Why We Need Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism

What is the solution for the devastating, world-wide problem of divisive ideologies, dismissal and demonization of those who disagree with group-shared views, and resort by default to violence of all kinds: communicative, physical, and by exclusion; through actions of individuals, gangs, militias, and national armies; motivated by frustration, by a sense of long-borne injustice, to gain group advantage, as divinely sanctioned, and as a matter of international policy? Such epidemic violence at all levels, like any other social disease, cannot be cured by addressing its symptoms alone. These may force us to face the fact that we have a problem, or a series of problems, but they do not by themselves tell us what to do.

When we think that the solution to violence is more violence, that’s our disease talking. What we need to do instead is listen to our own deep longings for peace within and among us, for the conditions that will allow all of us to grow stronger by growing together, and for lives governed by love, creativity, shared knowledge, and social hope, rather than by fear. Then we need to begin what John Dewey called a collaborative pragmatist inquiry into the historical and contemporary conditions that are keeping us from living in this better, more deeply democratic way, as well as the kinds of changes we will need to make as individuals and groups, diverse nations and cultures, and a world community as a whole in order to make the kinds of lives we long for really possible for us and those who will come after us.

In other words, we need to cultivate what I call “pragmatist cosmopolitanism.” This phrase owes debts not only to Dewey, but also to ancient Stoic thinkers like Marcus Aurelius and their modern inheritors like Immanuel Kant, to the great pragmatist social democrat Jane Addams, to the great “absolute pragmatist” Josiah Royce, to the great critical pragmatist Alain L. Locke, to the visionary pragmatist-personalist Martin Luther King, Jr., and a to number of brilliant and influential twenty-first century philosophers and political economists, including Martha C. Nussbaum, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Muhammad Yunus.

Since the Stoics’ time, “cosmopolitanism” has meant a kind of world-mindedness that supercedes and frames but does not exclude loyalties to nation, culture, religion, party, family, friends, other groups and those personal projects that help to make our lives meaningful. Some cosmopolitan thinkers, including Kant and Appiah, have grounded such a wider commitment and the “perpetual peace” they think may flow from it in a kind of individual reasoning that shakes off ideological and cultural claims, respects others as fellow humans rather than as group members, and reserves to the individual alone the choice of how to live. In critical response to such thinkers, feminist cosmopolitans like Nussbaum and Benhabib have argued that some of our unchosen group memberships are basic to our becoming able to reason, to value, to live as humans, and to experience life freely and creatively; the challenge is to assure that these groups (including families, cultures, and nations) work well for all people (women and girls as well as men and boys) in twenty-first century global contexts. Classical and contemporary pragmatists offer a five-fold contribution to the continuing development of cosmopolitanism: (1) the recognition that reason, like creative imagination, works on the basis of habits, institutions, and contributions from earlier thinkers, some of which must be conserved and some of which must be rejected or at least changed in some ways if we would solve new problems in living; (2) a process of context-specific collaborative inquiry that includes both experts and others affected by a problem; (3) an emphasis on the necessity of basic and continuing education to share the best insights and skills growing out of humanity’s earlier experience and current inquiries; (4) a willingness to experiment in active, thoughtful, attentive ways to discover just what kinds of changes will achieve the better outcomes our reason and imagination tells us must be possible; and (5) a commitment to the necessary work of reconciliation that heals the breach between those who have harmed and those who have been harmed within time’s flow as it carries tangible and intangible deposits from our past into our present and on into our future.

To change the world-killing practices of violence that currently overshadow our lives and our limit our hopes, we must hold fast to and lead countless others to share a cosmopolitan commitment that transforms how we understand and live in our twenty-first century global contexts. Pragmatist cosmopolitanism admits that we do not yet know how to do this, but it proposes effective processes for discovering and acting on what we need to know, for sharing old and new insights, for tweaking our existing institutions and designing new ones, for willingly changing our ways in order to become more fully ourselves even as we make peace with others, and for taking responsibility together to achieve the kinds of conditions in which all of us can grow into the fullness of our human capabilities and live the kinds of free, creative, contributive, and mutually supportive lives toward which our highest and best ideals lead us.