Our choice—more commonly, our ancestors' choices—was relatively recent. Moreover those choices are validated daily by the numbers of people who want to come and join us. Is the Mexican's choice to risk the border to find work arbitrary? Hardly. Was the Soviet dissident's choice, or the Cuban dissident's choice, to come here for political or literary or artistic freedom arbitrary? Is it arbitrary when a young man or woman, born here, says, "I like this piece of dirt. I like the neighbors. I believe I'll defend it and them," and joins the military? No, except insofar as each is rejecting the cosmopolitan ideal and then only if the cosmopolitan eats her own tail and defines arbitrary as "that of which I do not approve."
To an extent, that's just what they do. When Martha Nussbaum, in her essay, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,[10] calls for children to be educated away from patriotism, to be educated into and for cosmopolitanism, she is substituting her choice for anyone else's. That, friends, is arbitrary.[11]
But let's not stop there. There are all kinds of voluntary, non-arbitrary choices people can make, choices, be it noted, that have no taint of nationalism. What, after all, is a member of the Mafia but someone who rejected his nation and society and opted for that non-nationalistic, cosmopolitan ideal? What of Mara Salvatrucha 13? The KKK? What of Legionnaire De Gaulle of the French Foreign Legion? All these are people who reject the nation and opt for a very non-arbitrary, tribal, even (accepting there is such a thing as a non-blood related—that is to say, a chosen—family) familial and ultimately exclusionary primary allegiance. What of the soulless, greedy, transnational Microsoft or Union Carbide or United Fruit CEO or corporate bureaucrat? Their loyalty is to the Family of Man? Their loyalty is to their paychecks, their stock options, and their golden parachutes . . . and, of course, to the families those things provide for . . . and to themselves.
Thus, to succeed, the cosmopolitan must eliminate free will and choice, for too many people will, left to their own, choose something besides cosmopolitanism. Indeed, true cosmopolitanism is the choice of a very tiny number. Why should this be? Kos' admissions alone seem inadequate. Rather, they are closer in spirit to corporate greed and Mara Salvatrucha drug running than to the cosmopolitan ideal.
Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
"This is my own, my native land?"
—Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Ralph Nader, whatever else might be said of him, is a patriot. In 1996, he wrote to one hundred of America's premier corporations, asking that they show their support for "the country that bred them, built them, subsidized them and defended them" by opening their annual stockholders' meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance.[12]
In a stunning display of cutting edge, transnational, corporate greed, indifference and disloyalty, with no pretense to either nationalism or cosmopolitanism, ninety-nine declined. Ford, Motorola, Aetna and Costco, at least, declined explicitly. (No, I will never again buy a Ford, Aetna or Costco product. And I'll dump my RAZR as soon as contractually possible. I'd rather buy a non-American product than an un-American one.)
I'll suggest to you, though, that Ford, Aetna, Costco, Motorola, MS-13, the KKK, and Legionnaire De Gaulle are all rational. For people give loyalty to what matters to them: Kos to his family, the corporate CEO to his paycheck and golden parachute (which is usually, ultimately, for his family), the KKK member to his klavern and what he thinks of as his "race," the MS-13 assassin to his peers and his pack leader. All have rejected loyalty to their entire nation, but they have not thereby acquired any notable loyalty, any transcendent loyalty, to mankind. Instead, each has picked a smaller group than the nation as the focus of their devotion.[13]
This should come as no surprise. Humanity, the Family of Man, asks nothing but it also gives nothing. It is an abstract, distant and ineffectual. People need the closeness and emotional support of some group they can know or, at least, think they can.
It is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation people need enemies: competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics.
—Professor Samuel P. Huntington
In Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, Martha Nussbaum wrote about concentric circles and how, having drawn one arbitrary circle at the level of nation, there is nothing to stop people from drawing ever smaller circles, from nation to religion to class, etc. , Indeed she seems to make the claim that drawing the one circle practically demands that one draw ever narrower circles, excluding more and more of the human race.
Another writer, Lee Harris,[14] has pointed out that this flies in the face of the historical record which demonstrates that the nation has, in many cases, been the only thing shown capable of overcoming such narrow circles.[15]
That's both interesting and true. More interestingly to me, though, is that the converse is also true. The nation overcomes interior small differences by presenting people with a set of exterior larger differences. But it is with de-emphasis on the nation, with a closer approach to that cosmopolitan ideal, with the decline of the legitimate nation, or in its absence, in other words with "post-national citizenship," that people define themselves and confine themselves into ever smaller groupings. We see Scotland gradually seceding from the United Kingdom. We see Quebec threatening to disassociate itself from Canada ("Good riddance," say most of my Canadian acquaintances). Yugoslavia breaks up, bloodily. Czechoslovakia splits, fortunately without bloodshed. Arab Shiites and Sunni Kurds in Iraq want out from under the Arab Sunnis. Indeed, everywhere we have seen some close approach to denationalization, we have seen just what Nussbaum informs us is the ultimate logic of nationalism. This is not a coincidence.
Consider Africa just as it was about to be decolonized. There, the European white devil provided the enemy, the outsider, the other, that held the locals together in a common cause. With that enemy gone, however, with that unifying phenomenon out of the picture, the overwhelming bulk of sub-Saharan Africa fell into mere tribalism and, wherever there was some power to be exploited for personal and family gain, amoral familism.[16]
Cosmopolitanism doesn't appear to lead to the ideal of Utopia, somewhere down the road, but to the miserable reality of sub-Saharan Africa, to Rwanda, Biafra, and the Congo, just around the corner.
The world is a vastly better place because it contains people whose only fault is the desire to make all people as good and reasonable as they themselves are.
—Lee Harris[17]
Respectfully, I disagree. For the world to be better the cosmopolitans would have to have some good effect. At a minimum one would hope that things might stabilize at a level no worse than we now have. Can they? What chance?
A cosmopolitan might say, "Look, if people can be educated and trained to die for artificial, even abstract, constructs like nations, surely they can be educated and trained to live for natural, concrete humanity."
It's not a bad argument, up to a point. Unfortunately for cosmopolitanism, that point comes quickly.