Country of Exiles (20 page)

Finally, universities founded a range of institutes and programs that directed the intellectual energies of the university away from national to global interests, from the inside to the outside.

In 1996, the College of Letters and Science at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, created the Global and International Studies Program, a full degree program modeled after the recently created UCLA International Development Studies Program, and International Relations Program at UC, Davis. Designed to examine “transnational processes,” postcolonial peoples, and “diasporic” men and women uprooted and in motion, the program was headed by Mark Juergensmeyer, professor of politics and religion and a practicing liberal Protestant minister. Though born in a small Illinois town, he viewed America as “dissolving territory” and hoped to prepare his students for “world citizenship.”
⁷⁸

In the same year, the University of Chicago opened a new path in the humanities—“a new intellectual configuration,” or a “new refashioning of the humanities,” according to the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, a departure from its earlier conservatism. Scholars in history, literature, cinema, gender studies, and in several other fields abandoned the old paradigm to deal with transnationalism, the future of the nation-state, globalization, and a reassessment of the whole nature or character of “knowledge.” In 1995 New York University created the International Center for Advanced Studies, headed by Professor Thomas Bender, whose central project was to study “the city in a pluralized world,” evaluate “urban knowledges,” and explore the character of “citizenship … in regional, national, and global contexts.”
⁷⁹

Throughout their history, America’s greatest universities aspired to do what Cardinal Newman, in his classic book
The Idea of a University
, said they should do—educate “the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”
⁸⁰
American universities also often taught the world (or at least the elites of the world) what the world did not know about itself. A Japanese scholar who studied in the United States in the 1960s recently told an interviewer that he wanted to go
to a particular American university because it “had the largest collection about South East Asia programs in the world. So if you [were there], you [didn’t] have to go to South East Asia countries.” An Indian-scholar observed of American libraries that “library collections on Asia are better in U.S. universities than those in Asia.” Hungarian-born American historian John Lukacs, who immigrated to this country in 1946, was similarly impressed with what he found at American libraries. Living in Europe, Lukacs knew next to nothing about European history as a whole. “In Hungary, there had been no such thing as a course in European history at the Gymnasium or the university. It was in America, only in America, that entire verities in the history of Europe opened before my eyes.”
⁸¹

At the same time, insofar as American universities have emulated business practices and allied with corporations for revenues and status, they have exchanged what was left of an older form of open inquiry for a new internationalism tailored to the needs of the marketplace and indifferent to the life of the country. This trend showed up in ties to transnational business, in the ardent recruitment of skilled people from anywhere in the world, and in the creation of an outsider campus culture. It took form in the obsession with demography or race rather than place as a central university concern. And it appeared, above all, in the decline of the liberal arts mission, which had always been given a privileged berth in university life.

Increasingly, modern universities have come to resemble less the place-oriented institutions of the past than the populist casinos of the present. Like big casinos, they were also making a new cosmopolitanism, a vision without boundaries that domesticated the mobility of skilled elites around the world.

But this vision went well beyond the academy. It was bigger than the academy, although many academics helped fashion it.
It emanated, in fact, from all the things we have examined in this book, from the intermodal highways and the landscape of the temporary to the transnational companies and casino-dominated Indian reservations. It was the mentality, the ideology, of the new age we have entered.

O
n August 24, 1996, Walter Capps, candidate from California for a seat in Congress (which he would win that fall, only to die a year later), said in a speech before the Democratic Convention in Chicago that Americans “had no common history, no common ancestry, no common language, not even a common faith,” nothing in common in any traditional sense. But they did share something, Capps observed, and that was “a common creed,” a common set of universalist ideas, beginning with the idea that “all men are created equal.” Furthermore, Capps announced, they were beginning to share a new sense of humanity, a new bond with all the strangers in their midst and around the world. We have reached the point, he claimed, where we must all “look into the face of any human being” and see ourselves.
¹
A few years earlier, in 1993, Robert Jay Lifton, the noted sociologist, argued in
The Protean Self
, that Americans were developing a “place for many places.” Without even knowing it, we have gone slowly but “inexorably” from “individual to family to
social or ethnic group to nation,” and now to “global belonging.” “The human community has been radically broadened; our ‘ancestor souls’ populate the globe.”
²

These statements, among many such in our time, point to the rise of a new cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, of course, has a very long history. As a philosophy, it appeared as far back as ancient Greece, when the Stoic philosophers first proposed that men might give their primary allegiance to humanity as a whole rather than to their local origins. It emerged again from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in the form of economic and political liberalism. Excited by the revolutionary new capitalism, thinkers such as Voltaire and David Hume believed that unobstructed trade anywhere—in which private individuals renounced their differences in the pursuit of wealth—would lead to heaven on earth. Cosmopolitan themes also took politically liberal form in documents like the Declaration of Independence and in the writings of Thomas Paine in the 1790s and William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s, both of whom said “my country is the world.” Karl Marx, too, inherited the Enlightenment legacy, believing that “workingmen have no country.”
³

Cosmopolitanism was more than a philosophy, however; it was also a general historical condition marked by creative interactions among diverse peoples that typified the richest civilizations since the beginnings of recorded history, as historian William H. McNeill long ago showed.
⁴
In its last enduring incarnation (between 1850 and the 1960s), such a cosmopolitan pattern was driven by Western (European and American) power and determined by Western interests, which, by 1920, had reached all across the globe, importing modernization (technology, science, capitalism) to the non-West and exposing the West to regular fruitful interactions with other cultures. At the same time, this cosmopolitan condition operated against the current of a more powerful nationalist and tribalist consciousness
that overshadowed both European and non-European political life.

Cosmopolitanism carried other meanings as well, which more often than not associated it with specific places and individuals. For many people, it invoked a butterfly kind of behavior, a person who waltzed through life, dabbling here, dabbling there, never settling anywhere. For others, it suggested the city, especially the big city, and sophisticated urbanites who supposedly knew how to mix with anyone, enjoyed fine art and foods, spoke many languages, and accepted or tolerated many kinds of behavior. From this view, cosmopolitanism depended for its existence on the city, or at least on the idea of the city as a magnetic, free place. “I had the provincial’s belief,” remembered Indiana-born writer Darryl Pinckney, of his undergraduate days in New York, “that an interesting life could take place only in a great metropolis.”
⁵

By the 1990s, however, a new cosmopolitan mentality had taken up residence in the United States, broader than anything that preceded it. As a condition, it was beyond Western control and consisted of “many civilizations” in contention with one another; and it ran uniformly through established power in corporations, universities, and government.
⁶
As a philosophy, this cosmopolitanism little resembled the vision of the past, which often commented critically but not without sympathy on provincial foibles and that conjured up richly textured and fascinating places. This newer, more earnest vision advocated that all places, not just cities, become cosmopolitan. The vision had an almost conformist character and it broke entirely from conventional notions of place.

After 1980, this new mentality came in two basic varieties—one from the academy, the other from business. Liberal academics were the most prolific of the two groups, producing at least three kinds of cosmopolitanism: a multicultural outlook
that divided people into groups and demanded that all marginalized peoples—or those viewed by multiculturalists as unfairly excluded by the majority culture—be fairly incorporated into systems of power; a fluid approach that invited interactions between groups and at the borders of cultures; and a postcolonial angle, developed mostly by emigré intellectuals, which singled out displaced and exiled individuals as America’s key culture-makers. All struck at conventional and historical conceptions of place and loyalty. The business approach, intermingling with and shaping academic thinking, was simple but no less total in its cosmopolitanism; in it, one heard the jingle of casinos and the rush of the intermodal ports. Its basic contention was that the capitalist market, left to itself, would dissolve differences and bring on harmony.

In the past fifteen years, many in academia have been talking cosmopolitan ideas and themes. Some of these people resemble the ancient Stoics who imagined that human beings might someday leave behind their local prejudices and embrace the “world as a whole.” Among these are philosophers Judith Lichtenberg and Martha Nussbaum. A professor at the University of Maryland, Lichtenberg asserted in 1981, quite simply, that Americans exist in a “global world” and that “the limits of the planet are the limits of the world.” “There is continual movement,” she said, “from self to family to clan to tribe to nation, and ultimately to the whole human race.”
⁷
Nussbaum, currently at the University of Chicago, has argued that we should just accept the fact that “we live in one world.” “We are all born naked and poor,” Nussbaum has said, ignoring the differences
between the Rockefellers and the slum-dwellers, and we should learn to see all human beings as the same, with the same claim on our compassion. “We should recognize humanity wherever it exists, and give its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity, our first allegiance and respect.” “National boundaries” are not “morally salient,” and “patriotism is very close to jingoism.”
⁸

Nussbaum struck a note agreeable to all cosmopolitans. At the same time, her downgrading of cultural particulars, which she repeatedly displayed in her writing, turned off many thinkers, in particular, the multiculturalists. Multiculturalists asserted that Americans have no common culture, to invoke the late Walter Capps once again. Not only was Capps a congressman from California; he was also, for many years, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he lectured on the “Voices of the Stranger.” Capps did not think what most Americans probably believed—that they shared the same culture. For him, Americans shared only a loyalty to political principles. Otherwise, they belonged to their own cultures. Multiculturalists rarely defined what culture meant, but usually (for them) it was reducible to race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, all conditions, in other words, that bore little relation to real places (except, in the ethnic case, but then as somewhere left behind), indeed, that transcended place.
⁹

The multicultural view has a long lineage in this country, dating back in its earliest version to at least the 1910s, and resurfacing in the late sixties, when many defended the outsider and argued passionately for a politics of inclusiveness.
¹⁰
By the nineties, however, multicultural cosmopolitanism was the prevailing view, expounded by many thinkers, among them Michael Walzer, political philosopher and contributor to
The New Republic
.

Employed for many years at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, with its serene and beautiful setting, Walzer has tried to form a coherent vision of inclusiveness and, in the process, he has become more and more multicultural.
¹¹
He sees America not as a “union of states” but as an ensemble of “nations, races, and religions, all of them dispersed and intermixed, without ground of their own.”
¹²

He disputes those writers who think that too much cultural difference—too many self-asserting groups—harm the country. What pattern does that, he counters, is not multiculturalism but individualism, a long American tradition that Walzer admires but also fears because it cuts people off from their groups, making them isolated and lonely.
¹³
The groups, however—racial, ethnic, or religious—are the keys to true citizenship, the unifiers (not the spoilers) of American society, empowering people to take part in democratic politics. So indispensable are they to checking the worst effects of individualism, Walzer believes, that the state should be called in to protect and nurture group differences. Through whatever means necessary, “the state” should “produce hyphenated individuals … who will defend toleration within their different communities while still valuing and reproducing the differences.”
¹⁴
At the same time, the state should embrace immigration. “We are a society of immigrants,” Walzer contends, “and the experience of leaving a homeland for this new place is an almost universal American experience. It should be celebrated. But the celebration will be … hypocritical if we are busy building walls around the country. Whatever regulation is necessary … the flow of people, the material base of multiculturalism should not be cut off.”
¹⁵