Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 35
CITY OF GLOBALISTS
reducing economic inequality, engaging in
nuclear disarmament, developing renewable
energy, promoting economic growth, fight-
ing disease, and ending poverty). Obama
artfully encouraged a greater "passion for
resemblance" among the peoples of the world
by suggesting that since all face the same ide-
ational and material threats, all must work
as one to secure a common peaceful future.
Perhaps no progressive leader in world his-
tory had drawn a more complete progressive
picture of the world. President Obama was
the one that the American and European
cultural elites had been waiting for. He was
the one who assumed that the world could
work as they thought it should work-never
mind the very real political differences that
separated men, or the material conditions
that helped produce human suffering, or the
metaphysical considerations that more fully
complicated human existence. Progressives
had come upon a charismatic leader who
promised, with the wind of elite American
opinion at his back, to captivate his fellow
citizens into believing that human advance-
ment required mastering the beliefs, lan-
guage, and manners of global citizenship.
But if the idea of a universal politically
homogeneous state does not correspond
to the nature of international politics, why
not simply ignore such global stargazing? If
the expectations of would-be citizens of the
world were to be crushed by the weight of
how the world works, what would it matter if
Western elites traded in their stylish cosmo-
politanism for global citizenship?
We ignore the advances of those seeking
universal political homogeneity at our own
peril as the growing political influence of a
false idea threatens the livelihood of particu-
lar cities and the practice of citizenship every-
where. The global stargazer who assumes that
there is but one ship of state to be piloted in
human affairs is as politically dangerous and
useless as the philosophic cosmopolitan of
old was thought to be. Whereas the efforts
of cosmopolitan philosophers sometimes
served to ennoble political communities, the
zealous global partisan believes that political
universalism requires dispensing with par-
ticular political norms. In other words, there
is nothing in philosophic activity applied to
the study of politics (in the accounting and
comparing of the traditions, customs, and
beliefs of human associations) that requires
the philosophically inclined to sacrifice
particulars (i.e., their own city) to universals
(i.e., the establishment of a universal city).
But a city held captive by globalists is a city
whose particular claim to justice, right, dis-
tinction, and importance is threatened by a
universal claim that challenges it on all these
accounts.
B
eyond the moral and ideational dan-
gers that come from the displacement
of political norms, the globalist also poses
a material danger to his political commu-
nity, in that his dogmatic notions about
human nature suggest a state of human
affairs that does not correspond to political
reality. A more philosophic accounting of
human norms that might encourage par-
ticular improvement-one that includes an
acknowledgement of the human condition
on one hand, and the influences of civiliza-
tion, culture, and regimes that differentiate
mankind on the other-is ignored. A city
held captive by globalism thus experiences
all the dangers of cosmopolitanism without
benefitting from the political prudence that
might result from its exercise. As much as cit-
ies would do well to understand themselves
and others in a manner that a philosophic
accounting of international affairs some-
times produces, the global partisan endan-
gers the livelihood of particular caves in his
blind attempt to create a universal cave.
35
Modern Age - Fall 2014
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