In the course of a long critique/attack on Obama’s phrase “citizen of the world” straight out of a late-night college bull session, James Poulos says this:
Our yearning for pan-human solidarity is an absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition, and the most utopian of all utopian ideas is the idea of a Brotherhood of Man: because the human race is not a family, just like it isn’t one big polity. We are stuck with differentiation; there is no metaphor that allows us to redefine humanity as a closer relationship than it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Indeed, the only trope that allows us to develop closer amicable relationships with strangers is the trope of friendship, and the only way to close the relationship with a stranger is to make friends. Not to ‘make citizens’; not to ‘make brothers’. This is crazy European talk — the discredited language of the bloody French and German experiments in various kinds of border-busting solidarity.
The notion that the vague sentiments of anodyne rhetoric should be taken as evidence of radical anti-American sympathies (in this case, European-socialist-utopianist sympathies – the same sympathies that brought us those 20th century conflagrations!) makes no sense. Of course “citizen of the world” is a sentimental phrase, and in some sense an aspirational one. It could imply membership in some kind of global club marching in lockstep toward world government, trampling individual rights along the way. But it could mean a lot of things. That’s why it’s anodyne! A more reasonable interpretation is a) we all have some things in common; b) of the things which divide us, some are potentially reconcilable, some not; and c) in spite of the differences the people of the world ought to aspire to behave in a civilized manner towards one another.
Also, I see nothing in human nature that would prevent a) continued cultural homogenization via the avenues of globalization, development, and the Internet/media or b) the eventual formation of an actual global polity of some sort, in which case we all would become “citizens of the world.” This isn’t going to happen tomorrow. And when it does happen, it’s not going to eliminate all conflict. But I don’t understand why it would be an impossibility at some point in the coming centuries or millennia.
