Liberty or Solidarity? World Citizen as Nonsense, Take Two

In light of the savaging I’m taking in comments, I’m going to say a bit more about this ‘citizen of the world’ business. As it happens, I do know a thing or two about french liberalism, intellectual history, and the social construction of international politics, so no need to fear on that count. Or maybe there is: because it’s from that frame of reference that I’m interested in conceding the bulk of Obama’s speech to zero in on the use of a longstanding bit of rhetorical force that I want to knock off its longstanding rhetorical pedestal. Lots of people from Paine’s time to ours have been interested in constructing a cosmopolitan political identity for the whole world and the whole human race, and I am extremely interested in deconstructing that identity, because I care more about political liberty than I do about social solidarity.

Knocking Obama’s phrasing is not an exercise in snark. “Relax,” you say, “it’s a figure of speech” (although note that the smartest critique in comments is from someone who takes it fully seriously). But whether you take it as a metaphor or a concrete political goal, it’s a framing rooted in a deliberate desire to muddle up and blur the boundaries between the political and the nonpolitical, to speak two languages in a single phrase. I’m more than happy to talk cosmopolitanism on purely cultural terms — a ‘postmodern conservative’ ain’t much good unless he can hang with his wealthy, world-traveling, self-entitled young postmodern liberal friends — but only insofar as the politics of pan-humanist/secular-Gersonian cosmopolitanism is left out back in the trash.

This is all but an entree onto a big long conversation about how much we should tolerate (…or be economically complicit in…) the suffering of strangers, one which I happen to see as occupying the center of the debate over the future of America and the meaning of life. I can’t cram that into this post, but I can set the record straight — and clarify — why it is I bracketed all the rest of Obama’s speech in order to pick on the world citizenship line. I consider the ‘citizen of the world’ trope flawed from the start, a dangerously mixed metaphor about the human yearning for solidarity with strangers which politics can never solve among free peoples.

Our yearning for pan-human solidarity is an absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition, and the most utopian of all utopian ideas is the idea of a Brotherhood of Man: because the human race is not a family, just like it isn’t one big polity. We are stuck with differentiation; there is no metaphor that allows us to redefine humanity as a closer relationship than it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Indeed, the only trope that allows us to develop closer amicable relationships with strangers is the trope of friendship, and the only way to close the relationship with a stranger is to make friends. Not to ‘make citizens’; not to ‘make brothers’. This is crazy European talk — the discredited language of the bloody French and German experiments in various kinds of border-busting solidarity. (The genius of the EU is how it functions best without an ounce of romanticism about solidarity; its inability to even generate its own preamble to its own constitution is proof that our apparently pan-human longing for pan-human solidarity may actually be a parochially European hang-up which it can only resolve by forgetting.) If I really wanted to be snarky, I’d allege that world citizenship is an atavistic little bit of European ethnocentrism — yes, even since the ancient Greeks. And though I don’t quite want to go there, because it’s just not true enough, it’s close enough for discomfort, and we Americans, especially, ought to think long and hard about exactly in what way that’s so.

Because fortunately, we Americans, far from Europe, developed without any deep collective desire and need to unify politically what was already unified culturally. But now some Americans want to look at the world as a unified culture, just as the Europeans once looked at themselves, and fantasize a symmetrically unified polity into existence. (Of course, part of the stated aim of that long-term project is to make a more perfect cultural union, too — proof of how the whole idea is the product of dual utopian stipulations that get traction by acting rhetorically as if each was both immediately possible and never achievable.) I consider this a dreadful error — not because I’m a jerk, but because we’ve seen this kind of thing go down before, and it’s unworkable. If you like liberty, that is. I fear I’m losing that argument, that liberty ain’t what it used to be, but that’s yet another story.

You want to talk world friendship? I’m right there with you. In friendship, though, not solidarity…. And these are two very different things.

Bottom line: social solidarity is incompatible with political liberty, political liberty is far more important and far greater of a human good, and to speak in terms of ‘world citizenship’, in whatever sense and for whatever reason, is to add fuel to a rhetorical fire intended to blaze away the distinctions that we need to recognize in order to appreciate the truth of my claims.