The cosmopolitanism of the poor
Aug. 12th, 2006 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAnd 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 11:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 01:14 pm (UTC)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..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 02:06 pm (UTC)"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?
Andy "Stoker" Growcott
Date: 2006-08-12 02:16 pm (UTC)There is an interview online, but I can't find it at the moment. I'll link to it if I do.
Naz
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 02:41 pm (UTC)I still think enlightenment values work, if properly hybridized by a sufficiently thoughtful gardener.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 02:59 pm (UTC)...
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 03:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 04:19 pm (UTC)<< 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 04:46 pm (UTC)"It seems that anthropologists might have the tools to go into a place like this and help opposing sides understand one another. After all, being a cultural anthropologist takes both a lot of diplomatic skill, and being able to respect and attempt to represent the people you're working with."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 04:52 pm (UTC)I'm too impatient to look at PDFs unless I'm being paid to do so : ) I much prefer the HTML format, and almost will never open a PDF when I'm browsing the web for fun.
I have seen xenophobia in the New Yorker, by one of my favorite NYer writers no less, Adam Gopnik. He was criticizing Manhattan's big street signs, and suggesting that if you didn't KNOW your way around, you didn't really belong there. What an arrogant prick! Here's the two page column if you care to read it.
http://www.famouslibrarian.com/image/doc/xenophobia/xenophobia1.jpg
http://www.famouslibrarian.com/image/doc/xenophobia/xenophobia2.jpg
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 05:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 05:18 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 05:25 pm (UTC)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
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 05:57 pm (UTC)Then you become the fly in your own ointment in your account of Japan, the polluting immigrant.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 06:01 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 06:25 pm (UTC)There's nothing wrong with assimilation; once the culture becomes too homogenous, subcultures of a different type (not ethnically-based), will emerge.
I support global assimilation and the remarkable explosion of undercultural art that will occur as a result.
I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-12 06:51 pm (UTC)"Welcome to America: Shut that gobbledy-gook talk up, learn English, and GET A JOB."
cerulic
Date: 2006-08-12 07:15 pm (UTC)The traditional white U.S. culture is changing a whole lot because it is absorbing so many immigrants, and that's pretty cool.