The cosmopolitanism of the poor

[imomus]

And what if... wandering Muslims were the new wandering Jews? The poor were the new jet set? And fundamentalism was something as modern as a 747?



I'm nine years old, up on the flat roof of a house in Athens with another boy, the son of a diplomatic family. Although my dad works for the British Council in Kolonaki Square and I'm at the British Embassy School, he's just an English teacher. We don't really get "postings". This boy, though, is the son of a proper diplomat. "Where have you been?" he asks. "|'ve been to..." The list of countries is endless, his pride shameless. I listen dutifully to this cosmopolitan, clearly trumped by his utter privilege.

Cultural Cosmopolitanism: "Cultural cosmopolitanism pertains to wide international experience. Cosmopolitan, meaning citizen of the world, refers to a taste or consideration for cultures besides one's own culture of origin, as with a traveller or globally conscious person. The term derives from Greek cosmos (world) + polis (city, people, citizenry), and was widely used by ancient philosophers, such as the Stoics and Cynics, to describe a universal love of humankind as a whole, regardless of nation. The term may also be used as a synonym for worldly or sophisticated." Wikipedia

I'm grown up. I'm sitting with my father in my fiancé's family's home in Woodford, Essex. My future wife Shazna and her family are Bangladeshis; my soon-to-be father-in-law has two wives, one in Bangladesh, one in London. And here they are, all ranged around the living room, cousins, uncles, brothers, an imam. They're people who fly to Bangladesh regularly. People with dual passports. Cosmopolitans. Economic migrants. Muslims. The jet set.

I spent the early afternoon yesterday giving an interview to David Gordon Smith of Expatica, "the #1 English-language news & information source for expatriates living in, working in or moving to the Netherlands (Holland), Germany, France, Belgium or Spain." David turned out to have gone to the same university as me, Aberdeen, and lived in the same halls of residence. I gave him my usual (Paul Bowles-derived) stuff about the pleasures of staying foreign, and also about how I want immigrants to integrate without being forced to assimilate. In other words, to preserve their difference.

I started talking about the differences, in Berlin, between a yuppie area like Prenzlauer Berg and an immigrant area like Neukolln. One difference is that Prenzlauer Berg is less cosmopolitan, the same way Williamsburg is less cosmopolitan than Flushing. Take the Karl-Marx-Strasse, a few blocks south of where I live. There's a Chinese supermarket next to an African barber next to a Turkish hookah pipe café. There's nothing quite so exotic, and so dense, in the yuppie districts. It's the cosmopolitanism of the poor!

In 1999 the New York Times published an article entitled Smart, Lyrical, Even Genteel, But Is It Rock? by Eric Weisbard. It was about my "famous for 15 people" scenario, but tried to cast this not as a democratic thing but a "world clique":

"When those on the rock fringe do reach out now," Weisbard wrote, "it's to people like themselves, who just happen to live in other countries. Nouveau cabaret acts like Momus in London, Kahimi Karie in Tokyo and the French-singing April March in Los Angeles use their sophistication to make common cause across national boundaries... Such alliances supersede the need for a local scene and offer an alternative, albeit a deliberately small one, to the planetwide media presence of a Celine Dion or Puff Daddy. Yet the worldliness these performers manifest inevitably promotes an ideal of affluent cosmopolitanism."

Responding to this article on my website, I made a pointed observation (which flirted with Godwin's Law): "I don't want to underline this too heavily, but doesn't this argument remind you of something disturbing? Rootless cosmopolitans, intellectuals with international connections with like-minded outsiders, minorities who collaborate across national and racial divides... isn't this exactly how Hitler characterises the international Jewish conspiracy in 'Mein Kampf'?"

Actually, I could as well have mentioned Stalin. It was his anti-semitic campaign of the late 40s and early 50s which gave birth to the phrase "rootless cosmopolitans" to designate Jewish people euphemistically (Stalin thought Jewish doctors were trying to poison him, but didn't want to name their race publicly because it went against communist principles).

Could it be that those "rootless" (and therefore, by implication, disloyal) cosmopolitans the "wandering Jews" (who mostly only wandered because they were persecuted) have now been out-wandered by economic migrants of other races? Could it be that it's now Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese, Africans who wander, while the Jews are, weirdly enough, increasingly invested in "blood and soil"?



Some commentators try to range "conservative" Islamic radicals against "liberal" global cosmopolitanism. Here's Michael Clarke, Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London, in a Times article yesterday entitled Here's why jihadis just love to fly. According to Clarke, they love to fly because they hate flying and all it stands for:

"Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology — they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism. The Boeing 747 was the last of the “great machines” that characterised the 20th century: it opened up air travel to the mass market. And it was so very American; big, brash and useful."

The trouble with the argument that radicalized Muslims hate modernity is that it ignores the fact that they are completely a product of it. Without 747s, without the globalization of the economy (and without, of course, a history of Western imperial adventure) there would be as few Muslims in the UK as there are in Japan. Bin Laden is as much a part of "modernity" (or post-modernity; the society of the spectacle) as a Boeing 747.

The kids who planned to blow up planes over the Atlantic were no strangers to flying. Their parents arrived in Britain via 747s, and their trips to training camps in Pakistan were made on 747s. To down a 747, for these people, would be like killing one's mother, or killing the stork that brought one into the world, or killing oneself. Which is, of course, exactly what they planned to do.

You cannot be in favour of globalization and against the most cosmopolitan people on the planet; the urban poor. They're the new jet set -- even when they're blowing jets up. And, needless to say, only a tiny percentage of these "cosmopolitans" are terrorists, just as only a tiny percentage of the old aristocratic elite who used to pass for the jet set were imperialist war-mongers.

Comments

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Interesting Momus. I have alot of friends here in Irvine that are a direct product of this concept as well. Even my father is an example of this. Someday I hope to be as well traveled. A citizen of the world. :)

[joji-poji.livejournal.com]

this is a little bit off topic, but your description of eric weisbard's article reminds me of my first week in art college when we were all given an essay by frederic jameson called "postmodernism and consumer society". it was a provocative piece to give to first year art students and cynical too- in it, amongst other things, jameson talks about the fragmentation of "a linguistic norm" where "each group comes to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or idiolect, and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else.....it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing." he goes onto say that when this "linguistic norm" collapses, we say goodbye to parody and all we're left with is pastiche and nostalgia.
i understood it to be an attack on pluralism, or at least raising issues about pluralism. for jameson, pluralism was bad, because it implied "an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought." and that postmodern fragmentation should be understood as a result of late capitalism- that rather than it being anywhere near "subversive", this fragmentation read like a capitalist manual.
i know from this blog that like me, you're all for the plural and for exchanges between the multiple and marginal- but i've never really been smart enough to articulate and argue coherently against this jameson article other than just saying that i find it absurdly cynical. i found your views on "the dangers of satire" interesting in relation to this as well..

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This relates to an old entry of mine called relativism swings right (http://imomus.livejournal.com/94432.html). But instead of Jameson it was Terry Eagleton making this point, in response to Frank Furedi's book "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone":

"Once society is considered too complex to be known as a whole, however, the idea of truth yields to both specialism and relativism. Because you can now know only your own neck of the woods, the general critique as launched by the conventional intellectual collapses. There is no longer any big picture, a fact for which our rulers are profoundly grateful. And given that anyone's view is now as good as anyone else's, the authority which underpinned that critique is downsized along with it. To suggest that your anti-racist convictions are somehow superior to my anti-Semitic ones comes to sound intolerably elitist..."

"We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity - all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left."

My problem with that is that intellectuals with a big picture are no better than politicians with a big plan. It has to be the right big picture, and the right big plan. What is the right big picture, and big plan? Ah, well, there you have me, squire. Everybody's got a different answer, innit?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

It looks as though many in the Islamic diaspora (if it can indeed be called that) identify with what they call the transmodern (http://www.islamonline.net/english/Contemporary/2002/05/Article20.shtml) rather than the postmodern--or at least, that's how many of them frame it. Seems a bit cake-and-eat-it-too at first blush, but you be the judge.

I still think enlightenment values work, if properly hybridized by a sufficiently thoughtful gardener.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(He said with a mouth full of cake)

[polocrunch.livejournal.com]

"Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology — they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism. The Boeing 747 was the last of the “great machines” that characterised the 20th century: it opened up air travel to the mass market. And it was so very American; big, brash and useful."

...

To down a 747, for these people, would be like killing one's mother, or killing the stork that brought one into the world, or killing oneself. Which is, of course, exactly what they planned to do.

I'll credit terrorists with being smart, but I think both of you have read way too much into their actions here. The simplest explanation for why 747s are terrorist targets is that they are the biggest planes around, carrying lots of people, and they are enormously popular - so they can cause huge damage to whatever they hit and inconvenience tens of thousands of air travellers in a dozen countries, instantly making global news. All this stuff about killing your mother and destroying a symbol of globalisation seems like a lot of froth to me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, your view that my view is froth seems big and brash and useful to me. Quintessentially 20th century American!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Anthropologist Owen Sichone (http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=1789&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) thinks women are more cosmopolitan than men, the poor more than the rich, and Africans more than Europeans.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I didn't read the 90 page pdf file of Sichone's, but I did read the summary provided by your link, Momus, and it sounds a bit brash to assert that Sichone thinks women are more cosmopolitan than men based solely on these words:

<< On the other hand, Cape Town (where his paper focuses on) is a quite xenophobic society. This may be the result of imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. Sichone found striking gender differences. Women are much more friendly to strangers than men. >>

Isn't it a bit of a leap to go from saying "Cape Town women are friendly" to "women in general are more cosmopolitan than men"? Or was there material on the page you cite that I missed?

Perhaps I should read the pdf.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

say did you here that the world is going to end on August 22 (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/11/world_to_end_on_aug_.html)?

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

[hear]

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

so what about you, mishmash. do you read pdfs?

[trini-naenae.livejournal.com]

Does that make me any less cosmopolitan, then? I was born in Trinidad, I've lived there for 12, and in Pakistan (about 1 1/2 yrs), and in three different states in the US. I have dual citizenship.

I would beg to differ, at least a little. The people who come to the US (esp. from Islamic countries) are often not "poor". They're often middle class. Maybe it's different in Europe, and those that were part of the middle class in their own countries are now poor due to difficulties in the new culture.

There is a fairly decent Punjabi community here in my city, and those who have been my friends were not struggling financially. Perhaps I live in the wrong part of the US, perhaps I'm in the wrong circles, but ultimately, I have a hard time seeing being "poor" as a common denominator among people who live in multiple cultures.

Even so, you're forgeting the expats who are NGOs, missionaries, people from the military, business people, and so on.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The anthropology page I link to states that 97% of the world's population are "immobiles" who don't travel much in their lives, so you may have a point that the economic migrants we see in the West are, at the very least, middle class, if not a sort of aristocracy (I know the London Bangladeshis are seen as something approaching that when they go back to Sylhet).

Which reminds me of an observation I was going to bring into my piece; that the Western liberal's fondness for the ethnic communities he encounters in his own city is actually not a fondness for the poor, but a fondness for economic enterprise -- ultimately, for the protestant virtues of thrift, hard work, saving, and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

When a group is homogenous, it is able to preserve tradition because there are no forces of pressure acting on it. The first couple hundred years of American settlers, though belonging to disparate sects, all essentially came from, and carried with them, British culture. Protestantism and other traditional aspects of their culture, of which they were essentially united in, were the moderating forces that acted upon crass capitalism and crude behavior.

Enter other ethnic groups, with different cultures and religions, and it has the effect of chipping away at the cultural and ethical foundation of the original settlers. The only common ground that the melting pot of individuals was able to find was the pursuit of freedom and wealth. Everything else was necessarily repressed in order to allow every one to get along.

Some immigrants are quicker to assimilate than others, but it's very tough for any group to completely resist assimilation. Thus, while there are Italian and Polish neighborhoods in Williamsburg or Greenpoint, those neighborhoods have not necessarily expanded in size, but rather the vast majority of those ethnic immigrants have assimilated themselves over the years, across the country, into American culture. By the time these groups have assimilated, they have lost most of the ties to their original cultures. The Chinese American may still take his shoes off in his house, or have a wok in the kitchen, but that's the extent of it. The end result is then a mushy mass of people with nothing but the vicissitudes of popular culture to hang on to.

Japan is presently held together by unity of tradition and culture, just as the original settlers were, because it is more or less a homogenous group. There is a certain Western influence in action, but it is external, not internal.

-henryperri

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm amused by the contradictions in your account. You have the protestant puritans going to America and being monolithic until "other ethnic groups" arrive to ruin everything. No account of the indigenous American Indians, whose ethnic purity was just one of the things wiped out by the arrival of the foreign bodies on the Mayflower.

Then you become the fly in your own ointment in your account of Japan, the polluting immigrant.

replies to a few things

[dignified-devil.livejournal.com]

"All this stuff about killing your mother and destroying a symbol of globalisation seems like a lot of froth to me."

I'd be surprised if these people feel such a high level of attachment to these planes as to consider them their friends, but they are a symbol of globalisation and the intention of crashing them and blowing them up is intended to be an indictment of their power. These extremist groups are often relegated to the idea that their somehow both clever and resourceful and also ignorant at the same time (and also comprised of the poor) but this isn't really true and the use of force and inversions of the intended usefullness of globalisation into a weapon is probably intentionally, although of the Bin Landen transcripts I read few seem to be against globalisation in the economic sense, just in the sense of Islamic culture dissapating into a more morally licentious world.

"finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island, separated from everyone else"

This sounds like fun.

"i know from this blog that like me, you're all for the plural and for exchanges between the multiple and marginal-"

It is important to point out that while Nick does seem to beleive in pluralism and especially in cultural differance, he doesn't seem to believe in individualism as much or at least he seems to advocate a more communal confucian inspired sense of societal identity. Also, while there's plenty of great post-modern criticism, I think the mark of understanding is to disagree of to have issues.

"I would beg to differ, at least a little. The people who come to the US (esp. from Islamic countries) are often not "poor". They're often middle class."

This is actually not true in India. In fact something like 60% of Bangalore's I.T. outsourcers come from one of the poorest providences in India, although that providence ironically has the best education system in India (but loses it's high-earners to Bangalore). Hence many I.T. workers that come to the states from India are far below middle class. Also of note, according the last census data Indian immigrants are the wealthest ethnic group in the U.S. now and also the most well educated, Japanese and Chinese come right after them. I might also add Iran has spent millions sending students abroad for high-tech work some of which come from less high-class homes and also many African immigrants arrive in different countries on UN scholarships, the African community in Seoul is actually pretty cool. Although for the most part, immigrants from most middle eastern countries are wealthier my friend Omar's dad is a neuroseurgon for instance.

an off-topic question about Japan

[arpad.livejournal.com]

I did my search work, but I feel I need to ask opinion of someone who actually was there.

What is more common way to watch/show foreign movies in Japan - dubbed or subtitled?

Re: an off-topic question about Japan

[(Anonymous)]

On TV? Dubbed, as far as I could tell a few years ago.

While I feel that these economic immigrant communities aid cosmopolitanism, I don't feel ...

[(Anonymous)]

While I feel that these economic immigrant communities aid cosmopolitanism, I don't feel that they themselves are necessary cosmopolitan.

For example, close to my home there is a neighborhood that is made up of predominately Arabic/Muslims and Mexican with a mix of older hanger-ons from past immigration waves. While (like Karl Marx Street in your neighborhood) these communities share storefronts, I rarely see either community co-mingling (as I would find desirable) in each others stores. There just doesn't seem to be an appetite for whatever reason to respect and experience each others culture. (I won't discuss extremists who do not seem to respect any culture but their own.)

The only people (and I throw myself into this category for better or worse) that I see taking advantage of this cosmopolitan experience are individuals that don't seem to have any national culture of their own. Like Paul Bowles without the need to travel so much, these individuals (who are predominately, white creative class) leverage the possibility for cosmopolitanism that immigrant communities import (without themselves being cosmopolitan). Interestingly and unfortunately, this creative class has traditionally also taken the role of being the forward signature and intelligence for economic imperialism in the form of either gentrification/yuppification in cities or worse in nations and states.

--Joshua

Re: While I feel that these economic immigrant communities aid cosmopolitanism, I don't feel ...

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

The only people (and I throw myself into this category for better or worse) that I see taking advantage of this cosmopolitan experience are individuals that don't seem to have any national culture of their own.

Unless you're a robot, you have a national culture of your own.

I heart imomus!

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

This blog is the Algonquin Roundtable of the early 21st. c.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Round_Table

(Even though I don't always agree with him!!!)

Re: I heart imomus!

[(Anonymous)]

I agree whole-heartedly. I just learned about Momus' work and subsequently this site last week and already got a lot of joy out of this site and the three albums I've listened to.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

An interesting parallel, in an (I blush to say I it, I await your flame!) American sense, is the situation with Mexican immigrants in the United States. I think the most fearful thing about "illegal immigration from the South" to the US is not the threat of terrorism, but the fear of a "rootless people" who "have no law." And yet, in Los Angeles, I see the influence as only beneficial: a reclamation of a stolen city by the culture that gave it its name!

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

how come u wear a tie? ties are weird.
i like your glasses.

[beketaten.livejournal.com]

These are the kinds of connections that I'm shocked that more people aren't conscious of.
Radical Islamo-fascists wouldn't even know to be incensed at the modern westernized global influence if they hadn't been exposed to it by modern means. That's the hugest irony.

[wingedwhale.livejournal.com]

Thank God for people who aren't WASP males!

[(Anonymous)]

But who else would purchase your delicious tapioca beverages.

-Joshua

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Poverty? A strikingly high proportion of the Muslim men involved in 9/11 and other such actions have come from prosperous families, and have had higher education. Osama Bin Laden was born into an extremely prosperous family, and he studied civil engineering at Jeddah University. Mohamed Atta studied architecture at Cairo University and Hamburg Technical University. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British Muslim who beheaded Daniel Pearl, attended public school and the LSE. Its almost impossible to understand the worldwide reversion to a more hard-line conservative "us-and-them" Islam (ie Wahhabism) without reference to the massive wealth of Saudi Arabia. When poor Muslims anywhere in the world want money to build a mosque, the people who can fund it are the Saudis. And with Saudi plutocracy comes Saudi ideology. This is petrodollar globalization.

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

hey Mr Delatour,

your ease at discussing these matters humbles me. You say Wahhabism is an "us-and-them" philosophy. But does Wahhabism have to have an enemy? What if the world were ruled by contented Wahhabism? What would that mean?

I guess we don't like the way the Islamics treat women? Right? So happy Wahhabism is not possible because it denigrates women. But, well, I've spent some time with Persians recently (are they Wahhabists?) and I believe they want to progress, sexually and culturally. So what if the wabbies took us over, but in a good way?

Just thinking.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Among bombers who have come from modest backgrounds, a significant proportion have been converts to Islam (Richard Reid, Jermaine Lindsay - there are reports that some people involved in the recent alleged plot are converts). So far they have all been men. Surely this is significant?

[(Anonymous)]

I think, before you introduce theories of a male Electra complex into this, you should read what the bombers themselves say. Here are Mohamed Atta's final instructions:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,560773,00.html