, with flourishing of the Civil Rights movement, then the women’s movement, which spoke to a diversity in popular culture and an attack on the conformity of an increasing corporate society. They were followed by the gay rights movement, the rights for people with disabilities, and the celebration of a more open and diverse society.
To simplify what is a long and complex story, I think we are witnessing now, in part, a parochial, nationalistic backlash against the diversifying, progressive and liberalizing trends of the 1960s, 50 years later as exemplified in the local and illiberal nationalist reaction epitomized by the Trump constituency.
So given this history and given our polarized condition, what is to be done? I think a way out needs to begin with a vision.
It seems to me, that almost from its inception, our nation has appropriated three different approaches to American identity; what it means to be an American. From the early decades of the nineteenth century until the mid-1960s, the prevailing American identity was that of the “melting pot.” The melting pot ideal asserted that people came from all over to the United States and left their cultural identities behind in their countries of origin. In their stead they appropriated a new American identity which was a blended mix of these different cultures, but something new and distinctive. was created. As Ralph Waldo Emerson exuberantly proclaimed, “the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and of the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages.” This image of America, in other words, would reflect an assimilationist ideal.
This ideal had its critics such as Horace Kallen a Polish-Jew who wrote a treatise in the early twentieth century entitled “Cultural Pluralism and the American Ideal.” Kallen rebelled against the assimilationist tendencies of the melting pot and argued in favor of an American landscape of ethnic pluralism. Within this vision, Americans would adhere to their local identities, but at the same time would enrich the nation through expressing what was characteristic and best of each group. He analogized society to an orchestra, in which each played his or her unique instrument in manner that would fructify the nation and create a better whole.
Despite dissident voices such as Kallen’s calling for a pluralistic demography, the melting pot remained prevailingly unchallenged until the late 1960s with the emergence of the Black Power movement and its militant rejection of the integrationist aims of the Civil Rights movement. Despite its small size, the Black Power movement actually transformed how many Americans understand their identity as Americans. Its leadership claimed that while Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews etc., could melt into American society, blacks as a consequence of the color of their skin and the ineradicable reality of racism, never could. What the Black Power movement also did was unmask the melting pot as an expression, not of a neutral American identity, but as a form of Anglo-dominance. Hence American Negroes became African-Americans, which ushered in the phenomenon of hyphenated Americans. This involved with pride factoring into one’s Americanism a positive appreciation of one racial, ethnic-religious, backgrounds, which previous generations might have been happy to jettison. So we now had Italo-Americans, Latino-Americans, Jewish-Americans. Gender followed as a component of one’s American identity.
Multi-culturalism was born, which had at its center a celebration of cultural difference and its watchword was that of tolerance. Multiculturalism, in turn, became the basis for identity politics, whereby people express their political interests through their distinctive and parochial identities whether it be racial, ethnic or gender identities. Identity politics has certainly been a powerful force, especially for those minorities who have been the object of oppression, marginalization and invisibility throughout our history, and it remains so. Yet without a transcendent, common ideal, identity politics can be and has been reduced to power struggles for recognition among disparate groups.
Perhaps the time has come to envision and advocate for another way of understanding American society and American identity. And what I propose is the renewal of what is actually a very old idea, namely that of cosmopolitanism.
It’s an image of American society that is put forward most cogently by the philosopher Anthony Appiah, who teaches at NYU and is known to readers of the New York Times as the Ethicist who writes a column in the Sunday magazine section.
What is cosmopolitanism? The word comes from the Greek meaning”citizen of the world.” At first glance cosmopolitanism would seem to stand in direct opposition to the localism, provincialism, illiberal nationalism and populism which have emerged in so many countries, including our own and threatens liberal democracy which many of us would argue is the best form of government.
In its assumed contempt for concrete, local values and loyalties, cosmopolitanism has often gotten a bad rap, in that it seems to be identified with the elitism which comes under so much disdain these days. More specifically, the cosmopolitan has been accused of being the type of person who loves humanity more than he or she loves real, down home, human beings. The cosmopolitan, it is claimed, has more concern for the stranger on the other side of the world than the neighbor next door, or perhaps too preoccupied with others than even members of his family who are closest to him. Or as Appiah puts it, the cosmopolitan might be “the frequent flyer who can scarcely glimpse his earth bound compatriots through the clouds.”
In the Soviet Union in the Stalinist period, Jews were referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans.” It was an anti-Semitic slur, implying that the Jew didn’t really belong anywhere and therefore were suspiciously unpatriotic.
But, in Appiah’s version of cosmopolitanism, these notions are mistaken, and I find his understanding of cosmopolitanism very attractive. In his view, the cosmopolitan outlook doesn’t exist in opposition to local values and loyalties, but incorporates them and extends beyond them to embrace wider circles. By his understanding, “The cosmopolitan task…is to be able to focus on both far and near. Cosmopolitanism is an expansive act of the moral imagination. It sees human beings as shaping their lives within nesting memberships: a family, a neighborhood, a plurality of overlapping identity groups, spiraling out to all humanity. It asks us to be many things, because we are many things.”
This implies that when it comes to my own personal identity and my allegiances it is not a question of either or, but of both and. I can and do have multiple loyalties. So I am a resident of the City of Hackensack, a resident of New Jersey and of the United States. If you ask to which I hold the highest loyalty, the question doesn’t make all that much sense. When I vote in a local school referendum in Hackensack what matters most is that I am a Hackensackian. When I vote for a Senator or Representative, my New Jersey residency moves to the fore. When I work for international human rights with Amnesty International on behalf of a prisoner in a foreign country or on behalf of an asylum seeker arriving at our boarder and escaping persecution in a faraway land, I am very conscious of being an internationalist. None of these identities or loyalties contradicts each other; all of them make me who I am. On the big issues, I can feel myself to be an American patriot, but that is not necessarily a reason why I cannot commit myself to the fate of the earth.
Another very important point is that some cosmopolitans are seduced by the thinking that if everyone matters, then everyone must matter equally, and if this is true then each of us has the same moral obligations to everyone. Therefore being partial, favoring those who are connected by blood or culture or territory can look arbitrary. In other words, if I am a citizen of the world, is it wrong to partial to one’s own place or people? For those cosmopolitans who answer “yes”, it is that position which raises the contempt of those people I am referring to as localists.
But this impartiality is a fallacy. As Appiah notes, “… the fact of everyone mattering equally from the perspective of universal morality does not mean that each of us has the same obligations to everyone. I have a particular fondness for my nephews and nieces, one that does not extend to your nephews and nieces. Indeed, he says, it would be morally wrong not to favor my relatives when it comes to distributing my limited attention and treasure. Does it follow that I must hate your nephews and nieces or try to shape the world to their disadvantage? Surely not. I can recognize the legitimate moral interests of your family, while still paying special attention to mine. It’s not that my family matters more than yours; it’s that it matters more to me.” And according Appiah, there is nothing wrong with that.
This opens the door to another aspect of the cosmopolitan outlook. And that is that a cosmopolitanism way of life needs to be accepting of the rights of others to be different from themselves, and in that acceptance cosmopolitans extend the right to be uncosmopolitan. Central to cosmopolitanism is that every human being matters, everyone counts, which lies at the heart of cosmopolitanism’s universalism. And the reality of the human condition is that different people do have different values, and many choose to live in communities with people who share their language, customs, and values they think of as their own. That is their right.
I think the stance of a genuine cosmopolitanism is to not want to impose one’s own values on others who wish and choose to lives by different and more parochial values. To think otherwise, is to be imperialistic and to claim for oneself a certain infallibility.
This formulation does cause some problems, which, in my view, Appiah does not fully address. And that is that the cosmopolitan can more ready accept into his or her framework the uncosmopolitan than the uncosmopolitan can accept the cosmopolitan into his. This is indeed the problem we confront in our polarized society at this moment and to which there are no easy answers; it is a serious struggle. My guess is that the Biden “Build Back Better” program, which will open doors of economic opportunity that have been closed to so many, is our best chance. That, however, is another essay.
In the final analysis, this contrast between those whom I am calling localists and the global view embraced by cosmopolitans is not merely a question of personal preferences. It’s not merely an aesthetic choice or choice of lifestyles. Those who have opted for localism, parochialism and tribalism in this country and elsewhere, in a sense have withdrawn from the world, where the greatest threats to the planet and human survival are to be found. Today with carbon dioxide levels at their highest point in 800,000 years, with global warming threatening the fate of the planet, with 260 million international migrants our problems are truly global, not local. In short, tribalism is a luxury that humanity can no longer afford. Therefore, we need each to develop an ethos that while affirming our own sense of place also needs to transcend our local allegiances to embrace the world.
That is the “what.” The “how” is a much more difficult problem.