Cosmopolitinism

Our friends at Wikipedia say that Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community.

Cultural cosmopolitanism pertains to wide international experience. It refers to a partiality for cultures besides one's own culture of origin, as with a traveler or globally conscious person. Cosmopolitanism supposedly dates back to Diogenes answer to the question where he came from “I am a citizen of the world." Human beings dwells in two communities – the local community of our birth, and the community of "human argument and aspiration."

Cosmopolitanism does not call for world state. A single world order is considered hegemonic at best and ethnocentric at worst. We acknowledging the otherness of those who are culturally different and the otherness of other rationalities. Cosmopolitanism shares some aspects of universalism – namely the globally acceptable notion of human dignity that must be protected and enshrined in international law. However, the theory deviates in recognising the differences between world cultures.

Snips from Jonathan Freedman's NY Times review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity, gets at what I am getting at:

"Seeks to revive the traditions of tolerance, pluralism and respect for both individual and group rights that animated liberal thought for the greater part of the last two centuries.

I am who I am not only because I am engaged in the lifelong task of becoming the person I want to be but also because I can identify myself with groups of people engaged in similar ''life-projects'': secular Jews, people with kids, people raised in Iowa City, to mention three personal instances. Appiah stresses that the life-project I am carrying out, the story of my self that I'm struggling to tell, can't be separated from the affiliations in which that project was formed and to which it refers. The very pursuit of individualism demands the cultivation of collective identities, and the often conflicting ethical demands of each represent the poles between which Appiah's arguments swing.

Nowhere is this impulse more eloquently displayed than in the final chapter, where Appiah argues for a ''rooted cosmopolitanism.'' The term seems oxymoronic: to have roots is to be embedded in a specific history, nation or people; to be a cosmopolitan is to declare oneself a citizen of the world. For Appiah, however, these two are inseparable. Local histories, he reminds us, have themselves been shaped by the movements of peoples and their communal practices (let's not call them cultures) as old as human history itself. And -- the point has special salience after 9/11 -- one can pledge allegiance to one's country and still conceive of oneself in terms of global identities or universal values.

Appiah repeatedly invokes the example of his father, Joe Appiah, a Ghanaian and African nationalist who believed with equal fervor in internationalism. Kwame Anthony Appiah not only allows for but celebrates the contentiousness of the conversations that are to take place in a world where multiple affiliations are increasingly becoming the norm.

the superb rhetorical performance of this book offers the most persuasive evidence for his case. Indeed, his extraordinary scope of reference -- ranging from the proceedings of the Pueblo tribal council to Tolstoy's ''Anna Karenina'' to the experience of Appiah's multicontinental family -- not only exemplifies rooted cosmopolitanism, it performs it. To read ''The Ethics of Identity'' is to enter into the world it describes; it is also to imagine what it might be like to live in so urbane and expansive a place."

Appiah struggles with this as do we all, balancing, sorting and negotiating our way through the often conflicting thicket of individual rights and group rights; majority rules and minority rights; multiculturalism, pluralism, nationalism and universalism; tolerance of and betwtween ethnic identities.

How do I claim to be a humanist and cosmopolitan, and support the of Israel to exist as democratic Jewish state (albeit one closer to the 1967 borders, real two-state solution, no occupation and settlements...)?

How do we show tolerance for religious fundementalists at home and abroad, and uphold human rights, including equal rights regardless of nonbelief, sex, gender, orientation, etc.