The Cosmopolitan Illusion (2003)

IS IT WRONG teach our children be patriotic? Or may we teach them be a little patriotic, provided that we also teach them value and respect cultures of others? Should they be encouraged be loyal their own nation, or should they be taught that they are citizens of world before all else? These are questions that were addressed in justly celebrated essay Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism by Martha Nussbaum, and her answer was that education should actively encourage the very old ideal of cosmopolitan, person whose primary allegiance is community of human beings in entire world. (1) The significance of cosmopolitan ideal in contemporary American education is obvious at every level. At its most topical, it is illustrated by course of Islamic studies that John Walker was encouraged pursue in his Marin County high school, almost entirely exclusion of once mandatory courses in American history and subject quaintly known as civics. Indeed, a look at curriculum of modern public education demonstrates a core emphasis on precisely those subjects that do not require an undue prejudice toward, or interest in, one's own culture, if it happens be American. But what is basic justification for notion that American education should promote cosmopolitan ideal? And, indeed, that it should promote this ideal even if it is at expense of less inclusive ideals such as patriotism? At beginning of her essay, Nussbaum sketches an answer. If we are going stop short of full-fledged cosmopolitanism and choose promote patriotic values instead, then what is keep us from descending increasingly narrower and ever more exclusive categories of allegiance, such as our particular class or race or region or trade association? Or, as Nussbaum puts it, and ethnocentric particularism are not alien one another, but akin -- so that to give support nationalist sentiments subverts, ultimately, even values that hold a nation together. But there is an immediate problem with this argument. For if Nussbaum is making a historical claim, record runs counter it. The rise of both German and Italian nationalism in nineteenth century was accompanied by a struggle against all those less inclusive forms of particularism -- regional, linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic -- that had kept both of these nations so politically backward. In fact, it could be argued that point of nationalism was precisely dissolve hold that lesser forms of group loyalty had traditionally imposed on human mind by subsuming these lesser loyalties under an allegiance larger community. It is possible, however, recast Nussbaum's argument as one that is not historical, but logical, in which case it can be stated roughly as follows: If your first loyalty should be your own group, then why arbitrarily make this group one represented by your country? Why not direct your primary allegiance your own particular tribe or kinship group? After all, if mere accident of belonging such and such a group is be basis of your moral allegiance, then what makes your country a more logical choice than your sect or tribe or even your family? Where do you draw line? The point of this argument should be obvious: There is only one nonarbitrary point at which such a line may be drawn, and that is at community of all human beings on planet. This is only group that cannot be challenged as being merely accidental in sense that you might have been born into one nation rather than another, or one sect rather than another, or one tribe rather than another. In other words, while we are accidentally white or black, Christian or Muslim, Anglophone or Francophone, Indian or Swiss, we are all essentially and necessarily human beings, and this is something that remains no matter how much we abstract from contingencies of our incidentality. …