Cosmpolitanism’s Warrants

• In Event: Teacher Meets World: A Critical Conversation on Hansen’s Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Cultures, and individuals bearing the mark of their enculturation, have traditionally come into contact in many ways including trade, migration, and territorial expansion. Today’s world of rapid transportation, media, and telecommunication has accelerated the temporal frequency of such interaction. Meanwhile, diverse populations have become compacted into relatively small spaces with the emergence of mighty urban centers of global commerce. This has made the clash of cultures, often marked by racial, ethnic, and religious conflict, the critical issue of our age.
Since its ancient origins, cosmopolitanism in its many guises has sought to assuage the conflict of cultures and cultural identities by seeking a common humanity behind the contingencies of individual cultures and personal identities. Oftentimes, this common humanity is taken as an antecedently fixed and final essence such as God or Reason. Such forms of cosmopolitanism lead to a strong universalism that often denies cultural contingency and may lead to ethnocentrism, colonialism, and other forms of violence that reduce the Other to the sameness of some predetermined identity. Softer forms of universalism emphasize the moral dimension of human existence, and affirm that different cultural values and beliefs can frequently yield similar moral actions of recognition, response, and cooperation. They emphasize the co-creation of meaning and value in an ever-changing world where diversity, as with Darwinian evolution, is the key to survival and well-being. This is the approach taken by Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hansen among others.
Surprisingly, thus far only a relatively few scholars have carefully examined cosmopolitanism for its educational significance. Hansen’s new book, The Teacher and the World, is a major contribution to the emerging field of educational scholarship in education and, as far as I know, the first to take a close look from the practitioners perspective of teachers, administrators, and researchers. He relies on moderate forms of moral and cultural cosmopolitanism that emphasize our common humanity, respects cultural difference, and celebrates transformative, cultural hybridity while offering rich opportunities for social self-creation in the classroom community. Here lofty theorizing meets the rigors of everyday practice.
Still, even the best work leaves complicated questions. Here are three that are extraordinarily difficult. First and most generally, what warrants the cosmopolitan claim to a common humanity? Is it determinable without privileging one culture’s view and values over others? Second, as probably everyone attending this session, Hansen works in the liberal tradition of the post-Enlightenment era shared by most in the West, and many in the rest of the world. It is also clear that unlike some, he is a liberal pluralist, which leads to a paradox. How is the liberal pluralist to respond to illiberal cultures and individuals that dogmatically refuse to dialogue respectfully across differences and would reject hybridity out of hand? This leads to a closely allied question about indoctrination. So the last question is this: What would Hansen say to those who claim that his form of cosmopolitanism is actually a form of indoctrination not only into liberalism, but worse, liberal pluralism?

Author

• Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University