Beyond Blood Identities: Posthumanity in the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Blood Identities

Beyond Blood Identities Posthumanity in the Twenty-first Century

Jason D. Hill

Lexington Books A Division of

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hill, Jason D., 1965– Beyond blood identities : posthumanity in the twenty-first century / Jason D. Hill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3842-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3843-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3844-1 (electronic) 1. Self (Philosophy) 2. Identity (Philosophical concept) 3. Individualism. 4. Culture. 5. Ethnicity. 6. Ethics. I. Title. BD438.5H555 2009 128—dc22 2009025186

∞™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American

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For Frederick

I am an idealist only in the region of practical philosophy, that is, I do not regard the limits of the past and presents as the limits of humanity, of the future; on the contrary, I firmly believe that many things—yes, many things—which with the short-sighted, pusillanimous practical men of to-day, pass for the flights of the imagination, for ideas never to be realized, for mere chimeras, will tomorrow, i.e., in the next century,—centuries in individual life are days in the life of humanity,—exist in full reality. —Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1:

ix 1

Moral Reasoning from a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture I. Culturalism and Moral Reasoning II. Toward a Moral Conceptual Base of Culture III. Cosmopolitanism: A Definition and the Question of Tolerance

Chapter 2:

Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry I. Culture-Faith: The Mystification of Culture II. Culture-Faith Applied: Cultural Privacy and the Ownership of Native Culture III. Counterarguments against Applied Culture Faith: The Right to Cultural Privacy IV. Representation without Authorization V. Who Has the Right to Speak for Whom? VI. Ethnocide or Culture Killings: Is It So Bad? VII. Dismantling the Tribes from Within: Modernization and the Capabilities Approach vii

19 35 42 45 57 57 65 72 75 78 81

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Chapter 3:

Moral Culture Is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare I. Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” and the Creation of Moral Culture II. Moral Incommensurability and the Clash of Cultures III. The Anatomy of Antiassimilationism and the Logic of Contagion IV. The Cult of Death and the Worship of Ancestry: The Genesis of Group Narcissism

Chapter 4:

The Psychopathology of Tribalism I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

The Tribalist as Moral Appropriator Symbolic Ethnicity Ethnic versus Ethnic: The Problem of Definition Tribalism, Untouchability, and Human Slime The Art of Symbolic Necrophilia Imagistic and Emblematic Representations: Tribal Epistemology and the Impossibility of Knowing the Other VII. Moral Masochism and Black Identity: A Tragic Tale VIII. Jim in Africa Chapter 5:

Theorizing Posthumanity: Radical Inclusion, Jews as the Chosen People, and the Identity Politics of St. Paul I. Laissez-Faire Existential Engagement II. Posthuman in the Flesh: Jews and the Fragility of Chosenness III. How God Became a Cosmopolitan IV. The Identity Politics of St. Paul

Appendix:

Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response

Bibliography Index About the Author

107 108 115 120 126 137 137 140 144 150 155

160 166 171

177 183 188 193 205 215 237 243 251

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Acknowledgments

This volume on race, ethnic identity, and cosmopolitanism is the work of several years in which many of my thoughts on cosmopolitan identity have been both modified and, in other cases, radicalized. Throughout the entire journey I have had the good fortune of speaking to several persons whose ideas have influenced my own ideas on the role of blood identities in human life and the moral and psychological challenges in practicing the cosmopolitan virtues. The first chapter of Beyond Blood Identities was presented at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 2000, where I was a Society for the Humanities Fellow. Many thanks to Dominick LaCapra and the other fellows who provided invaluable feedback and dialogue. Versions of chapters 2 and 3 were presented at the intellectually stimulating Philosophy and the Social Science Conference that meets every year in May in Prague. Although I am not a critical theorist, this enormously benevolent group has welcomed me into its fold for over eight years in Prague. Many thanks to Marek Hrubec, who first invited me to Prague in 2001 to deliver the Prague Lectures at Charles University and has subsequently invited me back to Prague every year since then. His respect for my ideas and his comments on my work have been invaluable. My thanks to Martha Nussbaum for inviting me to present my work at her philosophy and law workshop at the University of Chicago, where some of my ideas—against the intellectually rigorous backdrop of lawyers, law students, and philosophers—were refined and made more accessible. On ix

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occasion when I have been afflicted with writer’s block I have turned to Nussbaum’s work for both cure and inspiration. Both my chair, Richard Lee, and my former chair, Peg Birmingham, are to be thanked for doing everything possible to support my work and for granting me opportunities to work on my manuscript in spite of what has been, over the years, a challenging teaching schedule. Conversations with Lee and Birmingham about cosmopolitanism have been both personally and professionally rewarding. Leonard Harris and Naomi Zack have been stalwart supporters of my work even when, as in the case of Harris, they may have found some of my ideas objectionable. Both have cultivated my spirit especially when I thought this book would never be completed. My absolute gratitude goes to my former editor, Matthew McAdam, for his total enthusiasm for the book and for approaching me in the first place. Because of his enthusiasm I ended up adding an extra 150 pages to the book, making it a broader and richer work in the end. Thanks to my production editor, Julia Loy, for her efficiency and enthusiasm, and to Rebecca McCary for keeping the fires burning. As always my family: my mother, Diane; my brother, Philip; and my sisterin-law, Donna. They are always in the background, supportive of and curious about my work and ideas. Finally my deepest gratitude goes to Frederick Neuhouser, who has read every word I have written in the past eleven years. His philosophical feedback and mechanical contributions to this book are enormous. When I thought the book would never be completed he was there to assure me that it would be. But the gratitude goes deeper than his intellectual contributions to my work. He has opened up the world for me in a way that has made it easier to fulfill some of my biggest dreams: to continue loving humanity as much as I do; to exalt this earth I live on; to practice the cosmopolitan virtues in order to lead a more enriched life with my fellow human beings; and to craft a stylized aesthetics of existence that can inspire others to discover the superlative within themselves.

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Introduction

My first distaste for strong blood identities didn’t begin with experiencing racial prejudice. It came at a seemingly innocuous moment in high school in Jamaica where I was born and raised. The Jamaican motto, like that of several other places, is: “Out of Many One People.” The motto exists against the backdrop of a collage of different “group types.” There are the Chinese and the East Indians who came over as indentured servants after the abolition of slavery to fill the labor vacuum. There are the Jews and Syrians who came to escape persecution in the case of the former and to seek economic opportunities in the case of the latter. They, along with a significant percentage of East Indians, control much of the wealth of the country. There are English expatriates who never left the island and who intermarried among locals like all the other groups. The English expatriates consisted of plantation owners, managers, and overseers. Some of them, too, were poor English men who were never able to flourish economically in England and Scotland; so they came to Jamaica to make their fortunes. With few exceptions, all of the direct remaining descendants of the expatriates who did not intermarry are wealthy. There are the direct descendants of African slaves who—Jamaica being a raceless society—are mixed with any of the above groups to varying degrees, or not at all. The key to knowing how much African or mixed ancestry they have is their skin pigmentation. The concept of race is absent, but pigmentocracy is the social means by which to gauge their social and, 1

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not infrequently, economic status in society. Those with mixed ancestry are regarded as brown if their skin is brown, and red if they are fair-skinned to the point of looking red, as is the case of my father. Those mixed with East Indian and Chinese are labeled according to the dominant morphological characteristics they display. Most Jamaicans and Caribbeans—regardless of mixed ancestry—would be regarded as black by American standards. This, of course, has to do with the one-drop racial taxonomy rule in the United States. My first contact with anything like blood identity, as I’ve said, was seemingly innocuous. I was a twelve-year-old high school student who was given an assignment that most students delighted in: we had to trace our ancestry and depict it graphically in the form of a family tree, replete with maternal family lineage on one side, paternal on the other. I was immediately bored. I never cared for ancestry, always thought of myself as an outsider, and tried to connect with people on a deeply individualistic level. I am sure feeling like an outsider came from being secretly gay in the most homophobic country in the world. I could never belong because if I did I would be “found out.” Nevertheless, I went home and attempted to trace this ancestral family tree with the help of my maternal grandmother. It turned out that her father was half Jewish (Sephardic, I believe) and half East Indian. His father had been a Jewish merchant who came to Jamaica from Jerusalem sometime in the nineteenth century. Other details of the tribal portrait elude me, but on my father’s side it turned out that his father’s father was the son of a slave woman and a white Scottish plantation owner. There were some Sephardic Jews on his mother’s side of the family, along with more interbreeding among white plantation owners and slaves. What strikes my memory most was the excitement my classmates exuded in the classroom. It was more like elation. And the elation that was most palpable was the one that rode on the discovery of white ancestry in their backgrounds. Actual discovery of white ancestry made them delirious. Without thinking, without analysis—primitive as analysis might have been in a twelve-year-old child—my thought was: I am already excluded because I am gay, now I’ll never truly belong to any of them. I listened to them bragging loudly: “My mother’s dad was German,” and “my father’s father was pure English.” It was true there was a German community in Jamaica where most of the children were mentally retarded because of inbreeding. Some students stuck their tongues out in playful my-family-tree-is-betterthan-yours one-upmanship.

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I looked behind me where the black-skinned and very dark-skinned students were sitting. They slunk deep into their seats, a look of embarrassment and slight fear marring their features. It turned out I had one of the “good” ancestral charts in the class, but that didn’t leave me with a good feeling. It was not because the dark-skinned students had “bad” ancestral charts. It was something in the elation in the students who felt pride in their charts. I felt they were looking for prestige and upliftment and that they had found them in symbolic relationships with the names of the dead people on the charts they were holding. In the years ahead I thought repeatedly of elation in having high social prestige ethnicity and in having “good blood.” I thought of the shortcuts people wanted in having prestige in life and then back to those students who had “bad” ancestral charts. I saw them alone, ashamed, naked, and helpless. I felt sorry that I had not gone over to them and said something kind. But I had been pondering too much, wondering if East Indian “blood” had as much social prestige as “Jewish blood,” if too much African blood meant you had succumbed to contagion. I knew for the most part that to have Chinese ancestry was to have a high prestige ethnic identity. During the colonial era the Chinese had been a dominant group. They had even had their own Miss Chinese Jamaica beauty pageant. What I came to realize, as I also became a moral cosmopolitan in my late teens, is that glorification of blood identity is strongly problematic because it shuts people outside the domain of the ethical and, a fortiori, the human community. It does so for one single reason: they have “bad blood.”  Humanity is an incredibly new achievement on this earth. And in its early incarnations it needed protection from the myriad threats that would see its dissolution before it could be sustained and inherited by future generations. The human race—modern Homo sapiens—is a young species. While scientists indicate that apes have roamed the earth for 25 million years, the modern speech-making, language-wired, self-aware version came on the scene between 100,000 to 120,000 years ago. These first humans that appeared from animal-like existence were similar and different from us in many ways. They were the first hominids that were self-aware, interested in and masters of art and self-beautification. But it would take another 65,000 years for the first humans to discover agriculture and the first attempts at writing. By all evidence there were several species of hominids that nature experimented with for millions of years before the ultimate survivor emerged.1

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This ultimate survivor, what we would today call the human species, lived according to what we may call the law of the jungle: the strongest and the weakest alike competed for resources for survival. As the mammalian part of the human brain expanded, social evolution occurred. And with this social evolution came coordinated means of cooperation and long-term techniques for survival. The unit in which this social achievement occurred was in the tribe. By some accounts, humanity has enjoyed a 100,000-year tribal history. Membership in the tribe has been a constitutive feature of this humanity. Within its folds we constituted our moral agency and schema for the world. Our relationship to ourselves, our role in the world—small as it may have been—and, most importantly, our view of the Other and how to relate to her were forged in the crucibles of the tribe. Tribalism, therefore, played an evolutionary role in the matriculation from animal creatures to human beings with a moral consciousness in the making. Human beings lived in tribes because therein lay not just their means of banded protection, but also their human and eventual moral socialization as human beings. It was in the tribal unit that enculturation took place and that persons learned the norms and customs that were conducive to survival, norms and precepts that eventually graduated to sophisticated forms of social organization and self-sacrifice. According to philosopher Igal Moira: Tribal form of organization was markedly different from that of the herd. For the first time, obedience to a leader was not based on the leader’s physical prowess but on his wisdom and experience. Surrender to elders became the name of the game. Myths of origin made the tribe more cohesive and provided a context for renunciation of raw animal drives for the sake of the whole tribe. Verbal communication, logical thinking, and inquisitiveness lead to the discovery of sharper weapons, made of bones rather than stone, and to the refinement of tracking and hunting techniques. And tools and weapons were produced with great care, symmetry and beauty, way beyond their practical utility.2

It was within the confines of the tribe that a restricted form of morality was learned. Where human beings felt insulated from the outside threats of others—competing clans and tribes, for instance—there was a space within which mores, norms, and ultimately morals could organically develop over time. Although the domain of the ethical was still limited to those belonging to the tribe and those related by blood, there was still a domain in which the emerging moralities could be applied. We were still a long way from the period in which the domain of the ethical could be extended to include strangers—let alone animals and the environment. But this is understandable. To have extended the hand of benevolence and altruistic benevolence to the

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stranger could have resulted in death. We may safely say this was the period before individual rights were conceived, or even a concept such as sanctity for each human life because it is a human life. It would be a long time before ethical sensibilities would be refined to the extent that respect for intrinsic dignity and equal moral worth would act as a virtual restraint against the aggressive impulses of human beings toward each other. As is still the case in many instances, our early humanity was tethered to a separatist tribal logic. In the widest sense of the term, then, early tribalism developed in fora in which social and moral evolution took place. By first organizing themselves into units that protected them from threats, individuals developed what we may call moral common sense. This moral common sense was the response to the following dilemma: how does one preserve one’s life in the absence of a political machinery that monopolizes the authorized use of force, and that recognizes rights claims that one can systematically press against those who violate one’s inalienable and inviolable rights? In other words, in the absence of a code of political morality that protected and recognized bodily integrity as an indisputable value, how would one seek to protect one’s life? Tribal solidarity offered protection in two ways: literal physical protection and a generational sense of security that came from being ensconced in a unit that prevented one from the psychic worry of staving off death at each step of one’s forays into the outside world. The historical antecedents of some of our basic social norms that we live by were undoubtedly forged in the crucibles of tribal life. Love of kith and kin began in the tribe and the circle of compassion grew eventually to encompass the outsider, who, by his own moral parochialism and separatist tribal logic, forged a complicated alliance with his fellow human being. We should not be lulled into a romantic belief that this alliance was one that was born out of love of this growing humanity, or affection for the Other. Without doubt these alliances were strategic, instrumental in nature, and born out of an early sense of political expediency. As prehistoric individuals had realized that no person was an island unto herself, so tribal individuals realized that no tribe could possibly conqueror and harness all the resources required for human survival by itself. The art of compromise and concession, trading skills, and negotiating for mutual advantage were inextricably linked to the challenges of survival. But it is not only that tribalism played an evolutionary role in the sense that it functioned like a makeshift womb—as do all places of human abode—to protect the fragility of human life and a burgeoning sense of moral goodness that gradually marked human life. The tribe was the milieu in which social experimentation with ways of life and of living took place and whose

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results ultimately codified into what we may call a tradition. This tradition was maintained in the name of the tribe and passed on generationally. It was stamped with the imprimatur of tribal authenticity and this tradition came to represent, among other things, the distinguishing identity of the tribe, and all too frequently, the identity that would be pitted against those of other tribes. It would be used to separate them from others and this tradition would be framed in such a way that the outsider’s identity would always be opposed to theirs. The stranger would forever be a stranger because separation by blood, custom, and tradition—that which constitutively defines us as us and as us against them—meant that she could never be a deep participant in the life of the other. And to be excluded from the Other, to be prevented from being with the Other in deep and engaging ways means that, to the extent that one’s subjectivity is linked to that of another, one is alienated from one’s own humanity. The experience of one’s deepest humanity is tied to one’s experience with the Other’s humanity. It is this human exclusion from radical participation in the life of the Other that makes tribalism a contentious concept to both live by and defend. For today, in the era of human and individual rights, where inclusion of the Other does not certainly lead to threat to one’s physical well-being, when interaction with the stranger can teach us about our own subjectivity, when it can expand the boundaries of our moral agency and widen our ethical commitments to broader swaths of people, tribalism seems anachronistic. It seems dated and reactionary given the full protection persons enjoy under the law, and a growing human rights discourse that now covers the rights of all human beings including the global poor, the disenfranchised, and the economically and politically oppressed. Tribalism’s evolutionary goals have been accomplished. With a growth in the political and moral enfranchisement of persons kept out of the domain of the ethical and the political domain in the last forty-five to sixty-five years—roughly from about 1945—there has been a decreasing need for the type of radical parochialism and insularity that had characterized previous forms of tribal life. The logical terminus of this type of living, I shall argue in this book, is to live a cognitively and morally landlocked life. What compels the idols of the tribe, those who worship at the shrine of blood and belonging to hold on to an atavistic way of life, is an atavistic fear of the Other—fear that getting too close to the Other will contaminate the purity of one’s identity; a fear that any modification and negotiation of identity that comes from contact with the Other will result in a symbolic kind of death—one will lose one’s essence—the forever-being-that-one-is against the being-in-becoming that is one’s possibility; a fear of contagion, that one will

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“catch” something from the Other, “catch” those indecipherable traits and features that make the Other who the Other is. It is those traits of the Other and the denigration of them that give one’s identity the gravitas and permanence that it has. To “catch something” from the Other would mean that one not only loses one’s identity, but that one would die to oneself. Tribalism is predicated, then, on a fear of the world and a deep-seated fear of death. Insulation in the tribe is protection; it wards of death. But in the twenty-first century with its increasingly porous borders, mass migrations of persons to all corners of the globe, the tribal mentality that was once a shield against assaults from others now seems like a desperate attempt to hold on to an irretrievable past. There are very few places to escape from the Other. The Other has become a constitutive feature of the public domain and to the extent that we carry the public space within us, the Other is not just a temporary visitor any longer, but a permanent citizen of our outer and inner world. We are as coimbricated in a nexus of relationships with her as she is with us. Without going into her neighborhood she will inform ways we see the world, foods we will eat, and how we choose to vote. The Other has become an organic outgrowth of our very nation and it is no longer our nation, but hers as well. When we try to imagine a glorious purified past of history and origins, we will find that it is embedded in the personal identities of each Other that we come face to face with. The sacralized genealogy of the group will be interrupted by the face of the Other. Forced to go beyond blood in the reach for a sustainable historicized past we will have to genuflect before the Other in a spirit of reciprocal respect, acknowledging that blood cannot be the major signifier where belonging and kinship are concerned. Both contemporary tribalism in the form of ethnic, racial, and national particularity, as well as indigenous tribalism represent an inability to engage the world. The displaced religiosity captured under both brands is reflected in the deification of identity. It becomes a form of idolatry. This displaced religiosity, I submit, posits a “be in the world but not of it” schema for living. Tribalism has come to an end if not in practice, then certainly as a viable possibility for modern life. It is not that the tribes are dead, and it is not the case that for those who don’t live in tribes but who live according to the ethos of tribalism that they are abating their pleas for their ways of life. Indeed, cultural nationalism as we have seen under Hitler’s Nazi Germany, in Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, and in the genocide that took place against the people of Kosovo, as well as the tribal slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, all attest to the ways in which the tribal ethos is still alive. It lives in nationalist movements, ethnic particularism, and separatist movements of all stripes and in the crude racism and ethnocentrism that

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are pulsating throughout the world. It was alive in the United States under racial apartheid in the South, and it is alive in the gender apartheid that is functioning virtually uncontested by today’s liberals in Saudi Arabia. Less, or perhaps more controversially, tribalism lives on in the mindset of those who privately hold on to strong racial, ethnic, and nationalist identities. The major issue is that tribalism has come to lack a justificatory narrative for its continued existence. Formal tribes such as Native American tribes, various tribes in Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and South America are living premodern existences in modern times. Individuals in many such tribes live well below the subsistence level of developing and developed countries. Their capabilities are compromised and their talents restricted because of limited resources. The mortality rates and life expectancy among most indigenous tribes in Africa and South America are drastically low. One writing from a cosmopolitan perspective, and as he has stated on numerous occasions, writes from a profound love for humanity, would see the dissolution of all tribal life—indigenous or symbolically, among nonindigenous peoples—in contemporary life, with a view to bringing all persons into the global commons of the twenty-first century.  This book is the second volume of a trilogy on moral cosmopolitanism. Although it develops some of the themes from the first volume, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium, it is a free-standing text of its own, with entirely new themes and radical departures in cosmopolitan theory from the first book. I have two goals in Beyond Blood Identities. One is to identify and analyze from a cosmopolitan perspective the basic principles and beliefs that those with strong blood identities use to defend their ethos. I shall, from here on, describe this phenomenon as tribalism. There are many forms of tribalism—the most common being racial, ethnic, and national particularity. I abstract from all forms of tribalism a comprehensive portrait of the tribal mind-set, that is, the fundamental attributes common to tribalists in general. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, I argue that strong tribalism is a form of pathology. I describe the social psychology of the tribalist and argue that at the heart of his psychic makeup is someone who wishes to bypass the arduous task of building a moral identity—which, by definition, is an individual identity—and cash in on the social prestige of his group ancestral tribal identity. These blood identities come with a set of ready-made attributes imbued with

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“magical properties” linked to having good blood. To possess those attributes is to become what they are taken to represent: goodness, cleanliness, and moral superiority over those who do not have the identity that one has. The second goal is to show how a particular understanding of culture could lead to a new theoretical approach to enriched human living. This challenge is first accomplished by revealing the skewed understanding of culture that has dogged contemporary philosophy. I argue that philosophic conceptions of culture are still heavily dependent on archaic museum-pointing views of culture. The clearest expression of this view of culture is a form of identity politics. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural anthropology, I develop a version of cosmopolitanism that I refer to as posthuman cosmopolitanism to solve a number of challenges in contemporary society. From the problem of defining culture, the failure of multiculturalism, the question of who owns native culture, the identification of Jews as a posthuman people, and the problem of their status as “chosen people” in a modern world, I apply a cosmopolitan analysis to some of the major problems faced by our global and interdependent world. A key feature of Beyond Blood Identities is the development of the cosmopolitan virtues through a process of radical intersubjectivity where each person hands over her continued socialization to the Other in a spirit of deep respect and reverence. I posit a world in which community has been dispensed with and replaced by its successor term sociality—the broad unmarked space in which creative social intercourse takes place. In this work I have tried to articulate a new cosmopolitanism and a new posthumanity for the twenty-first century. Strong cosmopolitanism repudiates the tendencies of cultural nationalism and racial and ethnic ideologists to impute moral value to morally neutral features—accidents of birth such as skin pigmentation, national origin, and ethnic background. Strong cosmopolitanism argues that there is no one fundamental culture to which any one individual is biologically affixed. It leaves the question of identity entirely to the individual. That is, individuals ought to be able to fashion their own identities based on the extent to which their experiences and their life roles have allowed them to experience themselves as the persons they take themselves to be, rather than, say, the passive wearers of tribal labels assigned to them by their culture or society. Moral cosmopolitanism holds, among other things, that geographic demarcations among groups of peoples, and national, ethnical, and racial differences among human beings, are irrelevant factors when determining moral obligations persons have toward each other. Moral cosmopolitanism further holds that tribalism hijacks our moral lives because it works according to an

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egregious logic of false separatism. That is, tribalism takes the morally neutral markers of human beings such as nationality, ethnicity, and morphological markers—the latter codified into various racial categories—and imbues them with moral relevance, punishing and persecuting persons solely on the basis of characteristics that are accidents of birth and that tell us nothing about them as moral human beings. As a philosophy of life that requires its defenders to practice it so that it may have existential grounding in the world, cosmopolitanism’s expression in the life of any single human being will undoubtedly be influenced by the individual who attempts to express it in words. The Renaissance philosopher and French skeptic Michel de Montaigne articulates this existential challenge quite beautifully. His eclectic philosophical journeys in all their informalities elicited the admiration of other eighteenth-century cosmopolitans such as David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire as “an impressive drama.”3 Appropriating the wisdom and learning of the past and present, and then testing it by his own experience, Montaigne practiced what he acquired from it: “not because Socrates said it, but because it is really by feeling, and perhaps excessively so, I consider all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as I do a Frenchman, setting this national bond after the universal and common one.”4

Chapter Outline Chapter 1: Moral Reasoning from a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture This chapter is an attempt to examine the philosophical foundations on which the argument from cultural integrity rests. This chapter contributes to two areas of philosophical thought. The first is theoretical and conceptual. I show how culturalism, a philosophical theory that argues that cultural integrity is compromised by the universalist agenda of cosmopolitan democracy, relies on folk conceptions of culture and old-school anthropological notions of culture. The latter fails philosophical meaning tests and, more importantly, remains insufficiently observant of the modern era’s more nuanced and complex understanding of culture. Cultural norms such as female genital mutilation, suttee (widow burning), and child marriage are defended by culturalism by the following line of reasoning: since those acts constitute a viable living cultural tradition, we have an intrinsic obligation to respect them. I argue that the transfer of an intrinsic right to respect the autonomy and inviolability of individuals on to cultures is a category mistake. Cultures, unlike human beings, are not inviolable wholes. Individuals, while relying on culture for their social identities, cannot be reduced to their cultures.

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The chapter’s second contribution is a moral justification for those norms that all cultures ought to agree—minimally—to uphold as a way of achieving a universal threshold of moral decency. Without this moral defense, the various internationalist goals of cosmopolitan democracy are compromised and have less chance of winning the moral support of ordinary citizens and policy makers. The chapter is also of relevance to contemporary politics. With the ongoing war in Iraq, along with recent trials in The Hague of persons accused of participating in acts of genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, this project is timely. It confronts tough questions such as: at what point do cultural traditions detract from the unconditionality of sovereignty? When external intervention into the internal affairs of a nation-state remedies gross injustices but challenges or further weakens a nation or culture’s cultural framework (some would say such is the case in Afghanistan), is the tradeoff morally defensible? Chapter 2: Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry If questions about the respect due to cultures are problematic, questions about the ownership of culture are even thornier. Anthropologists, ethnographers—to say nothing of philosophers trying to make sense of the terms applied to concepts of identity associated with culture—must wrestle with the following issues: What does a code of cultural privacy look like and how might it be implemented vis-à-vis culture? At what point does one regard “esoteric knowledge” and fear of its loss as valid grounds for believing that they constitute the essential grounding of a culture that ought to be protected against intrusion, modification, and, above all, interpretations? How does a society deal with groups that assert an indigenous identity without demonstrating continuity with ancestral practices? “Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry” attempts to answer these questions and reflect on some of the debates about the ownership and protection of what is regarded as Native Culture around the world. There are documented cases dealing with the question of knowledge ownership. Knowledge of this kind is guarded by a handful of anointed experts. This knowledge, in turn, becomes lost or stolen by anthropologists, missionaries, and other miners of human artifacts.5 These debates rely on a form of identity politics that treats identity as a patented commodity. The right to cultural ownership translates into a demand for the protection of cultural privacy. Scholars researching Native or indigenous cultures face a dilemma few know how to directly wrestle with from a moral perspective. If moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective is stymied by folk conceptions about culture, then answers to the above questions are compromised

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further by other problematic conceptions of culture raised from philosophical perspectives that can be regarded as neither liberal nor communitarian. These are philosophically inspired legal debates in the field of anthropology and folklore that address cultural privacy. I argue that cultural privacy is a potentially conceptually vacuous term because culture by definition is public. I show that claims for cultural privacy are granted philosophical respectability by a term known as the “culture-faith theory of culture.” As a successor term to religion, faith in cultural norms and symbols is expected to resemble traditional defenses of religion. Here, culture functions as a legitimate and healthy guide for a person’s moral decisions by way of a kind of faith. Culture faith theorists model this faith on the version of Christian faith defended by St. Augustine. I argue that the claim to cultural privacy made by indigenous peoples and others is false, harmful, and one that keeps them outside the global commons of humanity in the twenty-first century. I offer a cosmopolitan response to the notion of culture. It is one that embraces radical intersubjectivity and moral becoming in human character. By showing how the right to cultural privacy rests on a tribalist logic of separatism and an antiassimilationist fear of contagion, I reveal what is morally contentious in forms of strong tribal identity—from the white racial supremacy goals of Nazis, to the cultural nationalism of Serbia. In prioritizing roots over the present and the future, tribalism in all its manifestations restricts the expanded humanity of persons. This expanded humanity is an organic development that comes from interacting with each other as members of a sodality (social spheres not determined by physiology or ancestry) rather than as members of communities. I make a modest proposal for the abolition of terms such as “indigenous peoples” and “native cultures.” My moral goals and justification for this plea are as follows: Such terms are archaic and restrict the ability of “indigenous peoples” to achieve socioeconomic and educational parity with mainstream groups; the terms foster a mentality that permits members from nonindigenous groups to continue viewing “indigenous peoples” as second-class citizens; and, finally, the term is, from an epistemological standpoint, too empirically problematic to apply properly. I discuss recent scientific viewpoints that upset anthropological truisms that shape and influence our understanding of the term “indigenous” and beliefs about “first peoples.” Using Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach, I argue, from a cosmopolitan point of view, that a strong case can be made for why all indigenous tribes ought to be dissolved through a lengthy and committed process of modernization from within. Incentives ought then to be given to individuals to assimilate in the larger society. Only

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then can we affirm and do well on our moral commitments by bringing all persons within the global commons. If we do not make a qualitatively moral distinction between ourselves and members of native communities, then the Capabilities Approach, lest it be accused of racial discrimination, ought to be applied indiscriminately to all peoples—including native ones. Finally, I argue that it is only a moral viewpoint that affirms the inherent dignity and intrinsic equality of all peoples regardless of their race, ethnicity and nationality that can offer us a sound understanding of culture and of human moral psychology. This understanding is one that could lead to action that resocializes the individual into a posthuman member of twenty-firstcentury humanity. This moral viewpoint is moral cosmopolitanism. Chapter 3: Moral Culture Is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare This chapter defends the following idea: the creation of moral vocabularies that affect our sensibilities and our capacity to interpret our world is the right of artists and ordinary citizens. Cosmopolitan value makers—artists or ordinary citizens who use their creative agency to fashion new moral vocabularies—are better off not heeding the warnings of cultural heritage gatekeepers who adopt a stance of ethnic proprietorship toward cultural artifacts and other phenomena directly related to cultural groups. I argue that any expression of human subjectivity inserted into the public space loses its right of self-containment or self-concealment. All forms of life expression can make meaningful contributions to humanity. I defend my thesis through arguments and case studies of two artists as cosmopolitan value makers. The following comment by comedian and actor Greg Eagles in response to criticisms that “Ali G,” a white comedian, appropriates unfairly from black culture is a good way of introducing the contemporary dilemma over cultural artifacts. He writes: As an African-American stand-up comic and actor, I was surprised to discover that Ali G had received negative criticism from certain black British comics accusing him of minstrelsy for creating his Ali G character. Not once have I ever felt personally offended by this character. Maybe it was because I was too busy laughing my ass off. “Ali G” is a parody of the hip-hop culture. That culture has rapidly transcended the ghetto and made its way across the globe, which makes it open to global interpretation. It’s also a culture that is ripe for parody, from the garish “bling” to the boisterous posturing, to the slang that is rapidly becoming standard English.6

My reasons for the thesis I advance are simple: any contact between one person’s subjectivity and another’s is an engagement, a dance, if you prefer.

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The consequences of this union are varied and multidimensional. They range from repulsion and rejection to acceptance, celebration, and mutation—a synthesis that produces the new and the unimagined. This synthesis overrides the systems inherent in a cultural unit. Aside from the fact that the public space is just that—public and not private—and in a world devoid of intrinsic values and natural guides to human living, every phenomenal expression originating from a cultural unit is an attempt to play with and modify what one philosopher calls “social ontology.” It refers to society’s basic belief system and accepted categories that define what counts as “truth” and what constitutes “reality.” Knowledge presupposes that one can understand the way things really are. Those who control what counts as knowledge get to define social ontology, that is, what counts as the truth about reality.7 The logical terminus of cultural proprietorship is self-evacuation. One discounts one’s experiential journey through life. The cultural artifacts ossified as social ontology are always correct. How does one know? Here standpoint epistemology is all that’s needed as far as the cultural heritage gatekeepers are concerned: It emanates from my body and from my experience. My body and experience are shaped and determined by the dictates of my group. Therefore my social ontology must be authentic. Cultural proprietorship stands before past and present, and by its own logic it discounts the wonders of the future. Yet as I shall argue, Sylvia Plath in her irreverent poem “Daddy,” published after her suicide and replete with eroticized references to Nazi iconography, possessed the temerity to liken her psychic suffering to that of Jews in the Holocaust. The poem did plenty to refute the view that the Holocaust belonged only to the Jewish experience. I examine extensively why this is a legitimate use of the Holocaust, and I argue that the same principle applies to cultural creation in general. Chapter 4: The Psychopathology of Tribalism Here I explore the social and philosophical dimensions of tribalism as expressed through ideas of a national character, symbolic ethnic identities, and racial mythologies. Symbolic ethnicity is defined by sociologists as the tendency to identify oneself with an ethnicity with little or no attention paid to ancestral continuity of values, language, ways of life, and customs. I explore studies that reveal how those with strong or weak symbolic identities still judge those with different ethnicities in a negative light. This means that holders of symbolic ethnicities attribute moral values to their ethnic identities—despite the fact that they hold the ethnic identities in name only—and judge those different from them to be lacking the moral characteristics they associate with their ethnicities.

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The politics of labeling as revealed by census criteria for determining the ethnicity of children is explored and its consequences discussed. Until the 1970s, the criterion for determining ethnicity in the Unites States was head of household. This was, without exception, taken to be the father. A patrilineal criterion for determining ethnicity, therefore, was often at odds with ethnicity in the household where the language of the mother, along with her religion and ethnic customs, might have been observed in varying degrees. The social construction of ethnic identity in the United States has been largely ignored. Ethnic markers, like racial markers, are treated as biologically distinct categories. The problem of definition has had a problematic history. In this chapter I explore how further damages to moral agency occur when the false moral attributions imputed to ethnic identities are pitted against each other. The consequence of this racial and ethnic constitution resulting from sociopolitical constructions is a view that may be termed racial or tribal subjectivism. We may define this as the view that a person’s inborn ethnic or racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution. My goal is to show how those aspiring to strong ethnic identities, when they are generationally removed from them because their participation in the history and traditions of the “people” from whom they derive their tribal identity is minimal, are committing a category mistake. We may say the category mistake results from lack of ancestral continuity. This makes the term conceptually problematic—what makes one Italian if one does not speak the language, has never visited the country, was not born there, and lacks a sustained relationship to the myriad cultural customs associated with being Italian? But it also shores up, on close examination, the questionable motives such individuals have for labeling themselves as they do. In this chapter I further show the damaging effects such a paradigmatic approach to ascriptive human identity has on human relations. Notions such as untouchability, disgust, and contamination are natural consequences of tribal essentialism. Although it is easy to dismiss such consequences as the nefarious and exceptional paths taken by extreme cultural nationalists, I argue that variants of such a worldview permeate our everyday world and subsequently tarnish human moral relationships and human moral agency. In this chapter I try to answer the question: why are racists, strong ethnoparticularists, and ethnic chauvinists attracted to those ethnic and racial Others whom they find repulsive?

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Leading Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt summarizes strong tribalism eloquently. He writes: “An alien may be as critical as he wants to be, he may be as intelligent in his endeavor, he may read books and write them, but he thinks and understands things differently because he belongs to a different kind, and he remains within the existential conditions his own kind in every thought.”8 Chapter 5: Theorizing Posthumanity: Radical Inclusion, Jews as the Chosen People, and the Identity Politics of St. Paul Beyond Blood Identities closes with a chapter titled “Theorizing Posthumanity” It offers a cosmopolitan understanding of human subjectivity and the way in which a cosmopolitan notion of intersubjectivity could inspire us to live lives beyond conventional understandings of community. I argue that traditional community as we have come to know it is becoming obsolete and that it has been damaging to human moral agency. I discuss how some of the shortcomings of contemporary multiculturalism have radically destabilized the community through a specious form of identity politics, and I suggest that we replace community with cosmopolitan sociality and sodality. I explore ways in which cosmopolitanism sociality, in transcending communitarian tropes, can lead us beyond historical and conventional notions of humanity that have been compatible with the compromise of groups of persons’ intrinsic dignity and equal moral worth. Life in the cosmopolitan sociality gives rise to what I call laissez-faire existential engagement. This is a uniquely cosmopolitan mode of interacting with one’s fellow human being in which face-to-face relations are not protected by any barriers. The second part of the chapter is a lengthy phenomenological meditation on the notion of Jewish chosenness and religious identity. I argue, for various reasons given in the chapter, that Jews are both the paradigmatic tribal people and a posthuman cosmopolitan people. I offer reasons for why I think it would be an act of benevolence and moral maturity for Jews to surrender their chosen status in the name of a cosmopolitan spirit of equality among all God’s children. The final section of the chapter looks at the identity politics of St. Paul. I argue that Paul was a strong cosmopolitan who aspired to create not a universe of sameness but of one of human solidarity. His criticism of external physical markers and customs as metaphysically relevant signifiers of distinction places him squarely in the camp of a radical reformer of human moral sensibilities. He was determined to resocialize human beings within an open-ended community of faith and grace where all could be members by accepting his hero, the Messianic Christ, as their savior. His insistence that Jewish Law paled in comparison to faith and grace, and his detribalization of

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the old Israel for the sake of a new open and cosmopolitan Israel forms part of Paul’s radical identity politics. One possible challenge this project faces is: dimensions of family unity rest on the idea of blood; how, therefore, can moral cosmopolitan notions of posthumanity deal with this inescapable feature of human existence? I will respond by saying that much depends on interpretations of the concept of unity. Blood as such is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for family unity. The question is misframed largely because it takes a descriptive fact—blood is a feature of family relations (although not necessarily)—and turns it into a morally necessary feature of family life. Blood as such is not the problem; rather, it is the emphasis one places on blood as the constitutive feature that grounds unity. The moral grammar of unity has been shrunk to allow for a misframing of the scope of unity. Unified, nonblood relations among family members should serve as a case in point. This is to suggest that the original reliance on blood as a necessary condition for family unity is predicated on a nuclear family heterosexual paradigm. It overlooks competing and alternative models of family relations that do not rely on blood, and on conceptions of family that require neither blood nor unity. Appendix: Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response Since this book purports to give a cosmopolitan response to strong blood identities, I offer an appendix that brings into sharper relief the ideas of cosmopolitanism. Objections continue to be raised against cosmopolitanism and are likely to continue, given the rising popularity of nationalism against what many perceive to be the leveling effect of globalization. I have, therefore, included the appendix at the end of the book to address reasonable objections against cosmopolitanism. Aside from respectfully contending with the objections against cosmopolitanism, the responses I offer will, I hope, add conceptual rigor to the version of cosmopolitanism I have tried to develop here, and to the broader tradition itself.

Notes 1. National Geographic magazine, April 2005. 2. Igal Moira, “An Evolutionary Perspective on the Global Crises and World Future,” unpublished paper. Quoted with permission from the author. 3. T. J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press), xxii. 4. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Vanity,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne, ed. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 743.

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5. For a full and detailed analysis of this topic, see Michael Brown’s Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 6. Greg Eagles, Vanity Fair, October 2004. 7. Michael Zimmerman, “The ‘Alien Abduction’ Phenomenon: Forbidden Knowledge of Hidden Events,” Philosophy Today 41, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 236. 8. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Plume Publisher, 1983), 319.

CHAPTER ONE



Moral Reasoning from a Cosmopolitan Perspective The Problem of Culture

Moral reasoning and moral deliberation are difficult tasks. In attempting to locate the truth about conceptions of the good life and the moral nature of human beings, one is engaged in a hermeneutical enterprise, and a journey of discovering fundamental features of the human condition. To reason morally is, among other things, to attempt to prescribe a set of goods (social, moral, psychological, and political) whose beneficiaries are human beings. It is to attempt to assign, against the backdrop of a particular conception of the nature of human beings, the unique attributes indigenous to humans, a set of indispensable values that are deserved by all persons. Moral reasoning, then, is a Herculean responsibility that, in the spirit of existential thought, ought to fill one with a sense of anguish. To reason and assign meaning to one’s reasoning means that one sees oneself as a qualified moral epistemologist capable of generating certainties and clarifications, rather than, say, mere provisional hypotheses and tentative conclusions. It means attempting to prescribe those values, meanings, and features generated through reasoning, as binding on human beings because they are human beings. It should be clear then that the type of moral reasoning I am attempting to articulate and then prescribe is not one that is local and particular, culturally specific, and relativistic. Rather, moral reasoning of the sort I intend to exercise purports to be objective and central to the humanity of the individual as a human being. My aim in this chapter is to show why moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective is stymied by prevailing views of certain folk conceptions of culture that philosophical analysis 19

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renders problematic. Cosmopolitan moral reasoning is stymied by a separatist tribal logic. This means that our moral lives and our moral reasoning become hijacked by ways in which human beings impute moral worth on the basis of morally neutral and accidental features of birth: race, ethnicity, and national origins. This separatist tribal logic characterizes the moral reasoning of many well-intentioned persons whose reasoning is informed by the assumptions of culturalism. I will address culturalism in greater detail later on. Among the myriad folk conceptions of culture that impede cosmopolitan reasoning are the following claims. First, cultures are ends in themselves whose goals and values are ordained and sanctioned by a logic that is unique to the culture itself. Second, it is difficult, if not impossible, for outsiders to gain access to anything that may be conceptually identifiable as the ethos of a culture. Short of being morally credentialed insiders, we are thought to be innately handicapped as impartial outsiders. Third, all cultures are worthy of respect because they are the cultures of some people who, in some more fundamental respect, are basically like you and me. The proclivity for granting respect to cultures simply because they are the cultures of some people stems from the same basic premise that motivates us to grant respect for the beliefs and values of other people. Moral reasoners are often unaware of the erroneous, underlying premises that inform their reasoning and deliberation. By attempting to identify the most judicious procedures that ought to guide moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective, I hope to show how they aid the larger moral and political goals of cosmopolitanism. I will locate the egregious attitudinal stances about cultures that handicap us with regard to our treatment of cultures and identify major conceptual errors we make in our analyses of culture. I will show for the purpose of moral cosmopolitan reasoning and its concomitant goal—cosmopolitan human rights—what an alternative method for arriving at a proper treatment of culture ought to be. In so doing, one has a way of defending the systematic amelioration, and if necessary, destruction of oppressive and immoral cultural practices. This is done not with the intent of harming the humanity of persons; rather it is born out of a desire to protect the humanity of those who suffer injustices. Moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective has, as one of its aims, a defense of the implementation of human rights through a conception of cosmopolitan law. Moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective means, above all, that one reasons within the conceptual parameters of the cosmopolitan position. In a previous work, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium, I argued and worked out a conception of

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the self in moral becoming that embraces a moral cosmopolitan identity and practices a cosmopolitan morality. In that book, I demonstrated why a cosmopolitan morality was, above all else, the best morality to have. I argued that besides representing a heroic and exalted way of existing in the world, it was the best moral life option that, when exercised consistently, allows one to treat persons as they ought to be treated because of the moral nature they possess as autonomous, end-in-themselves human beings in whom dignity should be affirmed. To treat human beings any other way is to deprive them of the minimum respect they deserve as human beings. I will briefly visit the cosmopolitan morality as I articulated it in Becoming a Cosmopolitan. To be a radical moral cosmopolitan is to refrain from locating the centrality of one’s identity in one’s racial, ethnic, and national background. In other words, to be a radical cosmopolitan is to reject as ontologically binding and metaphysically robust, racial, ethnic, and national tribal identities. The moral cosmopolitan rejects tribalism of this sort as philosophically and morally untenable for various reasons. The first reason is that racial, ethnic, and national identity markers are morally neutral concepts that do not designate anything about the moral character of those persons they attempt to identify. That is, to hold such ascriptive identities is to hold a sociocultural construct that may tell us interesting exotic details about persons. They do not, however, communicate any personality, character, or moral and cognitive features about their bearers. Tribal identities are passive identities with little or no moral potency. Those who either cling to racial or ethnic identities, or those who are involuntarily marked by them, wear them without adding or strengthening anything substantive to the concept; they fail to delimit it by subsuming under it attributes that pertain only to the concept. A white or Indian person may take pride in his or her racial and or ethnic ancestry. Because the identity is so fluid, open-ended, and diverse, however, in moral terms and in manners of taste, style, occupation, life plans, and character, the particular white or Indian person contributes nothing constitutively to the identity in question. I wrote, “For example, if we look at Dr. Martin Luther King’s moral heroism, we will see that it contributes nothing to the concept blackness, because that concept may refer to the actions of those who are the antithesis of Dr. King’s moral heroism. The term blackness can and does refer to people whose behaviors are morally deplorable.”1 His moral heroism contributes a great deal to concepts like martyrdom, selflessness, and courage because those concepts rule out individuals whose behaviors are antithetical to the concept. The radical moral cosmopolitan blurs the distinction between personal identity and moral identity. Her moral identity is thickly infused with a set of

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moral ideals. Those ideals limit what is permitted within the personal sphere. This allows the cosmopolitan identity to become an active identity. Its constitutive features are connected to the practices and actions in the world that give the identity its character.2 A practicing moral cosmopolitan gives the identity its moral efficacy. Morally efficacious cosmopolitans are autonomous individuals who are capable of modifying their inherited tribal identities. They have embraced moral becoming with the purpose of becoming cosmopolitans. Moral becomers undermine the predications of the self that tribal ontology advances. That ontology views the self as static and mummified, and assumes that its authenticity lies in individuals remaining shackled to the set of alleged practices that typify the nature of the particular tribal self. A bloated metaphysics of tribal ontology assume that the humanity of persons is inherently mandated by the predicates of the tribal self. The aspiring cosmopolitan, however, realizes that radical contact with others leaves her identity modified, refigured, and altered in a way that puts it at odds with the predicates of its tribal identify. She realizes, too, that her humanity has not been damaged or compromised, but instead, expanded. Newer realities and a wider framework for the capacity for moral choice is what she now inherits as she immerses herself in a foreign world of varied value options, worldviews, and modes of being in the world. Moral becoming opens up the moral imagination and permits persons to subject their bequeathed social identities to a hermeneutics of inquiry. The individual is free to revise the circumscribed genres of those narratives that formed the basis of her identity. The rules for interpretation are revised. Meanings are abandoned, old selves modified and, sometimes, cast aside. The ambiguity of social reality is acknowledged and our moral becomer sees what the Stoics first articulated centuries ago: that a wider reclaimable humanity lies beneath the overdetermined local identities we thought formed the largest layer of our essence as human beings. The cosmopolitan self, therefore, realizes that identity is negotiable. It sees itself as a compound of many varied value conceptions, and authenticates itself according to criteria that legitimize the moral ideals that enable one to live in the most socially exalted and just manner with one’s fellow human beings. Moral cosmopolitans advocate the affirmation of the inherent moral value and dignity of all persons. Recognizing that accidental features of birth such as class, race, gender, racial, ethnic, and nationality are improperly used to gauge moral worth and humanity, moral cosmopolitans know that tribal affiliation cannot be the proper criterion for allocating resources, rights, and social goods that give life its quality and deep meaning. Cosmopolitanism cancels the grammar of a univocal sense of identity and deratifies the ontology on which such an identity rests.

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What I have articulated in the above paragraphs by no means exhausts what I have to say in this chapter on the portrait of the moral cosmopolitan. In the ensuing discussion on culture, a more robust depiction of cosmopolitan reasoning will be further developed and should complement the portrait of the cosmopolitan self that I drew in Becoming a Cosmopolitan.  One of the great challenges faced by moral reasoners is to understand the actions taken by individuals from another culture against their own compatriots. Judgment of actions that offend our moral sensibilities and that strike our moral intuitions as egregious, or downright pernicious, is often tempered by a caveat that entreats us to be wary of pronouncing judgment on the policies, ways of life, and attitudes of others from different cultures without first understanding the function and role they play in cultures. A type of cautious ratiocination leads us to view the complexity of cultures as outside the purview of our immediate and often canned moral responses. We must first understand the complexity of culture in two ways, goes a certain form of reasoning. First, a culture is as an end in itself. Its goals and values are ordained and sanctioned by a logic that is endemic to the culture itself. It would be a form of hermeneutical imperialism to attempt to understand the culture by appealing to the schemata that inform our own judgments and beliefs. We must step outside of ourselves and occupy the skin of the culture, so to speak, in much the same way that we attempt to understand the behavior of a character when we read a novel or watch a film. The second way in which we are advised of the complexity of cultures is by appreciating the difficulty, if not impossibility, in gaining access to anything that may be called the ethos of a culture, or more loosely, its sense of life. Short of being a morally credentialed insider we are innately handicapped as impartial outsiders. There is then, from the beginning of our moral contemplation of cultures, a mystification that is indelibly linked to it. It looms over us as an impenetrable mystery that is difficult to decode and access. To tamper with the working of such a phenomenon is, in some schools of thought, to disrespect a deity whose nature lies outside conceptual comprehension. Moralists, of a certain brand, attempt to impress on us the extent to which our interpretive capacities and faculties of judgments are denuded of the requisite skills that ought to be in place for fair claims to be made, and impartial assessments arrived at. They also make a further claim: that all cultures are inherently valid because they are cultures and because they are the cultures of people, people

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who are just like you and me. They claim that they are worthy of respect by virtue of being a culture. One definition of culture is that it is a complexity of systems that include arts, law, customs, values, norms, belief, knowledge, and human capabilities acquired by human beings in society. Culture includes also languages, ethical systems, and religious institutions. What I am going to grapple with is the extent to which a certain attitudinal stance about the nature of cultures influences the conceptual moves that underlie any moral reasoning process. These influences are more like unfair curtailments of the moral reasoning process. The proclivity for granting respect to cultures because they are the cultures of some people undoubtedly stems from the same basic premise that commands us to respect the rights, beliefs, and values of others. It is a proclivity that is a moral imperative forged in the crucibles of political liberalism with its view of the person as a rights-bearing entity who has the capacity to choose her own conception of the good, and who need not exist as the means to anyone’s end. She exists as an end in herself. Political liberalism did not originate this idea, but its sociopolitical representation of the individual as such an entity is a recent phenomenon. We have a common sense idea, and it strikes me as correct, that culture is the milieu in which we matriculate socially and morally. Or, as Charles Taylor puts it, our moral starting points originate in our communities. Like Aristotle, we suspect—he knew—that a person devoid of a social milieu would be a monstrosity, for he would have none of the attributes and tendencies that make him fit for cohabitation with his fellow human beings. Agency is not possible without identity. Some of us, then, are reluctant to start out with an iconoclastic attitude toward the place in which human socialization occurs and persons are introduced to the virtues we regard as crucial for the development of any semblance of a human identity. It would be uncharitable to adopt a suspicious attitude toward the very preconditions that make persons recognizable as human beings. Why not just assume a basic respect for any culture as a fair starting point? Moral philosophers such as Michele Moody-Adams argue that it is difficult to construct a reliable description of the moral practices of an entire culture, “a description of the sort that could license judgments contrasting one’s culture’s basic moral beliefs with those of another.”3 Moody-Adams raises some interesting points I would like to reflect on because they reinforce what I think are the attitudinal stances toward culture that affect moral reasoning of a certain kind. Obstacles to formulating contrastive judgments about the moral practices of particular human groups are made more acute by the following serious challenge:

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Who—if anyone—has the “authority” to represent the defining principles, especially the basic moral principles, of a given culture? Should the undergraduate who is unwilling seriously to contemplate arguments about animal rights or interests, for example, be treated as representative of the American moral stance toward animals? Or is the moral fervor of the animal rights activist who periodically fires off a letter to the New York Times perhaps more representative? Of course, neither stance adequately represents the moral convictions of American culture as a whole. But if it is reasonable to expect in the culture of a large industrialized nation-state moral complexity of the sort that might frustrate the attempt to formulate meaningful generalizations about moral beliefs, would it then be reasonable to expect the same kind of complexity in the culture of small, pre-industrial, and often “preliterate” communities?4

There is also the view that an ethnographer might hold—to say nothing of an outside observer who is nothing more than an astute resident alien, unless in Moody-Adams’s words, she decides to become a cultural émigré—that proves problematic. Familiar ethnographic methods like interviewing people, we are told, make sense because it is reasonable to assume that a group’s consensus about its own culture is central to any adequate understanding of that culture.5 My immediate response is that this is false. A culture comprised of uninformed and politically and socially apathetic persons is less capable of understanding its own culture than an astute observer who understands it from miles away. My sense is that several astute European and East Asian intellectuals and laypersons understand American culture in a far more nuanced and profound manner than the American of average intelligence. Perhaps this is because they perceive that American culture impacts their lives far more deeply than their respective cultures impact American life. It is a basic prerequisite of cultural interpretation, we are warned, that the ways of life of the cultural interpreter and the interpreted cannot be fundamentally different regardless of the differences in details. Failure to acknowledge this basic premise betrays a predilection for seeing cultures as fully individuable, self-contained wholes.6 Moody-Adams is not a relativist. She is a critical moral pluralist who argues for a set of premises in order to defeat relativism. Relativists of a certain type want to claim that because cultures are distinct entities and individual wholes fundamentally different from our own, we wield the imperial hand when we attempt to address moral discrepancies between them and us. Moody-Adams claims that moral barriers between cultures cannot be erected because on some level cultures share a similar moral language, and that moral language is complex and rich, and it can do much of the real negotiation and arbitration involved in moral cultural disputes more successfully than

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relativists admit. In a telling paragraph she writes: “relativists often forget that cultural survival is not a matter of the static preservation of every practice that has ever been part of a culture.”7 While admitting that the forced prohibition of a cultural practice by outsiders is often morally indefensible, she believes that when external stresses on a practice come from criticism, then respect for a culture requires that its inhabitants “be allowed to make what they deem to be appropriate choices about the value of that practice to their culture.”8 Anything else constitutes condescension rather than respect. Moody-Adams’s moral pluralism informs her that no single philosophical theory can contain the whole truth about morality, and that no one way of life could realize or contain the whole truth about morality. For this reason, she writes: “I presume that every culture is in principle valuable and worthy of non-interference, and I take this presumption to be central to a critical moral pluralism.”9 This presumption is only a starting hypothesis that one uses when engaging in critical reflection on another culture and its practices. Even if the presumption is plausible, it does not establish the inherent worth of any particular practice or any particular culture. Critical pluralism still makes it possible for careful reflection to offer grounds for rejecting a particular practice or culture as in some way indefensible.10 The idea that all cultures are in principle worthy of respect and nonintervention because no single philosophical theory can contain the whole truth about morality is false. It simply does not follow that because all theories might be epistemically limited in their capacity for amassing the totality of moral truth that we must then grant respect to all cultures. This assumes that an inherent limitation to moral systems incapacitates moral inquirers in their efforts to penetrate and understand any culture that might attract their attention. It could be that the moral theory that I adopt as my own is incapable of locating all the moral truths, but the theory could provide particulars that allow me to make a claim against the practice of another culture that turns out to be true. The theory might, for example, provide me with a crucial edict that I take to be central to the treatment of any human being. It might affirm that all human beings are to be treated as ends in themselves but remain silent on privacy rights of a serial killer who confesses his crime to his priest. This limitation in no way prevents me from making judgments against a culture, for example, that not only criminalizes homosexual behavior, but quarantines citizens with HIV in concentration camps. If I am not to treat my particular moral theory as a radical subjectivist would on the order of “what’s true for me may not be for you,” but as a value that I take to be binding on all persons because of the particular moral natures they have as

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human beings, then I cannot allow the nonomniscient nature of my theory to prevent a legitimate position I can actually hold. The position would be to observe and judge the predominant treatment of a class of citizens and then withhold the attendant disrespectful stance. This is a simple conceptual issue. When I say, incidentally, that I take my moral theory as a value that is binding on all persons, I am thinking here of a moral system that defends basic moral axioms that we hold to be applicable to persons because they secure and preserve even a thin account of agency. I am thinking here of bodily integrity, freedom and autonomy as representatives of such a theory. It is a tenet of civilized society that we accord basic respect to all persons until they have given us reasons not to. We accept that all persons have intrinsic moral value and worth, and we typically do not wait for persons (strangers or intimates) to prove their goodness before honoring them with basic respect and goodwill. Indeed, if we were to assume either a suspicious kind of agnosticism in relation to every person we met before according them minimum respect, our lives would lack the civility and ease that are required of minimal social interactions. But the actual legitimacy of this stance, although it may have a social utility attached to it, resides in the inviolable sanctity that is attached to the lives of all persons by virtue of their humanity. That is, although we may not respect each person’s beliefs and values and actions, all persons because of their unique natures as humans are said to be deserving of respect and recognition of their inherent worth. This is a moral precept endorsed by all the major religions, the ancient Stoics, and fiercely by Immanuel Kant. Christianity maintains that all persons are made in the image of God and, therefore, have a share in divinity. Early forms of cosmopolitanism contain a deep and wonderful insight: they urge us to recognize the equal and unconditional worth of all human beings. This worth is grounded in reason and moral capacity, as well as the share of the divine all humans have as God’s creation, rather than in the accidental features of birth such as class, sex, or origin of country. Martha Nussbaum writes: “The insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal and as having worth beyond price is one of the greatest insights of Western thought, and is directly responsible for much that is fine in the modern political imagination.”11 Moral capacities that link all human beings together, along with the integrating faculty of reason, are the qualities that grant a sui generis status to individuals as human beings and which make them worthy of a special kind of treatment. Aristotelian virtue theory defined the human as a rational animal, by which is meant not that all persons behave rationally, or that they are rational all the time, but that persons are equipped with a rational apparatus that gives them their constitutive identity as humans; it means that

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their survival as human beings depends on the exercise of this faculty. When performed it places them outside the category of animals: human beings are conceptual creatures. At the level of potentiality we share a profound equality. Stoic cosmopolitanism locates the basis for the human community in the worth of reason in every human being. All human beings, male or female, peasant or king, have infinite worth by, virtue of this dual participation in reason and moral capacity. Stoicism holds that it is this reason that makes us fellow world citizens. Undoubtedly, this position is taken up later in the Enlightenment and championed by, above all, Immanuel Kant, who upholds the moral worth and dignity of all by virtue of universal reason. Each and every individual for Kant is an originating source of universal human reason. What is it that makes every human being equal to every other? The fact that every human is a direct participant in a universally distributed rationality that, interestingly, is the great unifier of humankind and not the leveler. It is in reason that we find our dignity. This reliance on the inherent dignity of human beings functions as the foundation for human rights. It is what grants it moral and political legitimacy. Contemporary human rights theorists and moral activists do not champion universal human rights on the grounds that rights are a condition of survival. They appeal, instead, to the moral nature possessed by human beings and only human beings. Rights are those social goods that make a particular type of life worthy of being lived: a life of dignity. The International Human Rights Covenant states quite clearly that human rights arise from “the inherent dignity of the human person.” When such rights are violated it is not the case that all of one’s needs are prevented from being satisfied, but that one’s humanity has been violated.12 This recognition of dignity is a moral posit that is grounded in some working conception of human nature, a conception that is loosely constituted so as to allow for varied versions of sociocultural associations to find room in it. As Jack Donnelly puts it: “The scientist’s human nature sets the ‘natural’ outer limits of human possibility. The moral nature that grounds human rights is a social selection from these possibilities. The scientist’s human nature says that beyond this we cannot go. The moral nature that grounds human rights says that beneath this we may not permit ourselves to fall.”13 What emerges from any tradition, religious or philosophical, that has championed the dignity of the individual and encouraged the inherent respect and reverence for her qua individual, is the inviolability of the individual who exists as an independent entity. It is a mistake, however, to transfer this innate respect and reverence on to the landscape of culture, which is not an individuable whole, and which pos-

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sesses none of the requisite attributes of individuals that make them deserving of such treatment. Observe again that as moral reasoners we do not begin our deliberations with any prima facie obligation to concur with the beliefs, values, and actions of any individual. We do not treat them as givens. We do respect the inviolable right of the individual to bear her values, beliefs, and sentiments in her own name, or generally, to possess them as her own; but this is because we respect the individual as a free agent with the capacity to choose for herself—regardless of whether we think those choices are good or correct. As a fully individuated, reasoning entity, we grant the individual the right and the attendant respect. A culture is no such entity. Any constitutive feature we may attempt to amass through a great deal of examination is traceable back to individuals. Culture is not an easy concept, since as Michael Novak so aptly puts it, “so many institutions, rituals, and practices contribute to its shaping. Its ramifications are sweeping, subtle, and often unarticulated.” Its effects upon persons lie below the threshold of words or even of consciousness.14 There are several institutions, rituals, and practices that constitute its shaping. There are also many competing validity claims, social, political, and economic configurations that clamor for membership under its title. An uncontroversial substantive claim that we can make about culture is that it is the milieu in which persons discover and exercise their humanity. But in order for the best, the highest form of that humanity to find expression, it is precisely the highest particular conception of culture that has to be imagined, worked out, and then articulated. I take it to be true, therefore, that cultures that fail to uphold and defend individuals as venerable entities worthy of respect cannot be deserving of respect. Moral reasoners, therefore, who attempt to transfer the prima facie obligation they have to respect the inviolability of the individual on to a culture, are guilty of committing a category mistake. It is an egregious error to treat a culture as one would an individual. To demand group consensual understanding of culture seems highly problematic. We know that persons can be participants in their cultures without understanding their cultures—the foundations, beliefs, rituals, and even the surface premises that constitute the culture in some way. One could argue that many American students do not understand their cultures in the sense that they have not calibrated the features of the culture that constitute their own identities as members of their culture. We know, furthermore, that consensus cannot be a legitimate criterion for determining the truth or falsity of any phenomenon. The number of a claim’s adherents is irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of an idea, since a majority is just as fallible as a minority. A group’s consensus about its understanding of its culture might tell us some-

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thing about certain factors operating in the culture, such as communication networks, the set of myths and beliefs around which persons formulate their sense of their culture, whether the culture is homogenous or not, and the ways in which beliefs are codified through education or even propaganda. But an astute alien observer would not need the group’s consensus to gain a deeper understanding of the culture in question. Consensus might reveal that persons in the culture understand the culture in a certain way. The moral observer might be led to wonder how beliefs are shaped and whether or not competing validity claims are allowed expression and, if so, from whom or what element in society. If, as I and numerous others have argued, the idea of race as a natural kind or biological construct is false, then truth or falsity of this view is not determined by group consensus around folk conceptions of race. It is determined by the objective evidence that exists independently of personal acknowledgment. Internal membership does not grant one epistemic privilege that eludes the careful outsider. Experience shows that insiderism too often induces a myopic one-sidedness in the minds of individuals who then reject alternative portraits that are more accurate. The assumptions that moral barriers between cultures cannot be erected because on some level all cultures share a similar moral language and that moral disputes between cultures cannot be disagreements in fundamentals even when marshaled to defeat a relativist type of argument, encourage a misguided approach to culture. Moral barriers do exist between cultures for the simple reason that prevailing practices, values, and views of persons often differ radically among cultures. A shared moral vocabulary among cultures is not sufficient to ensure against disagreements over fundamental issues. There might be shared moral meanings and values that do not cover a range of wider values that legitimize the working ideals of the cultures in question. Two cultures might agree that all persons have a right to due process. They differ, however, in their philosophy of punishment. One advocates life imprisonment for a premeditated murderer while the other recommends the death sentence. These punitive assessments are radically different viewpoints and hinge on two central moral axes: a view of rights and when, if at all, it is permissible for a person to be absolved of his right to life because of an action taken. There is no less of a moral barrier between one culture in which individuals believe that a sacrifice of the first born in every family on the first day of the second month of each year is needed to placate the gods who control the rain, and that of another culture in which persons believe that human sacrifice under any condition is morally impermissible. Both cultures might, however, share a moral vocabulary in ways that cover the treatment of the old and sick in their societies as well as the overall economic well-being of their residents.

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It must be remembered that moral cosmopolitans do not allow geographical demarcations or the existence of cultural differences to interfere with their reasoning process. Because cosmopolitanism is oriented first toward the individual and places the welfare of individuals above any concern for preservation of culture, the moral cosmopolitan sees the value system of any culture, including the one from which she is from, as open game for criticism and also appropriation. The moral cosmopolitan argues that the culture’s right of self-preservation cannot take precedence over the individual’s right of self-preservation. The cosmopolitan argues further, that any right of any culture derives its legitimacy first from the right of preservation held by the individual. If we take the most uncontroversial definition of culture, deep conceptual problems still emerge because of failure in following the evaluative procedures set by the requirements of the definition itself. Culture is understood by many as the “knowledge, beliefs, and practices . . . historically created and transmitted across generations.”15 There is a popular consensus among cultural relativists and culturalists in general, that cultures are equally valid, and that their differences do not carry moral weight. Contrary to assimilationist assumptions, some retreat to a pluralist or relativist egalitarian position where even the cultures of the most primitive type are equally constitutive of society and expressive of humanity.16 The minimal definition of culture as the knowledge, beliefs, and practices historically created and transmitted across generations is, arguably, one that protects those cultures that might not satisfy some of the more advanced conditions of culture one is likely to find in technologically and politically advanced cultures. This is a good thing, however. It at least conceptually places all those who wish to claim that theirs is a culture on the same theoretical and conceptual footing. But even a minimal definition is not a substantive one. Its content will be provided by the actual practices, beliefs, and knowledge of the particular culture in question. One cannot go from the claim that culture is comprised of knowledge and belief, to the claim that all knowledge, beliefs, and practices (regardless of what they are) are equal. We simply know that this is false. We do not consistently maintain this position when it comes to determining the knowledge, behaviors, and practices of individuals and institutions such as schools, governmental agencies, and historical enterprises that we judge by our modern sensibilities to be false, problematic, or specious. We do not regard all beliefs and practices even within our personal repertoire of values as equal, let alone those of our friends and families. We evaluate various practices and call some better than others. Courtesy to strangers as opposed to explicit hostility is regarded as a superior practice because it is an attestation of a virtue civilized moral persons regard as worthwhile: affirming

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wherever possible the dignity of all persons by treating them with respect.17 Similarly, we regard promise keeping as a worthwhile activity and reprimand those who routinely break their promises. Although we might be sympathetic to the beliefs a child might hold, such as the belief that his little sister is really the reincarnated spirit of the mean stepmother in Cinderella, we do not regard that belief as equally valid as the belief in the treatment of all persons as ends in themselves because of their intrinsic dignity and moral worth. If the child continues to harbor such beliefs to the extent that it undermines his capacity to function, then we will have to treat the belief quite seriously and provisionally, at least as a crucial component of his malfunctioning cognitive machinery while he is being treated. It is not a valid belief and cannot be taken as such. It is a cognitive aberration. Observe also, that in extreme cases the relativistic assumptions about the equal validity about the beliefs, knowledge, and practices of cultures are undermined when certain wrongs committed in certain cultures warrant the attention and remedial intervention of international action. Simply stated, the relativistic folk conceptions about equal validity would procedurally and conceptually stymie international law and would turn each of us as moral creatures into paralyzed moral cripples. If the minimal definition of culture is embraced as it is by ethnographers and moral philosophers; if the minimal constitutive feature of any definition would be a culture’s practices, beliefs, and knowledge; if, furthermore, there are criteria for judging the truth or falsehood of practices, beliefs, and truth claims; and if such criteria reveal that some beliefs, practices, and truth claims are false, then all cultures would not be equal or valid. There is a rather quick way of undermining the relativistic position of the claims about culture we have just been arguing against. The claim of relativism cannot sustain a belief in the equal validity of all cultures in terms of their beliefs, knowledge, and practices. In fact, it needs to be based upon a universal moral belief for it to hold true. Let us assume that whatever a cultural tradition holds to be the moral truth is the moral truth. If it is a culture’s belief in a particular society that some cultures are better than others, and that there are criteria for determining the validity and invalidity of truth claims in certain cultures, then it would be entirely permissible for that culture to believe so, and in fact, the relativist would have to grant that such beliefs are actually true.18 But clearly this cannot be the case. That is, it would be indefensible for one to simply attempt to prove the validity of one’s claims by mere appeal to its endorsement within the culture from which one is making the claim. The folk idea that even cultures of the most primitive type are equally constitutive of society and expressive of humanity is deeply

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problematic.19 This claim still informs our view of culture. It affects our attitudinal stance toward culture, and it compromises moral reasoning. There are two ways of responding to this claim. The first way of responding is to question the extent to which any contribution because it is adjudged to be a contribution in the form of a cultural bequeathment, is truly expressive of humanity. One would have to examine the concept of humanity and determine what sorts of contributions would count as constitutive of its nature. It strikes me as wrong to assume that female genital mutilation as a cultural practice is a legitimate expression of humanity, or that the gender apartheid practiced in Saudi Arabia against women ought to be respected as a genuine contribution to humanity. It is precisely because the moral grammar of humanity is up for grabs that we can articulate dehumanizing behavior as contrary to the spirit of humanity. A second way of responding would be to accept the idea that the contributions of the most illiberal and oppressive culture is constitutive of society and expressive of humanity but to reject the image of humanity presented and to identify the particular feature of society offered in its name as morally problematic. This move would involve rejecting the claim that all expressions of humanity are worthwhile expressions. That something is expressive of humanity might be accepted as a fact; what is left open is the question of whether it is a worthwhile contribution. Again, this is not difficult to accomplish. Several expressions artfully constructed in the name of some exalted ideal have been rejected by moral persons who reject the damage done in their names to human life. It is this second response that I wish to focus on philosophically. I will do so by way of a normative contestation of the idea that cultural expressions, even those of the most illiberal and oppressive, are equally constitutive of society and expressive of humanity. All constitutive features of a society are not morally equal. Some are ontologically indeterminate. Perhaps all of them are. Some we may discover we ought to treat as if they are ontologically determinate because in a real way they are. That is, given our moral nature as human beings, we will find that there are indispensable social goods that are required for the upkeep of our lives in a way that surpasses life on a purely survival level. We observe dietary rules not only because we want to maintain good-looking bodies, but also because our biological survival depends on them. Since unlike animals we have no immediate and instinctual guide to know what is for our own good—we have no olfactory apparatus that can automatically sniff out the poisonous mushrooms, for example—we have to rely on certain human discoveries that are codified into rules, customs, and norms. Cultural contributions are artifices that, narrowly speaking, purchase a type of life that is conducive to

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surviving and, broadly speaking, human flourishing. Human flourishing— which means a life in which one’s spiritual, social, material, cognitive, and political needs are met—is achieved and proportionately satisfied with the progressive incline of human civilization.20 Paradoxically, as Freud demonstrated in Civilization and Its Discontents, progress and civilization also usher in new sufferings, as primordial instincts are repressed and outlawed in the majestic effort to harness and then rechannel them as human energies committed to the goal of order and civility. What is indisputable for a moral reasoner, however, is the insight that regardless of how tortured and often tragic the road to civilization is, no semblance of moral progress and no chance for longevity of human life is possible without it. One of the crucial differences between the period we now call modernity and premodern era is the liberation of the varied culture spheres from the church. The role and influence of the church was a constitutive feature of premodern European society. It confined all the culture spheres of arts, science, and morals under its cosmological tutelage. Today, the individualism and freedom that is to be found within the arts is a result of Enlightenment liberalism; the attendant emancipation of the individual from an authoritarian “God-knows” omniscient perspective is a corollary of this philosophical category whose endpoint is political liberalism. Even what we call science, a human artifice, is today regarded more as a process of inquiry guided by a method that prescribes a procedural protocol in the process of inquiry, as opposed to a set of immutable affirmations and beliefs. Liberated from medieval cosmology, science enjoys a freedom today that Galileo would, perhaps, have longed for. Countless features that may plausibly be taken as constitutive of any society have and do exist. They are modified gradually, challenged, or overthrown by revolutions of one sort or another, or bled to death by the thousands of tiny scratches inflicted by innovators of various kinds. What then can we substantively say about a claim urging us to take the contributions of persons who collectively constitute a society as givens? Not that much, indeed. Short of a substantive account of the contributions at issue, and short of some evaluative criteria against which to determine how much of a contribution they actually make to a particular vision of human well-being, we are left clueless. A challenge to the tendency to take as a given the sundry contributions of various cultural features—internally and externally—operates on the assumption that some portrait of human living is to be exalted over others; that not all types of human life are worth celebrating, and that against the edifice of a superior way of existing, the likeness of some portraits ought to be prioritized over others. It will not be my job in this chapter to

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fully explicate the portrait of human moral living that I believe to be unassailably right. I have attempted its broad outlines in Becoming a Cosmopolitan. It assumes its continued place in this book. That portrait will continue to be drawn in the pages of this book and will culminate in the final chapter.

I. Culturalism and Moral Reasoning Moral reasoning is hampered by misconceptions we have about the nature of culture and its place in the life of individuals. I am going to suggest that false views about culture arise from deeper folk conceptions people hold about the nature of authenticity and its relationship to cultural norms and ways of life. I will attempt to locate these conceptual folk misconceptions under three headings: culturalism, cultural authenticity, and cultural interference. David Bromwich argues against culturalism, which he defines as: [The] thesis that there is a universal need to belong to a culture—to belong, that is, to a self-conscious group with a known history, a group that by preserving and transmitting its customs, memories, and common practices confers the primary pigment of individual identity on the persons it comprehends. This need, culturalism says, is on par with the need to be loved by a father and a mother, and with the need for a life of friendship and associates.21

He thinks that in the trivial sense the above claim is correct, but that in the strong sense in which it is worth discussing, the claim is false. Why, he asks, should each of us be more than matter-of-fact in committing our lives to our history and cultural identity? A culture may indeed be like a family, but are we to presume it a happy family? We owe nothing to any object or condition as a mere forced consequence of its permanence. He invokes Blake’s characterization of the artist as the exemplar of a highly evolved sort of agent. The artist is any person whose highly particular material is sufficient for reflection. “We had better admit from the first that we are touched by individuals, and by the idea of their lives, and that by association with these alone do we ever come close to imagining a race or its way of life.”22 What emerges from Bromwich’s article are the ways in which the culturalist, like the pluralist, must be committed to preserving cultural identity by filtering out those values, beliefs, and practices that may genuinely cause the particular culture to become extinct. He locates this thesis by analyzing the arguments of Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Joseph Raz. Taylor, for example, worries that if cultures are assimilated by a liberal society, they will suffer extinction and lead to loss of integrity for each member. Raz fears that

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a loss of cultural identity will result in a loss of some sense of the meaning of life. He advocates the education of the young of all cultures in the culture of their own groups. Bromwich sees evidence in Raz’s argument for the idea that the state should bear the costs of this education. Cultures that are undereducated should be educated; cultural support must be found for “autonomous cultural institutions” such as museums, charities, and so on. What is done for artistic and community activities should extend to “public space (as well as air space on television).” Bromwich recognizes major problems with the implementation of these recommendations on the list of the culturalist’s agenda. He writes: A liberal society has a commitment not to infringe the rights of unaffiliated talent. A thinker may chose, as Spinoza once did, or an artist may choose, as Naipaul and Rushdie have, to cease to belong as reclaimable property to the culture that “constitutes” them. They are doing what Walzer, Taylor, and Raz agree is epistemologically impossible. Nevertheless, they are doing it.23

The suggestion of culturalism, he argues, is that tribal cultures will abate not a jot of their property in each member whom they own and that they are sufficiently flexible proprietors to allow us a spotless conscience as we commit to their care individuals of the many nations-within-nations tending toward dissolution. A criterion for moral maturity is the ability to make judgments based on some widely recognized and shared rational standard. The judgments rendered ought to be binding on the commitments one makes, the values one holds, and one’s moral responses in any given situation. Now, here is where the culturalists and other tribalists fail: In personifying culture—a move that fails all sorts of conceptual, logical, and psychological standards—they often exempt it from the very standards that they would insist individuals meet. They treat culture as if it is something worthy of love in the same way that human beings are worthy of love. Whereas to retract one’s love or modify it when dealing with an undeserving agent is regarded as praiseworthy, to subject one’s culture to similar treatment is viewed as a betrayal and a mark of inauthenticity. I call this the clinging syndrome. The clinging syndrome is a way of preventing individuation, autonomy, moral responsibility, and becoming in any meaningful manner. One’s life remains thematized by the tribe and one, therefore, has no way of redressing, challenging, and circumventing those aspects of the tribe that are deserving of reproach. As a result, one cannot assume narrative control of one’s life and thematize one’s ordered moral becoming.24 It is for this reason that cosmopolitans are no respecters of cultures qua cultures. They do recognize, however, that it is in culture that one develops, learns, and morally

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matures. Cosmopolitans, however, do not validate a particular culture because it is the culture of a specific group of people. Cosmopolitans, as I have argued, realize that culture is the milieu in which we navigate and matriculate morally and socially. But just as we are hardwired to speak in language but not in any one specific language, so too we are constituted to inherit and practice our humanity and experience human authenticity in any of the configurations of culture that are conducive to human well-being. Indeed, Jeremy Waldron notes that our language, science, civilization, and literature make us all. These configurations, however, go far beyond national and ethnic boundaries. If we owe anything to the social structures that have formed us, then we owe a debt to the global community and civilization as well as the local particulars that have formed us too. 25 Culturalism’s predilection for authenticating the life of persons on the basis of how their values and actions match the norms and roles of their culture betrays a narrow conception of self that has already been called into question. Any theory of the good life that ontologically prioritizes the past over the future, roots over an ideated new state of affairs, assumes that the self is static, that stasis is either a permanent feature of the self, or that it ought to be, and that the interference of the relationship between a robustly constituted self infused with communal values and ideals and its attendant community disrupts a natural process. If culturalists offer a disclaimer, then one would have to ask: why would any challenge to the idea that persons’ identities are irrevocably tied to any one specific cultural calculus be met with such opposition as we find in the empirical world, and most strikingly, in identity politics? Philosophical analysis of the self reveals, among other things, that the self exists in a state of becoming; that without even capitulating to the phenomenon of conversion, the self is capable not just of reconfiguration and radical reconstitution, but of modifying its own conception in small doses by way of interacting with a complex world. We are generally not surprised (at least in the United States) when we discover that psychotherapy breaks down deep behavioral patterns and self-constituting ideas and values to which a self is indexed. On some level we assume that such changes still operate against the backdrop of a supercultural self from which the self still derives the major thrust of its identity. A self, however, that begins the process of revising the deeply embedded and unreflective practices of its cultural makeup is viewed with a good dose of suspicion. This could not be because most people really agree with all interpretations or meanings of their cultures, or fail to grapple intellectually and emotionally with the demands made on them by their cultures. It means, though, that a deterministic view of the self loosely operates within the sense-making prism of people’s consciousness.

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Both Sartrean existentialism and the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, however, deeply locate the social ambiguity and narrative-making aspect of human identity. Their theories articulate the major ways in which identities may be revised and reconfigured by new criteria: the large range of choices offered by the world and the varied cultural influences that compete for the individual’s attention as she navigates among the several candidates for identity making; the vision of the individual as she attempts to cull a new human identity, one that is fashioned by her, ideated by a moral imagination that is itself activated by alien and foreign attributes. The codified and sedimented cultural ways of life, undoubtedly reinforced by tradition and the ritual participation of others, is in no way more deserving of human respect than the new and the idiosyncratic, providing that the new and the idiosyncratic are goods that enrich rather than compromise human character. My position is that there is nothing innately cultural about any self that locates its humanity that is both indeterminate in some respects and determinate in others according to any single metric. Human beings cannot exist as moral beings without humanity. The development and contents of that humanity is an open book, a work in progress. One, in certain cases, will have an obligation to maintain cultural ideals because they might offer persons a superior way of existing in the world in the way that modern science offers ailing persons an improvement in medical treatment over bloodletting, or leech therapy of witchdoctors of the past. False conceptions about the self that deny its plasticity, adaptability, and evolvability, and that permit culturalists to advance claims about the need of selves to belong in certain ways, are more wishful hopes than psychological or philosophical truths about the human condition and human beings as we find them in the world. Failure to realize the varied options and areas in which humans gain their identities (professions, parental roles, friendships, religions, civic participation, to name but a few) spawns illusions about the nature of the self that stands to inherit and practice particular identities. All arguments advanced by culturalists or their various satellites such as radical communitarians, ethnic, and racial particularists, fall back on a primitive hermeneutics of self, and an unexamined overreliance on social contingencies. What do I mean by this? Any immediate, thickly infused instantiation of a culturally specific posited self, such as the national or racial self, is also a modern self. It is a self embedded in a modern world, indexed to a host of modern conceptual configurations and sociopolitical paradigms found in language and in political discourses that defend and guarantee promises, rights, and privileges to

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each person. A contemporary culturalist in the guise of a strong nationalist who demands authentication culled from endorsed myths, stories, legends, and rituals, and who treats even the idea of a very recent phenomenon such as the nation-state as a phenomenon rooted deeply in the natural order of things, is a person who appeals to a crude version of historical determinism. He fails to recognize that the phenomena he thinks are so deeply ingrained in the order of things are social artifacts whose meanings are wrought from the imaginations, practices, and interpretations of others. The same culturalist fails to recognize that in the process of authenticating himself in the name of some tidy conceptual space he believes to be impervious to the value sediments of others, he inauthenticates himself as a purified object once he begins to utter the honorable western adage: I have a right to. Isn’t one tempted here to ask: “But in the name of whose culture and by what standard? For certainly to hearken back to the primitive ideal to which you wish to authenticate yourself, no such right was yours.” Should we retreat to pre-Cartesian days, before the father of the modern concept of “I” granted the individual the capacity as an individuated thinking entity the authority to question and doubt everything? The heretic was born, and the ontological license for the reversal of pre-ordained explanations and causes was set into motion. Self-creation as we understand it today—mature reconstructed models of a moral self—came into existence late in human history. The culturalist betrays history. He betrays it by failing to admit the contextual and interactive quality of cultural and or group identity. History is replete with cases of the hybrid nature of identities that are taken to be ineluctably pure. These identities are not only the result of colonial chess maneuverings, but also of the elemental environmental shifts, internal political dissolvements, and realignments. Donald Horowitz points out that in the late 1960s in Assam, Bengali Muslims found it advantageous to have Assamese declared as their language. This was done to make them eligible for land reserved for indigenes. Horowitz states: “Culture is important in the making of ethnic groups, but it is more important for providing post facto content to group identity than it is for providing some ineluctable prerequisite for an identity to come into being.”26 This argument is worth taking seriously. It needs to be remembered that deep self-identity can go in different directions. James Rule argues, “it is hard to see why religion, ethnicity, or nationality necessarily has, or deserves, any prior or overriding status among all possible attachments. Who can say that being Irish is, or should be, inherently a more basic identification than being gay, or Protestant, or socialist, or disabled?”27

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If, as I have argued, culture is the milieu in which persons matriculate socially, morally, and politically but that no one hermetically sealed culture is necessary for either moral or personal identity, then one can argue that persons do not have a necessary need for rootedness in the culture in which they and their ancestors were reared.28 Waldron argues: People used to think they needed red meat in their diet. It turns out not to be true. Vegetarian alternatives are available. Now some still may prefer and enjoy a carnivorous diet, but it is no longer a matter of necessity. The same—if the cosmopolitan alternative can be sustained—is true for immersion in the culture of a particular community. Such immersion may be something that particular people like and enjoy. But they no longer can claim that it is something that they need.29

Jeremy Waldron does not advocate crushing minority cultures. Rather, he argues that the fallacy of the Herderian argument that is based on distinctively human need undercuts any claim that minority cultures might have to special support or assistance. It leaves the right to culture on the same footing as the right to religious freedom. In the same way that we no longer believe that everyone needs religious faith, or that all must be sustained in the faith in which they were reared because a secular lifestyle is available, as is conversion from one church to another, we are no longer required to believe that persons cannot live under a different cultural system from the one in which they were born. Would we think of subsidizing religious sects just to preserve them? As Waldron writes, “If a particular church is dying out because its members are drifting away, no longer convinced by its theology or attracted by its ceremonies, that is just the way of the world. It is like the death of a fashion or a hobby, not the demise of anything that people really need.”30 I concur with Waldron. The state may exercise control over borders and prevent members of groups from physical threats. It may devise fair criteria for entrance into a polity. But the state cannot control the overlapping spheres of voluntary consent among individuals in groups where cultures come face to face with each other, nor can it control the reimaginings and reframings that take place on that level. It cannot stop Little Italy from making encroachments into Chinatown—as is happening in New York City as of this writing. What will be the nature and nameable identity of these two merging cultures in a few years’ time? Will some of the distinctness that marked the nature of both cultures be lost? Undoubtedly, yes. But the intermixture will have forged new forms of creative social intercourse. Imagination will be exercised in order to cross boundaries that will yield fruitful communication.

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A hybrid offshoot of this union will have developed, and it will be one that cannot be predicted nor decoded until one is rooted in its midst as either an active participant or an astute observer. Liberal theorist Jack Crittenden argues convincingly that the notion of a fixed and unproblematic identity is not necessary in order to make sense of the membership world because many modern children are not really born into a total community but into a network of subcultures. Out of this amalgam the child constructs a coherent worldview not by integrating perspectives but by aggregating them. A network may include the shared conceptions of the society at large such as its languages, mores, laws, history, and even competing worldviews. He writes: One parent might be a Roman Catholic, from a neighborhood that is ethnically homogenous and from a family that continues to speak only Italian at family gatherings. The other parent might be Jewish, from a family that is both orthodox and Zionist. This child may be close to her parents but closest to a Zen Buddhist brother who lives with her and her family. For reasons of convenience and enrichment, the family may live in a neighborhood that is predominantly Chinese. The child may go to the best day-care facility run by Chinese who seek to raise community-minded children and who propagate the tenets of Confucianism. This child will absorb no fewer than four different value systems and will learn the rules and roles for governing each. Yet just as children up to a certain age can learn as many as eight languages without confusion, so they can absorb competing, even contradictory, world-views, because they do not need to integrate them. When self-reflection begins, conflicts and tensions arise.31

Theorists and radical culturalists who argue that children need a monolithic and stable cultural environment in order to develop a healthy ethnic or cultural identity are wrong. I agree with Crittenden that psychologically the child can learn to assimilate a variegated set of cultural options. Maladjustment seems to be the result either of the social stigmas attached to such options, or the enormous societal pressure to conform to clearly demarcated cultural paradigms that make political designations of ethnicity, race, and sociocultural backgrounds less problematic. When one considers the ways in which cultural goods are allocated on the basis of such designations, one sees clearly that the pathology lies not so much in the failure of individuals to conform to some alleged inherent psychological need for rigid tribal affiliation as it does in the arbitrary sociopolitical machinations and forms of exploitation that decree a fixed set of criteria for determining cultural membership and the pervasive societal ethos that prides tribal membership as a social good in the first place.

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II. Toward a Moral Conceptual Base of Culture In this section I’ll sketch a provisional working conception of how it might be possible to establish what may be called the working ideals of a culture. This move is vital for several reasons. Moral cosmopolitan reasoning may occur on two levels. It may occur in abstraction from any sociopolitical agenda. This would be a purely conceptual performance whose yielded truths would not necessarily be translated into moral or political action; by logical extension it would be a theory that, committed to a formal line of reasoning, need not fear being invalidated empirically. Moral cosmopolitan reasoning may also be more empirically grounded. It may start with a few moral axioms (autonomy, dignity, bodily integrity, freedom, upholding persons as ends in themselves) and derive most of its existentially grounded premises from an intense interaction with the world. Moral cosmopolitan reasoning may observe the varied conceptions of the good in people’s lives via an anthropological methodology; hence it may depend on the contingency and provisional nature of human artifices to provide it with a standpoint from which to make definitive conclusions about the nature of moral reasoning that is applicable to all persons (since its working view of human nature need not conflict with an anthropological account of varied conceptions of the good).32 However, moral cosmopolitanism that is indexed to a larger political project in the form of a moral defense of the right of some political and legalistic body to impose moral norms on persons outside its geographical and political jurisdiction will have to devise additional forms of moral reasoning. This is the headier job of substantive moral cosmopolitan reasoning in its widest application, an application that speaks to the creation of and the application of universal judgments. The job of constructing a reliable description of the moral practices of an entire culture, a description that in Moody-Adams’s methodological calculus would license judgments contrasting one culture’s basic moral beliefs with those of other cultures, is the penultimate goal. The big moral question is: who, if anyone, has the authority to represent the defining moral principles of a given culture? This entire book is an implicit attempt to answer that question. But here is how I will attempt to broach the issue. We must be willing to admit that, historically speaking, moral and political advances are made in all spheres of life. I may be nothing more than a naïve Kantian who must believe in the notion of moral progress in order to maintain a love of humanity, that is, a love of the species, in order to sustain a profound conviction in cosmopolitan

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values and goals. Nevertheless, I submit that a culture in which sacrificial victims are offered to appease the ineffable demons that control the rain clouds is infinitely different from one that not only has a science to forecast rain, but that protects the inviolable sanctity of human life. It is also infinitely superior to the former. A society such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, which sanctioned mass disenfranchisement and persecution of women who do not conform to medieval standards of female propriety, or Saudi Arabia, a country where gender apartheid is a routine cultural norm, is very different from a culture that treats females as ends in themselves and honors their dignity as human beings. The latter is a morally superior culture. There is a reason why we believe that representative democracies are politically superior to the rule of absolute monarchs and despotic dictators as found under fascism, Nazism, and communism. The former render persons with power accountable to a larger public constituency. They grant persons the right to have some share in the laws that shape their destinies. Moral cosmopolitanism is an attempt to widen the human constituency of accountability. Moral cosmopolitanism operates against the backdrop of an evolved sociopolitical specimen: the democratic liberal state. By this I mean that the minimal goals of cosmopolitanism and the overall ethos it encourages are best expressed through liberal democratic virtues. These virtues include tolerance for diverse conceptions of the good life that persons construct for themselves. These in turn hinge on an inherent right of persons to be autonomous and self-owning entities. As others have pointed out, a proclivity for persuasion and an appeal to the reasonable in others are appropriate ways of handling diversity, pluralism, and difference. The honorable Stoics, the first to conceive of what can today be called cosmopolitanism, never gave much attention to the sociopolitical machinery that might best realize a cosmopolitan morality. They actually cast aspersion on the idea that a set of external material goods were needed to cultivate and reinforce the moral dignity of human beings. Attempting to protect the moral value of persons from being indexed to external goods or intrusive social forces, they articulated a vision of the individual as a transcendent hero whose spirit could elevate itself above the shackles of his historicity and material deprivations. But again, today we know better, and if we do not, we ought to. Unconscionable lip service about varied cultural practices and the competing conceptions of dignity that are addressed by such practices still leaves the job of judgment to each individual. This is the responsibility that moral reasoners cannot abdicate. Goodness, moral dignity, and the capacity to esteem oneself are fragile human traits. They need bolstering and reinforcement. They are not immune to diverse social practices. In the effort to amass a moral concep-

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tual base of culture, it is culture that must be explored. To those who would say, “let us be wary of how we judge the practices of others as outsiders,” I would respond by saying, “do we exclude outsiders from judging us too?” If we do, then the Asian student in my ethics class has no right to lament the disgraceful way old people are treated in the Unites States when they cease to be commodifiable objects in a market economy. Why, again, presuppose that being an insider grants one the epistemic criteria for proper judging? What right, then, does the Asian student have to bemoan the proliferation of American malls as contributors to “mall culture,” and the cost to civic life that is purchased by it? The content, the “stuff,” of the moral reasoners’ stock of virtues will be cross-cultural. That is cosmopolitan indeed. These contents are part of the ingredients that, hand in hand with moral language, will do the job of negotiating, reasoning, and contesting. The efficacious moral cosmopolitan—to the extent that she not only wishes to cultivate a particular type of moral character but also intends to advance a society thickly infused with a set of cosmopolitan virtues—will ultimately have to say what is superior about the contents of the moral conceptual base she has chosen. Some ingredients will be worth more than others, and some more indispensable to a good life than others. Some will be morally neutral or morally irrelevant. Suspension of judgment is not an option. In this respect, cultural relativists should be taken seriously but their arguments revealed for their philosophical untenability. I shall not revisit all the arguments that have been used to show that it is a philosophically untenable position. Its basic fallacy is that it argues from the mere existence of cultural differences to a conclusion about the status of morality. Relativism argues thus: cultural differences point to a plurality of competing truth claims among various cultures. This makes it impossible to adjudicate among moral disputes. Therefore morality is incapable of generating moral truths. The latter could well be true, but it does not follow from the premises. If all American students thought Jamaica was in Africa, all Canadians felt it was in Asia, and Scandinavians believed it to be the Indian Ocean, we could not then conclude that the science of geography is unable to yield the truth of where Jamaica is. It is the form of the type of argument that relativism takes that makes it a fallacious form of reasoning. What has to be done as a continuation of the project of moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective is the job that relativists of one sort or another have asserted is impossible: to devise a moral threshold of human decency. Martha Nussbaum has already identified a set of capabilities that all citizens ought to be guaranteed. The capabilities may be referred to as a way of approximating a state’s moral commitment to providing the resources that citi-

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zens, based on their human capacities, need in order to survive. Nussbaum’s capabilities are ambitious and in many respects presuppose a state’s financial and institutional abilities to provide them.33 A cosmopolitan threshold of moral human decency would be a moral barometer of sorts. This threshold of decency would secure all democratic political rights for persons. These rights would include but not be limited to: autonomy; the right to life; the right to property; the right to economic participation; and the right to freedom of expression, association, and mobility. Any action that stifles the capacity for critical reflection would not be tolerated on the grounds that critical reflection, among other things, is necessary to make informed choices that affect not only one’s quality of life, but also one’s very survival. The capacity to exercise and apply critical reflection is a prerequisite for the right to self-preservation. As a broad approximation, this threshold could be used minimally to construct the working ideals of a culture, to make well-informed guesses at its overall ethos as well as examine the underlying portrait of human nature that is presupposed by any cultural system regardless of its contradictory, nuanced, and complex aspects. It would ultimately be a model of appraisal. This is the proper job of a moral ethnographer, and it is a job that must be performed, if at the end of the day, moral cosmopolitanism is to be a robust force that can inform policy, ground judicial reflection, and in the end regulate, guide, and direct the lives of persons with a view toward accomplishing the goal of every cosmopolitan: moral evolution and maturity of the human species.

III. Cosmopolitanism: A Definition and the Question of Tolerance There is a popular but false view about cosmopolitanism that needs to be addressed. The view is that cosmopolitanism is synonymous with toleration and indiscriminate absorption, and that it is all-embracing and inclusive. The danger of this assumption struck me while I was giving a talk in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on cosmopolitan morality some years ago. A participant of the conference in response to my idea that some of the world’s major religions were more cosmopolitan than others, responded by saying that if one were inclined to impute a cosmopolitan value to any religion, it would have to be Hinduism since Hinduism is by nature inclusive of every other religion. This view of Hinduism is not mistaken. It originates in a famous essay “What Is Hinduism?” by Mahatma Gandhi in which he attempts to establish Hinduism’s similarity with every other religion. The essay articulates not what Hinduism is, but what it is not.

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Similarly, one frequently encounters the view that cosmopolitanism is nonjudgmental, is nondiscriminatory and consists in a patchwork of differences, is multiperspectival, and that, in general, it tends to be quilt-like in nature. Conceptually this results in the view that cosmopolitanism indiscriminately endorses toleration as a virtue. If this were true of cosmopolitanism then it could not stand for anything. It would be disarmed in its capacity to achieve even the least ambitious of its goals. Why is this so? Conceptually speaking, an idea, a theory of the self, a moral system, in short, any concept, must be identifiable by some feature or trait or set of traits that distinguishes it from others. It is true that various phenomena in the world are often described as examples of cosmopolitanism. This could be because they share certain features with cosmopolitanism. But persons do not confuse capitalism with communism, or Christianity with Confucianism. They do not commit such errors because each concept has features that distinguish it from the other. It is true, for example, that capitalism might share common features with communism, but such commonalities (they both rely on certain assumptions about human nature, they both attempt to determine how goods are to be allocated in a society) are insufficient to ground the concepts in a way that guarantees each its distinct identity. We have already noted that if cosmopolitanism is to advance certain goals and attempt to realize these goals then its conceptual boundary has to be refined. Even if this boundary is a weak one, it must have discernible features that distinguish it from competing concepts whose characteristics are markedly different and those that even bear a family resemblance. Those who champion the idea that cosmopolitanism consists in indiscriminate absorption of all differences, or that it is a grand pastiche of varied elements, take the concept of difference as an irreducible primary; that difference, in and of itself, indicates the properties of that which is being marked off as different. Consider the following mixture of “differences”: the society for the elimination of obese people; the New Nazi—a militant organization carrying forth Hitler’s policy of extermination of Jews, homosexuals, and Catholics and Roma; the society for black separatism—a black nationalist organization; moral cosmopolitans; Mothers Against Drunk Drivers; American Association of Atheists; and the Moral Majority. These groups are different but they also have a great deal in common—they are made up of human beings; their goals are all directed toward human beings; and they all attempt to influence human behavior and actions in a substantial way. One could hardly suggest that this pastiche of varied human sensibilities, commitments, and beliefs are qualified to be labeled as cosmopolitan, nor could one suggest on the basis of the features that are distinctive to them all, that they all truly share some-

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thing fundamentally in common. What has been identified as commonalities are insufficient to link them under a meaningful conceptual rubric. Two men may have the same color eyes, but this shared feature is not what makes them human beings. The existence of difference, of a mélange of attributes without any indication of the sort of mixture involved, does not qualify as a cosmopolitan mixture. This should seem obvious. The proclivity of many writers to identify as cosmopolitanism any theory that may share similar features with cosmopolitanism, but which differs markedly in overall demeanor, disarms the concept epistemologically and morally. It is harmed epistemologically because there is no way to talk about cosmopolitanism without fearing that one’s interlocutors or readers have no specific idea of what one is talking about. The concept can then stand for any vague or accidental attribute that’s associated in one’s mind with the term, while omitting fundamental tenets or the base constitutive feature of the term. The first harm guarantees the second. If a firm conceptual base is not achieved then, given even the thinnest goals of cosmopolitanism, how can it seek to address, and, when possible, correct those wrongs and injustices of the human world that are its main concerns? If, as some writers would claim, cosmopolitanism is compatible with nationalism, how would it respond in a clear and definitive manner to those harms spawned by national conflicts, conflicts that result in one ethnic group, for example, being demonized, persecuted, and exterminated by another? For those who care to rescue cosmopolitanism, and especially moral cosmopolitanism, from the conceptual weakness of its definitional motif, the proper job is to delimit the concept as much as possible by specifying its base attributes and then deepening the concept by building on the base. Logic teaches us about concepts that are too narrow or too thin, and those too wide or broad. The former excludes too much to which the concept actually relates; the latter includes too many phenomena that cannot be covered by the concept.  Cosmopolitanism is the notion that one’s identity is not determined solely nor primarily by any racial, national, or ethnic background. Diogenes and the ancient Cynics began the cosmopolitan tradition by forming the notion that an individual could have a primary identity apart from the one he or she inherited from the polis. In de-emphasizing the value of class, status, national origin, and gender, the Cynics simultaneously placed great emphasis on the value of reason and moral purpose. Here is the revolutionary idea that the

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Cynics achieved, which is a given in the Western concept of personality and its concomitant dependence on dignity: regardless of how much one is deprived of the concrete goods that are constitutive of social identity, one possesses a larger universal identity grounded in reason, moral purpose, and above all, human dignity. Today, when contemporary cosmopolitans speak in terms of a universal human identity that they share with others, they are invoking concepts bequeathed to them by the ancient Cynics. The concept of world-citizenship in the sense of belonging to all of humankind gained ascendancy in the Hellenistic era. It is among the core features of Stoic thought, which, along with its great rival, Epicureanism, were reactions to the gradual disappearance of the small city-state in an age of empire. (One of the reasons, it goes without saying, for the current upsurge in interest in cosmopolitanism, is our own relation to empire.) As Philip of Macedonia and then his son Alexander imposed an overarching monarchy on the Greeks and conquered new territories, not only did the poleis cease to be the sole seat of political authority for citizens, but also they were no longer insular safe havens in which local identities could be formed. The cosmopolis, that vastly growing space beyond the insular polis, the place that heretofore had been the home of barbarians, was conceived of as a place where social and cultural distinctions were irrelevant compared to an essential sameness to all human beings, who are bound together, regardless of their backgrounds, by their subjection to natural law. Human beings may live in a multiplicity of ways, but there is a law that holds the variations in their actions and behaviors to a recognizably human model. The people in one village may live in an area populated with plants, some of which are poisonous and some of which are not; those of another may live off the meat of animals. In the first scenario someone has to learn how to detoxify plants and classify them and establish it as an art or science. In the second scenario, one has to establish procedures for effective hunting and so on. In both cases, each individual must live by the evidence of his or her senses. That is what is to be expected, as human beings are conceptual animals, and this shared nature provides the basis for a universal humanity. So goes the reasoning of the Stoics. Today, a contemporary cosmopolitan would point out that, for example, in no culture would you find mothers arbitrarily offering up their young to strangers, that individuals in all cultures have capacities for responding to shame and loss of dignity, and that such examples are just a few among several that are the shared core features that all humans have and that override local particularity. Cosmopolitanism stands in sharp contrast to two very important political categories in our contemporary world today: pluralism and multiculturalism.

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Pluralists defend the view that individual identity is to be configured within the parameters of a conceptually neat ethnic, national, or racial paradigmatic prism. Pluralists are not separatists, but they do insist that the boundaries that make separate identities distinct (Italian, German, Native American, for example) are protected and kept in place. Group solidarity and group identity, then, are the important values upheld by those in the pluralist camp. Multiculturalists are more likely than pluralists to acknowledge an overarching national or international community, but want to insist on the abstract nature of all such communities as well as critiquing the way one particular culture tends to pass itself off as pure, transparent, or universal for the community in question. Multiculturalists also insist on recognizing the contributions of seemingly “marginal” cultures to such allegedly pure cultures. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, in keeping with the pro-individual stance first evinced by Diogenes, are of the view that human socialization takes place in the world where human intercourse takes place: in the multiple spaces that we inhabit and among the myriad of human beings with whom we interact and exchange stories, experiences, values, and norms. Strong cosmopolitanism repudiates the tendencies of cultural nationalism and racial ideologists to impute moral value to morally neutral features—accidents of birth such as skin pigmentation, national origin, and ethnic background. Strong cosmopolitanism argues that there is no one fundamental culture to which any one individual is biologically constituted and leaves the question of identity entirely to the individual. That is, individuals ought to be able to cull their own identities based on the extent to which their experiences and their life roles have allowed them to experience themselves as the persons they take themselves to be, rather than the passive wearers of tribal labels assigned to them by their culture or by the society at large. In the field of political philosophy, one must distinguish between cosmopolitan law and international law. Cosmopolitan law protects the rights of citizens of the world by making their relations to the state a concern of the world community, while international law pertains to the relations among sovereign and self-legislating states. Kristeva and Derrida are among the continental philosophers whose writings have contributed to cosmopolitanism. Kristeva’s cosmopolitanism can be found in two texts: Nations Without Nationalism and Strangers to Ourselves. The latter is a psychoanalytically inspired scholarly work that traces the genealogy of foreignness. In it she develops notions of strangeness and Otherness that reside in each individual. If we accept the foreigner within us, then we are less likely to be disturbed by the political foreigner in our nations. For Kristeva, being a cosmopolitan means that she has, against origins and

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starting from them, chosen a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries. Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness is a treatment of the cosmopolitan ethos by means of an examination of the tensions between refugee and asylum rights. Derrida develops an ethic of hospitality and forgiveness as a viable cosmopolitan response.34  Perhaps the best analytic definition of cosmopolitanism in the widest sense of the term comes from Thomas Pogge, who attempts to abstract from all the features of cosmopolitanism a distilled definition of it in terms of its fundamentals. Pogge writes: Three elements are shared by all cosmopolitan positions. First, individualism: the ultimate units of concern are human beings, or persons—rather than, say, family lines, tribes, ethnic, cultural, or religious communities, nations, or states. The later may be units of concern only indirectly, in virtue of their individual members or citizens. Second, universality: the status of ultimate unit of concern attaches to every living human being equally—not merely to some sub-set, such as men, aristocrats, Aryans, whites, or Muslims. Third, generality: this special status has global force. Persons are ultimate units of concern for everyone—not only for their compatriots, fellow religionists, or such like.35

The real concern, though, regarding toleration has to do with areas in human life that involve exercise of choices and those that do not. It is widely believed by several theorists, for example, that moral beliefs and religious convictions are not matters of choice, that one is born into a community and simply inherits the institutional moral precepts that help define the identity of the community.36 Religious convictions then, and moral beliefs, are worthy of both respect and toleration not because they are the result of choice, but because they are central features around which human lives are constructed. To dismiss outright, so goes the reasoning, the central features that inform the thick identity of people’s lives—their moral beliefs and religious convictions—is to hold an intolerant and disrespectful attitude toward the very humanity of another person should that person hold moral convictions and religious beliefs as central features of her personal identity. Questions of choice aside, which I will address later on, religious beliefs carry metaphysical conceptions of human beings along with the roles of human beings that one may reasonably find objectionable. If a particular religion, for example, applies its metaphysical conception of women and such application denies women participation in the political and economic sphere, then one may

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reasonably object not just to that religion’s metaphysical conceptions, but to the religion itself. One draws a line between cultural practices and religious convictions that beget violence. Violence is done to a woman’s dignity and capacity to exercise her capabilities and reason if she is restricted from participating in the political and economic sphere. Her agency is deeply (often irreparably) compromised, and the moral cosmopolitan need not be under any obligations to respect beliefs that when acted upon injure the agency of a woman. This would be the case even if moral beliefs and religious convictions were not voluntary since acting upon them could at least be reasonably seen as voluntary actions. Thus one could hold a belief and still not practice that belief, which, if applied, would harm another person. A racist may have been socialized to believe that blacks are inferior to whites. Even if that belief is involuntary as some would argue, to deny blacks economic and political participation and to restrict their right to property would be seen not just as an egregious error, but a willful intent to harm. The belief that moral beliefs and religious convictions are not matters of choice is false on another level. It is the case that most of us start out holding the political beliefs and moral convictions of our parents and our communities. To that extent one may say we did not choose our religious affiliations or the moral convictions imparted to us. But our convictions and religious beliefs do become choices after we are able to critically reflect on them and evaluate them in our own minds. We make a conscious decision to modify them, give them up, or keep them. How else would we explain the number of persons who have become atheists after being raised religious, or those who repudiate as either repugnant or false their erstwhile convictions regarding the inferior racial status of other people? Many people reject the values and convictions they were raised by as incompatible with competing values and beliefs that they have encountered in the world. We cannot refer to such persons as mere aberrations or even exceptions. They form a consistent thread of human behavior as we find it in the empirical world. People change over time based on, among other things, altering their convictions and beliefs, and some people remain the same by choosing to retain their original moral beliefs and religious convictions. Human choices are intrinsically deserving of neither respect nor disrespect. Persons are deserving of having the freedom to exercise their choices and those choices are in turn deserving of observation and evaluation by others. Respect or its opposite is the logical terminus of evaluation. A second source of contention between cosmopolitanism and toleration rests on a well-known tension between toleration and global stability and harmony. In other words, there is the question of whether or not cosmo-

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politans ought to tolerate certain illiberal practices out of a commitment to world stability. If cosmopolitans voice opposition to illiberal countries that violate basic human rights as part of their domestic policy, and institutions, acting in accordance with international law, remain silent on such violations in order to protect international harmony, should cosmopolitans respect such governance institutions?37 This is a complex dilemma because governance institutions may have good reasons for not disrupting world stability by taking actions against illiberal societies that oppress their people. Regional instability and, a fortiori, the welfare of those in said regions, could be adversely affected by actions taken against oppressive regimes. This is especially the case where military action is involved. But the question itself is misframed in that it asks cosmopolitans to abstract from their own moral principles in order to assess the strategic importance of failing to take action against an oppressive regime. In other words, the cosmopolitan is required, a priori, to valorize strategy and expedience over right action—however that action may be carried out. It assumes all too quickly that even the threat of military action would result in regional instability and it takes international law as the final word on the rightness or wrongness of an action. International law has had to be broken several times to right heinous atrocities. This has been the case when the de facto sovereignty of a country, subject to constraints of justice, has been overturned and the country invaded in order to save lives. The question as posed requires that cosmopolitan sensibilities correspond to the law and the strategic exercise of power by authorized forces. Since there can be a host of legitimate moral actions taken against an oppressive regime, from international ostracism, sanctions, military threats to serious diplomacy, there does not seem to be any reason why cosmopolitans need to respect and tolerate governance institutions that remain silent in the name of world stability. Such a stance seems to be a form of realist global conservatism, a conservatism that does not see human rights protection as in its own self-interest and the interest of the global community. World stability is too broad a terminology and one that is also subject to broad interpretations. Given this state of affairs it does not seem likely to have purchase on cosmopolitan sensibilities when oppressive regimes are being evaluated. The dilemma ultimately is a false one since a world in which there are gross human rights violations occurring is already an unstable world; it is one that cannot be in the self-interest of strong liberal countries since silence sends this message to oppressive regimes: you may behave with impunity and without consequences to your actions. This illiberal behavior itself if left unchallenged undermines the moral and political standing of liberal countries that do nothing to remedy illiberality and rights violation.

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Governance institutions with a commitment to liberal democratic values of equality and fairness have just as moral an obligation as do individuals to make attempts to correct human rights violations. If an argument could be made, for example, that the condemnation of human rights violations are in a country’s self-interest because its moral standing in the world is tied to such condemnation, then the moral cosmopolitan need not tolerate—in the name of world stability—global institutions that violate human rights any more than she would individual persons who violate such rights.

Notes 1. Jason Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 126. 2. Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan, 123–25. 3. Michele Moody-Adams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 41. 4. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 43. 5. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 78. 6. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 80. 7. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 209. 8. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 210. 9. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 211. 10. Moody-Adams, Fieldwork, 211. 11. Martha Nussbaum, “Cynic and Stoic Origins: The Worth of Human Dignity,” Castle Lecture 2, delivered at Yale University, February 2, 2000. 12. See Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989) for an excellent discussion of the philosophical validation of the concept of human rights and the issue of moral dignity as its basis. 13. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 17. 14. Michael Novak, “Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thermstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 773. 15. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 2. 16. I am paraphrasing George Yúdice. See his The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). See also his “The Expediency of Culture,” a paper delivered at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature. Yúdice in the referred passage relies on Edward Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (1924): 401–29. 17. This is, for instance, assuming that one has no reason to suspect that strangers in general or a particular stranger in particular poses a real threat to one’s welfare. 18. I am indebted to Darrel Moellendorf for pointing to the one such absurdity about ethical relativism. Moellendorf develops this position in terms of the inde-

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fensibility of nonintervention on relativistic grounds. See his Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001). 19. Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” 20. I wish to call attention to the political because the nature and scope of the political, which I will later flesh out, will determine the extent to which one is able to enjoy and actually be an active coauthor in the satisfaction of a number of other needs which will fall under cognitive: social, emotional, romantic, and the affective needs. 21. David Bromwich, “Culturalism: The Euthanasia of Liberalism,” Dissent, Winter 1995, 89. 22. Bromwich, “Culturalism,” 95. 23. Bromwich, “Culturalism,” 102. 24. For details on the meaning of the concepts, moral thematization, moral becoming, and ordered moral becoming, see chapter 3 of Becoming a Cosmopolitan. 25. Jeremy Waldron, “The Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 103. 26. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985), 69. I am also here relying on Chandran Kuthas’s “Are There Any Cultural Rights,” in Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures for an analysis of Horowitz’s arguments. 27. James Rule, “Tribalism and the State: A Reply to Michael Walzer,” Dissent, Fall 1992, 519–24. 28. Jeremy Waldron, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures, 100. 29. Waldron, “The Cosmopolitan Alternative,” 100. 30. Waldron, “The Cosmopolitan Alternative,” 100. 31. Jack Crittenden, Beyond Individualism: Reconstructing the Liberal Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140. 32. I am using artifice here in the broadest sense of the term to refer to created human phenomena that are non-natural as well as unnatural however we may wish to make conceptual sense of the latter. In using artifice I will take the concept to extend to moral values, ethical structures, norms, mores, and those sorts of axiological properties that eventually form larger conceptual structures known as customs, traditions, and morality. 33. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34. Jason Hill, “Cosmopolitanism,” in The Edinburg Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. John Protevi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 108–11. 35. Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” in Political Reconstruction in Europe: Ethical Perspectives, ed. Chris Brown (London: Routledge, 1994), 89–122. 36. See Kent Greenwalt, Religious Convictions and Political Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also, Alan Dagovitz, “When Choice Does Not Matter: Political Liberalism, Religion and the Faith School Debate,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 8, no. 2 (May 2004): 165–80. For a thorough discussion of knowledge and morality, see David Copp, “Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral

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Realism,” Moral Knowledge: Volume 18, Part 2, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 37. Kok-Chor Tan has raised this issue. See Kok-Chor Tan, “The Problem of Decent Peoples,” in Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? ed. Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

CHAPTER TWO

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Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry

I. Culture-Faith: The Mystification of Culture If questions concerning the respect due to culture are problematic, then questions about the ownership of culture are even thornier. Anthropologists, ethnographers—to say nothing of philosophers trying to make sense of the concepts of identity associated with culture—must wrestle with highly controversial issues: what does a code of cultural privacy look like and how might it be implemented vis-à-vis culture? At what point does one regard “esoteric knowledge” and fear of its loss as valid grounds for believing that they constitute the essential grounding of a culture and that they ought to be protected against intrusion, modification, and, above all, interpretations that fall too far outside the schemata of cultural spokespersons? How does a society deal with groups that assert an indigenous identity without demonstrating continuity with ancestral practices? Answers to the above questions and continued debates surrounding them are centered mainly in fields whose primary area of study is indigenous cultures. The controversy brews in cultures all over the globe, from the Cree Indians in Canada to the Aborigines in Australia, to the Hopis in North America. There is much debate on the ownership and protection of what is regarded as native culture. There are documented cases of knowledge held by a handful of anointed experts that become lost or stolen by anthropologists, missionaries, and other miners of human artifacts.1 These debates, in turn, rely on insufficiently examined identity politics, where identity is treated as 57

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a patented commodity, and the right to cultural ownership translated into a demand for the protection of cultural privacy. Indeed, scholars researching native or indigenous cultures face a dilemma few know directly how to tackle from a moral perspective. If moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective is stymied by folk conceptions about culture, then answers to the questions in the preceding paragraphs are further compromised by other problematic conceptions of culture raised from philosophical perspectives that can be regarded as neither liberal nor communitarian. Samuel Fleischacker’s theory of culture is one that interprets culture as a moral posit—a concept if you will—rather than an empirical unit. It isn’t obvious why a dichotomy between these two spheres ought to exist; this is how he establishes his defense of culture, however, as a successor term to religion. Fleischacker’s theory of culture may be referred to as the “culture-faith theory of culture.”2 As a successor term to religion, he argues that faith in the cultural norms and symbols are expected to resemble traditional defenses of religion.3 He writes: “Take this as my excuse for arguing that a culture will function as a legitimate and healthy guide for a person’s moral decisions only by way of a kind of faith. I will model this faith on the version of Christian faith defended by St. Augustine.”4 Before reconstructing the method by which culture-faith theory attempts to justify its position, let us examine its definition of culture. Culture, according to it, is not synonymous with community. Rather, it is a designation for one specific kind of community. It is characterized both by the possession and enactment of a “symbol system.”5 Symbol systems are united around practices passed down generationally by the role-modeling method of child rearing as opposed to educational indoctrination. They are also passed down by way of a narrative that is convincing about how cultural practices are conducive to a good human life. Culture-faith has a great deal in common with concepts such as race and nation. Fleischacker, in fact, argues that culture has come to its present function during the same period and out of exactly the same nexus of historical factors that gave rise to modern meanings of “nations” and “race.” Along with culture, race and nation share a concern for antiquity and unreason and for the survival of groups of human beings in the same form over several generations, as well as “for ways of maintaining that identity that for the most part bypass reason.”6 The problem, according to Fleischacker, is that “culture,” “race,” and “nation” have divorced themselves from religion, largely as a result of the growing secularism of political liberalism. The latter advances two pivotal questions on which modern human agency rests, and they are: Are human beings fundamentally individual choosers? Or are they first and foremost members of com-

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munities? If an answer to the latter is yes, then the irony lies in the possibility that persons from many different types of groups are qualified to answer the question about the kind of group one belongs to. Group membership becomes a matter of choice. The group central to one’s identity is understood now to be a matter of which group one identifies oneself with. Culture-faith is supposed to be a way out of the liberal dilemma of choosing. Reason alone, we are told, is ill-equipped in the short span of a human life to endorse the best possible life for a human being in her lifetime. These choices—what we would refer to as “experiments in living”—are problematic for the advocates of culture-faith since they presume to cover exhaustively the comprehensive and qualitative requirements that a fulfilled human life needs. Only a religiously historical tradition defended by faith fulfills this role. What is needed, according to the culture-faith theory version of culture, “is thus a reason for abjuring reason in at least some of our decisions, for choosing not to run the maxims of choice, in those cases, through the test of our own reason— for choosing quite precisely, to be heteronomous in those areas of our lives.”7 Explicit in the Augustinian defense of faith is the value born from a humility that inevitably results from relying on faith rather than reason as a precursor to knowledge. Faith is the beginning of knowledge; without it the knowledge seeker cannot know God, although we are told by Augustine that non-Christian wisdom seekers or philosophers can discover some of the central tenets of Christianity through reason. None can know God’s nature or his ways in detail, however, without faith. The comparison between Augustinian faith and the ethical faith one has in one’s culture pivots on the answer to a fundamental question. And it is this: Is there or is there not, between the initial rational sighting of a general goal for the moral life, and the more or less successful achievement of that goal, a need to put faith in a culture as the source of norm’s for one’s everyday decisions? Is there something morally valuable about submitting one’s daily decisions to old and socially shared norms about sexuality, decorum, treatment of animals, and the like—which have structured good lives in the past, but are not, in themselves, particularly reasonable? Or are non-rational norms and the communities they structure at best irrelevant to moral living?8

An Augustinian faith in cultures would take the affirmative answer to the first question as its foundation. It would do so on the grounds that only a humiliation of one’s reason to the “mysteries” of nonrational norms can purge one of the pride by which the good life must remain ever a distant vision, an ideal land beyond the sea, rather than something one can actually attain. Once one undergoes this humiliation, moreover, one will begin, literally, to

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see the facts of one’s moral landscape differently, and eventually recognize why a path via culture-faith was the only way to achieve the kind of life one had earlier glimpsed philosophically. One also sees as “mists,” or “fog,” the objections the pure reasoner tends to raise to this approach to ethics. After one embarks on culture-faith, such objections appear as products of the very pride that culture-faith is meant to overcome: plausible, but ultimately spurious and self-serving arguments. The culture-faith model believes strongly that a way of seeing things, a vision, if you will, is forthcoming when one embraces faith. Vision is a way of grasping first principles. Augustine, we are reminded, repeatedly compared faith to vision. The moral value of culture-faith is a way of remedying the self-centeredness that is allegedly at the heart of much of the pursuit of the ethical life. Any purely rational approach to ethics “can all too easily play into our self-centeredness rather than work against it.”9 The culture-faith theory model is suspicious of what I would call epistemological hubris. Fleischacker unapologetically writes that discovering a good ethical theory enhances our arrogant sense of being able to rely entirely on our own resources and grasp all ethically relevant facts by ourselves.10 Such considerations make it reasonable for us to submit our wills (at least partially) to the norms and rituals of an authoritative tradition. The latter can teach us how to live and can be valuable for seeing certain things that are relevant to one’s understanding of the good life. Fleischacker writes: Humbling oneself to doing in practice what everyone else in one’s culture thinks one should do can mitigate the arrogance—characteristic of professional philosophers especially but also of everyone who thinks they have worked out by themselves a good “philosophy” of life—by which people think they can figure out what to do in all circumstances by themselves. Such arrogance can blind one to the true value of settled practices, and to the character-limitations that are likely to prevent one from successfully carrying out anomalous lifestyles.11

Moral commitment, according to the reasoning of culture-faith, is strengthened by a claim it treats almost as a statement of fact. The claim, one concerning the moral function of cultures, asserts that whether cultures help or hurt people is, so far, unproven. That an adherence to cultures helps people lead decent and rich lives has certainly not been convincingly shown—which is one excellent reason states should not coerce people into such commitments. The assertion that cultures are irrelevant, or even harmful, to the pursuit of the moral life is equally undemonstrated, Fleischacker goes on to say. All this strongly suggests, he argues, that governments ought not to make any attempt to eliminate cultural beliefs and practices.12

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A theory that spends countless pages exhorting its readers to humble themselves to what everyone else thinks in their culture, that sees ethical faith in a culture as a cure for epistemological arrogance and spiritual hubris, and then asserts in a sentence two semantic variations on a single theme on the order of no proof exists to show that cultures harm its people and, further, that cultures helps people morally is unproven is, one could reasonably hold, a form of conceptual obfuscation. It is and it isn’t. Cultural mystification is so widespread a phenomenon that even rigorous philosophers fall prey to the same cognitive errors average persons are guilty of. I will not offer a criticism of the dangers and consequences of faith in cultures. We have the weight of history on our side to reveal the dastardly consequences of such an option. We have the slaughterhouses, the charnel houses, and the killing fields of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as testimonies to what happens when faith, not reason and the defense of individual rights, stand as the linchpin of culture. Gender apartheid, both a cultural and religious practice, is alive and well in Saudi Arabia, and women are being harmed by such a practice. Nationalism as culture, culture as national, racial ideology as the culture and authentic voice of the volk and the ethnos, each with its competing set of myths and norms and customs and traditions that date back to untold centuries, have waged countless battles and immolated the lives of millions—all for the sake of custom-making lives in the image of what ancestors did thousands of years ago. That Fleischacker, himself part of a tradition whose members have been victims to precisely a culture whose leader demanded that its members uphold, defend, and honor it on the basis of faith, could be motivated to defend, culture on the basis of faith demonstrates just how ingrained is the belief that culture is a mystical phenomenon whose precepts are beyond rational analysis and whose inner workings cannot avail themselves to the cold dissecting hand of reason. This is epistemological and value relativism that has yet to be properly tackled. Rather than offer a criticism of the dangers and the consequences of culture-faith, I will briefly address its attempt to transfer a psychological state of faith from what we may reasonably infer is its subject—God—to something that is neither mysterious nor incomprehensible: culture. Without violating theological precepts, we may say that we attribute sanity to average people of common sense who believe in God for several reasons. One reason is that there are phenomena we do not perceive but, nevertheless, still believe in. We believe in them for valid reasons. They include the credibility of ancient religious texts and the authority of religious experts whose pronouncements

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and testimonies are confirmed in ways deemed credible by authoritative sources. Highly personal experiences that are unexplainable in ordinary language but which remain rooted in our cognitive database heighten tendencies to embrace faith. What many interpret as “signs” from the universe are often lacking in credibility in the eyes of radical empiricists. In the absence of scientific explanation, quirky events that take place seem to suggest that the universe behaves in an absurd or random manner. Historically, belief in an absurd universe is a recent phenomenon. Its most explicit form was born in the crucibles of French existentialism in the mid-twentieth century. We do not think it absurd that many people reasonably attribute such “signs,” which seem beyond the ken of empirical analysis, to a transcendental deity. It seems no more unreasonable to ascribe causal responsibility to an invisible being with undetected and undetectable powers than it would to nature or “the rational laws of the universe.” Why not assign as the author of those laws a God in whom one then places one’s faith? One, however, faces no such dilemma when dealing with culture. Culture, a human-made construction that is part of human civilization and that not only avails itself to human perception and conceptual analysis, but is also amenable to analyses of the human sciences, is always bound up with the political, economic, and social customs of any era. One need never have faith in any norm that is indexed to a particular era and that, retrospectively, we know functions to maintain social values that, given our modern progressive sensibilities, we may find dated. Indeed, culture-faith, one could argue, is a basis for psychological and political regression. To hold it means holding in good faith those norms and customs that we have outgrown as well as those that we can empirically identify as inimical to the dignity of individuals. Here one need only think of antebellum Southern culture and its folk beliefs about the moral and intellectual nature of persons labeled black. What would be the “reasonable” response of any “reasonable” white person at that time if he were asked the following questions: Do you think that, if given the chance, one of the descendants of your black slaves could grow up to be as intellectually advanced as your own children? Is the daughter of your black maid educable to the degree of becoming a brain surgeon? If your wife were deathly ill and in need of a blood transfusion and the only blood available was a black man’s, would you accept it? The answers to these questions are based on cultural assumptions whose “reasonable” answers are to be found in the cultural milieu of the era. I put “reasonable” in quotations because one ought not to accept any value or belief simply on the basis of the number of adherents. There are and always have been exceptional men and women of the mind who think outside the

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herd and form their own independent judgments. They see beyond the illusions, myths, and symbolism that the norms are meant to create. Culture-faith may be correct in pointing to the limitations of reason in exhaustively and comprehensively arriving at a set of indisputable answers for how human lives ought to be led on earth. Questions such as, “What is the good life and how ought I to live?” have been the eternal questions of religion and of philosophy. Given human fallibility, it is unlikely that reason will ever provide human beings with perfect answers to such questions. Culture-faith will have to do a great deal of explanation, however, to show how we go from an acceptance of the limitation of human reason (and even the proclivity of some human beings for arrogance) to obsequious humiliation of reason to the “mysteries of non-rational norms, norms that can purge one of the pride by which the good life must remain ever a distant vision.”13 Using history as a case in point, one could argue that men such as Hitler and Stalin did just that sort of thing. All types of nonrational cultural norms became the Soviet way of life that did succeed in purging the pride of the rationally thinking farmer who dared to question the new Soviet style of agriculture in the 1930s. The result was massive starvation for millions of Russians whose vision of the good surely remained ever a distant vision, while the new culture-faith of the era remained an ideal in spite of the failed crops and the rotting corpses. Instead of giving a robust metaphysical account of the nature of reason, rather than pointing to individual examples of its abuses, culture-faith undercuts its own philosophical position for critiquing any shortcomings of reason. Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of existentialism is a rigorous treatment of the tension that exists between the human condition and the demands of reason. Sartre contends that any account of a definitive human nature is nothing more than a set of traits that have been codified into characteriological taxonomy by an individual inevitably possessed of a perspectival eye. The creation of a taxonomy that is branded as brutish, benevolent, selfish, or noble results from selecting certain traits and leaving out others. The label, however, ignores competing characteristics of the human animal. Regardless of how operative any such features are in a human being, to reduce her to them is to overdetermine that human being. Groups of human beings are observed to behave irrationally over time. The conclusion drawn is that the individual by nature is irrational and that she misuses reason for her selfish purposes. There may be, however, any number of other persons acting consistently and rationally. Why not choose to characterize the individual as rational based on the behavioral traits exhibited by any number of individuals? Culture-faith has yet to generate convincing arguments for why one should bypass the constitutional liberties of secular political liberalism that

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protects the coexistence of religious and nonreligious institutions. Each person has the freedom to acculturate to those values they uphold. Each also has the freedom to both publicly and privately practice something like culturefaith within the sanctity of his or her own value system. Why culture-faith should be practiced by a people—indeed, exactly what counts as a people in a pluralistic society, and why, apart from the set of constitutional laws and edicts that protects its liberties, it should have faith in anything like a public culture—is not a question that seems particularly enlightened in a post-Enlightenment age.14 Culture-faith is not a viable option for persons living in a complex, everchanging world, a world in which adaptation need not result in the daily or yearly abdication of norms and principles, but one in which principles and norms are challenged and renegotiated. In short—a world in which culture-faith coexists with the reality principle. Such a world is one that is constantly evolving. Culture is not a symbolic pattern preserved like a butterfly in amber. It does not belong in a museum but, rather, in the practical activities of daily life where it evolves under the stress of competing goals and other competing cultures.15 These competitions are staged by individuals as an organic part of their ascendancy in life, as part of their coping mechanisms in navigating among the challenges of a complex world and the demands of their own particular lives. We may elaborate further on this problem by observing the reality of Third World peoples and their cultures, cultures any social scientist will readily admit are hybrid.16 A limited range of norms diminishes the capacity to choose from a menu of life-affirming options. There is no reason that in such countries—ravaged as they are not only by economic hardships but also by various social and political handicaps—persons should have abiding faith in the same norms they seek to escape by attempts to migrate. Whether persons in such cultures realize it or not, culture-faith is a nonstarter in their milieux. Adaptive negotiators engaging in cross-cultural exchanges are not engaging in culture-faith. Rather, they are engaging in an enterprise of resisting, testing, modifying, and interfacing with the norms regarded as “indigenous” to their own cultures. Adaptive negotiators that they are, cultural swappers, or cultural swingers, if I may use such a term, are not just betraying the spirit of culture-faith, but they are also refuting a basic psychological truism about how human beings function in relation to some of the norms and customs that inform their cultural heritage. Culture-faith, psychologically speaking, forces one into a contractual arrangement with a set of norms and customs in which one will participate morally, socially, and psychologically, but where one will have little idea how

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one will evolve and change over time in relation to those norms. Human beings who evolve and interact in political, social, and psychological time and space in tandem with others—different from and similar to them—cannot predict how they will react to the norms they readily accept in their lives at present. Cultural swingers are already displaying the psychological flexibility that is a precondition for any value change that occurs over time. All this, though, leads to an important criticism that is among the most damning against culture-faith advocates. It is this: culture-faith believers are dismayed over the passage of time and with its effects on norms, customs, and traditions. Logically, culture-faith cannot advocate faith in culture as a moral posit without having this timeless feature as an addendum affixed to it. Conceptually, the appeal to tradition is what gives it its conceptual rigor. Yet culture-faith advocates would have to be clairvoyants of the highest order, or believers in manifest destiny in order to invest faith in a set of human artifices that affect the well-being of human life without the possibility of revising that faith, should moral reasoning demonstrate that such norms are harmful to human life. If culture-faith has a revisability clause built into it, then it is not culture-faith. Faith by definition involves at least a suspension of reason and objective inquiry into the phenomena in which faith is invested. Let us revisit two crucial yet contradictory tenets of culture faith. The first concerns the moral function of cultures: we can assert with some confidence that the idea that cultures either help people or not, from a moral perspective, is, so far, quite unproven. Second, that an adherence to cultures helps people lead decent and rich lives has certainly not been convincingly shown.17 Why then regard culture as a moral posit as opposed to a morally neutral feature of civilized human life, or even a nihilistic endeavor on the part of human beings? I shall not attempt to give the answer here, for the answer does not lie in Fleischacker’s essay. The contradictory messiness reveals itself in the wider applications of culture-faith as it plays itself out in identity politics, multiculturalism, issues of cultural privacy, and the alleged sanctity of indigenous cultures.

II. Culture-Faith Applied: Cultural Privacy and the Ownership of Native Culture The practical applications of culture-faith litter contemporary society in many forms. Although the various organizations, schools of thought, advocacy groups, and ethnic groups practicing its various tenets would not necessarily identify themselves with the term, in many ways that philosophical

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approach to culture permeates their own commitments to culture as well as myriad ways of defining it. Culture-faith can be explored more fully by considering the issues surrounding ownership of native culture and its central dilemmas. One such dilemma is the following: a condition for admittance of a research scholar into a specific native community is that the truth standards of the scholar, that is, his or her evaluative and interpretive judgments, must meet the criteria of the group’s image of itself—its cultural self-image. Who are the experts judging the authenticity of a culture’s representations? Not necessarily those who are actually its producers—the living and the dead in whose name tradition and custom are defended. The experts are those who, by whatever criteria or absence thereof, are able to wade through the analysis of cultural symbols, interpret their meanings and submeanings, their definitive goals if they have any at all, and reconcile them against a host of counterinterpretations and meanings. The imprimatur of authenticity is gauged by a criterion that stipulates that the group must be presented in a favorable light. Advocates of cultural privacy, those who are not just culturalists but who go much further and insist that identity be legally patented, are advocates of Total Heritage Protection. But what do we mean by such a term, and what does a legally patented identity indexed to cultural privacy look like? These exciting and controversial topics are examined by anthropologist Michael Brown in Who Owns Native Culture?18 Brown brings to light a number of cultural and legal case studies that highlight much of what we have been discussing. The mystification surrounding issues of culture, the category mistakes that are committed when transferring our obligations to respect individuals on to cultures by reducing persons to their cultures, as well as the pseudorelativism often invoked when dealing with what is revered as native or indigenous cultures—as if individuals whose identities are forged in such cultures are somehow outside the global commons, a special caste in need of a special set of linguistic and legalistic tools to uphold their values—are brought forth in a new light. Cultural privacy is defined as the right of possessors of a culture to shield themselves from unwanted scrutiny. A right to “cultural privacy is presented as self-evident and morally unassailable, even if its scope remains unspecified.”19 It is a regulatory code used to influence the interactions between two parties. In a professional sense it identifies the conditions that restrain academic investigators in their studies. Scholars are required to “do everything to protect the physical, social, and psychological welfare and to honor the dignity and privacy of those studied.”20 Should conflicts of interests arise, the needs of (research) indigenous subjects come first. Fieldworkers are cautioned to

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consider the impact publication of their research might have on the communities studied.21 Indigenous people are able to set the terms that determine how scholarly work on their communities is conducted. The notion of cultural privacy has become a standard research protocol in contemporary anthropology. The norm has been strengthened by legal contracts that stipulate what a researcher may study and collect. It also governs archival placements. Brown’s text itself is a carefully researched essay that highlights those case studies in anthropological research where ethical questions that have haunted human rights activists and moral theorists for years are bracketed and treated not as ethical issues but as cultural ones. The most obvious example—and it is one that will upset activists and theorists on both ends of the philosophical spectrum because it is regarded as an easy target—is female genital mutilation. I am focusing on this issue not only because it is unalterably harmful—it permanently deprives a woman of the capacity to achieve arousal and sexual gratification through orgasm—but also because its abolition could defeat the pervasive cultural relativism that lies at the heart of “selective” cultural practices regarded as constitutive features of a culture. Brown points out that researchers may indeed stumble upon morally questionable activities “that require a painful choice between honoring cultural privacy and calling attention to abuses of human rights.”22 In the case of obligatory clitoridectomy, he cites cases in which folklorists and anthropologists facing restrictions may have their scholarship and years of training and objective analysis reduced to “trafficking in the public relations statements of indigenous political elites or serving as compliant puppets in new forms of cultural ventriloquism.”23 Such cases of cultural privacy are problematic for several reasons, which I will examine later. Cultural privacy, however, becomes a contentious issue when individuals seek constitutional protection for practices associated with certain cultures in order to protect outsiders from mimicking, imitating, “diluting the purity of the practice,” or worse: simply participating in such practices as noncredentialed outsiders.  On a surface level the notion of cultural privacy is difficult to take seriously for various reasons. The boundaries of native cultures are often very difficult to draw. In many instances individuals are free to claim tribal affiliation without any participation in ancestral customs and norms and, even more importantly, without demonstrating how the scrutiny of those norms that

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speak to their dignity would seriously undermine the general well-being of their lives. What are we to make, for example, of Kennewick Man? This case turns on the accidental discovery of the skeletal remains of a man believed to be over nine thousand years old. Based on the early examination of scientists, he was deemed Caucasoid. This term does not mean white or even European. Rather, this descriptive term may be used to pick out certain biological features of a broad category that includes South Asian groups as well as Europeans.24 Kennewick Man’s bones discovered in July of 1996 by two college students along the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, share company with a burgeoning collection of evidence that the earliest inhabitants of the New World may have been a Caucasoid people. The evidence is, as many scientists agree, tentative. Before scientists had a chance to conduct adequate tests and examinations of the remains, the United States Army Corps seized it and secured it in a laboratory vault. The Army Corps, succumbing to demands from various Native American tribes claiming ownership of Kennewick Man as their ancestral property, had decidedly different criteria for deciding who and what counted as qualified for “cultural affiliation.” Umatilla Indians, along with a coalition of five tribes and bands of the Columbia River basin, made a formal claim to the skeleton. The corps received more than a dozen other claims for the skeleton. They were all within geographic proximity to where the skeleton had been found.25 In spite of the conclusions of physical anthropologists who argued on the basis of strong evidence revealed by migratory patterns and other compelling factors “that it was not possible to demonstrate a relationship between a nine-thousand-year-old remains and any modern tribe of the area,” because those tribes were relatively new and pushed out other tribes that had occupied the territories before them and, in the face of scientific evidence that the Army Corps had no basis for claiming that the skeleton had a connection to the Umatillas, the corps, nevertheless, assumed that anyone who died in the continental United States prior to a certain date was automatically Native American.26 Qualitative differences among competing tribes suddenly became irrelevant. Scientific criteria that determined the origins of the skeletons to be those of a nine-thousand-year-old male Caucasoid were insignificant as far as the Army Corps was concerned. They became insignificant against the backdrop of political factors that had to be negotiated with various Native American tribes such as land issues, water rights, dams, salmon fishing, hydroelectric projects, and toxic waste dumps. The issue, as far as Native American tribes were concerned, was one of both privacy and property. In this case one would be hard pressed to call it cultural privacy. One needs to ask: whose culture?

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Tribes, certain that Kennewick Man was a descendant of their people, the original people of the United States—despite tribal differentiations that continued to distinguish them today—were agreed that Kennewick Man should be buried in a secret site and that he should never be made available to scientists. This conviction is part of religious faith, transmitted and maintained through oral histories, that Native Americans have always been part of the North American land since the beginning of time. That scientists can purportedly show marked biological differences between a nine-thousandyear-old skeleton and modern tribes today is irrelevant.27 Anthropologists and folklorists employ various criteria to determine cultural privacy as a valid protocol norm that ought to restrain research. Does the material gathered meet the ethical standards at the time of the original research? Does the availability of information cause harm? I will allude to two landmark cases featured in Brown’s book and then argue that the notion of Cultural Privacy Heritage protection in the Global Commons of the twenty-first century is untenable. I will submit, further, that from a psychological standpoint it is almost impossible. I will then demonstrate how a cosmopolitan approach to culture and moral psychology is better suited to the lives of human beings in the complex world of the twenty-first century.  In Bulun Bulun & Milpurrurru v. R&T Textiles Pty Ltd., the Australian courts set a precedent that made it possible for an entire tribe or clan to claim equal ownership of an individual artistic work with the artist. The case was tried in Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory in 1997. The artist, Johnny Bulun Bulun, is a member of a clan community known as the Ganalbingu people. He is committed to Aboriginal law and to his community. The moral defense for his case rested on the premise that his paintings were a physical manifestation of the fiduciary relationship between himself and his people. He claimed that his creations were a sacred duty entrusted to him by his clan. They were acts of creations meant to honor the beings who gave the land to the territory on which his clan resides. Any misuse of the image endangered the clan’s relationship to the spirits who inhabit the land. Bulun Bulun’s claim was that his designs belonged not only to him but also to his clan.28 The heart of the case, however, was a correlate claim made by George Milpurrurru, a clan member. He claimed that the Ganalbingu people as a whole had rights in traditional designs that were inextricably tied to rights in land.29 This case was largely symbolic. Johnny Bulun Bulun, whose paint-

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ings are reported to generate more than US$135 million in annual sales for Aboriginal artists and the dealers who represent them, had, along with other painters, sued firms that dealt in textiles showing unauthorized images of the artist’s work.30 In a previous case against R&T Textiles Pty Ltd., monetary damage charges had already been dropped when a financial settlement was reached between the company and the parties. So what exactly was the point that the case was meant to demonstrate? It was meant to demonstrate that a community, or a tribe, can legitimately be regarded as the default joint owner of a work of art and make remedial claims if the original artist, protected by copyright law, fails or refuses to enforce the copyright. This was, in effect, the outcome of the ruling passed in the Australian court. Johnny Bulun Bulun had already been financially recompensed for damages against the infringing textile company. Did clan leader Mr. Milpurrurru still possess an equal interest in Mr. Bulun Bulun’s painting, The Water Hole, for which suit of unauthorized reproduction had originally been filed? The court ruled in the negative. But should Mr. Bulun Bulun fail to initiate future action against what any member of the clan deemed unauthorized reproduction, the Australian legal system grants the right to remedial action to the clan. Remedial action means the right to seek recompense through the courts should the original artist fail to initiate legal action. Johnny Bulun Bulun claimed that reproduction of his artwork upset the religious, political, and legal balance of his society. Production of the painting without adherence to the law governing its production diminishes its sacredness “and interferes adversely with the relationship and trust established between myself, my ancestors, and Barnda [the long-neck tortoise, a creature being].”31 In a telling but all too short commentary, Brown muses on why reproduction of At the Waterhole in books and newspapers is theologically acceptable to the artist and clan, while reproduction of the same design on cloth is not. Brown argues that when an artist allows his work to be exhibited in public forums and mass media, the artist cedes control over who may see the image and how they may behave in its presence.32 I will return to this important point later on because it provides a pivotal insight into the unavoidability of transformation that takes place once any phenomenon—be it a form of art, a random bit of conversation, the odor of someone next to you, or the sound of metal against metal—is filtered through human subjectivity. By the latter I mean the plethora of all of one’s experiences, emotions, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas. Sometimes the transformation is gradual. Sometimes it is instantaneous. This is a re-

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markable human feat. It is also one of the most problematic aspects of human encounters we have with others’ experiences, identities, emotions, and thoughts. “What makes you laugh makes me cry” need not be a statement uttered by two cognitively and emotionally radically different human beings but instead two people who, in certain cases, have their experiences filtered through uniquely selected “subjectivity prisms.”  The second case study deals with ethnic or tribal proprietorship of signs or symbols. Formally we will refer to this case as Sign Wars.33 Quite recently the flag of New Mexico was voted as the best in the United States by a flag studies organization known as the Vexillological Association. The sun symbol design of the flag was originally inspired by the design feature of a nineteenth-century ceramic pot made by an anonymous potter from Zia Pueblo, an Indian community near Albuquerque. State documents reveal that the Zia sun symbol “reflects the pueblo tribal philosophy with its weal of pantheistic spiritualism teaching the basic harmony of all things in the universe.”34 One should note that this idea is not unique to pueblo tribal philosophy. It may be found in any number of Eastern religions and philosophies. Brown notes that in 1963 the pantheistic sentiments were formalized in the official salute to the flag in these words: “I salute the State of New Mexico and the Zia symbol of perfect friendship among the united cultures.” The Zia people, however, rebuffed this display of friendship by demanding reparations for the state’s use of the sun symbol. The amount: $76 million by 2001. That figure represented a million dollars for each year that the sun symbol had been used on the state’s flag and letterhead. Peter Pino, Zia’s tribal administrator, stated that the Zia sometimes approved the use of a symbol by businesses that sought the permission of the tribe and that acknowledged in writing that it belonged to the pueblo tribe. The heart of the case, as Brown points out, was whether tribal insignia, difficult as it was to define, “should be granted the protections conferred on the insignia of local, state, and federal agencies.”35 Related to this was another contentious issue: were insignia already registered by commercial firms disparaging of Native American cultures? We should remember that until quite late into the twentieth century, copyright laws did not cover the works of indigenous artists in Australia. Such works were thought to be devoid of the artistic merit that would place it on par with white artists. Brown notes that although Native activists are wary of copyright laws that protect their works now and fully support the

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protection clause of it, many oppose the fair use component of copyright law. They oppose it on the grounds that it is incompatible with their cultural rules.36 Native activists have supported trademark laws and the moral doctrine component (sometimes known as author’s rights) of copyright laws. Moral rights are perpetual. They are intended to prevent one from defamation against copyrighted work. Brown writes: “This potentially cordons off material from fair use, including the selective quotation of material by someone whose views the original author finds offensive.”37 The issue, however, is not as simple as it appears on the surface. It leaves open whether a number of artifacts, works, and/or representations are works of something else. Or, ought a group’s folklore to be classified? If all the folklores, myths, and oral personal experiences were transcribed and published, would the moral rights doctrine grant the group jurisdiction over innovative renditions of those rights? Brown sums it up succinctly: “If groups control all uses of works defined as theirs, would this effectively prevent others from quoting or borrowing from those materials in perpetuity?”38 In response to an Australian study Our Culture: Our Future, legislation was designed to protect indigenous people from derogatory treatment. The latter has come to be defined as anything that results in material distortion, mutilation of material, and alteration to a work that is prejudicial to an author’s honor or reputation. A subsequent report observed the following: “it will be hard to distinguish between simple portrayals of Aboriginal Life and investigative reporting that documents troubling aspects of it.”39 Those skeptical of the proposal grounded their suspicions on the premise that such measures would interfere with public media discussion of native peoples. Activists, on the other hand, argued that there were far too many loopholes in the legislation, and that it dealt insufficiently with the question of who was legally qualified to exercise moral rights after the death of an author.40

III. Counterarguments against Applied Culture Faith: The Right to Cultural Privacy The case studies we have examined—from the myriad claims to the remains of Kennewick Man by various tribes with different group identities, to questions of what constitutes derogatory treatment of an indigenous people and the means of determining symbolic versus real ownership of artifacts and symbols—all rest on the assumption that the right to cultural privacy is a legitimate idea. Anthropologists are agreed that it is. But should moral philosophers be bound to sociological and anthropological data without subjecting this claim

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to philosophical analysis? An initial examination of the right to cultural privacy reveals that its epistemological and interpretive monopoly is defended on the grounds of insiderism. Although I have argued against insiderism and its moral antecedent—the notion of the morally credentialed insider—more needs to be said in order to debunk the foundation on which it rests. The morally credentialed insider is one who must presuppose an exhaustive or, at least, vast understanding of the makings, operations, and transmission of his or her culture. To test the validity of this claim, one will need to ask: what counts as a condition for moral insiderism? What does one need to do, be, and believe in order to be a credentialed moral insider? We ought to note that the right to cultural privacy is a claim that is made even within societies that practice civic as opposed to cultural or ethnic nationalism. In civic nationalism there is a liberal commitment to separate culture from state on the grounds that, culturally, a pluralistic society has an obligation to uphold several expressions of the good cultivated by free individuals as long as those expressions do not encroach on the individual political rights of others. In this sense, culture is Janus-faced. It relies on the political values and principles that unite human beings with various beliefs, traditions, and customs to organize their lives—and “cultural differences”— around a set of core political values that guarantees to each protection of their inalienable rights. Cultural expressions, while they are to be permitted by the state, must in no way violate the integrity, dignity, and rights of others. It is for this reason that liberal societies should not endorse the following position of a cultural group living in its midst: It is part of our religious, and a fortiori, our cultural belief that girls between the ages of eight to ten must have their clitorises removed—including a huge portion of the vulva—and further, that they must first live with a man between those ages who will initiate them in the art of sexual healing and loving and who will then, upon successful demonstration of mastering the “pleasing arts,” will be married to said man for a period of two years, after which, upon the judgment of the man, he may decide to retain her for an indefinite period, or give her back to her family.

When those sorts of cultural expressions threaten the dignity, well-being, and the rights of persons not to be harmed, liberal societies reject them. They reject them on the basis that they are prohibited under universal human rights declarations. An important condition for making a rights claim is the following: the individual asserting the rights claim is recognized as a candidate, if you will, that plausibly corresponds to the claim being made. Minimally, this requires

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human beings and not apples and oranges to assert human rights claims. I raise this example because it points to another serious problem with the right to cultural privacy. The problem is that there is simply no way of responsibly assessing the rights claims of its claimants. In order to make conceptual sense of the notion of the right to privacy, what must one presuppose about those who make the claim? I submit that the strong sense of culture appealed to in cultural privacy claims requires us to presuppose that those making the claim have a strong a corresponding identity that fits the culture whose name they are seeking to protect via an appeal to privacy. When the criteria for identity are themselves often problematic and, in several cases, outright indeterminable, and, furthermore, when the right to cultural privacy is invoked to protect not just the individual claimants as individuals living in a particular culture, but all those who are publicly identified with the culture regardless of the personal identity they hold apart from the one taken to be their core identity, what ought to be the proper philosophical approach to cultural privacy?41 Our discussion need not be restricted to the case studies we have been examining. Later on, we will have several opportunities to show how applied culture-faith is a neurotic manifestation of tribalism. France and Quebec, for example, are among the best example of countries committed to applied culture-faith. The actors engaged in applied culture-faith are representative of individuals from all over the free Western democracies as well as the nonfree countries who believe in their right to fight culture wars. The latter are engulfing more of the Western world than we are apt to comprehend. For now, however, it is worth observing in the case studies involving indigenous peoples where the presumption of homogeneity within an in-group is not entirely inaccurate, how the issue of identity need not be sufficiently indexed to its cultural predicate in order for rights assertions to cultural privacy to have deep purchase on the legal and larger cultural public debates. Kennewick Man was claimed by various Native American tribes. Were these individuals from various tribes collapsed into a single compound— Natives by tourists—an insult would have been dealt and the offense felt. In the claims for the body of Kennewick Man, however, local “tribal identities” superceded any presumptuous meaning the term Native could ever have had for outsiders. The tribes in the surrounding areas, while sharing similar characteristics, were also, one must remember, tribally differentiated not just in name but according to subtler beliefs, customs, and ancestral lineage. Various tribes consist of people who have very strong tribal ties to some whose life experiences have very little to do with their tribal affiliations. It is analogous to, in name only, nonobserving Catholics whose beliefs and lifestyles are

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deeply at odds with even a thin conception of Catholicism claiming a strong Catholic identity. The claims to the remains of Kennewick Man by several tribes, therefore, were premature in many respects. The major one is that even if scientists had been able to prove that Kennewick Man was non-Caucasoid and a descendant of those persons who, in today’s racial and cultural taxonomy, are regarded as “Native American,” by what right would various tribes, each with its unique set of markers that mark them as bearers of a culture, have to the remains of Kennewick Man? Leaving aside for a moment the judgments of scientists who had determined that, based on the age of the remains of the corpse, it could not have belonged to any of the competing tribes vying for ownership, and that those tribes’ geographic occupation of the area in which Kennewick Man was found was too recent to establish a relational link between the tribes and the corpse, on what grounds were the claims of ownership being made? They turn out to be religious grounds. There are two problematic issues here. The first is: should liberal societies treat such religious claims seriously? Religious claims are neither sacrosanct nor inherently binding upon the legal practices and legislators of a liberal society. They are subjected to all sorts of legal and political analyses that are filtered through the contextual prism in which they are being made. For example, our legal system (to say nothing of our social mores) does not recognize polygamy, polyandry, or female genital mutilation as either legitimate forms of religious expression or fundamental features of a religion’s identity. The courts and our legal machinery have, in other cases, granted to members of certain religious sects exemptions from specific acts that stand in direct violation of their religious beliefs and identities. The courts will continue to deploy their own criteria in answering the question posed. From the perspective of the moral cosmopolitan philosopher, the legitimacy of the question can be gauged by examining the conditions of identity.

IV. Representation without Authorization Issues of identity are always problematic because they involve several roles and the perspectives of several social players. As the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed, our identities are not just first-person predicates. Much of who we take ourselves to be involves, to varying degrees, taking into account the conception and perspective others have of us. We assess these perspectives—or fail to—and factor them into our self-image.

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The latter serves to shore up much of our personal identities as human beings. Tribalism’s appeal lies partly in its ability to confer a historical identity on people who can partake in it equally without experiencing any of the events that foment the identities of those who share in them. In other instances, tribal identity in the form of cultural nationalism can be a form of mass delusion. During the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs in the early 1990s, there was a constant appeal to the mythic recounting of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. This battle has since played a role in cementing the “Serbian self” as one that was forged in the crucibles of oppression. This sense of oneself as a historic victim is an identity that may be held by any contemporary living Serbian. It matters little whether the conditions that first established this identity are still present. One’s historical identity as a victim supercedes all of one’s other identities and overrides experiences to the contrary—a wealthy Serbian raised as an aristocrat who employs and subjugates his employees can still have that identity, and have it in common with his subordinates. This is what holds nationalism together. These mythic connections that have little or nothing to do with one’s lived experience and the reality of one’s life. As far as cultural identity is concerned, since human beings are not reducible to their cultures, that is, each person’s identity is greater than, subtler than, and imperceptibly more complex than even the most exhaustive account of culture, claims made in the name of cultural identity ought to be treated with philosophical skepticism. If a person claims an identity as a father but we discover that he has only seen and spoken to his seventeen-year-old child once and has failed to fulfill any parental duties, we would treat his claim to that identity lightly. We would say it is a purely substanceless identity. The problem, therefore, with the argument from the right to privacy and more particularly, the claims by various tribes to the remains of Kennewick Man on religious grounds, is that methods for accurately gauging the connection between the religious identities of those making the claim against the unspecified physiological identity—to say nothing of religious identity, assuming it had one—of the corpse, either do not exist or are not used. Such tribes have no more right to claim the corpse of a man whose identity remained shrouded in mystery anymore than I would to the remains of, say, my great-great-grandfather whose remains might lie somewhere on someone’s property in southern Portugal. The case would not be true with, say, my mother, brother, or spouse, or—to stretch the legal complexities—a beloved platonic friend. That is because, even in the absence of a burial proxy, there is a reasonable context in which my relationship with the latter

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grants my demands for their remains legitimacy because of the following reasons: our social relations with others and the presumed sharing and exchange of values, experiences, and emotions are exactly what give reality to such demands. Why should there be a presumption on the part of a third party to honor the demand for my loved one’s remains? Because the nexus of social relations and the presumed reciprocity between us is sufficient evidence to assure that my wishes in all likelihood do correspond to the desires of my loved one. Placing myself in the position that the deceased would have had in the absence of a burial proxy, the reasoning is as follows: Retrieving my remains is a great desire on the part of J. Since I hold this friendship in high esteem and did not leave a burial proxy, and, further, since I cannot be harmed whether my remains are left to rot in a strange place or are honored with the sacraments as my friend wishes, and since I value the happiness and well-being of my friend and do not oppose the sacraments, the demand is simply one more, but final exchange of demands that we made on each other in our lives together. Furthermore, as someone who was raised as a Catholic and who on occasion casually expressed the desire to have a religious funeral, I would expect J to retrieve my remains. From a moral perspective, the above reasoning honors the agency of the deceased, or to be more precise, it makes one final gesture in the name of reciprocity and mutuality that pays respect to the agency of the deceased. The reasoning also proves that I am indirectly authorized by my friend to represent him. One of the reasons the return of the remains of Kennewick Man to Native Americans is so troubling—religious demands not withstanding—is that the demand functions as a form of representation. But it is representation without authorization. Since direct authorization is not a necessary condition for the request, we may argue that indirect authorization that may be reasonably inferred is a sufficient condition. In this case, no Native American tribe had any more right of access than did scientists or, more importantly, since the remains where found on public land, its rightful owner is the people, whose trustee and fiduciary is the government of the United States. The case of Kennewick Man is a clear demonstration of the amorality of identity politics. Scientific progress came to a complete halt once more because of an arbitrary political criterion that sought to determine who were and were not original settlers. The criterion for determining the latter was nonobjective. Instead it was based on a fixed but arbitrary date that accorded with a mélange of historical treaties, occupation, bad conscience, and historical guilt. Representation without authorization is properly addressed by a single question: who has the right to speak for whom?

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V. Who Has the Right to Speak for Whom? I raise this point because in even the most homogenous cultures—where homogeneity refers to shared ethnicity, religious, and political convictions—no one can authoritatively speak as the cultural spokesperson for an entire group of people and, thus, advance claims in its name. Culture is both external and internal to human beings who, at each moment in their navigation through time and space, will be selective in applying or disregarding aspects of culture as they serve or fail to serve their needs, desires, and goals. Each person will be the primary and objective practitioner of culture. It is obvious that the right to cultural privacy stems from the impulse to preserve limited cultural diversity. But who is to say that the individual members of cultures wish to have this distinctness that diversity requires remain in place? Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature notes that “people have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly borrow whatever works best.”42 In the case of native cultures, this point is even more salient. It is the ordinary anonymous individual, struggling to successfully negotiate his way in the world, whose voice is unheard, whose imaginative and innovative maneuverings of cultural worlds is left invalidated by a society’s one-dimensional commitment to cultural distinctness. In whose name exactly is the right to cultural privacy made when its claim is uttered? To tell an individual—any individual—that his representatives who share his physiological traits are stand-ins for him is to discredit the inviolate sanctity of the individual’s life; it is to limit and stigmatize his capacity to choose among a plethora of “cultural options.” Culture in the broadest sense is a part of the human phenotype; it is a distinctive design that allows human beings to “survive, prosper, and perpetuate our lineages. . . . [T]he phenomenon we call ‘culture’ arises as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they institute conventions to coordinate their labors and adjudicate their conflicts.”43 What notion of culture and what philosophy of culture would best equip the individual to partake in the human pool of discoveries that we call culture? For now, I submit that it most certainly is not one that regards culture as a phenomenon that ought to exist abstracted from the life of the individual. The right to cultural privacy is deeply flawed by, among other things, its blindness to the importance of diversity over time.44 Once more, we must ask: what must we presuppose about the presuppositions inherent in that

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claim? What would be required for a culture—a phenomenon that does not exist in a museum, but rather is out there, pulsating, ever changing in a very public world—to be privately protected? It would require that one assume that culture is something that can be frozen in time and space, that it is something that should be protected from outsiders that is in itself so powerful a force that it is impervious to the contestations, offerings, and contributions of others—be they insiders or outsiders. A culture, however, as Thomas Sowell notes, is “not a symbolic pattern preserved like a butterfly in amber. Its place is not in a museum but in the practical activities of daily life, where it evolves under the stress of competing goals and other competing cultures.”45 Every person who makes a gesture, who utters a no, who offers something else, something that has sprung from her imagination, is both part of the culture that she contests, modifies, and challenges, and also not part of it. She is not part of it, or exists apart from it to the extent that her personal identity is not entirely reducible to her perception of her culture. If we take a naturalistic approach to culture, then we may make the following claims: Ideas can be transmitted; when they are transmitted from one person to another they may propagate. When ideas propagate successfully in different forms they may end up invading whole populations. Culture, it has been argued, is comprised of contagious ideas.46 Sowell also argues that cultures are not static entities that ought to be celebrated. Rather, they compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done. Who are the judges who determine how things get better done? Not outside observers but, rather, the individuals coping with their worlds as they negotiate the difficult realities of life. The writings, mores, norms, artworks, customs, and artifacts that identify a group’s predominant way of life as a culture are, by their nature, and because of their embodiment in human characters, ideas propagating phenomena. One interesting feature of the naturalistic approach to culture is its emphasis on the epidemiology of representation. It attempts to explain culture by investigating why and how some ideas are contagious. The Naturalistic Approach underscores the unreliability of oral transmission as a means of reproduction. Oral transmissions rely on accurate memory and a caste of mind that bears closer resemblance to a machine than to a human mind. As a means of reproduction, oral transmission generates a fuzzy set of representations that are more or less faithful versions, rather than exact copies of one another.47 Technological innovations such as printing and recordings made the duplication of existing works possible and similar to each other.

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Technology, I would argue, is precisely what makes culture public and more cosmopolitan. It takes it outside the parochial sphere where it is trapped when its “ideas” are reproduced orally. When men such as Galileo, Descartes, and Huygens began to imagine and interpret the universe mechanistically, they made it possible for modern technology to develop.48 Science is as much a contributor to culture as any other human invention or artifice. Furthermore, since, more than any other group of individuals, scientists are the most dispassionate vis-à-vis the pursuit and practice of their professional vocation—they pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge—their contributions and personal and professional orientation may be said to be the most cosmopolitan. An argument can be made, for example, that philosophy, originating at the central moment in human civilization when it did, was the greatest act of cultural creation. It was from this discipline that every other contemporary field of study in the humanities and social sciences emerged. More importantly, the development of science and the phenomena studied today by science were the province of philosophy up until the eighteenth century. At this juncture we may make a distinction between what I will call human culture and petty culture. Human culture is the domain of the arts, humanities, and science. The grand historical cultural developments may have originated in a specific epoch and under the aegis of those who lived in specific regions of the world. Science as we know it is a roughly sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury invention. It originated in the work of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Newton. It is a Western invention. Its birthplace is Europe. It is not only that its beneficiaries are to be found outside its place of origin and development. More importantly, its practitioners today are located all over the globe. The practitioners of science today are not restricted to the region and the “national” or “racial” group of its initial creators.49 Persons from far reaches of the globe were and are all invited to participate in science.  It is at the intersection of the conceptual sophistication of technological communication (involving numerous levels of abstraction) and the simplicity of oral transmission that the naked vulnerability underlying the right to cultural privacy is exposed. Oral transmission of culture occurs in limited space and time. It occurs at the moment of telling. It exists afterward, as a mental cognate in the minds of those who heard it. Unless there are others present who can affirm and/or contest the rendition of the narrative, its authenticity remains open-ended and not necessarily factually true. Stories passed on this way generationally will undoubtedly change over time. Peo-

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ple’s memories differ. Human beings are psychological creatures, and their ability to retell stories is influenced by a host of other criteria besides exactitude and accuracy. People forget details that are disturbing. Impressions are eventually what get transmitted. This is the fuzzy, vague approximations that were referred to earlier. What is important is this: regardless of how the stories are told, how they have been modified over time and how such modifications might actually compromise their accuracy, what confers legitimacy on them is one thing only—the storyteller’s membership in a tribe. Physiology, therefore, becomes the marker of authenticity. The argument for the right to cultural privacy is a plea to be left unexposed not just from the inquiring eyes of others, including insiders who may contest that which is told and are thus labeled as inauthentic. It is a wish to have the single criterion on which truth standards and cultural identity are based—a human’s physiological characteristics—left unchallenged. “Racial memory” achieves immutability by default: the narrative told is true because it emanates from the narrator’s body, which comes with internal epistemological infallibility. This form of standpoint epistemology is the foundation of the right to cultural privacy. This holds true for all forms of strong tribalism. It was true of the white racial supremacy ideology of Nazi Germany. It is true of the ethnic nationalism of Serbia whose adherents defend the decimation of whole populations of human beings. It is true today of the medieval legislations that serve to protect the intrinsic tribalism of the British monarchy.

VI. Ethnocide or Culture Killings: Is It So Bad? In keeping with the moral goals of cosmopolitanism, I pose the above question against the backdrop of a major premise: people are not reducible to their cultures, so, provided they have available life-affirming options, they can continue to flourish and prosper as human beings. Freedom from the necessity may be a way of allowing human beings the freedom to be finally born. Distinct cultural models are like wombs: one cannot get outside of them. One is not permitted to. If cultures are interactive, dynamic, and competitive phenomena that promote the best way of life for their members, then—according to the criterion of cultural traditionalists—any act that modifies cultures to the point where some of their traditional customs have atrophied and been replaced with new and competitive ones is an act that has irreparably harmed the culture and, a fortiori, its individuals. But if one can demonstrate that certain cultures are not fostering health in their communities because of, say, superstitious beliefs,

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and one is in the position to challenge such beliefs in order to achieve better health, then one has an obligation to do so. If one is in doubt, one can be assured by the knowledge that there are certain universal values that all cultures aspire to. Health is one of them. Health has to be such a value because it is a precondition of life. One values the life of the individual. The principle secures that life; it stands above the sanctity of any cultural belief or custom. I also pose the question of cultural ethnocide for another reason. I have begun a discussion of tribalism by focusing on the least politically problematic tribes. No indigenous form of tribalism is even comparable to the tribalism of Nazi Germany or the ethnic nationalisms that plague the contemporary world. The indigenous tribes discussed in this chapter are disarmed and, really, of no threat to anyone. The most ostensibly defined tribes, or those that appear most easy to define—indigenous peoples—are actually not the proper prototype for tribalism. In fact, they represent tribalism in its most benign form. They are not the best example of tribalism in either its ontological or its political form. I have spent so much time on the case of indigenous peoples because globally they represent the lowest socioeconomic consequent of a marginalized form of tribalism. As a result, they are more likely than any other group of “formal tribes,” those synonymous with the nation-state, to suffer continued marginalization, and socioeconomic and educational deprivation. I submit, therefore, that we abolish the very concept of native peoples, or indigenous peoples. In the world today it is a concept that keeps those individuals typecast and outside the global commons. Regardless of the lip service paid to the past injustices, the usage of the term still leaves them stigmatized as second-class peoples who, by definition, ought never to enter the mainstream. According to one nefarious viewpoint, metaphysically speaking, something about the natures of native peoples ill-equip them for the success and participation in shared values that immigrants, who initially, far more estranged from the values of their host countries, wrestle with and use to transform their lives to great advantage. The term indigenous people has a religious aura about it that mystifies the individuals to whom it is affixed. It robs them of their humanity and patronizes them in a way that is stultifying. One might ask: So what is the big deal if indigenous people are leaving their cultures in droves similar to that of North Dakotan youth abandoning their rural towns for big cities? Why mourn the loss of customs and norms among indigenous peoples any more than we do the losses among religious sects? The proclivity for doing so betrays a narrow understanding of the ways in which human beings can adapt to different lifeconducing value systems that promote their survival in the world.

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The notion of indigenous peoples is also potentially hubristic from an epistemological standpoint. This remains an open-ended question scientifically. The case of Kennewick Man testifies to this. Scientific rulings about the veracity of the origins of any indigenous peoples to the land they occupy are always tentative. Some new corpse may (and often does) turn up to upset previous theories of origin. Besides, several claims to cultural originality, especially those involving food, have been shown to be false. Chili peppers, a central staple in Chinese food, are not indigenous to China but are from Central and South America. The tomato, a signature staple in Italian dishes, is not indigenous to Italy but is a New World crop that was introduced into Europe by explorers returning home from their adventures. Plantain, a form of banana, is a staple used in the national dishes of many Caribbean countries and especially among the Yanomani Indians in Amazonia, a region shared by both Brazil and Venezuela. Plantains, however, were introduced from Southeast Asia.50 Pinker, citing M. Toussaint-Samant’s History of Food, echoes a similar sentiment in highlighting the shallowness of so-called cultural originality and purity. Ancestors of today’s Hasidic Jews did not wear black coats and fur-lined hats in Levantine deserts, nor did the Plains Indians ride horses before the arrival of Europeans. This point is particularly interesting because in the global iconic imagination, an Indian and his horse are symbiotic. One cannot imagine the American Indian without his horse. Potatoes in Ireland, paprika in Hungary, and tomatoes in Italy all were introduced into Europe after Columbus discovered the New World.51 The colloquial criteria for cultural authenticity turn out to be shallow; they turn on the common practice of making major differences out of minor details. Finally, there is a form of reverse discrimination defended via a form of reasoning that defends indigenous peoples’ right to protect their cultural purity from contaminating outsiders, and that decries any preservationist move on the part of Western societies to protect their Kultur from disruption by foreigners. In the past, several countries in Europe including Germany and Austria have adopted a preservationist ethic and used it to justify preventing dark-skinned people from swamping their nations. But what is good for indigenous peoples to maintain their traditions is also good enough for societies with high Kultur to preserve their cultures from people with odd customs—goes the counter reasoning.52 This is not my position. And the Western preservationist ethic is indeed marred by its preservationist defense of a hegemonic notion of Kultur. From a cosmopolitan perspective, though, I do believe that there is a double standard at work. Any purist appeal to cultural authenticity not only overlooks shifts in demographic realities, but also attempts to subvert the au-

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tonomy of future generations by forcing on them a preservationist ethic that may have become obsolete because of demographic shifts by the time they come of age. An egalitarian approach to culture cannot favor the protection of any one culture over another. Why should the loss of cultural integrity of Bavarians because of increased African immigrants in the region matter less or more to us than the loss of cultural integrity of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon? Is the humanity of the Bavarians worth more or less than the individuals of the Anlo-Ewe tribe in Ghana? Why should we not take seriously the psychological need of ethnic Serbians to live under a pure Serbian culture with imagined connections to thirteenth-century ancestors—assuming that this need never expressed itself in violence—but we should, so goes the reasoning, take the needs of tribes in Africa and South America to retain their cultural purity seriously? Do Western ethnoparticularists carry the burden of proving that their humanity as expressed in a culturally pure environment need not be compromised by outside cultures? If so, then indigenous tribes occupy a moral default position. Outside influences by definition is equivalent to annihilation. If Western ethnonationalists attempt to protect the purity of their cultures they are called cultural chauvinists—which they are. When indigenous cultures do the same they are said to be displaying cultural integrity. In keeping with my cosmopolitan separation of culture and state, I submit that no culture—indigenous or nonindigenous—has the right to cultural protection for the purpose of maintaining cultural purity. The individuals in cultures have a right to protection against physical violence and threats. They cannot have the right to cultural protection any more than religious organizations have a right to protect their sects from dying out. Part of the problem of Western protectionism vis-à-vis indigenous tribes and outside populations is that it betrays an unconscious form of racism at worst, and exoticism at best. Michael Walzer, an ardent defender of indigenous populations, expresses this form of liberal racism and exoticism. He writes that confronted with modernity that all human tribes are endangered species.53 All of them, he notes, regardless of power, have been transformed. He argues that we might recognize the right to resist transformation and to build walls against modern culture.54 The reference to members of the human race as members of a species is upsetting. Walzer is a decent human being who writes from a deep moral source. He is trying to widen the domain of the ethical by using language that comes closer to describing animals rather than humans precisely by preying on people’s sense of animals and nature as existing on a continuum of endangerment in ways that human beings do not. For indeed, there is one human

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species, and if indigenous “species” are threatened, then so are all human beings who are in reality members of the same species. Indigenous tribes must be recast as animals in order for this point to be driven home: indigenous tribes fall below the threshold of ordinary humanity and for this reason they are to be regarded more like exotic animals rather than full-fledged human beings. Human beings, in truth, ought not to and cannot be exempt from the challenges that face all human cultures—indigenous and nonindigenous alike. If we considered indigenous peoples as part of the human family then we would no more devise special programs to protect their ways of life than we do in the case of nonindigenous peoples. To do otherwise is to place the psychological well-being of members of indigenous tribes above those in mainstream populations. But, truth be told, reference to indigenous tribes and peoples as species is upsetting because it conjures up a type of humanity for full-fledged human beings that predicates their survival on a univocal sense of identity and a habitat that is a constitutive feature for their survival as human beings. Some animals, to the best of my knowledge, are the only living creatures that are intrinsically disposed to live definitively vis-à-vis their survival in the environments in which they were born. Endangered species die off. To often save them we take them out of their natural habitat and place them in controlled environments. There they can reproduce and recover. To follow the logic of the “endangered species indigenous tribes” analogy, the reasonable thing to do would be to take such members of indigenous tribes out of their habitat into controlled environments. But this form of assimilation would be cruel as it would bypass the crucial need for humans to organically grow into new environments, a feat, as I shall argue in the next section, that will take generations to happen. More importantly, it overrides the individual’s capacity for choice. Animals do not have moral agency, therefore, we need not consult them and wait for their consent when we take them out of their endangered habitats. But indigenous tribal persons do possess agency. And this cannot be ignored. They cannot be forced to leave their environments if they do not want to, although they certainly cannot opt to prevent future generations from leaving their environments. There is a plausible criticism on the order of: what is being advocated here is the equal treatment of unequals and that this is a form of injustice. The criticism, however, in one sense relies on the assumption that ways of life can be indefinitely protected from externals incursions by favoritist policies that themselves prevent organic changes from taking place within threatened societies. It does not take into account qualitative differences among types of incursions—say, literacy programs for native populations, versus illegal logging and poaching within such communities—but, rather, conflates

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all change and any negotiable exchanges as sociologically disruptive. The criticism presumes that cultural protectionism is an ethically viable means of maintaining stasis among members of the human family whose membership is truncated precisely at the level where a crucial ontological distinction is made between us and them. Protectionism protects all too often ways of life that would see members of the human family living below their basic capabilities and below the range of human potential broadly construed. Equal treatment of unequals is not always fair. Indigeneity and preservation are not moral axioms. But one’s position on this issue can take the reverse course. It is precisely because indigenous persons are not the equals of nonindigenous populations on too many levels, including health and capabilities, that there should be the equivalent of a modified affirmative action policy toward them. To bring them up to a level of equality—and our objector should admit they are not equal, or else why the protectionist laws?—means measures will have to be taken for them to achieve greater parity with outsiders in areas such as life expectancy, basic health, and infant mortality. We may turn the objection on its head and say that in the name of fairness and equality for all human beings, we will not treat members of indigenous populations as equals. Rather, in the spirit of how affirmative action functioned for blacks and women in the United States, we will create policies that will bring them up to a basic level of capabilities functioning and bring their customs and practices that are at odds with international law and democratic human rights in alignment with those in the industrialized democracies. There is one final point to be made about the criticism of treating unequals as equals. There are several indigenous groups that would use governmental state power to restrict the internal movements of its members in the name of group solidarity. This invocation of group rights sees the state intervening on behalf of the tribe to restrict the liberties of its members.55 Here the law has the moral obligation not to condone patriarchy or, say, religious discrimination in the case of a tribe discriminating against members who do not share the religious tradition. The law has the right in such cases to enforce fair and equal treatment. This becomes especially relevant when the restrictions against liberties are deeply at odds with say the Bill of Rights of the larger country. Thus the Unites States has at various times been complicitous in illiberality by exempting tribal councils of Native Americans from the constitutional requirement to respect the Bill of Rights.56 With the passing of the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, tribal governments are required to respect most constitutional rights. As Will Kymlicka notes, however, there are serious limits on judicial review of the actions of tribal councils. He writes: “If

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a member of an Indian tribe feels that her rights have been violated by the tribal council, she can seek redress in tribal court, but she cannot (except under exceptional circumstances) seek redress from the Supreme Court.”57 This means that human beings residing on North American soil can have their basic human rights curtailed by means of juridical autonomy of nations within the larger nation itself. It means that the constitutional commitment to sexual equality should be denied a woman simply because she is a member of a tribe whose illiberal policies would curtail her movements, her actions, and her freedom to exercise her judgments on behalf of her life. It treats the tribe and its traditions as self-validating regardless of whether or not the practices that constitute the tradition are oppressive. Hence, a woman or a child’s welfare is subordinate to the constitutional rulings of the larger society. One way out of this dilemma is to continue granting indigenous peoples, in this case Native Americans in the United States and Canada, efficacious citizenship rights.58 Government can make distinctions among tribal groups in ways that promote the equality among groups. It can protect groups from illegal incursions into their habitats and homes. But it cannot make distinctions among members of the entire body politic and use tribal affiliation as one criterion for doing so. If indigenous populations have citizenship rights, and if the government does not consider the value of human life according to tribal and nontribal affiliation—all human life is of equal moral value—then said citizen rights trump the illiberal practices of tribal councils. The state in effect would be saying: women qua human beings enjoy sexual equality. This is a moral and juridical axiom. A woman cannot be exempted from this category of treatment simply because she belongs to an indigenous tribe. If the government failed to exercise citizenship rights then it would be colluding with illiberality and guilty of sex discrimination on tribal grounds. No tribe residing on United States territory, in the name of equality and fairness, ought to be exempted from the constitutional requirement of sexual equality. It ought not to be exempted for several ethical reasons. The major reason is that exemption from protection of the law potentially results in persons having their humanity carved up into different categories. It assumes a radically different human nature for indigenous women, one that pits their suffering against the tribal need for cultural purity and solidarity, and one that subordinates this basic human right of a woman—bodily integrity—to the need for group coherency and cohesion. For a country to have a class of persons living in its domain that fall outside the purview of its constitutional protection is a betrayal of its fundamental commitment to equality and fairness. And, above all, it is a violation of the implicit social contract—recognized by the tribe or not—between the state and those who reside on its soil. To discriminate on

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the basis of tribal affiliation is to revert to a mode of existence that tarnished the reputation of the United States for centuries: the elevation of biological collectivism and the privileges associated with it above the constitutional Bill of Rights’ promise of liberty, equality, justice, and fairness for all. As Kymlicka puts it: “Demanding exemption from judicial review in the name of self-government, for many people, is a smokescreen behind which illiberal groups hide their oppressive practices.”59 What makes the situation more contentious is when members of a tribe seek outside judicial review on their own. That is when individual rights are being denied as they are in the Pueblo tribe where if a woman marries outside the tribe she and her children are denied membership. Not so with the men. So we have cases in which Indians are divided about their own traditions and seek redress in judicial review. Native women’s associations based on their worry about increased sexual discrimination on their reserves have demanded that the decisions of Aboriginal governments be subject to the Canadian Charter.60 Government in its position of advocacy for equality, justice, and fairness cannot fall prey to the Argument from Historical Inequity. That is, given the contentious historical relations between indigenous peoples and the state and the moral atrocities inflicted against native populations by the government, the government cannot, out of retrospective shame and embarrassment, refrain from demanding that those living within its borders adhere to the constitutional and Bill of Rights clauses and articles that regulate human life and conduct in the civilized polity. Contra Kymlicka, I would argue that not only immigrants, but the presence of any indigenous group within the geographical boundaries of the state entails accepting the state’s enforcement of liberalism and its commitment to democratic rights. Again, my worry is that, short of a centralized system of rights arbitration and judicial review, we short-sight those who have not had the fortune of being born in a system that is committed to the basic human rights of freedom of conscience, religion, and bodily integrity. There is an ethical dilemma in granting judicial autonomy to any nation within the larger mainstream society—especially where there are constitutively undemocratic and illiberal governance policies guiding the various nations that occupy the larger territory. It is the case that on some level the members of indigenous tribes are regarded as part of the human family. International law and human rights covenants protect their ways of life and cultural integrity in many instances. If international law and human rights language can be utilized to protect their well-being and the rights of groups to exist, then international law and human rights should oversee—as they do nonindigenous populations—the

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internal activities of indigenous tribes. It would have serious rulings on occurrences of child betrothal; female genital mutilation, which involves the cutting away of the clitorises, labias, and vulvas of girls from as young as four years old; and myriad initiation rites of passage that could reasonably be construed as torture, sexual abuse, and child abuse. If the law remains silent on indigenous practices that violate human rights and international law, then the law suggests that we have a two-tiered system of humanity at work. The humanity of indigenous children and women in certain tribes who are subjected to torture, domestic violence, and sexual abuse is below the threshold of nonindigenous persons. If one would not want torture inflicted upon oneself, if one cannot imagine oneself without one’s clitoris, or imagine one’s daughter being married off at the age of eleven when her menstrual cycle begins, why would one imagine that such persons who are subjected to these indignities would be living a quality life, one in which their capabilities are able to grow and flourish? It is only manufacturing a false separate sense of humanity for certain types of people that could allow one to escape making judgments against practices that one would rightly condemn in one’s own culture. There is a similar mentality at work here as the one that failed to see how slavery could have scared the lives of those who were enslaved. Some decent persons failed to make the connection because those enslaved were thought to be morally inferior by nature, and that nature made them immune to the indignities of enforced labor. Looking upon these morphologically distinct human beings that many of us see only on travel channels, we impute to them an animal nature that makes it hard for us to make a connection between the things that make us suffer and the things that make them suffer. Human suffering is two-tiered. What makes us suffer is not what makes them suffer. And the things that they can endure so bravely would surely make us suffer. There is something about these strange-looking people, so many unconsciously feel, that make us uncomfortable, make us wonder how they could ever assimilate in our culture with their weird body shapes, grotesque features, and incomprehensible belief systems. This is why they are viewed like animals in a zoo and why the discourse surrounding their protection befits animals more than human beings. Animals do not change. Their biological DNA limits the scope of their capacity for adaptation and cognitive evolution. Members of indigenous tribes hold on to a primeval past. Many are living prehistoric lives in the modern world and, like animals who have been around for a long time and still hunt the same way, and function the same way, so these primeval human beings tenaciously hold on to their original mold for human preservation.

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The challenge for those who care deeply about individuals qua individuals rather than the primacy of culture is to understand how to respect the intrinsic dignity of indigenous tribal persons while allowing them to enjoy their capabilities to the fullest, to grant them full membership in the human community by, among other things, altering their lifestyle in ways that improve their quality of life, such as access to health care. I realize that for many indigenous tribal persons the absence of illness is not the only criterion for a happy life. The latter requires access to nature, living in harmony with the environment, and maintaining a deep spiritual life. I have made a cosmopolitan argument for why indigenous populations should not be regarded as exotic species in need of cultural protection. This position stems from the conviction that, like immigrants in foreign countries with drastically different customs and traditions and who matriculate and flourish within said cultures, so indigenous peoples, sharing the same chromosomal markers and other human identifying traits as the whitest German or the mixed race offspring of Peruvian and black, can also matriculate and resocialize under different cultural systems. The challenge is: how to do it? In the next section I will use Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to show how through intervention of a certain kind, indigenous tribal members can be brought closer in to the domain of the “mainstream” human family. The capabilities, I shall argue, allow us to utilize this level of interventionism because of its nondiscriminatory and universalistic feature. That is, human capabilities are just that—human. There is not a different set of capabilities for indigenous tribal populations than there is for nonindigenous persons. Although the capabilities are adaptable and are left to the discretion of countries to realize them, I shall argue that if it is to have real political traction in the world—especially when it comes to children—then it may require a strong hand to enforce the good when what challenges the good are not only harmful practices, but human subversions of the human capabilities.

VII. Dismantling the Tribes from Within: Modernization and the Capabilities Approach Consider the following disturbing facts: the average mortality rate for indigenous infants among several native populations all over the world is, according to a multiplicity of data, between 30 and 40 percent. Indigenous health worldwide is far below the health of nonindigenous populations and is rapidly falling. It is worse than everywhere else in the West. The life expectancy for the average male in the Mek tribe in West Papua is forty years old. The infant mortality rate there is 50 percent.

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Canadian aboriginal people die earlier than their fellow Canadians, on average, and sustain a disproportionate share of the burden of physical disease and mental illness. Mortality and morbidity rates are higher in the native population than in the general Canadian population. The infant mortality rates averaged for the years 1986 to 1990 were 13.8 per 1,000 live births among Indian infants, 16.3 per 1,000 among Inuit infants, and only 7.3 per 1,000 among all Canadian infants. Compared with the general Canadian population, specific native populations have an increased risk of death from alcoholism, homicide, suicide, and pneumonia.61 Between 1993 and 2003, in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and the Northern Territory, the national mortality rate for indigenous infants was three times the rate for nonindigenous infants. That is 15 and 12 per 1,000 for indigenous males and females compared to 5 and 4 per 1,000 live births for nonindigenous males and females. From 1996 to 2001 the life expectancy for an indigenous male in Australia was fifty-nine years old; for an indigenous female sixty-five years old. Over the period 1999–2003, 75 percent of indigenous males and 65 percent of indigenous females died before the age of sixty-five. These figures are to be compared to 26 percent of nonindigenous males and 16 percent of nonindigenous females dying under the age of sixty-five.62 The average infant mortality rate among indigenous children in Panama is over three times higher than that of the overall population (60 to 85 deaths per 1,000 live births) versus the national average of 17.6.63 As of November 2008 the Piripkura tribe who live in the Amazon rain forest in the state of Mato in Brazil numbered three. The group faces extinction because of illegal loggers and deforestation. Similar threats plague most tribes in Peru. Their infant mortality rate and life expectancy fall well below levels of nonindigenous populations.64 There is a literacy crisis in most indigenous populations all over the world. Some tribes such as the Himba in Namibia are deeply suspicious of education, and only one in six children is sent to school. In African countries the situation is worse for indigenous tribal populations. Ancestral medicinal practices are incapable of warding off malaria, measles, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis, river blindness, and Lassa fever, diseases that ravage the lives of indigenous tribes there. Life expectancy is alarmingly low as are infant mortality rates. According to the Encyclopedia of Public Health, the poor level of health among indigenous South Americans today still represents the level of their ancestors in the worst moments of history. One does not have to exhaust a litany of figures on the plight of indigenous peoples to argue that most are not living quality lives. Lives ravaged by diseases and high infant mortality rates are not the pristine lives some de-

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fenders of indigenous tribal life would have us believe exist. One has to ask: what is so great about a way of life in which life expectancy is between fortysix to fifty years old and the infant mortality rate is 50 percent? And further: how can advocates of indigenous tribal life continue to uphold their right to their way of life when said life involves crises whose consequences are far worse than crises of persons living in the West? Those in the democratic West who are not well off still orbit a world of rights claims, justice talk, and law that purports to protect each one without discrimination. They are part of an ever-ongoing discourse of progress talk involving universal health care, job protection, and environmental protection. We may ask, what is it that makes a life one of quality? How do we determine when people are doing well in their lives? What do people require in order to become capable of performing basic human functions? How do we determine what people are able to do and be? It is the answer to these questions that Martha Nussbaum devotes her list of human capabilities. The capabilities go beyond mere rights talk of determining whether or not human rights refer to equality of well-being, access to resources, equality of opportunity, or equality of capability. There has to be a theory that answers some of these questions. That theory is the language of capabilities and human functioning. Since 1993 the Human Development Reports of the United Nations has assessed the quality of life in nations of the world using the notion of people’s capabilities.65 This involves their capacity to do and be certain things that are viewed as valuable. The important fact about the capabilities approach is that it has been used as a conceptual framework from which to compare nations and individuals on a quality of life index with a view to an answer to the question, how are they doing? It has also been used as the basis for articulating goals for public policy. In fact, Nussbaum has developed a thick conception of the central capabilities that should be the goal of public policy. The goal of policy is to promote what she calls the combined capabilities. There are three basic forms of capabilities: basic capability, which includes practical reason and imagination, which most infants have but which requires further development to exercise. There are the internal capabilities, which are states of the person. So a woman who has not had her clitoris and labia and vulva excised has the internal capability for sexual pleasure. As Nussbaum states, most adults have the internal capability for speech and thought in accordance with their conscience. Nussbaum defines the combined capabilities as internal capabilities combined with suitable external conditions for the exercise of the function. A woman who is not mutilated but secluded and forbid-

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den to leave the house has internal but not combined capabilities for sexual expression—and work, and political participation. Citizens of repressive nondemocratic regimes have the internal but not the combined capability to exercise thought and speech in accordance with their conscience.66

The capabilities find justification in its long list in the idea that choice does not only involve spontaneity. Choice is made in the context and presence of material and social conditions that are conducive to choice. Before looking at Nussbaum’s list it is important to understand why she focuses on capabilities rather than, say, desire satisfaction and self-reportage. It is easy for one to seemingly gauge quality of life by asking people how they are doing and how their desires are being satisfied. But by appealing to what Nussbaum calls “adaptive preference,” she shows how easy it is for people to adapt to standards below an acceptable threshold and to use that adaptation to evaluate how it is that they think they are doing. For Nussbaum, deprived people frequently adjust their sights to the low level they know they can aspire to and actually experience satisfaction in connection with a much-reduced standard of living.67 A woman who is beaten frequently in the home by her husband and who suffers from malnutrition because she is incapable of cooking may adjust her assessment of a good household if her husband stops beating her but merely abuses her verbally. When asked how she is doing and what can she do she may say, “I am fine and there is much I can do.” She may be right. In the absence of daily beatings she may be able to do much more than she could have done otherwise. But this does not mean that the adaptive role that explains her answer is any true indicator of a quality of life—especially when compared to other households in which beatings would be a crime and do not occur at all. What is salient about the capabilities is that they are cross-culturally applicable in the sense that they are not dependent on a strong metaphysical conception of human nature. Persons are free to hold whatever metaphysical conception(s) of human life, view of women’s nature, and the nature of reality as they see fit. But these beliefs cannot contravene in the public sphere in an applied form that would see, for example, women’s exclusion from the political and public domain. Persons are free to function in relation to their capabilities. That is, although ideally they should achieve a high level of the capabilities, how they choose to exercise their capabilities is entirely up to them. Let us now look at the list of capabilities all persons are deemed worthy of having and discuss how an extrapolation of the capabilities in their theoretical form on to the populations of indigenous tribes could improve quality of life. I want to stress again why I think that this is important. If the

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capabilities cannot say anything about or be applied to persons living on the peripheries, then it is seriously restricted in scope. I do not think this is the case with the capabilities although how I intend to interpret it and apply it may not be in accordance with the vision of its architect. Nussbaum has developed a number of versions of a list of ten such capabilities. Here they are: 1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length, not dying prematurely or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living. 2. Bodily health and integrity. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; being adequately nourished; being able to have adequate shelter. 3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault, marital rape, and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. 4. Senses, imagination, thought. Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training; being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing expressive works and events of one’s own choice (religious, literary, musical, etc.); being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech and freedom of religious exercise; being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain. 5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; being able to love those who love and care for us; being able to grieve at their absence; in general, being able to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger; not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear or anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.) 6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s own life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience.) 7. Affiliation. (a) Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various

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forms of social interaction; being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship. (Protecting this capability means, once again, protecting institutions that constitute such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedoms of assembly and political speech.) (b) Having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. (This entails provisions of nondiscrimination.) 8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature. 9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities. 10. Control over one’s environment. (a) Political: being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the rights of political participation, free speech, and freedom of association. (b) Material: being able to hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason, and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.68 An examination of the capabilities on first inspection makes them apparently applicable to any indigenous tribe. Capability number ten, which seems to be outside the control of several indigenous persons, is normative. They ought to have control over their environment and if they do not then it is incumbent upon the state to ensure that they have this control. But if we look at part A of capability ten we see that this conception of engagement is one that would be incorrectly seen as a Western conception of political engagement. Freedom of association and being able to participate in political choices are not universal rights options for not only countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but also for several indigenous tribal cultures. How then do we bring the democratic virtues into such cultures so that, in effect, we may resocialize and induct them into the human rights domain? A look at capability number six, practical reason, the one that suffuses all the other functions, is one that is dependent on favorable living conditions and adequate material resources such as food and health in order for it to be exercised. Capability four calls for literacy, science, and mathematical training in an era when the literacy rates of indigenous populations is alarmingly low. Few in the extreme remote areas have any adequate mathematical training. Capabilities two and three I read as normative. We have an obligation to ensure that bodily health

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and bodily integrity are capabilities achievements that persons can enjoy. When I say we, I mean the universal cosmopolitan human rights community as well as governments because it is clear that poor countries will be very hard pressed to bring their citizens—let alone indigenous tribes—up to the level of the basic capabilities. We have a right to ensure that persons are able to move freely without loss of their public identities. Capability number three, therefore, stands in stark opposition to indigenous cultures that excommunicate members who leave the tribe for various reasons including safety. For capability three to be exercised it would need to be embedded in indigenous cultures with an exit clause so that persons would not be afraid to move about and, say, explore the outside world. Part of capabilities four and ten stipulates being able to seek employment on an equal basis with others. The capabilities are predicated on the assumption that people will be able to define their own development in one sense. That is, they may decide how the capabilities will be ranked according to resource dependency for their realization. Although Nussbaum thinks that none are reducible to the others and that all are necessary for a life of quality, it is practical to assume that some are more dependent on acquisition of power and education than are others. This is why countries must work assiduously on behalf of its members to bring them up to a high level of capability functioning. It seems that indigenous populations realize this, and further, they realize that some degree of assimilation is necessary for their members to function at a high level of human capability. Indigenous leaders in Peru, for example, have called on the government to provide them with a scholarship program that would enable indigenous youths to attend universities and pursue a professional career. Many indigenous leaders in that country have asked for a prevention and eradication of alcohol and domestic violence abuse program. They have called for indigenous centers in which members can be educated on all levels of government with a view for democratic participation in government and the holding of elected offices. Education centers for indigenous women to establish capacity-building centers is just one more goal of several indigenous populations. Other programs suggested by indigenous leaders and members were the launching of training and participatory programs at the community level for leaders in which they could acquire technical skills in management, skills in negotiation, and legal knowledge in order to develop the capacity to participate at all levels of the political spectrum.69 Community leaders stress poverty and the fact that their communities do not have the same economic opportunities as the rest of society. They cite the fact that opportunities for economic development are limited and that government programs do not reach indigenous center areas.

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Indigenous populations are asking for government assistance not just for the sake of maintaining their own cultures. That they are doing. Their participation in modernity is devoted to longevity of cultural identity. But it is also, ironically, a move toward the very modernization that several leaders decry. What are human beings asking for when they request that their youth be given governmental scholarships to attend universities and to pursue a professional career if not a chance to achieve educational and economic parity with nonindigenous populations? This is not enforced modernization; rather, it is modernization because of sheer necessity. Environments, both those of indigenous and nonindigenous persons, remain competitive in the contemporary world. To not maintain a competitive edge means one and one’s community will begin to atrophy. This is what the indigenous leaders in Peru and their fellow tribesmen realize. Domestic violence, illiteracy, and disease are all factors that disintegrate a community rather than build it up. Well-being in its varied dimensions is factored in when deciding how much modernization can be called for in the maintenance of cultural identity and how much must be resisted. The demands of indigenous populations debunk many of the shibboleths surrounding Western values versus non-Western values. Education, literacy, bodily integrity as expressed through the rejection of domestic violence against women, clean water, decent sanitary conditions, and the freedom to pursue a career of one’s choice are a heartbreaking revelation that several indigenous peoples and members of their tribe want what everyone else wants for their children. Those values cited as Western are universal values because they are the means to a holistic sense of wellbeing. People want economic parity, parity of participation in institutions of governance, and equal peership in social life for their children. There are consistently held views by indigenous folks and Western advocates of indigenous rights that well-being among indigenous populations entails first and foremost collective as opposed to individual well-being, permanent access to the lands that they live and hunt on, festivities that reinforce their cultural identities, and an uninterrupted spiritual life connected to the environment. I shall respond to the first folk belief—for that is what it is indeed—that collective well-being is to be prioritized over individual well-being. On a rudimentary level we may deduce that the collective well-being of a collective consists in nothing more than the collective well-being of its individuals. What gives the collective its identity as a flourishing and well society is that each of its component members is functioning at a high level of human capability. The sum total of each member’s well-being gives us a picture of the collective well-being of the society. So during chattel slavery in the Americas

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we cannot truthfully say that the society, no matter how prosperous, was doing collectively well without committing a misleading rhetorical sleight of hand. Too often collective well-being involves adherence to a single metric of measurement. The definition of collective well-being is constructed in ways that overlook the plight of members who are suffering. The definition of collective well-being involves the definition by an authoritative univocal voice. Consider the fact that slave culture was a rape culture. Women and girls were forced to capitulate to the sexual advances of their masters because they had no choice. To have resisted would have resulted in being sold, beaten, and simply raped again in spite of the absence of consent. Girls in indigenous cultures, like those in former slave cultures in the Americas, are subjected to rape in the disguised form of child betrothal. Others are subjected to the same tribally sanctioned rape by genital mutilation. Collective well-being in such cultures depends on the continued practices of such forms of torture in the name of collective well-being, where collective well-being is predicted on a consistent and coherent adherence to tribal practices. In other words, collective-well being cannot and should not be taken at face value for it lacks an evaluative and thoroughly distributivist account of justice in individual human life. Built into much of collective well-being is the absence of accounts of the well-being of each individual. This is an important component of the capabilities since, unlike GNP, which does not reveal disparities in income, inequalities, and partial treatment under the law, the capabilities are designed to access the quality of life of this life and that life.70 Second, I would argue that the entire collective versus individual wellbeing paradigm is passé. The atomistic individual in practice has always been a fictitious straw man devised by strong communitarianism to win an inflated argument. No individual, regardless of how she conceives of herself, has ever existed as an atomistic individual apart from the community or society that she lives in. She is coimbricated in a web of relationships that mediate her self-conception and her sense of either how well adjusted or maladjusted she is to her societal frame of reference—her community. The liberal individual who is pitted against the communal and/or communitarian collective self would have either have had to engage in massive self-deception or live in an existential void to have satisfied the conditions for atomism put forth by nonliberals. I have spent this much time discussing the collective versus individualistic divide because I think the collective paradigm is not sufficiently evaluative of the inequalities, asymmetrical relationships, and domination that is embedded in the tribal status quo. The absence of such evaluative exercises allows

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one to take at face value the unquestioned importance of indigenous claims to collective well-being over individual well-being. In the spirit of the capabilities we should be asking, what are individuals doing and what are they being? In short, how are they functioning in relation to their capabilities? The communal-based model relies on a hegemonic grammar of community that is predicated on a politically expedient script: strict customs, traditions, mores, and a distinct and nonmodifiable culture. Under such a reading of community persons are not individuals. They are social categories. A strong community-based approach to well-being is too literalist. It takes for granted the spatially bounded relationships that individuals have as being the only ones that robustly count in evaluating a good life. By a complicated network of interrelatedness the individual, to borrow a phrase from Nancy Fraser, is coimbricated in a web of causal relationships with those outside her tribe. The bounds of community begin to expand although membership need not. From policy makers to the average consumer and producer, the indigenous woman’s life is not the imagined insular space she and others may take it to be. Even the most remote tribe ensconced in seemingly inaccessible areas is affected by an ever-growing mainstream population that has an insatiable desire for titillation. This desire feeds into a similar desire of journalists, adventurers, and explorers to seek out that very same insulated tribe for public consumption on the world’s television channels. What is needed is a remapping of the bounds of communal relatedness and a destabilization of the hegemonic grammar of collective well-being, which gives rise to talk of collective capabilities. The capabilities presuppose a democratic polity in which they can be realized. Indeed, the core capabilities of freedom to experience sexual pleasure, bodily integrity, freedom of movement, and freedom of expression are not capabilities Saudi Arabia will promote soon. In implementing the capabilities, a fundamental role remains for the state.71 Nussbaum writes, “It would be inconsistent if a defender of the capabilities approach, with its strong role for democratic politics and political liberty, were to seek an implementation strategy that bypassed the deliberations of a democratically elected parliament.”72 In her response to the concerns about universalism vis-à-vis the capabilities, Nussbaum notes, among other things, that there are constraints on implementation. The approach is designed to offer the philosophical grounding for constitutional principles; however, the implementation of the principles must be left, for the most part, to the internal politics of the nation in question.73 There is a tension here that I am going to attempt to resolve, in hopefully, an uncontroversial manner. The capabilities are culturally nonspecific in the

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sense that each culture is left to determine which of the capabilities it would seek to realize. Nussbaum notes that there is a multiple realizability clause affixed to them. Each of the capabilities may be concretely realized in a variety of different ways, in accordance with individual tastes, local circumstances, and traditions.74 Promoting capability rather than functioning is the goal. The issue that arises that I find problematic has to do with persons who are extremely poor, illiterate, and whose health is seriously compromised. Such persons are not in a position to perform the evaluative exercises regarding the capabilities if they lack the requisite conditions that make such evaluations possible. In other words, I cannot make an accurate assessment of the capabilities in my life by granting myself the freedom to reach the life I value via the capabilities when the material resources that mediate my assessment of this choice are lacking. What is needed is some outside agent to raise the standard of the life that can be valued and that I can then choose. In other words, many indigenous tribal peoples cannot be best situated to define their own development precisely because to do so successfully one needs an alternative model by which to make an assessment, a comparative schema to evaluate one’s preferences against. The more options we have the more meaningful our decisions can be because we can imagine what our lives would be like in different situations. We make thoughtful comparisons. But persons whose lives are marred by poverty and the absence of progressive growth in technology, medicine, customs, and traditions are incapable of making mature evaluative exercises and rendering sound judgments about the life to be valued because of material deprivations and, in some instances, compromised cognitive capabilities. Going back to the notion of adaptive preferences, we can easily imagine a young girl—let us call her Arunanka— who has never had a choice in refusing to be a child bride sold for two pigs to a man twice her age; who has never seen dissenting discourse about the ethical nature of child betrothal; who has never been presented with alternatives that, while not ideal, may give her some autonomy over her body. She has never had a life in which she had control over her reproductive organs. Arunanka cannot choose her life, so to speak, because evaluative exercises and contemplation about the good life vis-à-vis the capabilities are useless in the absence of an enforcing agent of meaningful change, one who can present her with alternatives and options against which she can exercise her practical reason. Arunanka, like several others, has her vision of development stymied by lack of viable alternatives to what she knows. Comparatively speaking, tribal living and tribal life are forms of arrested development. This is especially so in the case of remote and not-so-remote tribes who have clung to the same ways of life for thousands of years. I take

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this to be an uncontroversial but politically incorrect statement to make. But if persons, because of a lack of material and cognitive qualifications for performing astute evaluative exercises that lead to sound judgments about what constitutes a good life, are to be brought to the highest level of capabilities, who is it that will ensure that they are brought up to the optimal level? It is to be the state, and here I would argue that the state has the obligation to bring such persons up to the highest level of capabilities via modernization from within. By modernization I do not simply mean granting persons access to health care, basic sanitation, and electricity into their homes—for those who even have homes that are amenable to electricity. I mean changing the structural nature of the unit in ways that persons can perform the evaluative exercises regarding alternatives to their ways of life in order to come to an autonomous conclusion should they decide to remain faithful to a seemingly strict and univocal identity. This involves literacy programs for children first and foremost since they not only represent the next generation, but will be, if they decide to stay within the tribal unit, the transmitters and carriers of the culture. Children should be educated in the language of the mainstream society in order for them to achieve parity with nonindigenous groups and to remain competitive in the global commons should they eventually decide to join it. Legal aid workshops should be available to women as well as the availability of credit so that they may, if they choose to, begin to make entrepreneurial headways into the larger culture. For members of those indigenous populations who wear little to no clothing at all, workshops on clothing design could be made available for them to begin the designing and construction of their own clothes. This may seem like an overtly paternalistic recommendation, but modernization from within, it must be emphasized, is a prerequisite for persons to be able to adequately perform evaluative exercises and then make sound value judgments on behalf of their lives. Since clothed bodies are a staple of mainstream society, such persons should be given the choice to decide whether or not they wish to partially or fully enter mainstream society, or stay within their tribal cultures. Our goal goes much farther. It rides on a vision of human beings—all human beings—as deserving of the products of modern civilization. One such benefit is political economy under which is subsumed a host of features like literacy, knowledge of the democratic virtues, perspectival equilibrium, which, among other things, involves knowledge about the world outside the tribal unit and knowledge of perspectives other than those reified within the insulated unit. Perspectival equilibrium involves the process of being able to hold one’s state accountable to basic political principles. Since the functional and operational aspects of political economy are instrumental in shaping a social

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world including the desires of individuals, persons who are aware of how their desires are shaped by the sociopolitical configurations of an economy achieve perspectival equilibrium by means of weighing their choices against the myriad forces of political economy that have gone into making them who they are. They achieve a balanced perspective because the one-model-fits-all perspective of collective tribal tradition is offset by alternative truth claims. It is against these competing truth claims that persons will be able to define and measure their own development. The old adage knowledge is power rings true as they evaluate and judge the competing prescriptive recommendations. One sure way of modernizing cultures from within is not just through education, but through education of a certain type. If we are to take the primeval mind as one among several prototypes characterizing indigenous persons, and if we are, in the spirit of a “no mind left behind” commitment dedicated to aligning people’s desires and preferences with what is actually good and just—broadly construed—then knowledge of different moral systems is a sure way to accomplish this task. Knowledge of moral systems not only challenges the tradition, which, in a free society, is constantly open to revision, but also functions as a counterfactual system that debunks cherished beliefs with a view to making one a critical and self-reflexive thinker. The indigenous tribal mind, for the most part, is one that remains impervious to change. Indeed, a constitutive feature of indigenous life and one corroborated by the demands of indigenous peoples for protection from outside influences is the tenacious holding on to customs, beliefs, traditions, and knowledge forged in the crucibles of ancestral life constructed thousands of years ago. But let us go back to the capabilities for one moment and recalibrate its means of qualitative assessment in the form of two questions: What are individuals actually able to do and be? We will have to measure functionality in indigenous life not simply in terms of what persons can do in their own milieu. Rather, we may ask, what could they be and do if they had a range of options from which to make choices in their current state? Truthfully we may say: not a lot. Given the restrictive nature of roles that characterize indigenous tribal life, and given the minimal resources to develop a wide range of potential talents, their capabilities are severely retarded. The development of capabilities that could lead children to realize themselves by choosing among several life plans drawn from several competing options is foreclosed. One is able to be a hunter, a father, a mother, caretaker of the home, planter of the fields, and harvester of the potatoes, and basically spend the majority of one’s waking hours either hunting for food or preparing it. Surely, there is too great a similarity between that kind of life and that of animals whose lives are centered on hunting for food. A human life constructed around that lifestyle

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seems to have fallen below a certain threshold that makes it less recognizable as a human life. What are the members of indigenous tribes able to be and do? In the widest sense of the term we may never know. The absence of an abundance of resources stymies the capabilities in the same way it stymies it in black American children living in poverty on the South Side of Chicago and in the depths of rural Mississippi. Again, it is clear by now that what I mean in referring to modernization from within has little to do with the introduction of mechanical gadgets, washing machines, and cell phones. These will have their place, but in the moral division of labor first comes what I call the transformation of the indigenous mind. It is the transformation of this mind that, coupled with outside incentives to leave the tribe and join the larger society, will see a radical transformation of indigenous life and, for such persons, a move beyond their present humanity into what we may call a posthumanity phase.

Notes 1. For a full and detailed analysis of this topic, see Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 2. Samuel Fleischacker, “The Moral Interpretation of Culture,” in Varieties of Ethical Reflection: New Directions for Ethics in a Global Context, ed. Michael Barnhart (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003). 3. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 152. 4. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 152. 5. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 144. 6. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 144. 7. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 151. 8. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 155. 9. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 156. 10. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 156–57. 11. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 157. 12. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 159. 13. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 155. 14. Questions such as these are crucial and inevitable. I am reminded, for example, of the occasion on which a Muslim woman in one of my classes objected to a love scene between an unmarried couple in a film shown in class. The film was an internationally critically acclaimed artistic one that, among other things, revealed the crisis of identity among immigrants and refugees in foreign countries. This Muslim woman claimed that on cultural and religious grounds she was not permitted to watch the film, and subsequently asked if she could be excused from the class during the presentation. It should be mentioned that the course in question was a mandatory course that all students at the university were required to take. It was a course dealing with the philosophical approaches to multiculturalism. Of course, requirements

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aside, this issue raises an important question: in a secular society, is belonging to a religious order sufficient grounds on which to claim exemption from core requirements of a college curriculum? The student subsequently asked to be exempted from the course since its secular orientation clashed significantly with the truisms of her particular religion. For the reader’s information, I denied the student her request—to the extent that it was even in my powers to honor her request. Architects of a secular core curriculum were under no obligations to honor religious mandates and truisms as fair criteria for exemption from the universal core requirements. Prospective students had an obligation to familiarize themselves with the standard secular core curriculum and then decide whether or not they violated the spirit or the law of their religion. My reasoning was the onus of responsibility lies with the student to choose responsibly and not with the university to modify its core curriculum to suit the demands of religious protocol. 15. Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York, Basic Books, 1997), 387. 16. See Tyler Cowen’s “The Fate of Culture,” The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2002, 78–84. 17. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation,” 159. 18. Fleischacker, “Moral Interpretation.” 19. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 27–28. 20. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 39. Brown is here quoting from the American Anthropological Association’s Statement on Ethics. 21. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 39. 22. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 40. 23. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 40. 24. Douglas Preston, “The Lost Man,” The New Yorker, June 16, 1997, 70. 25. Preston, “The Lost Man,” 72. 26. Preston, “The Lost Man,” 73, 74. 27. Preston, “The Lost Man,” 74. Native Americans are indeed correct to be suspicious of contemporary research that would attempt to locate racial differences on the basis of cranial measurements. Such nineteenth-century techniques have long been rebuffed by modern biologists and by leading philosophers of science whose cutting-edge work on philosophy of race and science have done much to shed light on the growing acceptance among many scientists that race as a biological category does not exist. The leading philosopher today doing work in this area of philosophy of science and race and who has successfully demonstrated why race as a natural category fails is Naomi Zack. See her Race and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Routledge, 2002). 28. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 45. 29. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 48. 30. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 44. 31. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 54. 32. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 54. 33. Since I am going to be relying exclusively on Brown’s text for the material provided in this text, I will avoid further endnotes regarding this case. It should therefore

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be understood that factual information regarding the cases are taken from Brown. All other analyses and comments regarding the case are mine. 34. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 69. 35. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 69. 36. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 72–73. 37. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 73. 38. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 73. 39. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 73. 40. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 74. 41. When I use the term publicly, I am here not restricting its use to members of an in-group, but also the broader public outside a group’s core unit. 42. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 66. 43. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 196. 44. The phrasing of this term actually belongs to Tyler Cowen. In “The Fate of Culture,” he argues that the critics of globalization are blind to the importance of diversity over time. I am, where appropriate, applying the same line of reasoning deployed in his argument to my criticism of the right to cultural privacy argument. 45. Sowell, Migrations and Cultures. 46. This is the general thesis of Dan Sperber in his Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 47. Sperber, Explaining Cultures, chapters 1 and 2. 48. José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays toward a Philosophy of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 117. 49. Here one must be careful, of course, not to map contemporary racial ascription on to the identities of human beings who reasonably could not have held such identities. There was no such thing as white identity in the way that we conceive of it today. 50. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? 105. 51. Pinker, citing M. Toussaint-Samat’s History of Food (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992). 52. For a discussion of the Preservationist Ethic, see Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 53. Italics are mine. 54. See Michael Walzer “The New Tribalism,” in Dissent, Fall 1992, 332. See also his reply to James Rule’s “Tribalism and the State: A Reply to Michael Walzer,” Dissent, Fall 1992, 519–24. 55. See Will Kymlicka’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable: Minority Group Rights,” in The Philosophy of Human Rights, ed. Patrick Hayden (St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House Publishers, 2001). 56. Kymlicka, “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable,” 450. 57. Kymlicka, “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable,” 451. 58. Kymlicka, “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable,” 451. 59. Kymlicka, “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable,” 451. 60. Kymlicka, “The Good, the Bad, and the Intolerable,” 453.

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61. Harriet L. MacMillan et al., “Aboriginal Health,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 155 (1996): 1569–78. See also http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/201/300/cdn_ medical_association/cmaj/vol-155/issue-11/1569.htm. 62. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, http://aihw.go.au/indigenous/ healtth.cfm (accessed January 30, 2009). 63. Pan America Health Organization, Health in the Americas, vol. 1 (Pan America Health Organization, 2002), 181. See also Who Media Centre, http://www.who.int/ mediacenter/factsheet/fs326/en/index.html (accessed January 30, 2009). 64. Survival: The Movement for Tribal Peoples, http://www.survival-international.org/ news/3944 (accessed March 2, 2009). 65. Martha Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights,” in The Philosophy of Human Rights, ed. Patrick Haydn (St. Paul, Minn.: Paragon House, 2001), 227. Reprinted from Fordham Law Review 66 (1997). 66. Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights,” 227. 67. Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights,” 219. 68. Martha Nussbaum, “Women and Cultural Universals,” in Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–54, 41. For a detailed treatment, see Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 69. Björn-Sören Gigler, “Indigenous Peoples: Human Development and the Capability Approach,” paper read at the 5th International Conference on the Capability Approach: Knowledge and Public Action, September 11–14, 2006, Paris, France. See http://indigenous.developmentgateway.org (accessed March 30, 2009). 70. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 6, 60–61. 71. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 103. 72. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 104. 73. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 105. 74. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 105.

CHAPTER THREE

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Moral Culture Is Public Culture Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare

Culture belongs to the world. It is universal. It cannot be the property of any group, let alone any one individual, although, undoubtedly and uncontoversially, that which is defined as culture can always be traced back to the history of a group of individuals, and to geographic space and time. But culture by definition is public. No human phenomenon known as culture can possibly exist outside the public sphere. Culture lives in the world as a dynamic and interactive enterprise among cultural members and—with very few exceptions, save those isolated cultures—cultural outsiders. Cultural traits, traditions, customs, and experiments in ways of living are consciously and subconsciously absorbed through psychic osmosis by all those who inhabit the public space. The interaction of our unique sensibilities with the cultural units of the Other produces a subculture and a hybrid culture, one that belongs neither to us nor to them but instead to that indefinable space where the innovative, unpredictable, and uncategorized merge to produce a distinctly new cultural phenomenon that will then be taken up by others in new and idiosyncratic ways ad infinitum. The creative social intercourse that we regard as culture gives birth to moral, social, and political vocabularies that become common coin in the mouths of those outside the allegedly distinct culture. Culture is always sharing itself in spite of the peripatetic efforts of those who take themselves to be its vanguard, who seek to protect it from intrusion and any other interference from outsiders. But what else justifies the idea that culture belongs to the world? Metaphor does. From metaphor, culture arises. Metaphor with its multiple signi107

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fiers and possible meanings is suggestive. Interpretational latitude and the concomitant behavior and or actions produced by the former is a rite of passage of all those who play with metaphor—so to speak. Once metaphor, that elusive, nonquantifiable phenomenon, is let loose and takes root in the human imagination, then, what force can stop the mind from taking it in and spawning something different, something that’s not a facsimile but, instead, an assemblage of one’s own experience, one’s very being?

I. Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” and the Creation of Moral Culture At a time when the horror of the Holocaust was finding its way into language, and when it seemed to many as if what took place in the camps was beyond language itself, Sylvia Plath wrote a poem in which she likened her own psychic suffering to the Jews. A few months later she gassed herself to death. Some accused Sylvia Plath of having the temerity of claiming equal victimization with the Jews who had suffered in the Holocaust. In her infamous poem “Daddy,” Plath offended many by appropriating many of the symbols reserved for Jewish victimization at the hands of Nazis for her own tortured psychic suffering. In a review of a book on Holocaust survivors, one prominent critic used his review of the book as an occasion to unleash his dismay at Plath’s effrontery against Jewish suffering and the perceived trivialization of the worst atrocity of the twentieth century: the Holocaust. The reviewer notes that Auschwitz had given to all later art the most arresting metaphors for extremity.1 Sylvia Plath broke the ice with her poem “Daddy.” There was real pain there, the critic Leon Wieseltier noted. The Jews with whom she identified were, however, something worse than “weird luck.” Regardless of what Plath’s father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews. Wieseltier regards the metaphors invoked in her poem as inappropriate, not because he thinks that the Holocaust is truly out of the reach of art. Rather, he thinks that poetics, contra Adorno, can be done after the Holocaust but not without hard work and what he terms “rare resources of the spirit.”2 He writes: “Familiarity with the hellish subject must be earned, not presupposed. My own feeling is that Sylvia Plath did not earn it, that she did not respect the real incommensurability to her own experience of what took place.”3 Elsewhere, in Jacqueline Rose’s brilliant The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, we are treated to Plath’s posthumous admonitions from a plethora of literary critics for her poetic transgressions and her assertion—at least within the confines of art—of her right to identify with the Jew. Irving Howe describes her alleged link as monstrous and utterly disproportionate. Another critic describes Plath’s reference to the Nazi as empty, histrionic, a cheap shot and a topical device;

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the poems, that critic asserts, lack any sense of personal or social history.4 Even novelist Joyce Carol Oates joined in the tirades against the dead Plath’s predilection for snatching metaphors from newspaper headlines. Plath was accused of two things. The first was what we may call esthetic incommensurability—lack of objective correlative. Had she been a black woman who had suffered under slavery, or a Roma who had also been dehumanized in the concentration camps alongside Jews, there would not have been such outcries. Her personal grief, so the reasoning goes (even though it drove her in the end to commit suicide), was not comparable to the suffering of any Jew in the concentration camps. The suffering inflicted upon her by any of the accused referents in the “Daddy” poem—her father, the “black man” who bit her beautiful heart in two pieces, he in whose image she made a model of a man dressed in black with a Nazi look, and a black swastika that halts the sky from breaking through—could never equal any of the sufferings inflicted by Nazis on Jews in the camps.5 Rose identifies a second objection against Plath that Wieseltier summed up in his review. It succinctly describes the collective objections of many against Plath. Collectively, there was the unquestioned Jewish belief that “only those who directly experienced the Holocaust have the right to speak of it—speak of it in what must be, by implication, non-metaphorical speech.”6 In “Daddy” Plath laments that on looking for her father in a Polish town, she thought every German was “you” (her father). She finds the language obscene. It’s like an engine sending her off like she’s a Jew. She thinks she could be Jewish and starts to talk like a Jew. Plath goes on to comment that with her Gypsy ancestress and her weird luck, she may be something of a Jew, and that she has always been scared of this man in the poem with his Luftwaffe and his sparkling blue Aryan eye. Conjuring an erotically charged image of her beloved father Plath writes of a panzer man that’s not allegedly her father or a God but a black swastika that suffocates the sky. In honor of the paternal-erotica imago she writes that all women adore the Fascist; they want his boot in their faces that emanates from the brute heart of the father or father figure Plath is both paying homage to and repudiating with every atavistic fiber of a vindictive and tortured soul. The loss for Plath is unbearable. She was eight when her father died. She tried to die at twenty to join him in death, but they resuscitated her against her will. And what did she do? She writes that she made a model of this man in dressed black with a Nazi look who loves the screw and the rack. In the spirit of a doleful sadomasochist she utters the words that consummate her to the daddy she so badly wants to kill and she says, I do, I do.

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Plath even went as far, one critic suggested, as claiming in the “Daddy” poem that Jewishness is the position of the one without history.7 Plath writes that she never could tell where her addressee put his foot; she was never able to speak to him. Plath, arguably, was the first contemporary poet with the audacity to appropriate Nazi iconography, wed it to Jewish victimization and suffering, and then to salaciously suffuse the imagery with the purposeful moral rectitude of her own suffering. Aesthetic incommensurability is irrelevant. Who can say with full certainty that a Jew sitting in his own feces, contemplating the loss of his children while smelling the rotting stench of flesh all around him suffers more than Sylvia Plath—quietly, sometimes, furiously at other times, but still suffering constantly, a suffering that has no public vocabulary to give it dignity, a suffering that lacks a credentialed dispenser who cannot be faulted? Plath, however, was not the first poet who longed for the specialness that Jewishness conferred. The specialness of being Jewish is derived from protracted suffering. The suffering and the historical conditions that ground it are what grant one special access to a special God. The confessional Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Anne Sexton in an early poem “My Friend, My Friend” asks who will forgive her for the things she does. She has no special God to refer to and no special legend. With her white pedigree that is as calm as stillness and her “Yankee kin” she thinks it is better to be a Jew. In a telling stanza, written perhaps to her Jewish friend Maxine Kumin, Sexton writes that to have her friend’s understandable hurt to belong to could ease her troubles like alcohol and painkillers. Again, she thinks it is better to be a Jew. Ironic isn’t it, that Sexton seizes a moment when Jews, still reeling from the Holocaust, were wondering whether God had abandoned them or not, to express moral envy for the reasonable hurt of the Jewish people—something one can belong to: that hurt alone rather than the healing power of God’s love can ease the trouble like alcohol and painkillers. In the final stanza, Sexton goes on to seek the personal moral redemption she knows only a “Jewish God” can grant her: She says that if she has lied it was out of a deep love that she has for her friend and because she is upset by the things she has done. Her friend’s hurt intrudes on her tranquil white skin. And without a special legend and a special God she thinks it is better to be a Jew. Plath and Sexton unintentionally accomplish revolutionary and transgressive feats in their poetry. Sexton’s poem is milder and has received little critical acclaim. It was published in 1958 in the Antioch Review before Sexton had established herself as an American poet in the tradition of Robert Low-

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ell, William Snodgrass, and George Starbuck. She and Plath became friends in workshops conducted by Lowell in the late 1950s. Sexton at the time was ahead of Plath in her publication record. At their first meeting, Sexton was readying the world for her debut collection of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Plath subsequently acknowledged the enormous influence Sexton’s unconventional style and subject matters—madness, suicide, the unconscious, and incest—had in liberating her from the formalism of her rigid training. Although “Daddy” is indeed a more strident and angrier poem than my “My Friend, My Friend,” the latter is far more revolutionary in what it is implicitly: a social protest poem. Sexton, by wishing she were a Jew at a time when Jews in America were just beginning to become white and mainstreaming into white American society, isn’t engaging in exoticism. She is undercutting the monopolistic claim on victimization and, by default, the indefinite moral innocence that comes from the protracted trauma of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is never mentioned in the poem. No need for that. What is mentioned several times is the special relationship to God, the special legend and, once more, the unblemished moral reputation born out of suffering. Sexton writes that she forgives her friend for what she did not do. She, Sexton, is impossibly guilty, but unlike her friend she has no special relationship with God or special legend to help her. Human beings are original sinners. But Jews are the chosen people. They are God’s special children. Sexton’s poem is the benign cry of sibling envy appealing to the favored siblings for understanding of the alienation that her separation from the Great Parent causes. Could Sexton and Plath have known that at the time they were at the heart of forging a moral and aesthetic battle? The effects of that battle are still palpable today if only because theirs is the responsibility to evade all calls to political, public, and moral responsibility. As artists, they yield to the amoral impulse at the heart of the artistic endeavor. When that impulse intersects with the subjectivity of others in a particular manner and the product is a piece of art, it eventually provides the world community with its moral vocabularies. If our two aesthetic protagonists had known in advance what they were accomplishing, their art would have been moralistic, contrived, and aesthetically unmoving. This is how culture is made, and how it is modified. I will not attempt here to engage the political and philosophical literature that argues that the Holocaust was a historically unique event whose horrors are summed up in a semantic understatement: After Auschwitz. Although there had been genocides before and since the Holocaust, nothing in the history of human kind had ever equaled what took place in the concentration camps in the most

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tribal modern nation-state on earth in the twentieth century: Nazi Germany. It was grotesquely tribal even before, in the Weimar Republic preceding the rise of National Socialism. But the Holocaust—the moment that ghastly phenomenon occurred—did not, and could not have belonged to the Jews alone. Anything so awesome and grotesque that seeps into the public space and infuses itself into the collective consciousness cannot belong to any single group. It cannot belong to any single group because it betrays all attempts at containment. The public becomes affected in all sorts of ways. Like any great artwork that is sufficiently formal and abstract, one is able to mediate on it and find oneself in it, write oneself across it and into its characters. One is able to find a space where one can negotiate a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s place in the world. To demand that we hold the Holocaust in moral abeyance, to both distance oneself from it and then to dispense the appropriate moral sentiments to the real victims while resisting any of the haunting images, moral space, and discourse for oneself, is to ask us to radically evacuate ourselves from the moral and psychic public space in which much of our socialization and moral resocialization takes place. Cultural artifacts and symbols, including charred bodies, lampshades made of human skin, and the myriad narratives detailing, “the Horror! The horror! of it all,” once inserted into the public space and into the human host with his consciousness and his complex psychic cognates—imagination, memory, wish-fulfillment, creative impulses, and fantasies—leave human subjectivity inevitably altered. The Holocaust is not a containable phenomenon. We have had our ethical sensibilities bombarded with its images for decades. Its victims cannot say, “witness it, observe it, but do not ever take any of the ways in which you might have been moved by it for the purpose of expressing any of your aesthetic goals in ways that betray the authentic psychoemotional and political realities of the concentration camps and the Jewish people who suffered there.” Subjectivity cannot be bullied or ordered around. Honesty and beauty, the emotionally moving, and the culturally innovative arise when restrictions are absent from the cognitive interplay between culture and its artifacts. The Holocaust accomplished phenomenal feats. Social movements that have sprung up as a response to political injustice such as the civil rights movement, gay rights, and the women’s movement give us a moral and political vocabulary of resistance that can be responsibly extrapolated to other forms of oppression. The Holocaust went beyond this. Its carnage opened

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up inside of us new capacities for suffering. It tapped into uncharted psychic spaces and gave us agonistic capabilities we never knew we had. The Holocaust works in this way because the Nazi perpetrators left no aspect of human life sacred or private, or immune from defilement or inspection. There was not any part of one’s personality that was invulnerable. Perhaps there never was. From psychoanalysis we learn that character is a vital lie and that personality traits are “secret psychoses”8 that hide from us our own animality and denial of death. Personality, on this reading, is an illusion because what motivates its formation and cements its consistency and “traits” that its holders take to be the core of them is a belief in its invulnerability. It staves off the belief that we are merely corpses in the making. The Holocaust in becoming a voyeuristic phenomenon via stories, chronicles, art, and the theoretical depictions of its annihilatory nature, changed the human condition. It broke the belief that the artifice of personality—the man of qualities—could withstand the external threat of nothing more than simple linguistic utterances. It gave a moral vocabulary to those who, heretofore, had no name for their suffering or, rather, no legitimate moral counterweight to balance the stigma of shame visited upon them by simple human frailty.  Identity politics in contemporary discourse relies on similar moral schemata to protect the assumed turf of those who are the ancestors of people who have been the victims of gross injustice, and of those who still are. The following story might shed light on this interesting dilemma. It is my hope that after meditating on it, we can come to a deeper understanding of how we are formed by absorbing the cultural templates of our environment in ways that take us outside of group-specific notions of culture. At a conference I attended, political philosopher Ladelle McWhorter recounted her dilemma in responding to the murder of a gay man who was the victim of a hate crime in ways that would link it to antiblack racism. In 1998, two heterosexual men murdered a gay man by the name of Mathew Shepherd. By all accounts, he was tortured and then murdered because he was gay. McWhorter responded to a call by gay and lesbian students at the university where she was teaching. The students, young, all white, were upset, afraid, and deeply disturbed at the cruel way in which this young man had been tortured and then left to die hanging on a fence. Suffering from hypothermia and multiple wounds, he died a protracted death, precisely the type that we all fear, and even more so if we think it could be inflicted on us

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from others as a form of moral punishment for alleged vices we harbor in our physiological system. Some of the students suggested singing “We Shall Overcome,” the spiritual linked with the moral struggles for social and political justice of the black civil rights movement of the 1960s. McWhorter, however, was reluctant to go ahead. Nobody knew the words, although some of the lyrics were obviously known. Group humming could have filled in the remainder of the song or even parts of it. McWhorter in that moment, however, remembered some time ago, the words of a young black American gay man who had resented the tendencies of (mainly) white gay activists to claim equal victimization with blacks. He objected to the comparisons between forms of oppression that he believed to be incomparable. The issue of experiential incommensurability was deeply at play. McWhorter resisted the urge to sing the song with the frightened gay and lesbian undergraduate students. The black gay student’s “objection” to alleged invidious comparisons between antiblack racism and gay bashing was all too alive in her consciousness. I responded by saying how disappointed I was that she had not given in to the urge to sing the song in spite of students’ ignorance of the words. I wondered aloud exactly how many young middle-class black students knew the words. I told her that I understood that the caveat against likening various forms of oppression often stemmed from legitimate concerns. Flippant comparisons among “forms of oppression”9—like beggars making invidious comparisons of their sores—could be politically damaging. It ends up devaluing the moral currency of legitimate social, moral, and political issues. Hence, on college campuses around the world, apolitical students and students from all political backgrounds, including neoconservative ones, have posters of socialist revolutionary Che Guevara on their dorm room walls. Similarly, the politically radical and subversive content of early protest rap music has been defanged by being marketed to white suburban teenagers. As a result, it is turned into pure entertainment. Its role as a protest of injustice is diffused. The offensive and disturbing features of Pan-African nationalist movements during and after the civil rights era were reconfigured by innovative sloganeers who turned what were once incendiary statements denouncing the actions of white society against blacks into vacuous platitudes that could be mouthed by anyone and that communicated nothing in particular. There is, then, among objectors of the sort McWhorter faced, a worry that finds its legitimacy under The Argument from Trivialization. This argument could be summed up as: not all forms of oppressions are equal nor its targets

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equally harmed. To conflate forms of oppression that are, at best, debatable is to run the risk of diluting the moral urgency of those that are not. If moral legitimacy is undermined then an uncontested moral crime, in this case antiblack racism, becomes trivialized. It was clear, however, that in the case of McWhorter and the gay and lesbian students, there was no intent to trivialize antiblack racism by drawing on one of the religious and moral artifacts used to underscore the moral gravity of racial injustice.

II. Moral Incommensurability and the Clash of Cultures My reason for expressing regret that McWhorter had not sung “We Shall Overcome” with the gay and lesbian students was that it was clear that antiblack racism would in no way be trivialized by comparing it to homophobia and its potential behavioral corollary: physical gay bashing. Both forms of discrimination focused on attributes of human beings that were morally neutral. Neither an individual’s physical morphology nor her sexual orientation identifies anything about her moral character. My suspicion was that McWhorter had aborted an impulse that came from a deep moral center. She did so not because she doubted the sincerity of her moral outrage at both homophobia and antiblack racism. Rather, she had allowed her ethical sensibilities to be hijacked by the objection of a gay black man. This objection had the force of a moral imperative. What gave it its force was not his ability to claim dual victimization but the special status that one of his identities—his racial one—holds in our culture. That identity lodged in the body of a black person who lives in a society where structural racism still exists trumps the individual impetus to wed moral vocabularies and or symbols (“We Shall Overcome”) to one’s unique moral sensibilities. To be in a blessed situation like that is to find oneself morally pregnant. The offspring of the union between those moral vocabularies and one’s deepest ethical sensibilities is something beautiful. It is larger than reconfigured moral agency, or psychological development. One occupies an existential space where one can be an active participant in the creation of moral culture. This, I submit, is how we grow and develop morally. Most importantly, it is how we become authors of our own moral identities and thus infuse the world with an original assemblage of who we are. To stifle the moral impulse out of misguided loyalty to the specious notion that a gay black man might have held, and that much of identity politics fosters—monopolization of victimization—is to surrender one’s autonomy and the network of one’s values, life projects, and

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moral commitments out of guilt, shame, fear—anything and everything save the sole criterion that matters and that ought to be at work in such a moment: the purest integrity governing the impulse. To stifle the moral impulse is to cease acting like a moral competitor with one’s fellow human beings and with the world in general. How could one function otherwise? In a postmodern world stripped of its universal claims to truth and its faith in fundamental values, each of us is left with the sacred responsibility of using our own agency to compete morally in the best sense of the term: I would like you to emulate my values and my beliefs. A more philosophically elegant way of stating this would be: I want my discourse to have purchase on your conscience. You have become the author of a moral reality that ought to play some role in socializing the universe. This need not be one’s duty or one’s prime motivation. The fundamental point is that moral competition is the strategy that enables the individual to adapt to his or her own evolution. Developmental psychologists of all persuasions have described evolution as the final outcome of the competition between organisms for the energy they need to survive. The denial of the impulse I have been writing about is a way of foreclosing this adaptive strategy that each individual has as she pits her developmental transformations against the norms and values of a society in flux. The indictment of Plath for esthetic incommensurability and McWhorter’s moral dilemma over singing “We Shall Overcome” reflect the messy state of affairs visited upon moral life when we adhere to strong tribal conceptions of culture. They are existential examples of how culture starts from and within the individual. Both face obstacles, however, from those we may regard as tribal sentinels—guardians of culture, who, while not being the actual creator of what we regard as “culture,” nevertheless assign themselves the job of regulating the conditions under which cultural negotiation may take place. The culture sentinels want to keep the reality of epochal moments—the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, to name only two—and the discourses that frame them in a mummified state. Cultural Discourse is often characterized by nostalgia. The cognitive museum that is housed in each of the tribe’s legitimate members ensures that its users have passed, not philosophical meaning tests, but the meaning tests of whatever criteria are established by representatives of the group or culture. I would venture to characterize these representatives as unauthorized. Plath and the ideal responder to McWhorter’s dilemma are cosmopolitan moral value makers. They need no person’s or group’s permission to appropriate the narratives, terminologies, and discourses of those deemed cultural agents or representatives—in this case Jews and blacks.

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Why not? Because once the relevant discourses are inserted into the public space, human imagination inevitably reworks them; it molds and shapes them and broadens ethical and aesthetic sensibilities by using them as alternative prisms with which to better interpret experiences and to engineer such experiences into existence. “We Shall Overcome” was the anthem sung by citizens of the Czech Republic during the fall of 1989 when the demise of communism in Europe began. It was the cry of freedom of a people oppressed under totalitarian rule and overthrew such rulership with the rest of Eastern Europe in 1989.10 Food for thought: The English language, once a dialect derived from a form of old German and several other languages, is today the international language of commerce and trade. It is the cosmopolitan language of our global society. Englishness would be a silly way of defending an authentic usage of the term, although paradoxically this is precisely how the language at one time was defended against those who tried to master it. It could not be done in a way that would be uniquely English. The significant modification of the idea of a language being “distinctly English” did not come about as a result of dialogic cooperation among language users. What changed it was the organic manner in which it simply was taken up by multiple foreigners and English speakers from countries outside of England. Such individuals used the language to paint dramatic, exotic, and sometimes idiosyncratic pictures of their interior lives and their experiences in reality. We are all, as Byron put it, “differently organized.” Learning to navigate and live within the restraints of our temperament, we alter the formal contours of language that give external shape to our experiences precisely in the articulation of our inner lives. This is what a commerce of exchange accomplishes. Cosmopolitan Moral Value Makers operate on two levels: the didactic, conscious, and analytic on the one hand; and the intuitive and aesthetic on the other. We might describe the latter as a form of spontaneous, creative social intercourse that involves risk and leaps of faith but that, nevertheless, produces new hybridized moral courtships and marriages. The former is not antithetical to the cosmopolitan project. The equation of cosmopolitanism with world travelers, alcoholic drinks, city slickers, globalization, metropolitanism, and internationalism continues weakening its conceptual base. Formalizing its analytic base remains a crucial goal. I have taught cosmopolitanism to freshmen, sophomores, seniors, and to graduate students over a number of years. I have engaged ordinary people with its ethos while trying not to proselytize. I have also treated it primarily as a way of life, as a worldview that can be practiced consistently. As a

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lifestyle, however, one of its most exalted forms of expression is realized in academic formalisms. This is because the development of a cosmopolitan ethos can be a symbiotic two-pronged project: engaging in dialogue with its historical architects; and allowing the dialogue and the attendant refinement of one’s ethical sensibilities to organically unfold in the world where human beings meet and live. To hold this position while convincing individuals that cosmopolitanism is not an elitist lifestyle that only educated privileged people can embrace is to play one more role in the division of labor on behalf of cosmopolitan work. The task is to find ways to socialize nonintellectuals by means of cosmopolitan virtues and values. This is not the creation of morality. I am thinking of something more like a dance, an interaction among strangers where the rules of engagements are intuited by signals accessed in the moment and where each step is determined by reciprocity of exchanges. Cosmopolitan virtues of this type are born from an attitude where radical intersubjectivity is neither abhorred nor embraced as a form of exoticism or patronization—the latter dehumanizes. Rather, radical intersubjectivity is freedom to be deeply touched by another and to allow the spontaneous gestures and responses that blossom from the encounter to shape a new identity. It might resist the terminologies and labels of the social world. Still, it corresponds to the psychological and moral terrain of one’s inner life. This is the gift-giving feature of our humanity that is precisely in our control and need not depend on the political machineries of the state or other institutions that effect changes in our social lives. I want to investigate in a more reverential manner the act of organically interacting with our fellow human beings. I would refer to this cosmopolitan virtue as the Art of Moral Genuflection. Protracted genuflection—as a way of life—would be a form of radical intersubjectivity. Without discounting the place that intersubjectivity has had and continues to have in the history of philosophy, for the sake of simplicity I’ll refer to it as the willingness to grant oneself permission to be deeply penetrated by the humanity of another person—where that humanity can call into question the very core of your identity, where it forces you to make that identity negotiable. It is the willingness to hand over your continued socialization to others (good judgments prevailing of course; we’re not talking about serial killers and rapists). It means that we see socialization as an ongoing process that does not stop at legal adulthood. It is a humbling and gift-giving aspect of human living. It is the freedom granted to oneself to be deeply touched by another, and to allow the spontaneous gestures and responses from the encounter to shape a new identity, or to transform an ongoing one in a rigorous, morally enduring manner. This is the gift-giving feature of our humanity that we own and the deepest source of love we can offer those we call strangers. It

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is, in effect, one way of making the world more lovable in a twofold manner: first as value-makers and valuers who love in the world and thereby make the world more lovable; and second by loving in the world because there is much in the world that is lovable and ought to be loved. This dialectical relation of loving in the world is another way of also achieving and practicing creative moral agency simultaneously. Later on I shall make the conceptual distinction between exoticism as a superficial expression of intersubjectivity that, while having ethnocentric and racialistic overtones, is not an act of racism and/or ethnocentrism, and racial or ethnic exoticism, which because of an inner protective insularity prevents creative agency from being born. Radical intersubjectivity is not passive submission, nor is it a form of inactive spectatorship. This gift-giving feature of our humanity—anathema to the spirit of every variant of tribalism, whether it takes the form of cultural nationalism or racial particularity—is the humble capacity to genuflect before the other in a spirit of reciprocity, in respectful brotherhood and sisterhood, and say, “I am not so complete that I can resist handing over to you some part of my continued socialization and identity formation as a human being. With you, my friend, my humanity, regardless of its origins, continues to expand and will take me to places I could never have imagined.” I regard this gift-giving impulse as part of how we organically make cosmopolitan values as human beings. One says further in the genuflection, “We share a common humanity, and in the spaces of that sacred humanity something of the Divine is achieved. I open myself as a canvass on which you may inscribe your wisdom, teachings, and generosity—or whatever seeds of it you may have discovered in your own soul.”  I think that this gift-giving feature is crucial to our moral becoming, which is too often hijacked by a separatist tribal logic, or an “Other separatist logic,” where the “separatist” feature hangs on factors that are morally irrelevant. This is the dance, the spontaneous move that regrettably McWhorter did not make. This is the move that each of us can make, especially at a time when our world is ravished by the suffering of unjust wars, where vocabularies of resistance seem impotent, and where the humanities of entire peoples are defiled. This defilement occurs not even on the basis of the least attractive actions of the members of groups. Rather, it is done in order to enable some of us to engage in the massive self-deceptions that allow us to cling to moral systems that allow this debasement to continue without even slightly pricking our conscience.

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At the heart of tribal separatist logic—a separatist logic that the artist overcomes and that the ontological rebel and moral becomer who aims for radical intersubjectivity with nothing but his raw and naked humanity manages to transcend—is antiassimilationism. Antiassimilationism, a value staple in multicultural education, is predicated on a specious logic of contagion. To assimilate is to become like them. It is to risk contaminating oneself with the “false beliefs and values” of a culture different from your own. So one must ask those who cower in fear of assimilation, who fear becoming like them: But what is wrong with them? Antiassimilationism, of course, is a doctrine that relies on narcissistic and solipsistic impulses. One is interested in interacting only with those who are tribal replicas of oneself. It betrays any tendency one may have toward intersubjectivity, that is, the desire to relate to another human being as such and to have that exchange modify one’s identity. It is the most intimate form of giving, where the gift is the humanity of yourself that you hand over to another person as something to be co-formed by his or her humanity.

III. The Anatomy of Antiassimilationism and the Logic of Contagion There is something mean and self-withholding in those who erect cultural barriers against those they perceive to possess attributes that would upset the purity of their blessed and sanctified cultures and, a fortiori, their own identities. In their cultures lie the attributes and the magical properties that have saved them from death—death as a people—and have preserved their collective souls, which they have passed on to their descendants who will now have them, and for eternity—provided they stay within the tribe. It is this sort of comfort that has given ordinary people the absolute certainty in either participating in or condoning what outsiders recognize as heinous acts against strangers. To the insider, they are not acts of cruelty. They are not wanton acts of sadistic self-indulgence. They are a visceral and, some would argue, automatic recourse to self-defense. When self-identity is inextricably indexed to a set of core beliefs that one believes forms the heart and soul of who one is, logic and reason often prove inadequate to tame the passionate hearts that are tied not just to land and soil, but to memories—real or imagined mythologies but, nevertheless, stamped with the tribal imprimatur of one’s culture. To lose such features, the culturalist would argue, is to face a kind of death, to become a complete stranger to who one is, to face a world unarmed with the internal resources that all identities provide us with as we navigate our way into the complex matrix that is our social milieu.

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To tell the insider that this is simply not the case, and to point to thousands of examples of people in the world—refugees, immigrants, free thinkers, open-minded individuals who engage with their fellow human beings in the inescapable task of becoming—is like pointing to strange anomalies in life such as fire eaters, sword swallowers, the shipwrecked surviving at sea without fresh water and food, with just their wits and will to keep them alive. Many reasonable people find it difficult to understand how such people exist. The culturalist is equally perplexed by those who adopt a nontribal lifestyle and whose lifestyle is reflected in their approach to their fellow human beings. But the culturalist knows that living among others and allowing culture to take care of itself does not bring the same survival risk as being abandoned at sea. He knows it because he lives in the contemporary world where cultural negotiation is a staple of modern living—and he is not dead, yet. Still, the struggle and concerted attempts to keep the strangers and their ways, to keep the cosmopolitan goal of intersubjectivity and value-sharing, of genuflecting before the other in a spirit of reciprocity at bay is reinforced. The cosmopolitan mantra (“I am not so complete that I cannot resist handing over to you some part of my continued socialization and identity formation as a human being. With you, my friend, my humanity regardless of where its origins started, continues to expand and will take me to places I could never have imagined.”) sounds the death-knoll to culturalists. Why need this be so? Why this spirit of meanness, and on what foundation does it lie? A complete robust answer is beyond the scope of this book. Indeed, it would require a historical command of psychological characters and their attendant characteristics at work in various historical epochs. One might have to conjecture as to how various epochs contributed to the creation of archetypal psychological human templates that created the individuals who shaped the cultures that produced them. One thinks here, for example, of Lewis Mumford’s The Transformations of Man and his sweeping portraits of the various instantiations of such human prototypes: animal into human, archaic man, civilized man, axial man, Old World man, New World man, and posthistoric man.11 An even more interesting conjecture, however, is to be found in utopian fantasies that characterized National Socialism in Germany and Fascism throughout Europe in the twentieth century. The spirit of meanness that we find among antiassimilationists is the dark side of utopianism: those who are perceived to threaten the conditions thought necessary for utopia are despised. We ought not to forget that the National Socialists proclaimed that if the individual subordinated herself or himself to the Volksgemeinschaft

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(the people’s community) and “became one with their leader, their soil and their soul, then psychopathology will be markedly reduced (at least for the racially pure Aryan).”12 Those who are perceived as threats to the utopian dream of eternal protection are treated as scapegoats. The literature on scapegoating—a phenomenon whereby aggression unites one group into a cohesive unit that directs its aggression against another—is gargantuan. René Girard’s The Scapegoat is, perhaps, the best contemporary work on this concept. Girard’s own work was deeply influenced by Freud and LeviStrauss.13 Freud’s seminal analysis on scapegoating involves an examination of how the aggressive impulse functions as a catalyst for both love and hate. It unites people in love when there are outsiders who are the recipients of residues of this aggressive impulse. Freud’s investigation of tribal squabbles among individuals in communities with adjoining territories who are related in significant ways but who feud with, humiliate, and ridicule each other, has given us much to think about. Freud labeled these fights among the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the Scotch and the English as the “narcissism of minor differences.” Minor attributes that mark distinctions among peoples are imbued with much ontological significance and taken to identify profound differences in kind, rather than differences in degree among human beings who share a range of traits along a vast continuum. A minor attribute becomes a bloated self-identifying marker that is not just a part of one’s identity, but the fundamental attribute that distinguishes one from others. One begins to see oneself not just as a different racial or ethnic or national kind of individual, but as someone whose essential attribute marks one out as a different species from those who do not have that attribute. Ostensibly, those are the outsiders. This meanness exists, and its spirit is camouflaged under the dressage of custom and tradition, which are thought to possess magical moral properties. Identity politics is not just a game, as it has been mistakenly painted by conservative critics. It was forged in the crucibles of hereditary monarchy, not aristocracy, since under the latter concept was subsumed virtues that, while not communicable to commoners, were at least worthy of admiration and veneration. The aristocrat, in the noblest sense of the term, was and still is one whose regal bearing and nobility of character are conjoined. The aristocrat, even in the guise of the consummate aesthete, is still a person of conscience and potential goodwill. In his perfect form he is the Aristotelian embodiment of sagacity because he has practiced acts of excellence as a habit. Hereditary monarchy, however, dispenses with question of moral character altogether. Protocol and decorum are not to be confused here with character.

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Hereditary monarchy allows one to “inherit the character of the crown” and all it stands for—in spite of one’s personal character. In an era in which the equal moral worth of all human beings regardless of background has become the staple of progressive moral and political thought, the British monarch—indeed the idea of monarchy—embodies the worst social ills that deplete any hope for civilized society: racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and religious preference. Just how racist, sexist, and ethnocentric are the British criteria for becoming head of government? The specifications are set forth in the 1701 Act of Settlement that stipulates that one has to be able to number oneself among the descendents of: “The Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess dowager of Hanover, daughter of the late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of King James the First, to inherit after the King and the Princess Anne, in default of issue of the said princess and his Majesty, respectively; and the heirs of her body, being Protestants.”14 This makes clear what is meant by the term “heirs of her body.” It is dependent on the notion of primogeniture, which gives preference to sons over daughters, as well as the children of sons over the progeny of daughters. Therefore, Prince William is second in line to the throne while Princess Anne, his aunt and the Queen’s second child, is tenth. To be head of state one must also be Protestant and a member of the Church of England. One must descend in the male line, and the favored ethnicity one’s lineage ought to be traced to is German. The English are, after all, descendants of German tribes and people and the British monarchy has its roots in the chieftaincies of the Angli, Saxons, and Jutes. Ethnocracy, the genesis of so much human bloodshed and butchery, is institutionally guaranteed longevity via the veins of the blue-blooded royals. This is offensive because it is politically regressive. It is Germany that emerged as one of the most savagely tribal states of the twentieth century. Until recent years Germany’s citizenry laws were still largely ethnically determined. They are changing at an astonishingly progressive rate.15 Most of those who aspired to German citizenship had to demonstrate German lineage as fully as possible. This ought to have offended the moral sensibilities of all Americans who relish the idea of a civic as opposed to an ethnic form of nationalism. Ethnic Turks, born and raised in Germany, and schooled in the German language and culture, had, until around 2000, less claim of citizenship than ethnic Germans born and raised in Russia and whose ancestors have lived in Russia for over two hundred years. That such individuals can’t speak a word of German is irrelevant. Blood, that human body fluid most revered by a tribally minded people, is imbued with magical powers. Possession

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of it guarantees the possession of all sorts of traits that are normally achieved by the rest of us through discipline and courage. Moral virtue, the tribalist believes, is determined by blood.  The cultural barriers that exist among nation-states, when examined and analyzed, offer us an easier route into the barriers that exist in the psyche of individuals. This is not because people are entirely or even partially reducible to their cultures. It is because on the most basic level, human beings acquire their moral and political vocabularies and, hence, the concomitant derivative framing devices through which to see, comprehend, analyze, and judge the world from culture. Depending on the particular society there are always “competing mileux” in the form of books, art, countercultures, and formal education that challenge the prevailing views of one’s environment. Notions of purity, good breeding, and superiority by virtue of blood transmitted through ethnic and racial channels lie at the heart of the human impulse to erect cultural barriers and to maintain them. Mongrelization and hybridization are feared because of competition—real or imagined—between factions. This competition, it is imagined, would disappear under conditions of tribal purity. At the heart of culturalists’ sentiments lies an unflagging commitment to antiassimilationism. Antiassimilationism, in turn, relies on a logic of contamination that itself hinges on attitudes of shame and disgust. Much interesting work has been done on the notion of disgust. Paul Rozin and Martha Nussbaum have contributed to our understanding of how our conceptions of disgust have shaped our social attitudes to other people and the law. Rozin’s work in particular highlights the cognitive component of disgust and allows us to conceptually differentiate it from other similar emotions such as distaste. Rozin’s research reveals that disgust rests heavily on our conception of a particular object. If we believe that we are sniffing expensive cheese in a vial that actually contains feces, our response is different from the one we have when we are given another vial with the same substance but are told the truth of its contents. In the first scenario, subjects who were part of such an experiment actually liked the smell of feces when they thought that they smelled aged cheese. In the second scenario, subjects experienced disgust. Rozin concluded, “It is the subject’s conception of the object, rather than the sensory properties of the object, that primarily determines the hedonic value.”16 Later, I shall return to this idea of the conception one has of an object—for our purposes it will be the conception one has of

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human subjects—as a way of extrapolating Rozin’s findings on disgust to the sphere of antiassimilationist reasoning. Martha Nussbaum’s work on disgust identifies the idea of psychological contamination as a prominent feature of the concept. The basic idea is that past contact between an innocuous substance and a disgust substance causes rejection of the acceptable substance. This contamination is mediated by what Rozin plausibly enough calls laws of “sympathetic magic.” One such law is the magic of contagion: things that have been in contact continue ever afterwards to act on one another. Thus, after a dead cockroach is dropped in a glass of juice, people refuse to drink that type of juice afterwards. A second is “similarity”: if two things are alike, action taken on one (e.g., contaminating it) is taken to have affected the other. Thus a piece of chocolate fudge made into dog-feces shape is rejected, even though subjects know its real origin; subjects also refuse to eat soup in a (sterile) bed pan, or to eat soup stirred with a sterile fly swatter.17

Disgust, for Nussbaum, has thought content with a serious imperative affixed to it. The thought along with the imperative is on the order of, “That which I find disgusting is capable of contaminating me. I need to get out of here!” There are several aspects of tribalism and its parasitic relationship to an antiassimilationist mentality, along with the logic of contagion and disgust on which it rests, that we may now return to. If we meditate a while on the phenomenon of blue-blood, which is meant to signify the lineage of royals, and compare it to the other type of blood that commoners are thought to possess, we can recognize the “sympathetic magic” at work in the tribalism of hereditary monarchy and the very concept of royalty.  There are four principal human blood types. They are dispersed among what is today described as the various human racial and ethnic groups. That is, there is no set of individuals who are regarded as belonging to a distinctive race who all exclusively share the same blood type. The four human blood types are allocated among all the people today regarded as black, white, Asian, and Indian—to name just a few of the tribal taxonomies under which individuals are classified. An interesting question to consider, and one whose answer could give at least some conceptual respectability to the concept of blue blood, would be this: is there a commonality between the blood type of blue-blooded royals

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and noncommoners whom royals are expected to marry in order not to spoil the bloodline? Is there even a common blood type among royals, and is there a high level of correlation between this blood type and the blood type among those individuals classed as aristocrats? The question, perhaps, is absurd to begin with. The ugly underside of all forms of antiassimilation is that their advocates deliberately assume that others have a greater share in humanity by means of morally irrelevant criteria. When you abstract from the qualities you have and the qualities others have, you discover that there is as much variety within groups as among them and more shared moral vocabularies among groups. The logic of antiassimilation rests on folk beliefs and a misplaced sense of one’s own higher humanity based on an inflation of one’s objective “values” net worth.18 One assumes a lesser humanity for others based on deflation of their “values” net worth. In some sense, their “values net worth” can be of low worth because external markers of the kind picked out by tribalists are, by their definition, prepriced and valued at very little. At bottom, antiassimilationism aborts the self’s striving for continuity of identity in concert with others. It forecloses such a possibility through a bloated social ontology of identity that reifies the group imago as an objectively identifiable reality. It is radical intersubjectivity that brings about the natural abolition of ethnoracial culture. It does so partially by creating an as yet unnameable space and posthuman society. It is in this milieu, and the concomitant identity that it gives birth to, that we may hope for the emergence of a radically individualistic phenomenon we may call a new man, a new woman—a new posthuman cosmopolitan.19

IV. The Cult of Death and the Worship of Ancestry: The Genesis of Group Narcissism Membership in a tribe—any tribe—is motivated by a deep-seated and exaggerated fear of death. The tribalist, often finding the conditions and criteria for tribal identity quite arbitrary, tries to formalize and codify them in the hope of establishing in the clan an alternative and makeshift womb that both protects him from death—or staves it off for as long as possible—and reproduces his likeness. This accounts for the taboo on intermarriage among those who adhere to strong tribal edicts, be they conservative New York Jews, Serbian nationalists, or contemporary Estonians who are more likely to marry Swedes than Russians because, among other things, it shores up and solidifies aspects of their identities that are crucial to their self-image.

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For now, I wish to establish a link between tribal identities and the belief in magical thinking that accompanies them: the belief that to be identified as that sort of person transforms one into a different kind of human being with myriad features that make one immune to things of this world, makes one a species-being who is able to transcend the messy phenomena of the human world to which others are subjected. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud observed that something happened in the psyche of the individual when he became part of a group. Vital and new characteristics appear.20 From numerical considerations, the individual acquires a sentiment of invincible powers. This sentiment permits him to surrender to powerful instincts. Conjoined with this feature is another: the idea of omnipotence. The lack of individual preservation—indisputably a source of psychic preoccupation for human beings who allay such concerns through procreation, works of art, or any individually created phenomena that one thinks is able to survive long after one has perished—is made more digestible by the collective efforts of the group. A consequence of the feeling of omnipotence gained through group membership is another feature of magical thinking that is located in the idea of contagion. Individuals with powerful group identities believe that sentiments and acts are contagious. The teleology of group organization is to equip the group with the attributes of the individuals who are its members, individuals who are of a certain kind and who, by virtue of being this kind, will, through some form of transubstantiation and contagion, make other members of the group into the phenomenal preservative each finds himself to be. The strong ethnoparticularist desires deep synthesis of his personality and his communities’ values. He wants congruence between his own ego-ideal and the identity of his social group. Secure membership in the group—which demands, among other things, that strangers not be allowed in or, if they are, that they know their places and do not disrupt the social order—staves off the fear of fragmentation and disintegration. Not only must identity be cohesive through carefully maintained homogeneity, but it must also be coherent. Self-coherency means that as a work of narrative, the self must make sense. This self makes sense by not just adhering to a cultural narrative, but also by being able to construct a narrative with one’s life that can be mirrored by the group. This affective mirroring involves finishing another’s life story with the thematized version of one’s own. An analogy would be two twins who often finish each other’s sentences before they are completed. The tribalist’s life, no matter how different it is in its lived and experiential form from another’s, can still complete the life of her compatriot and continue her personal narrative because their unit achieves its integration through shared memory and moral

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commitment to the community’s ideals. Each unit has its own spirit, ethos, and pathos, and it is this infusion of pathos and ethos into all their lives that makes mutual self-narration possible. There is often an eerie, almost telepathic ability of group members to spot each other out in a crowd of strangers. What cements their lives in spite of the difference in degrees to which each may be committed to ideals and values of the community is the recognition that such values and ideals are the normative and naturalized standpoints around which agency—local agency—is formed. Tribal units, be they the family, the clan, or the nation, are accredited institutions in their members’ eyes. As their culturally credentialed insiders mirror and narcissistically reinforce each other, there is established what we may call group grandiosity. One group’s values and ideals and ways of life are better than every other social group. Its great achievers are not just products of the Great Community and its superior ethos, but each member of the unit becomes a legitimate heir of the individual’s achievements. One of their own achieved greatness and it makes one—by mere association—a participant in that greatness.  In the ethnoracial culturalist or tribalist there is the deep need not just for basic human affirmation and recognition, but also the need for buoying and mirroring the self of her compatriot who shares similar ideals and values. The ontological value of the self is increased in proportion to the greater the number of compatriots there are who also share the esteemed objects, goals, and values it strives for. It is a confirmation of what the self has chosen as its own and a corroboration of its ego-ideal with the cultural ideas of the group. This ego-ideal says to the self: You are right; your judgments and perceptions of reality are correct; and you are not alone. It is this absence of aloneness, of having like-minded company that staves off another trait of the group-self that threatens its stability: enfeeblement. Perceived enfeeblement comes from the perception that energy is being drained through resource depletion. It is always the strangers who drain the community of its vitality; they suck the very energy out of it, the tribalist believes, and the nature of who and what they are makes them constitutionally incapable of replacing what they take. They lack the foundational and intrinsic group characteristics—the group aura, really—to replenish the vats from which they have fed. Group enfeeblement is the genetic antecedent to fragmentation and then disintegration. Group enfeeblement vis-à-vis the stranger is a complicated phenomenon because it is not the case that hostility and resentment always precede the entrance of the stranger and foreigner into the unit. Tribal units will often

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welcome the outsider in a spirit of benevolence. But although cohesion can be maintained through civil and public laws and subtle homogenization of behavioral norms it is, once again, the coherency of the group-self that is under siege. Outsiders are simply disruptors of a narrative that makes the retrieval of a nostalgic past difficult if not impossible. The stage becomes too crowded and the players too heterogeneous. The unit is infested and the social order disrupted by people who carry strange customs inside their heads. They disrupt the social order of the host inside his own head as he strives to figure what’s theirs and what’s his. When the tribalist looks at the stranger there can be no mirroring because she is psychologically segregated from the stranger by memory. The more strangers there are, the more each is segregated from the hosts, and the more these social disruptors threaten group grandiosity. The stranger, using the resources of the unit, begins to achieve, and his achievement reflects on his kind. Our tribalist cannot, in a cosmopolitan spirit, claim pride in the achievement in the name of a common humanity. The conjured false group-self that was constructed to achieve specialness and distinction begins to deflate. Members of the host group feel that its citizens who are bona fide mythological members are becoming impotent in the face of the encroaching Others—and this even when they exhibit fondness for such Others. But in the face of soul fatigue, cultural mutations, and, more importantly, a group of strangers who not only cannot manufacture memory but are also unable to viscerally “just get” what it’s all about, the mirroring, recognition, and affirmation that are part of bolstering group selfesteem begin to dissipate. It is only a matter of time before the group’s social anxiety over lost distinctness and the future of its culture goes from feelings of enfeeblement to fragmentation. Most units do not disintegrate, although some would see any changes from a conservative past to a mongrelized present as a form of functional disintegration.  We may describe the tribalist as a vampiric neonate who seeks out others like himself in order to reinforce who he takes himself to be. Who and what he takes himself to be is a creation of others like himself who are a distinct kind. This feature of distinctness is the misconception on which contemporary tribal identities are predicated and to which reality and common sense are subordinated in order to accommodate the wishful thinking, fears, and fantasies of individuals who seek to magnify individual identity by borrowing from the flouted and overwrought legacy of a nostalgic past.

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Perhaps the best chronicler of contemporary tribal identity predicated on myths and distorted legends is Michael Ignatieff. Commenting on the struggles between the Ukrainians and the Russians who lived with each other for seventy-five years, a period of almost four generations, Ignatieff suggests that their economic plight would recommend combining forces and cooperating. There are elements on both sides that drive the two groups toward civil war. “How can this be happening when both sides have sound historical reasons to consider themselves brothers?” Ignatieff asks.21 The reference to brothers suggests that the “Cain and Abel Syndrome” is the paradox to be explored. The irony that intolerance between brothers is often stronger than between strangers prompts Ignatieff to wonder how the essential elements of similarity that make groups “brothers” are denied and reconstructed so that the two groups confront each other as strangers.22 This consideration pierces the heart of the revisionism and historical selectivity that are the soul of national identity. Groups that have coexisted side by side for generations, whose values, customs, and lifestyles have shaped the characters of individuals from both groups will, under certain social and political circumstances, retreat to a historical identity, to a sense of themselves as a distinct people whose identity in its purest form existed some several hundreds of years ago. This historical identity then takes precedence over their contemporary ones. They ignore the similarities between themselves and the individuals in their “rival group.” Not to do so will mean that a crumbling self, predicated on a shaky identity, will be annihilated. One must purge oneself of the similarities one shares with the Other and that one had previously embraced as a constitutive feature of oneself. One rids oneself of a contaminant and protects oneself against contagion. In a poignant moment in Ignatieff’s documentary, The Road to Nowhere, based on his book Blood and Belonging, a Serbian soldier speaks aggressively about the problem with Croatian identity. He speaks in vague terms about the distinctness between the two groups. Some of this distinctness has to do with cigarette brands and the question of who among the two groups favors one brand over another. One should bear in mind that apart from the issue of religion—Croatians are mostly Catholics while Serbians are Eastern Orthodox—the two groups are almost ethnically indistinguishable. The soldier then goes on to say that the problem with the Croatians is that they want to be gentlemen. This is impossible, the speaker says. “Croatians are like us. We are all Slavs. We are all the same.”23 In one sentence, with gun in hand, fighting a war to protect the land that will enshrine the sanctity of his identity and make Serbia an ethnically pure state, he admits to the sameness between his group and the one he is fighting

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against, the one he imagines possesses all sorts of contagious and dangerous traits that must be expurgated from the territory designated Serbia. More telling is the case of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people indigenous to the hills of Crimea for a thousand years.24 The Crimea, now officially a part of the Ukraine, was ceded by Stalin’s successors to the Ukraine in 1954.25 Today, it is an area that is hotly contested by several ethnic groups and houses the aspirations and longings of several of those groups who see their identities and their survival as irrevocably tied to the land. There are Russian separatists in the region whose greatest desire is to sever with the Ukraine and establish the Crimea as an autonomous state. The Tatars, however, are the oldest inhabitants of the peninsula. Under Stalin, they were deported and relocated in Soviet Central Asia.26 After the collapse of the Soviet Union they have been returning to the area, especially to Bakhchisarai, their ancestral capital. The Tatars want a Crimean Tatar Republic; not a territorial nation, but an ethnic nation. Ignatieff makes an interesting observation in the form of a question posed directly to individual Tatars: How have they survived as a people? The answer is that they have a policy of not marrying outside the group. Big peoples can afford intermarriage, they say, but their strict prohibitions against intermarriage are responsible for their strong families and for the longevity of their traditions. Ignatieff, however—and he is not alone in this observation—discloses the glaring evidence of intermarriage among Tatars, Russians, and Ukrainians that has been taking place for centuries. Truth be told, the Tatars like almost all existing individuals categorized under contemporary ethnic, racial, or national labels, and who might conceive of themselves as a distinct and pure people, exist as hybrids. Why make such a fuss about what appears to be a tiny issue, the right of individuals to identify themselves as they wish regardless of lineage? One of the reasons for concern is precisely the effacement of consciousness and the historical revisionism that takes place when ancestry is imputed with a single imprimatur when, in point of fact, its loci are multiple. The foundation for contemporary Tatar identity is no more singular than is the identity of a Jew who marries a Catholic, or that of an offspring of a black American woman and an Irish man. The latter would have no less a right to claim on ancestral and ethnic grounds that she be labeled an Irish American rather than African American. The erasure of consciousness when human agency is formed by conjoinment of sensibilities, values, and multiple singularities is itself responsible for the distortion that arises when human beings assume the task of interpreting other human beings. I do not say when human beings analyze other human

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beings or when human beings judge others. Indeed, judgment already presupposes interpretation because the latter involves a mode of thinking, of sorting through and sifting among all that touches the senses in a manner that equips us to say after interpretation, for example, “This is a man competent to stand trial; this is a woman and not an animal!” This is the vocational task of judgment. We judge only that which we think is interpretable, and we judge after we have made the decision as to how to interpret a subject, a decision that itself is a form of judgment. In this vein, I submit that cases such as those involving the Tatars—or an even more extreme one: Jews who continue to think that they and their progeny truly stem from a line of descendants going all way back to Abraham, when those Jews breathing, living, and walking today, are an admixture of varied human types—are what make it possible for tribalists to fold back on themselves in the form of preserved myths, stored and communicated to other like-minded consciousnesses. The latter we may refer to as adumbrated enculturation. Those whose socialization fits this description abstract themselves from the variety of human life worlds that have shaped them. They become walking automatons of fabricated and imagined creeds.  The tribalist is a totalitarian in his approach to spheres of human life where human interactions produce results that are not easily codified into experiential concepts. Primitive attempts at such codification are found in notions such as blackness, Jewishness, whiteness, Indianness, and Germanness. These concepts function like colloquial terms wedded to a folk psychology that determines an ethics.27 The mistake here is not in assuming that those concepts are incapable of suggesting something on the order of a national character trait that we ostensibly recognize as being affixable to those who fall under the category.28 Rather, it is in treating a vague approximation and a constellation of character traits as distinct types that guarantee psychological and characteriological access to all those who fall under the concepts as members of distinct groups. This is not necessarily the literal goal of those who rely on such concepts. Rather, the concepts invade and then saturate their sensibilities in ways that ultimately compromise their larger ability to perceive those with whom they come in contact in a way that is not racially, nationally, or ethnically biased. The tribalist interprets all life forms, expressions, progress, epochal moments, monumental sufferings, and sundry variations on the notion of manifest destiny, according to the racial identity of human beings.

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Another offensive and, simultaneously, humorous example of this attitude is evident in the repatriation of Russians to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We see Russian nationals with ethnic German ancestry who do not speak a word of German not only transplanted back to Germany and granted German citizenship, but regarded as more authentically Germanic than Turks who were born and raised in Germany. They have this status because of “German blood,” which, with its magical properties, automatically gives them all the essential characteristics associated with things Germanic: cleanliness, efficiency, and productivity. Those are traits that the Turk, regardless of his character and value constitution, can never ever have. This is not only the distortion of thought that legitimized the genocide of six million Jews; it is the same madness that for decades influenced German citizenship laws vis-à-vis Turks. The impropriety of this lies not in the denial of the humanity of others. It is that human beings are prevented from seeing individuals outside their groups as real characters. Tribalists can see others only as symbols, rather than characters. It is this ability to abstract oneself from the dynamism that comes from enjoined lives with others that also makes it difficult for the tribalist to see even himself as a character. The playwright Bertolt Brecht underscores this truism in a most indirect and unusual way. Commenting on the technique of the actor in effectively portraying a credible character, Brecht writes that the actor ought not to catch on too quickly. He must think twice about the role he is playing so that he does not become too attached to a sense of the character that is not open to revision. He writes, This is not only to prevent him from “fixing” a particular character prematurely, so that it has to be stuffed out with after thoughts because he has not waited to register all the other pronouncements, and especially those of the other characters; but also and principally in order to build into the character that element of “Not-But” on which so much depends if society, in the shape of the audience, is to be able to look at what takes place in such a way as to be able to affect it. Each actor, moreover, instead of concentrating on what suits him and calling it “human nature,” must go above all for what does not suit him, is not his specialty.29

The capacity to submit to the “Not-But” informs the heart of the individual who embraces radical intersubjectivity with his or her fellow human being. Intersubjectivity—the creative social intercourse among human beings who let their humanities commingle and do not worry about its product—may not produce characters that are authentically “Jewish” or “Serbian” or “Ibo.”

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Instead, it creates a phenomenon more sacred and noble: a singular, irreplaceable, one-of-its-kind-only human being. The tribalist fixes what he thinks is character but what others know to be a caricature of a human being by inverting Brecht’s rule. He accomplishes this by assuming that he knows the character long before he has met the man or woman who possesses it. This is because the tribalist assumes a false epistemological head start in the difficult journey each has to take individually in order to truly know another human being. He is given the tribal traits, the outlines of a species-type that fit the members of his group. He doesn’t need to know the individual Mexican who faces him; he doesn’t need to understand his singularity, his experiences, his moral principles, and his idiosyncrasies. Nor does he even need to know that individual Mexican in his singular immoral mode. The tribalist already has the script that allows him to typecast the Mexican into a particular species-being. That not all Mexicans match the traits with the same degree of exactitude is irrelevant. Those, he may reason, are aberrations. The portrait of that cognitive style is precisely what we call a caricature.

Notes 1. The review referred to is that of critic Leon Wieseltier’s of Dorothy Rabinowicz’s New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). The article “In a Universe of Ghosts” was published in the New York Review of Books, November, 25, 1976, pp. 20–23. Cited in Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 205. 2. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 205. 3. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 205. Italics are mine. 4. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 206. 5. The reference of the “black man” to her father is controversial. Some critics have attributed this metaphor to Plath’s estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who was known to wear a burly black coat. The reference may very well be to Ted Hughes. I am taking the liberty, however, of interpreting this as a case in which the metaphor is transposed across two bodies; one literally—Ted Hughes—the other as a signifier of the darkness and melancholic constant in her life, Otto Plath, her beloved father who died when she was eight years old. 6. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 206. 7. Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 206. 8. See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). 9. I put this phrase in quotes because the form of oppression under discussion is a contested one. As such, there are judgments on the order of simply being gay is not a sufficient condition for one to be regarded as oppressed in the way that being black is. The obvious reasoning behind this sort of judgment is based on any one or all of the following options: one can be gay and not live a gay lifestyle; one can be gay and not be identified as gay; one can be a “straight gay.” By the latter is meant one who is

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the sort of gay person that is the least threatening to heterosexuals. As a result, one is immune or partially immune to the myriad challenges faced by a highly effeminate, politically “offensive” gay individual. A “politically offensive” gay person to a certain group of heterosexuals might be an individual who is militant in his or her advocacy of gay rights in and outside the workplace. The upshot of the objection is this: there are all sorts of ways that being gay can be problematized that are foreclosed to blacks. One is black by a nonnegotiable set of markers created by white society. Because the two identities of gay and black are socially mediated in ways that allow gays to exercise greater leverage in how that identity is inserted in the public space, to name but one example, the two are noncommensurable by any reasonable criteria that gauge both the kind of oppression and its intensity. 10. The origins of the language are not very well known even among historians and linguists. The first providers of English were the Saxons. The English language was born in the crucibles of Latin from the Romans and, later, the Vikings from Norway and Denmark who spoke Old Norse. 11. Lewis Mumford, Transformations of Man (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978). 12. James E. Goggin and Eileen Brockman Goggin, “Politics, Ideology, and the Psychoanalytic Movement Before, During and After the Third Reich,” Psychoanalytic Review 88, no. 2 (April 2001): 161–62. 13. René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), 1989. 14. Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, March 2001. 15. Germany’s criteria for citizenship are changing in an impressive manner. As of this writing, a residency of eight years is required for ethnic Turks who legally reside in the country. 16. Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94 (1987): 23–41. 17. Martha Nussbaum, “Secret Sewers of Vice: Disgust, Bodies and the Law,” in The Passions of Law, ed. Susan Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 2001). See also Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 18. I mean to make clear that values here do not refer to those things we label as values in the objective world; that is, principles and justifiable beliefs that we use to guide our lives and influence and/or determine the choices we make. I am also not referring to those values that a virtue theorist would stipulate we ought to have, such as generosity, courage, and compassion. Those sorts of values are precisely what would allow one to make some legitimate attempt to determine qualitative differences among people. Values here, as the antiassimilationists and culturalists mean them, are those features of human existence that in and of themselves are morally neutral: group membership, physical characteristics, and ancestry and lineage. That one is even a member of a religious group that holds its members to agreeable moral values tells us nothing about that individual qua moral agent. 19. Culture, incidentally, takes care of itself when human beings live and interact in an environment where freedom of association is the norm. Freedom of association

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of one kind or another, however, is exercised by individuals who have been weaned from the infantile need of tribal markers, human beings whose associations are radically individualistic. They engage with the enormity of the phenomenon before them: the inviolable, unique, indivisible human being who stands in his or her radical singularity. 20. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959). 21. Michael Ignatieff, “Nationalism and Tolerance,” in The Politics of Toleration in Modern Life, ed. Susan Mendus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 22. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Noonday Press, 1993). 23. Michael Ignatieff et al., The Road to Nowhere, DVD (Princeton, N.J.: Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2003). 24. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 132. 25. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 132. 26. Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, 133. 27. For a very interesting discussion of the notion of folk psychology and its relation to ethics, see Adam Morton, The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2003). 28. To say that the concept is affixable to any of those who fall within the group to which it is being attributed is not to say that it is necessarily affixable to anyone in the group. In stating the condition as I have outlined it, I mean only to suggest that when we do recognize someone in the group whose bearing matches the concept we do not think it anomalous. 29. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 197.

CHAPTER FOUR

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The Psychopathology of Tribalism

I. The Tribalist as Moral Appropriator Simply put, a moral appropriator is a person who tries to appropriate moral value by illicit means. In much the same way that a social climber creates the impression of possessing class, status, and pedigree by displaying markers that are interpreted by society as signifying the coveted impressions, so the moral appropriator tries to gain moral standing, not by achieving a moral status earned through a moral character cultivated by moral actions, but by riding on the prestige of a title with which he self-identifies. A social climber may, for example, associate with wealthy individuals, celebrities, and those with fancy social titles in the hope that through such associations, others will come to see him as having the coveted features of his friends. Ultimately, they’ll bestow—he hopes—the status he so desperately craves. Through association with these friends, he is allowed to bypass the long road they may—or may not—have taken in order to achieve their status. This is because the social climber does not believe that he has the requisite capabilities to pursue his goals and, more importantly, because he (for whatever reasons) would rather take shortcuts and create a deceptive facsimile of what others take to be genuine. The moral appropriator also comes in several guises, from the Great Pretender to the serial confessor who believes that a combination of confessions and good deeds will win him moral pride of place among the registers of society’s prized conventions. 137

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The tribalist, however, through his behavior and attitude toward his kin group and those outside of it, is a moral appropriator writ large. There are two examples that best amplify this phenomenon. One is the obsession some individuals have in extolling their own worth not by means of their ethnic/national traditions, but by harking back to a Great Past Mythology. What the individuals cannot achieve in their own person and through their personal achievements, they acquire by virtue of their membership in a culture whose distinctness lies in its great past. This great past is communicated by a mythical narrative that portrays it as the great contributor to human civilization in a way unequalled by other civilizations. Often it originated as a creation myth. Hence, all other civilizations or cultures are mere derivatives of this original first people and culture. Manufacturers of the Great Myth interpret and reinterpret the present to ensure that it accords with a reality (the past) that, although lacking remnants visibly present in contemporary culture, still retains its most fundamental features, thus ensuring each member a share in that greatness and an exalted share in humanity and personal worth that comes from membership in the group linked with the great past. The second example that brings into sharper relief the way in which the tribalist functions as a moral appropriator is what we may call ethnic revivalists, or in Harold Isaacs words, ethnic romantics. These are individuals who are many generations removed from their ancestral roots and who desperately seek some affiliation with roots; hence the plethora of hyphenated nationalities such as Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and German-Americans. The case of black Americans is a special one deserving of separate commentary. For the most part, those labeled as black or African-Americans have not voluntarily identified themselves as such. The racial taxonomy used to pick out such individuals has a long and interesting history. The terms used historically have included but have not been restricted to coloreds, Colored People, Colored Americans, Negrosaxons, AfraAmericans, Racemen, nonwhites, negroes, Negroes, blacks, AfroAmericans, and Black Americans. Individuals bearing such identifiers are not as autonomous in holding them as are those bearing the labels GermanAmerican or Irish-American—the latter being voluntary signifiers that individuals in the respective groups are free to adopt or drop at any moment in their lives. In other words, whether those terms are actually used to mark out any one specific individual is largely a matter of choice. This is not the case for African-Americans, many of whom prefer the terms black, colored, or people of color, but are denied public usage of such terms. As the author of one classic study in sociology argued:

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If one believes one is part English and part German and identifies in a survey as German, one is not in danger of being accused of trying to “pass” as nonEnglish and of being “redefined” English by the interviewer. But if one were part African and part German, one’s self-identification as German would be highly suspected and probably not accepted if one “looked” black according to the prevailing social norms.1

My goal is to show how those aspiring to tribal terms when they are generationally removed from them because their participation in the history and traditions of the “people” from whom they derive their tribal identity is minimal, are committing a category mistake. Not only does this make the term conceptually vacuous—what makes you Italian if you don’t speak the language, have never visited the country, were not born there, and lack a sustained relationship to the myriad cultural phenomena associated with being Italian?—it also shores up, on close examination, the questionable motives such individuals have for labeling themselves as they do. So it is more than just a category mistake that people are committing. They are attempting to ride on the social prestige of an identity that bears little resemblance to who they really are in their day-to-day lives. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America by Mary C. Waters is perhaps the single most comprehensive case study in the genealogy of EuropeanAmerican identity published in quite some time. The text reveals the various criteria that have made it more possible for individuals in some groups rather than others to choose ethnic identities as self-identifying signifiers. The book is an exciting examination of the often-arbitrary criteria by which an individual’s ethnic affiliation is determined. Census takers most often relied on a patrilineal model for determining ethnic affiliation. It was a criterion that up until the early 1970s remained true to the model of the single career family. Males were heads of most households, and in the majority of cases this was the factor used to determine ethnic identification. Census takers, however, were uninterested in the subtleties that factor into a more robust use of ethnicity as an identity signifier. For example, it made little difference to the majority of census takers, up until the 1970s, whether or not the child that was being classified as Italian because his father was Italian adhered to any features that identified him as Italian. That his mother was Polish and that Polish was the language spoken around the house, and Polish food the predominant food consumed by the household, made little difference. That the father might not have even referred to himself as Italian-American, while the mother held on strongly to her Polish heritage and passed this on to her children also made little difference. Until the mid-1970s, 30 to 60 percent of children were assigned something other than the logical combination of their parents’ ancestry.2

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II. Symbolic Ethnicity Moral appropriation is interestingly dramatized in the lives of those who practice what is often termed the new ethnicity or dime store ethnicity. Herbert Gans has coined the more conceptually precise term symbolic ethnicity.3 Symbolic ethnicity is applicable largely to white Americans of European ancestry who tend to have a merely symbolic relationship to their ethnicity. They may freely identify themselves as hyphenated European-Americans without necessarily displaying patriotism, or deep cultural affinity with their “ancestral home.” It is a leisure activity that need not influence their lives unless they want it to. They are free to march in parades celebrating their ethnic heritages—on Saint Patrick’s Day or Columbus Day—without being bounded to any cultural obligations. They do not have to demonstrate ancestral continuity with norms, customs, and beliefs that are believed to be constitutive features of their ancestral heritage. Among the diverse ancestries that may be responsible for an individual’s identity, he is free to elect at whim the one that best suits his tastes or temperament. Waters’s research reveals interesting phenomena about the freedom of white Americans of European ancestry in selecting their ethnic identities. Persons who thought that their ancestry was the same in both parents often did try to pass as having an ancestry they would like to have had. This desire is undoubtedly linked to another fact that Waters’s study unearths. People in general hold the belief that racial and ethnic categories are biological and fixed. They believe these attributes are fixed in their own person. They believe this even when they know that their own ethnicity is symbolic. One of the respondents in Waters’s research, Ted Jackson, had a very negative response upon learning that he had more ancestral features in his background than he had been aware of. Jackson originally thought that he was Irish, French, German, English, and Italian. He laments: “I didn’t even know I was Scottish until I got interested in my roots and I went over to my grandmother’s. I didn’t know I was English. I thought I was only a couple of things, but then she really made me feel like a dirt ball—throw everything else in there too.”4 The disgust at discovering mixed ancestry often led to selective forgetting. Subjects repeatedly identified themselves as having a single ethnic ancestry identity when their ancestry was mixed. They would often select the ancestry most others believed applied to them because of their surnames. Surnames, however, turned out to be a poor indicator of ethnic identity for several reasons. One was that children often assumed the last names of their fathers, many of whom had mixed ancestry, but retained one or two ethnic identi-

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fiers as components of self-identification. The offspring’s ethnic self-identity, however, might be derived from his mother who identified strongly with one ancestry and observed the rituals, customs, traditions, and language associated with it. One respondent who often relied on surnames to identify white Irish, or Irish-Americans, admitted that when she was at a loss in deciding whom to vote for in any election she simply voted Irish. Usually, however, when she voted for someone with the last name O’Brien it turned out to be a black O’Brien. Of course, in reality this cannot disqualify such an individual from being an Irish-American, given that 70 percent of persons identified as black in this country have white ancestry in their lineage.5 Feeling like a dirt ball because of mixed ancestry accompanied by selective forgetting, which seems to function like an unconscious cleanser, is made evident in the case of a woman with mixed ancestry—German and Polish. After giving an exhaustive account of her German-Polish identity, which is more Germanic than Polish (in spite of the fact that she identifies herself publicly as Polish), she goes on to remember that she has some English in her as well. Her grandmother had reminded her that a family member had married an English person. She was annoyed when her grandmother told this to her and remembered thinking: “I am already this mishmash, don’t tell me that I am anything else too.”6 Susan Badovich, a third generation Slovenian, is an interesting case of someone who deploys selective forgetting via her adopted son. His mixed ancestry is Irish, Austrian, and English. When asked if she will rear her son with a special knowledge of his ancestry, she is ambivalent. She states unapologetically that she does not celebrate St. Patrick’s Day because she is proud that she has no Irish in her. When her husband reminds her that her son is half Irish, she feels a need to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. She had a friend who went to Germany to purchase a pair of lederhosen, little Austrian trousers for the Austrian part of him. She comments: “I hope to instill in him some pride in his ethnic background.”7 What would be the basis for such pride and in what would it consist, especially in light of the fact that her son is also one-quarter Native American? Which of his backgrounds is he to have pride in and why the Austrian part if he is half Irish? Part of the answer lies in the fact that both Irish-American and Native American identities are low-prestige identities unlike, say, French-American and English-American identities. Another respondent in the study had more of a personal connection to her Germanic background; because of her last name, though, she publicly self-identified as Polish. Her understanding of Polish culture and traditions was largely stereotypical, symbolic, and superficial, according to Waters. It came mainly from media images and reflected negative stereotypes. The

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choice for ethnic identification, however, remained hers. She bought a mug with a broken handle with the painted inscription “Polish coffee mug” on it. This, she explained, was evidence of one of her Polish characteristics.8 A more apt description of her action would be that it is another arbitrary and conceptually vacuous use of an ethnic identity. This negative emotion, the feeling of being a dirt ball, is a crucial factor about self-identity that deserves an extensive analysis. It lies at the heart of the phenomenon of moral appropriation I’ll return to later on. For now, it sheds illuminating light on the fact that people do have underlying beliefs about the moral and social value of certain ethnicities. Even among individuals who claimed not to have any ethnic image-identity are those who ascribed almost mystical value to ethnic kinship secured through bloodline. Sean O’Brien, for example, freely admits that Irish-Americans are the same as everyone else with regard to traits or character, simply because of the generational passage of time and the assimilation that took place during this process. He still admits, however, to an affinity for the Irish. He says that he would “give them a second look” (special consideration) despite the fact that they are not different. He clarifies, “It is just the bloodline or something. They are ancestors from the old country. That is enough.”9 Much of the ethos that drives the moral appropriators can be captured in the phenomenon of an atheist who converts to Judaism. I knew of such an individual and always found the enterprise highly questionable. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag writes that Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. By this she means that they are creators of sensibilities. She notes, “The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”10 Jewish moral seriousness is an unquestionable formidable force to be reckoned with. Having kept themselves intact as a people over two thousand years, overcoming linguistic and national differences largely, but not solely, because of their socialization in Mosaic and Talmudic moral precepts, the Jews have erected a superior civilization that has withstood the nefarious attempts to compromise or annihilate it. Given the protracted moral identity of religious Jews arduously forged in a tortured relationship with God, who asked them to prove themselves over and over again, is it not clear that the atheist or agnostic who wants to convert to the Jewish religion is someone who wants an unfair and unearned shortcut to Jewish identity via a morally questionable path? If one is born Jewish but becomes an atheist, then the situation is different. A historical example would not be Sigmund Freud, who took his Jewishness seriously despite his irreligiosity, but rather the novelist and philosopher

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Ayn Rand. Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and later changed her name to Ayn Rand. She never denied that she was born a Jew; however, it held no personal significance for her identity since it had not anything to do with a self that was consciously chosen and imbued with her own values. Being born Jewish was an accident of birth she could not undo, but she saw no reason to be either proud or ashamed of it. It was a neutral part of her past. The atheist who converts to Judaism acquires a religious not an ethnic or national identity, and therein lies the moral duplicity. Such a person would be accepting the teachings of the Jewish faith. What such a person craves, really, is the prestige of inheriting a religious and cultural heritage without the struggle of religious conversion. There can be no such thing as an atheistic Jewish convert. To convert to a religion and be a nonbeliever is oxymoronic. It is to say to oneself, “I will abstract my identity from the religious sphere of Judaism. I will be able to tell people I am a Jew and be able to experience from their responses, and from the rituals of conversion, a new sense of self that is not earned but manufactured for me.” The authentic religious convert places himself in the narrative history of a people, realizing that his own history until now has been sequestered from theirs. However, he assimilates their past into his present by actively reframing his experiences and values according to his acquired Judaic identity-inthe-making. That assimilated past also shapes his future to the extent that it influences the choices he makes that directly impact his future. There is, so to speak, a lot of catching up to do. One must reinsert oneself into a tradition that is really like no other. There is a huge narrative chasm between one’s lived experience as a Gentile (or Muslim, Buddhist, etc.) and not only the life one must live as a Jew, but also the life one must reimagine one has lived as a Jew in the past. Memory takes on a new dimension in the life of this type of religious convert. The annals of Jewish history cause one to reinterpret one’s life retrospectively according to a new historical augury. The Jews are God’s chosen people. Before becoming a convert one was not among the chosen. However, as a nonnative believer, one may now insert oneself retroactively into this historical drama, provided one believes in the historical conditions that gave rise to the special relationship between the Jewish people and their God. To the extent that access to one’s past and the various interpretations that one has of one’s past are crucial for the present identities one holds, then retrospective insertion into the Jewish past for a believing convert is helpful in making one into an authentic Jew. The conversion is aided since it is not just a moral issue, but also one that relies on psychological and emotional continuity between past selves that still add up—recognizably—to the same

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individual, albeit one who has become. The past, reshaped and sculpted through one’s gradual present conversion, makes the conversion process even more organic. Given a significant passage of time, it begins to seem as if one had always been a Jew. The tribal moral appropriator works in no such fashion. He cannot, since all he wants are the accoutrements associated with things Jewish via Judaic religious oficialese and rabbinic sleight of hand. He wants what he thinks is the moral currency of Jewish superiority without having to undergo any of the moral transformations required for this. He wants an associational identity that is unlike others, that is, he wants to be a Jew without becoming one. Jews are God’s chosen people. We have yet to speak about the problem of hereditary chosenness from the perspective of tribalism. This I shall reserve for the last chapter when I highlight the problems it poses for a cosmopolitan ethics of equality among all God’s children. For now, however, let us meditate on the shortcut that the nonbelieving moral appropriator wants to take in order to be counted as one among the chosen people. Again, to be born Jewish and to become an atheist is to remain tethered to an inescapable part of one’s historicity. One is among the chosen by virtue of an accident of birth, and what one makes of that is quite literally the prerogative of the individual. The gentile, however, can never opt for a secular, nonbelieving religious/ ethnic changeover into Jewishness anymore than an Amish girl can opt to become Chinese through some sort of wishful thinking. Since Judaism does contain a conversion clause, chosenness is possible for nonnative Jews who follow prescribed rules and rituals. In that process one is also a literal value maker as a newly minted Jew (some dissenting opinions from various Jewish quarters notwithstanding). One does not intend to appropriate values. One has assimilated them into one’s humanity and, as a new stand-in for Israel, one reproduces Jewishness through one’s moral personality and good works.

III. Ethnic versus Ethnic: The Problem of Definition Waters’s study reveals the confusion about traits that people described as “Irish” or “Polish,” to name a few. Individuals could not decide what they meant and were guilty of regarding characteristics that were peculiar to their families as ethnic traits. Another study concluded that people often interpreted behavior and values as ethnic when they were merely idiosyncratic gestures of human beings in general, or of their own families in particular.11 Various behaviors or beliefs observed by respondents as they were growing up were thought to be widespread among people of the same heritage.12 Some of the popular beliefs held by respondents in Waters’s study—about their own groups and

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others—were as follows: Irish-Americans are garrulous and less pretentious than members of other ethnic groups. They are also rednecks, narrow-minded, guilty of bigotry, and they repress sensuality. They favor boys over girls. Czechs were believed to be heavy drinkers who did not pay attention to their children, while a Lithuanian warlike sensibility was believed to be the reason individuals from that group were more likely to be in favor of defense spending than members of other ethnic groups.13 Walters’s research revealed that “Italian” was the most common response by people to the question, “If you could be a member of any ethnic group you wanted, which one would you choose?” The reasons were a strong belief that Italians had a warm family life and excellent food.14 The study concludes that people described values and beliefs that were dispersed among the population as unique to their own ethnic groups. Waters argues that such values are ones held by the majority of middle class Americans. When Waters asked her respondents what made their ethnic group unique they almost universally ascribed certain values to their group. They claimed that their ethnic group was different from all others because of three fundamental characteristics: a very high priority placed on family, a high value on education (as proved by the sacrifices parents made for their children’s education), and loyalty to God and country. Waters writes: I noticed the similarities after I conducted interview after interview in which the same qualities were mentioned, but each time with a different ethnic label attached. I would be told that one family had sacrificed everything so that their children could go to college because they were German and Germans set great store by education. At the next house, I would be told that the Irish truly valued education, and that was why they had finished high school when others had not. In the next house, the story would be that the Portuguese sacrificed to educate their children. After a while I began to notice that people were all citing the same values— most often love of family, hard work and belief in education—yet each family attributed them to their own ethnic background. As a sociologist listening to these stories, I am tempted to ascribe these values to the common American middle class of which all of my respondents were members. Yet the respondents did not learn these values as children with the label “middle-class” attached to them, but rather learned them to be “Irish,” “German,” or “French.”15

Let us return to the phenomenon of white Americans of European ancestry who feel like dirt balls because of their mixed ancestry, as well as to a general analysis of symbolic ethnicity as attempted moral appropriation. Common sense informs us that there is not anything in the nature of moral

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practice that makes it susceptible to anything like blood or lineage insofar as any of these features can be used to detect its presence in a human being’s life. Nor can blood and lineage act in any shape or form as predictors of a person’s moral dispositions. A family of four generous and compassionate moral individuals cannot guarantee that the next child born into it will inherit any of the positive traits the family is known by. That is, short of moral socialization, the new addition to the family could not conceivably practice moral acts such as compassion and generosity merely because of his ancestry and the “pure blood” that secures it. It seems reasonable to assume, however, that were he to be ethnically, nationally, or racially predisposed to practice moral virtues, such an individual could in no way acquire moral worth linked to any of the moral virtues tribally encoded into his nature, until he had exercised them. A genetically secured moral disposition is a far cry from a volitional exercise of it in a way that achieves moral agency. Yet this is the superstitious belief that exists in varying degrees and that is consciously or unconsciously adhered to by the worshippers of blood identities—be they symbolic or nonsymbolic users of blood identities. They cling to the premise that moral worth can be acquired from ethnic, racial, or national tribal ancestry. It also has to be ancestry of the right type. Given the intertribal judgments where moral indictments are made on the grounds of tribal affiliation and verdicts filtered through the a prioricity of belief about guilt or innocence based on the possession of tribal blood, we could only conclude—on a tribalist separatist logic—that some ancestries are inherently evil or bad, others good. Persons possessing the right ancestries are granted a shortcut to the road to moral cultivation. The tribal mantle that they don already possesses features that give its wearers moral status and protection from those with bad ancestries. Waters, in a telling summation of her own invaluable study on ethnic identity in America, writes: In fact, people’s belief that racial or ethnic categories are biological, fixed attributes of individuals does have an influence on their ethnic identities. This popular understanding of ethnicity means that people behave as if it were an objective fact when their own ethnicity is highly symbolic. This belief that ethnicity is biologically based acts as a constraint on the ethnic choices of some Americans, but there is nonetheless a range of latitude available in deciding how to identify oneself and whether to do so in ethnic terms. Whites enjoy a great deal of freedom in these choices; those defined in “racial” terms as non-whites much less. Black Americans, for example, are highly socially constrained in their capacity to identify as blacks, without other options available to them, even when they believe or know that their forebears included many non-blacks.16

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Official census takers argued that others could determine the race of an individual on “objective,” quasi-biological grounds without that person agreeing. There are no such assumptions or legal definitions governing the choice of ancestry or identity for white Americans.17 Sean O’Brien, the Irish-American respondent in Waters’s study, embodies the impulse of the moral appropriator who believes in the magic of blood. When asked to explain the specialness of the Irish, O’Brien proclaims: “It’s just in the bloodline.” The moral appropriator knows that in reality there are to be found no moral features in accidents of birth that will make him into the moral clone of his revered group members. He hopes, though, that an associative relationship will give him moral worth, more so than those other ethnicities, the ones that are not as “good,” the ones that have a bad reputation and lack moral worth. But for the moral appropriator they are more than that. They are vehicles of contagion—a disgusting putrescence that has morphed them into an indistinguishable mass of necrotic atrophying tissue.18 He feels like a dirt ball because the mixture of questionable ancestry contaminates the imagined purity he believes an ancestry of one kind or another assures him. It doesn’t matter what acts he commits in the world or whether any third party can judiciously adjudge his character to be sound and of good standing. Somewhere in his unconscious—though for others it is an explicitly held principle—he believes in the indelible moral value grafted onto him by his ethnicity. This first branding—his tribal insignia—a curse, or a gift from nature, is so powerful that in his own mind the character that he fashions or, more likely, finds himself in possession of pales in comparison to it. The insignia has the backing of tradition. It has a history. It is dated and, therefore, this longevity is proof of its distinctness. It exudes its own sense of invincibility. It has stood the test of time. There is a quality the infinite embodies that makes his finitude and the limitations of his own character and “private” values seem insignificant. Ancestral mixture for the moral appropriator means lack of purity, which in turn means that he is morally compromised by the taint of original corruption through impure breeding. The moral appropriator believes in the salvific quality of ethnicity. If ethnicities are metaphysically real entities with restorative and redemptive qualities, then to have an ethnicity that one believes contains features such as cleanliness, productivity, and honesty means not only to have those features, but to be them as well. If you are clean and productive and special in some indescribably unique way that others are not, then you are protected against the contaminants of the world and safe from danger. You are inoculated against death itself. Ethnicity begins to look like a neurosis, and the moral

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appropriator as the quintessential neurotic. His neurotic-like disposition is brought into sharper relief when we see the hysteria in other like-minded appropriators over taboos against mixed marriage or unions that upset the imagined conceptual neatness of identity. What else could account for this upset? In Waters’s study, Cindy Betz, an American of Czech ancestry, recalled her father’s indignation when one of his nieces married a black man. Her father, she said, would never have permitted his children to do something like that. He would say, Cindy reports, “You are not going to marry a black man. I don’t care who else is, that is just it. You are not.”19 Rather than saying “I don’t care who else is marrying a black man” her father might easily have substituted it with, “I don’t care who or what he is.” The point should be observed carefully in order to unmask the pathology behind the response. Regardless of whatever personal characteristics that black man might have had, they are all irrelevant in the face of his racial affiliation. His actions and the attendant moral character culled from them are not just insignificant in comparison to the “bad ancestry” image of black ethnicity. It is that the character and actions of any black person are regarded as constitutionally incapable of protecting one from danger in the world. It is only the insularity of tribal membership—where others are mirror images of oneself in some strange, ineffable way—that can stave off death. How can the actions and character of one black person function in so powerful a manner? How can this individual character avert the danger of existence itself? The prejudice of the moral appropriator is, on one level, impersonal. He may actually like the black people whose acquaintance he has made. Some of them may be his friends. But they are constitutionally incapable of carrying on a bloodline whose existence ensures that one continues to exist long after one’s finite body has died. Sean O’Brien echoes the appropriator’s voice and the deep neurosis behind it when he says, I think I am a firm believer that you take care of your own. Probably I am prejudiced in a way that I might give an Irishman a second look before I would give a break to someone else, with some other ethnic background. I am a little prejudiced when it comes to that. Because he is Irish, he gets a little more. He could be ten generations away, but the name is everything. I might give an Irishman the edge.20

In giving to his national sibling an edge he is making an attempt at a regressive fusion with a stranger he regards as a symbolic blood brother. The psychologist Heinz Kohut used a term called narcissistic twinship, which best describes this relationship. Our agent here is creating narcissistic twinship via a sublimated homosocial relationship with himself. His narcissistic twin

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allows him the release of his righteous altruism that is allocated among the triadic registers of self, other, and the tribe—real or imaginary. Since the tribe represents the symbolic safety of mother’s womb where immortality is promised and annihilatory anxiety warded off, our agent can both stave off individuation anxiety and play the role of caretaker by feeding one of the hungry children ensconced in the womb. The sublimated relationship to the parent is maintained by working for the protection and safety of the children of the tribe. In return, our agent can expect that, somehow— magically—good will be returned to him and his own security will be secured through good deeds and acts. By some appeal to magical thinking our agent believes that if you do well by your kind, good will be done unto you. This means good acts create a karmic shield that protects the tribe against outside threats to its racial purity, which means, among other things, protection against committing racial suicide and group genocide through intermarriage and interbreeding. The flip side of our agent’s benevolence toward his symbolic blood brother is a sublimated act of aggression against the ethnoracial Other. To give the Irish man a second look, to “have his back,” so to speak, is for this kind of tribal-oriented individual to disqualify the ethnoracial stranger from being a recipient of his care endeavors and, too often, to expurgate him from the sphere of his ethical domain. The Other ceases being a bona fide unit of ethical concern, and if he is, it is only after our agent has expended his primary resources on his own kind. One sees the ethnic Other as a competitor, and to feed one’s symbolic blood brother is to lessen the resources the ethnoracial Other will have at his disposal. This is the unconscious psychic reality of the tribal-oriented individual who feels that if the lion’s share is distributed among his own kind that in some magical fashion he too will grow stronger and able to stave of finitude. Like members of that most tribal of units—the family—the tribalist feels that his own potency and well-being are constitutively tied to how well the members of his ethnoracial unit are doing. What Waters’s study reveals is the extent to which those Others, those from a different tribe, evoke an overwhelming mysterium tremendum in the perceiving individual’s phenomenal field. It seems quite alright to be a mixture of two ancestries that enjoy social prestige, but to be a mishmash of different ethnicities means that one is neutralized, that one’s specialness gets canceled out by the fusion of biological types that possess blood that is not obviously good enough. In fact, it is bad blood that is so potent that, like flesh-eating bacteria, it can dissolve the outer layer of that which rendered one unique: the body. To become racially or ethnically ambiguous is, for the European-American tribal-minded individual, a source of anguish since the

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mental categories of naming don’t align themselves up neatly alongside the body. In this instance one’s body morphology, that is, nature, has betrayed one’s ideal. One is no longer locked within the symbiotic membrane of a pure group. One’s body is allocated among the various registers of ethnic groups and we can imagine here the visual fantasy that conjures up a distinct type of fear: one’s body is literally torn apart and disseminated among a mishmash of ethnic types, some of which are believed to be the opposite of others. How can the individual abstract from all these types to form a coherent and cohesive value portrait of who he is? Hence the tribalist gives in to reductionism, instinctivism, and biological determinism to such a large degree that he ends up elevating difference into a cult. Group narcissistic vitality is depleted because although he may, as an act of will, identify with an ethnic type, he is overwhelmed by the negative traits he associates with the Other’s group. He feels he cannot lie to himself. He knows what he truly is and because will can never transcend blood in his mind, his own causa sui is obliterated by the presence of the Other(s) within him. He can never be the cause of himself through his group since his group as it exists in himself has been annexed and incorporated into an incomprehensible blob.

IV. Tribalism, Untouchability, and Human Slime Nowhere is the metaphysical tarnishment of the self more evident than in the notion of untouchability. The Untouchable (Dalit) in the Hindu caste system, identifiable by his community, is not only thought to be physically unclean. Indeed, the elaborate rituals that Untouchables undergo—sweeping behind them as they walk so that no higher caste will tread the same dust as they, assigned to specific occupational roles associated with contamination—could easily be remedied by attending to the hygiene of an Untouchable. But this is not the case. Not even a cleansing bath could erase his contamination and impurity. There is some intrinsic feature that the Untouchable harbors by nature of his existence—it cannot be located anywhere, a smelly armpit, an unwashed crotch, uncombed and dirty hair, for example. This impurity that he harbors is not even the residual stains of a sinful life. If such were the case, then untouchability might at least have the dignity of playing a redemptive role in social life. The Untouchable would atone for his sins by being scorned; his apartness would be punitive and rehabilitative. To be so set apart from the rest of humanity would restore in him an understanding of the importance of human sociability. But the Untouchable is robbed of any such rehabilitative possibility. He functions for others like a different species-being.

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There are degrees of uncleanliness that all persons, including the Brahmin, can succumb to. Their bodies can smell like other bodies, and can fall prey to the same diseases that beset the rest of humankind. But there must be in their imagination a state so lowly that not even they can descend to. That state is not so distinctly owned by the Untouchable. Such a state is outside the moral agency of the individual afflicted with the status. This is why the source of contamination, of filth and degeneracy that characterize the Untouchable, has no location. It is everywhere and nowhere, which means that the Untouchable is the prototype—a kind of Platonic representation—of concepts like filthy, nasty, and contagious. Traces of these can be detected in non-Untouchables, but they can never become those things. The diseased body of a non-Untouchable through which putrefaction slimily works its way, is still better than the healthy body of an Untouchable. The disease is external to the non-Untouchable’s unalterable essence. Untouchability is the crucial phenomenon that speaks to the limitation of reason, sense perception, and human intuition. Knowledge and truth are gained by the proper relationship that the intellect has to immutable symbols. The Untouchable is a symbol and an abstraction. So are the nonUntouchables. But their symbolisms are inversions of each other: one side clean and good, the other side dirty and shameful. The non-Untouchable’s sense of his value and worth is inextricably linked to the polar opposite and literal representation of what the Untouchable symbolically represents: lowliness, creatureliness, and intrinsic debasement. The non-Untouchable’s immutable status is not arbitrary. In his mind there is nothing unfair about it. His status, based on an unmodifiable essence, is a difference in kind, not degrees from the Untouchable’s. Among the non-Untouchables there are four major caste formations that themselves are subdivided. Varnas or colors are the basic caste. The Jatis or subcastes are subdivisions within the Varnas. The priestly caste, known as the Brahmin, is the uppermost caste, which is followed by the Kshatriya, or warrior caste. The latter is followed by the Vaishyas, who are merchants and traders. The Sudras, who make up the labor and servant caste, are at the bottom of the system. Untouchables are outside the formal caste-groups. In traditional society, if a non-Untouchable came in contact with an Untouchable, elaborate purification rituals had to be undertaken before one could reestablish normal social relations with one’s own caste.21 The translation of the two symbolic prototypes in the mind of the nonUntouchable is, “I am the standpoint, and I am everything. He is nothing.” Even some well-educated men and women of today believe that the caste system was created and imposed by the British during their colonization of

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India. The truth is that the caste system existed for millennia before and was made a social practice during the rise of Brahmanic Hinduism. Formalized under the laws of Manu, it persisted in exploiting and discriminating against women and the Sudras. The caste system is thought to have originated out of the conquest of the Aryan or Indo-European invaders of the dark-skinned Dravidians.22 The Bhagavad-Gita specifies the salvific qualities of the Brahmin as well as descending degrees of moral comparability between it and the other castes. The function of the Brahmin is to bring peace, righteousness, purity, vision, wisdom, and faith. He enacts these virtues through the austerity of his moral personality. The Kshatriya is heroic in stature. He is full of courage, inner resilience and fire, noble leadership, and generosity. The Vaishya works in trade and agriculture, and beneath them, the Sudra commits to a life of service. Seabrook writes, “It is significant that the higher castes are distinguished by their qualities, or virtues, the lower by their function.”23 Of crucial importance is the fact that the first three Varnas are born twice. This allows them to achieve spiritual maturity, to perform Vedic, and to write and study Sanskrit. The Sudras are once born and are not permitted to study Sanskrit and the Vedas. The Untouchable is indeed a social artifact; a human creation that ultimately hides from others the extent to which their own causa sui projects are compromised by the finitude of their existence and the creatureliness of their own physiology. The Untouchable exists to remind them of all they can never be despite the evidence of their senses that may suggest otherwise. The Untouchable is everything the non-Untouchable is not and can never be despite how unkind life might be to him in matters of health, economics, and social well-being. This is why the Untouchable is not just incorporated into the society; he is a constitutive feature of it. Were he interpreted as a leper and marooned off to an equivalent colony, the neurotic’s sense of invulnerability would collapse. In the absence of medical means to cure lepers, a leper’s colony—inhumane as it might seem—is a rational act of self-preservation by those who are defenseless against contamination. Observe, however, that there is no hysteria or panic among non-Untouchables when they brush against or come into close contact with an Untouchable. In spite of the illusion created to maintain the divided humanity between the two classes of humans, one knows one cannot literally catch anything from an Untouchable. One undergoes the purification rituals as a traditional response to a social taboo. The responses are varied and rely on personal temperament. One shrinks back, recoils even; few people run. Has anyone seen another person run in panic from a pile of feces lying bare on a sidewalk? Contact with it brings simple revulsion and a need to

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get away from it as quickly as possible rather than panic. One cleanses oneself of all traces of it and moves back into the world. Perhaps we should give pause to the question of running in panic from feces. An affirmative answer might make sense in the case of a neurotic personality. It is precisely the neurotic who would run from a pile of feces because, among other reasons, it triggers associations that he flees from in his conscious life. It isn’t just that he can’t deal with the messiness of the real world. That would be too broad a generalization that would not account for other forms of messiness that do not trigger panic. But feces and the reminder of where it comes from—the smelly anus and creviced rectum—are a stark confrontation of one’s creatureliness and one’s bestial nature, which makes one primitively reducible to every other living human being. This is why the Untouchable does not excite panic in those with whom he comes into contact. He is there to remove the link between humanity and putrefaction, animality and humanity, and ultimately shame and guilt. He is there to reveal to the non-Untouchable everything the latter is constitutionally incapable of becoming. The Untouchable absorbs the fears of the ordinary folks in his environment and in embodying them he mirrors to them a definitive, unalterable, and distinct prototype of something they can never become—dirt, creatures, impious, and purely functional like animals. Untouchables, paradoxically, are well-received objects in their societies. But it is this belief in the Untouchable as an appropriate scapegoat that recasts the non-Untouchable’s neurosis. Acting on the assumption that he is immune from danger, putrefaction, slime, and creatureliness, he represses his fears while believing that he has nothing to fear since that which fate has spared him it has cast upon the Untouchable. But his ritual cleansing upon contact with the Untouchable is the single most evident neurotic symptom that betrays a repressed impulse struggling to make it to consciousness. Untouchables are vessels of trauma for the clean caste. Karen Horney identifies three basic features of the neurotic personality. They are the externalization of problems, the construction of an idealized self-image, and detachment from emotional relationships with others. I have shown to some extent how various forms of tribalism are expressions of at least the last two features. If we substituted “Others” for others, we could very well see how the tribalist is the neurotic par excellence. At the deepest level of engagement, the agent detaches himself from a plethora of individuals who fall in the category of “Other,” where to be an Other is to belong to a different tribe.24 What I wish to do next is show how tribalism captures almost perfectly the construction of an idealized self-image in the form of a Great Past mythology.

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Among the clearest examples of this form of moral appropriation as sanctioned neurosis are to be found in the mythologies of the Far East. Imperial Japan, for example, claimed twenty-five thousand years of lineal descent for its emperors. The ancestors of these emperors were identified as divine.25 The Japanese are among the many peoples of the world who take pleasure in believing that they are a people with a very long recorded history. Within this history are annals of greatness, beauty, martial power, and industriousness. These mythologies appear in many of the popular Samurai films that are aesthetic rituals in honor of a great tradition. Isaacs observes: Transmuted in one form or another this tradition is funneled into the pride Japanese manage to take in some of their more current achievements. The uniqueness of the Japanese past, the power of the “tradition” is almost never included, I found during many interviews and conversations in Japan, as an essential part of what it means to be Japanese. The difficulty begins only when Japanese try to define what that uniqueness is.26

The cardinal sin committed by the tribalist in moral appropriation is his inability to qualify his incontestable uniqueness that corresponds to his tribe’s unmatched superiority. Aside from de facto membership, which, in several cases, is both a necessary and sufficient condition for carving out the features that guarantee one possession of those features that mark out ascriptive identity, the appropriator is unable to accord any special value significance to the attributes he possesses that make them qualifiedly different when found in outsiders. This means, in essence, the indefinability of features one regards as virtuous. Individuals holding this view regarding uniqueness as a fundamental attribute that marks them off from the rest of humanity. They alone possess it. The attribution of moral significance to this uniqueness is vital to tribal identity of all types. What must be reiterated is that it is not the case that individuals from any group are thought to lack uniqueness. Indeed, the latter is peculiar to individuals and to human subjectivity as a whole. Individual consciousness and experiences, from the basic to the fantastic or awesome, are never interchangeable. No two people, regardless of how alike they are, experience eating their favorite fruit the same way even if the quality and flavor of the fruits are identical. Uniqueness is fundamentally a feature of individuals first, not groups. This obsession with tribal uniqueness in a world in which human individuals share remarkable similarities sometimes takes a comic turn. A noted Japanese psychoanalyst and an expert on Japaneseness, Dr. Takeo Doi, claims that the capacity to borrow and the adaptation of what is borrowed is the essence of Japanese uniqueness. He notes, “We became connoisseurs of world civilization.

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We borrow, we like it, and we get self-esteem from it. We retain our own spirit by hiding in what we borrow something latent of our own society.”27 This is peculiar. Is Japaneseness already contained in a spirit, or is it the contained spirit that borrows relentlessly that which conveys the essence of what it means to be a unique Japanese? It certainly seems to be the latter in Doi’s analysis. If so, then it stands to reason that a person from a different group with the same capacity to borrow should be indistinguishable from Japanese. In another conversation with Isaacs, a different expert on Japaneseness notes that Japanese speak of Japanese culture and not civilization. One can speak of Indian and Chinese civilization. Japanese are uncertain of themselves but proud of their curiosity. The Chinese were identified as not sensitive. Japanese were proud of their sensitivity to new things. Isaacs surmises that in his conversations with experts on Japaneseness, the search for the essence of Japaneseness became a game of metaphors. He asks, “was wakon like an onion, each savory layer peeling away, ending finally in nothing, or like an artichoke, each leaf with its taste of substance, all pulled away and disclosing finally, under a bristling protective cover, a soft, strong, hidden heart all of its own?”28 The moral appropriator, then, is morally inefficacious. This is not a morally ambitious person, one who desires to achieve a moral personality through the virtues of his character. Like all tribalists he, regardless of the personal content of his character, borrows from the moral prestige of the tribe. By prestige I mean the social and moral standing of the tribe in the eyes of a wider group that recognizes its sovereignty as a distinct group, and that confirms such recognition by conferring on it a status that allows the tribe to identify those attributes it has singled out as unique to it as an immutable social fact. The moral appropriator is not just a secondhand consumer of ready-made values, but an existential parasite who rides on the largesse of the perceived greatness of his tribe. This is the moral DNA he imagines that he has inherited and this, I might add, is a dangerous and untenable viewpoint to hold: the idea of hereditary morality, or hereditary moral status through group membership. But this is what tribalism aims for, and this is what is sanctioned by good, ordinary men and women who exercise moral laziness when they fail to out the magical thinking on which tribalism rests.

V. The Art of Symbolic Necrophilia Tribalism by its nature cannot lead to a spiritual politics, nor can it lead to an ethical life. Why not? Because it is predicated on the antithesis of life itself:

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the Cult of the Dead. This predication closes all routes to human becoming outside the tribe. This becoming, this capacity to engage with an open-ended dynamic world, I have argued, is a precondition for moral agency.29 In whatever form it takes, ethnic or cultural nationalism, racial pride, or ethnic glorification, tribalism is an extolment of one’s ancestors—of the dead. Psychologically it is a form of necrophilia in which one continues to live in the confines of an enshrined past at the expense of the future. Roots and romanticized good old days are prioritized over the present. This obliterates any serious engagement with the future and its existential cognate: the not-yet-self. This is one of the reasons penetration of the tribe is all but impossible, why its rituals tie its members to an immortal past that allows them to transcend their finitude and, thus, their fears about the weakness and vulnerability in their bodies. It is also one of the reasons why tribalists believe it is possible to transcend intersubjectivity and merge with the objective and permanent mold of the tribal caste. There is an unchanging, ineffable geist that is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon that all members possess; it makes them recognizable to each other instantly, and this spirit is what guides and regulates their lives, their interactions with each other and their judgments of outsiders. Tribalism is a neurotic manifestation of a pathological fear of death. Tribalism functions like a shrine to the ancestors of the past. An apt analogy would be a widower who keeps an urn containing the ashes of his late wife in his house with a view to never letting go of his relationship with the deceased. The ashes don’t just function as a benign symbol of some part of the loved one that he clings to but which does not hinder him from moving forward by forging relationships to others who will eventually take the place of the deceased. Instead, he acts as if the loved one has taken on a new form. The ashes are but a transfigured shape of the loved one. They are still the living person. It is symbolic transubstantiation. Action, movement, and growth are stymied. Inertia is the modus operandi of the tribalist. Let us stay with the widower analogy. The widower who enshrines his life with the loved one by his proximity to the urn cannot meet a new woman and fall in love with her. To do so would not only be to commit adultery. It would mean losing his identity as the grieving husband who lives in two worlds: one world is illusory, and he knows it to be illusory—he is, after all, not psychotic—the other world is real and concrete. He does not talk to the ashes and sit down to supper with them. He goes to work, maintains friendships, and generally speaking, has no radical break with reality. The shift in his psychology is barely imperceptible. He remains emotionally tied to his wife in death and he needs the ashes to psychologically cement that

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relationship. Literally, he knows the ashes are not her. But the presence feeds his deep inability to move out in the world of change and movement. In the inertia lies his justification for remaining rooted to her. He thinks that his faithfulness to her memory is redemptive. He gives up his life in memory of his dead wife. What is the logic behind such a gesture? Commenting on a patient with a similar problem—one who refused to marry because to do so would replace his mother, who had died when he was eight years old—psychoanalyst Peter Shabad writes: Maybe it was only through a devotional act of heroic proportions such as this that Hank could make up for the destructive years that he imagined his unkind word had on her. All these years he had reserved a place for her return; to give his heart to someone else was to close off the possibility of his mother coming back and his chance to redeem himself with her.30

The act of sacrificing himself in memory of a beloved is reparative and restorative—it gives him the chance to make up that which he deprived her of in the marriage—the sacrifice he now makes in not having anyone else is, he imagines, a sacrificial act of atonement that would meet her approval. He is forgiven for past misdeeds. Tribal blood identities work on a similar level. The child, thrust into the world, is not allowed the freedom to unfold and simply be. She is placed before an imaginary sacrificial altar. Rather than being placed before a future horizon before which she can construct an identity, she is placed in a symbolic time machine that takes her back to her ancestors. Those born in the present have their lives qualitatively sealed at birth via initiation into the past, into the cult of the dead. It is a strange attempt to partake in the world of the dead—ensuring that one part of one’s nature remains tied to them—as a way of remaining alive. To describe the significance of the action in metaphysical parlance, one could say it is an attempt at symbolically raising the dead. Maintaining close ties to the dead can be a symbolic way of expressing one’s vulnerability to life’s harshness without their protective presence. It may also allude to some perceived sense of gratitude the dead must feel toward one’s loyalty. This gratitude generates some positive energy in the world, energy that comes back to enmesh one’s life. For the tribalist, there is no greater sin than letting go of the dead and forgetting them. This is oblivion, and oblivion is death carried to its final resting place. Conscience holds no greater sense of guilt than in the person who leaves the dead out of the world of the living and moves faithfully toward an uncharted future.

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A child is named for a grandparent who will die in a decade or so. She might be named for a living parent whose values, likeness, and character imprimatur become indelibly associated with the name. In the event of that parent’s death, one feels a greater responsibility to fill out with one’s own life the hollow spaces of a life that was not fully lived by the parent. The degree to which children become the carbon copies of their parents as the former age is, as one writer has remarked, simply amazing. One of the primary gestures of tribalism begins in the activity of naming. Names are magical. Many, if not most, parents think deeply about them before naming a child. In naming a child we feel it is possessed with powers of some kind. Jason means healer, Phillip means lover of horses, and Diana means goddess of the hunt. People invest enormous energies in names not because they feel the lives lived by those being named will invest them with an original assemblage of their own. Rather, they believe the names, blessed with the weight of history, tradition, and legacies with transformative and restorative powers, gives one a head start in life: blessed is he who walks in the power of the name he holds. People do not always hold such beliefs consciously and literally. But such are the unnamed emotional premises that guide the living as they psychically adorn their progeny. Psychologically, each child’s birth is tied to a past. This, we may say, is an unavoidable feature of the human condition. But customs and traditions that are the dead’s representatives vary in the minds of individuals who regard themselves as members of “tribes.” The individual with a tribalist mindset will treat those customs and traditions like mummified objects with fixed meanings. Not only that, their effects can have their magical powers only on certain persons, those whose lineage is traceable directly back to the objects, customs, or “traditions” that have been patented and symbolically copyrighted. A crucial feature of the tribal mind is that it is convinced that membership in the family is absolutely necessary for warding off death. This is, arguably, a feature that is peculiar to the human condition. In his psychoanalytic interpretation of history, Norman O. Brown deploys the Freudian idea that the death instinct is the core of human neurosis. It begins with the infant’s incapacity to accept separation from the mother as an inevitable biological fact. The separation is from the source of life: mother. From there on life leads one toward death. The social posturing against death is, Brown believes, grounded in human biology. It is grounded in the biology of prolonged infancy and it is grounded in the social correlate of prolonged infancy, the human family.31 When notions of the family extend to concepts of the nation, or the race, the measures taken to determine who belong and who count as members become a matter of life and death—literally, in some cases. The proclivity for

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prolonged infancy is sanctioned and given a permanent place in the racial, ethnic, or national tribe. The psychic unwillingness to die and the stubborn refusal to submit to finitude are most radically realized by the tribalist. He does not live fully engaged in and with the world. This would be a far too dangerous occupation. He lives like the eternal child in the imagined bliss of an Edenic womb—the tribe—where his infantile incapacity to individuate need never be challenged by any external stimuli—life forces—that upset the container that houses his alienation, fears, and illusions about life and death. This very vast container—the house of the tribe, be it community, nation, state, ethnos, or the race—is also a reservoir that satiates the existential angst that afflicts those whose lives are characterized by such fears. And even in death he will continue to live by ensuring that the makeshift surrogate womb remains intact and inhospitable to outsiders. Brown would refer to this type of person as archaic man. He writes: Archaic man conquerors death by living the life of his dead ancestors . . . profane (actual) living is submerged by assimilation with ancestral archetypes: what we do now is only a repetition of what they did then . . . within archaic society there is no individuality. There is no history because there is no individuality; individuality is asserted by breaking with the ancestral archetypes and thus making history. Immortality—the wish to be father of oneself—is attained by assimilation into the fund of ancestral souls, out of which comes a generation and into which they return.32

G. Róheim observes that among the Murngin “the most gratifying concept in the whole of the clan ideology is that of the sacred waterhole in which reposes the spiritual unity of clan life. It is the fundamental symbol of clan solidarity. From it comes all the eternal qualities, and to it those qualities return when they have been lived or used by members of the clan.”33 Here is a way of extrapolating a leading psychotherapist’s thoughts on emotional family incest on to tribalism. He writes: Although parents may warn their children against the dangers of the outside world, at the same time that they are doing so they may also be claiming their children as their own possessions. Inoculating children against the evil eye by means of spitting, baptizing, or circumcising may all be ways that parents put a territorial stamp on their children. In this same way, members of enmeshed families may use the mistrust of strangers as a pretext to huddle together indefinitely.34

With the passage of time, however, distinctions seen as threatening and regarded as critical become blurred. Changes occur, and politics makes in-

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roads in ways that tribalists must reckon with one way or another. What becomes characteristic of the tribalist’s mind is love of the ineffable. The tribalist’s humanity is always aligned along an ineffable prototype, a model that is paradoxically sketched out according to a strict script that fashions the group into nebulous absolute. It is a model that also falls short of conceptual explication. An appeal to instincts and the visceral is the tribalist’s method of defending his authentic identity. We must remember, as many have already reminded us, that the goal of National Socialism (Nazi) was to make each individual German an expression of the eternal German. German blood was one of the prerequisites for party membership. In this way, the single death of an individual could never matter much, for indeed, the eternal Germany and “something” of the eternal German lived on in the purity of countless millions who would ensure that, in spite of variations in personality traits, something, some yet-to-be-articulated set of characteristics that cannot be found among other groups of human beings on the planet, would still thrive in the Germanic soul. Like all tribally minded people, the Nazis and their acolytes believed that Nordic blood represented a mysterium that had replaced old sacraments. They believed that many forms of the state could and would inevitably change. Laws of the state vary from time to time. The volk, however, remains.35 Once more: blood, that fluid of the human body most revered by a tribally minded people, is imbued with magical powers. Possession of a certain type guarantees the possession of all sorts of traits that are normally achieved by the rest of us through discipline and courage.

VI. Imagistic and Emblematic Representations: Tribal Epistemology and the Impossibility of Knowing the Other Above all, the tribalist relies on imagistic and emblematic thinking. Close inspection shows it to be a crude form of cognition that represents the world in a distorted manner, a distortion that accommodates the fears and neuroses of the tribalist. It makes the world safe for him. Imagistic “thinking” is devoid of the abstraction required to navigate among multiple realms of human reality. Mature adults do not believe that the characters they are looking at on television are inside the television set; or, more fundamentally, that the characters portrayed by the actors are the actors themselves. Such literal thinking would handicap their ability to lead sophisticated lives as conceptual creatures. We may say that they do not get sucked into believing that the characters on the screen are “diabolic or angelic” or whatever else they

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perceive them as being in their cinematic representation. Mature voyeurs negotiate the symbolic, the emblematic and the literal world with varying degrees of successful cognitive and imaginative dexterity. The tribalist, however, remains rooted to the imagistic level of cognition. The pictorial representation of the Indian, the Persian, the Mexican, the Croat, or of the black man standing in the corner of the train, evokes a concrete emblematic response that is transferred unto all individuals of that type. Every Indian must have body odor, every Iranian (or people from the Middle East—tribalists in general conflate morphological similarities into a single prototype) must have garlic breath, every Mexican a horde of babies, and every black man a big penis. But how can we explain this overreliance on emblems in the tribalist? Hannah Arendt says that emblems are already visible illustrations of something invisible, a pictograph of the festive mood associated with wine, the shield of Aries, the scales of Justice in the hands of the blind goddess.36 From the British empiricists we know that ideas as they are presented to the mind are derived from antecedent sense impressions. These impressions are divided into two subcategories: reflections that include desires and emotions, and sensation, where we find sounds and colors. Some impressions are homogenous and therefore simple and unanalyzable, others are complex. All simple ideas presuppose simple impressions. Ideas are less vivid than the impressions from which they are derived. Ideas, on Hume’s account, are images, or mental pictures. They are the major engines of thought. Hume’s epistemological debt to Berkeley is well known. Berkeley thought that an impression was one distinct, “wholly determinate thing.” In an answer to the question of how we are able to think of an impression as one of a kind and of having some general term applied, we are told: Locke thought that we abstract the qualities common to all oranges and use the resulting abstract idea to recognize a particular orange as an orange. Berkeley rejected this, since different oranges have incompatible qualities. We use a particular image to “represent” all the members of the kind. But in any one image a host of kinds will be representable: oranges, but also round things, orange-colored things and so on. Hume coped with this by saying that when we allocate something to a kind because of its similarity to some standard image, we have a lot of other images at our disposal that we can bring to mind to guide our classification along the right path.37

The tribalist is the low-level radical empiricist writ large. His racial, ethnic, or national ideas are literally formed from the impressions made by that initial contact with someone from a particular background dissimilar to his.

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These impressions need not be derived from actual contact with a real person from such a group. He may have first encountered the impressions in conversations with others, through the media, or from the general impressions he absorbs as though through epistemological osmosis. In any event, it is the image painted by such impressions that create his tenaciously defended ideas about individuals—all of them—who belong to outside groups. In fact, evidence that could potentially undermine those vivacious impressions presents a conflict. The corresponding revised ideas should actually be more acute and vivid than the impressions he held previously. But the opposite is true, and therein lies the tension for the tribalist. That mental image that cannot be countered, and from which his ideas about the world are mere copies, is a feature that is not only nonmodifiable—it becomes a visceral property of his psychoepistemology. To see an Arab, to see a Jew, to see a black man—all produce an automatic response in him. It is sudden, upsetting or potentially upsetting, but it has no basis in reality. That is, the response is not a rational reaction to a true state of affairs that he has perceived about the individuals toward whom he reacts viscerally. The black man is not exuding a menacing and angry demeanor, the Arab is lovingly bottle-feeding his baby, and the Jew is listening quietly to his wife. Those individuals conform to images that have an emblematic meaning for him. Emblems and emblematic thinking are indispensable forms of cognition for the survival of the tribalist—be he an English aristocrat or a Zulu. What is invisible is the imagined and desperately hoped-for beliefs, mores, and worldviews that unite the tribe. In essence, it does not matter whether as a member of the tribe in question you truly have the belief or the worldview that is being sought. Possession of the emblematic marker is the magical property that relieves the anxiety of metaphysical loneliness, fear, and estrangement from a world in flux and becoming that haunts the tribalist. To possess the right emblem you must register the antecedent impression in the mind of the tribalist—you must be of his kind. You must be one of Him. This accomplished, he retains a safe emblematic cognate, a facsimile of an idea that is devoid of conceptual merit and levels of abstraction that are needed for one to properly hold an idea. A crucial feature of human existence is in our capacity to know. This capacity, in turn, helps us to qualify the judgments we make of other human beings. How do we know what we know? Do we come to know the things we think are true through intuition, hunches, revelation, perception, deductive and inductive reasoning, or by means of fantasy? The nature of human beings requires them to function cognitively on the conceptual rather than just

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the perceptual level. They perceive material through their senses and then organize it into concepts. The tribalist has a unique way of knowing. His epistemology betrays his immediate perception of another and, later, his confirmed conscious assessment of another’s psychological and moral makeup. The tribalist, for example, meets someone, Margaret, outside his kin group. He perceives her as generous but also as sensitive to criticism and nervous around strangers. In addition, she has a tendency to embellish stories. She can be self-deprecating at times. There are a host of other traits she possesses that fall along the vast continuum of the human personality. Margaret rarely loses her temper, for example. She is someone who thinks before she responds. When she does lose her temper, however, she becomes violently explosive. The first substantial feature of Margaret that the tribalist will establish in his mind, one that he identifies as a fundamental attribute, is her ethnicity, race, or nationality. The tribalist then selectively chooses a number of her personality traits and ties them to her ascriptive tribal identity. If she is Colombian, the tribalist will use these features that create his impression of Margaret as constitutive features of all Colombians. If she has a tendency to be private, perhaps secretive at times, he regards this as a trait all Colombians have because they must be involved, somehow, in trafficking narcotics. Instead of realizing that certain personality traits and emotions are cultivated and allowed greater freedom in some societies than in others—for example, one is just not as likely to find coffin-jumpers bawling their hearts out at a funeral among Finns or the English as one might among Caribbeans—he reduces the humanity of each Colombian he meets to a set of traits that his memory shores up as indelibly linked to Margaret, the first or second Colombian he might have met. The epistemology of the tribalist is such that it does not allow him to perceive reality at all. Instead of judiciously observing the traits of a person, and more importantly, her actions over time—a method that would allow him to form an accurate appraisal of a person’s character—the tribalist absolves himself of this responsibility. In fact, he does not have to think, to perceive, or to form any conceptual conclusions about individuals. The traits he associates with Margaret become integrated in his subconscious. When he meets other Colombians, they are automatically retrieved. Automatized as specific, singular concrete traits, they serve his memory well. All he has to do is remember, not observe, perceive, and then think, which is what one must do when one makes a judgment about human character. When meeting or thinking about another Colombian he forms a negative emotion. The emotion functions as the gravedigger, or as a subjective

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selector. It then retrieves from his subconscious the set of traits that have become automatized as fundamental attributes of all Colombians. Margaret’s secrecy; her violent temper (which we must remember occurs rarely, and which the tribalist has only learned of through a friend); her tendency to self-deprecation, which he interprets as cunning and sly; her sensitivity to criticism, which is branded as “typical of a dogmatic personality”; are all summoned like one big cognitive gestalt bolt of lightening. Her generosity and other traits that could easily be recalled are not. They cannot. They would betray the preestablished portrait of what someone from Margaret’s background must look like in order for the tribalist to maintain control in his psychic world. This is why I have argued that the tribalist is not capable of portraying people as they are but only as caricatures: all are reduced to a formulaic set of attributes that is established early on in his perception of an individual. This allows the tribalist the capacity to pre-judge individuals. He can do this because they are a confirmation of what he knew before he meets them. Good, solid, productive, clean, and upright persons if they are from his group; untrustworthy, dangerous, sly, and contaminable if they are from another. The scale of negativity of his judgment depends on the degree of scorn he has for the particular group from which the person he is judging is a member. The tribalist is not interested in whether his judgments are true or false, whether his appraisal of a person’s character corresponds to reality, that is, whether these are the behaviors and traits that manifest themselves in this person’s human life. If the person fails to manifest such traits, the tribalist will tell himself not that she is an anomaly or an aberration. He’ll say instead that the authentic traits are simply lying dormant. The individual is guilty of mimicry. He or she is acting white, or assuming Germanic characteristics that are the opposite of vulgar, crude Slavic impulses he harbors if he is Serbian, or trying to be a gentleman if he is Croatian and the tribalist is Serbian.38 To the tribalist, the manifestation of traits that do not correspond to his preconceived portrait of persons are viewed suspiciously. The person in question is masking who she really is, pretending to be another type of person. The real self lies dormant beneath the thin veneer of false characteristics being exhibited; only the omniscient and infallible tribalist, acting like a wholesaler as opposed to a retailer in the realm of character analysis, can know the real self. Why waste time getting to know the personality of each individual who belongs to a group? A national or racial or ethnic character-type forms the essence of every individual. To waste time looking for individuality in the individual is to seek out the accidental and the incidental as far as the tribalist

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is concerned. Sooner or later, the person will display the traits that mark his tribal character-type; sooner or later every Roma will steal from you; every Jew will “Jew you out of your penny, conniving entrepreneurs that they are”; “every Arab will erupt in implacable rage at some provocation”; and “every Italian-American is somehow connected to the mob.” In essence the strong tribalist is a racial subjectivist. Racial subjectivism is the view that an individual’s inborn racial constitution determines “his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.”39 According to one Nazi, knowledge and truth are peculiarities that originate in specific forms of consciousness and are therefore attuned exclusively to the specific essence of their mother consciousness.40 Each race, therefore, creates its own truth and in its own universe. Leonard Peikoff notes that human beings of different races are separated by an unbridgeable epistemological gulf according to this subjectivist logic. This makes it impossible for them to communicate or resolve disputes peacefully. Carl Schmitt noted, “An alien may be as critical as he wants to be . . . he may be intelligent in his endeavor, he may read books and write them, but he thinks and understands things differently because he belongs to a different kind, and he remains within the existential conditions of his own kind in every decisive thought.”41 Polylogism is the ruling principle of the racial subjectivist. That is, the idea that each group—Aryan, British, and Jew—has its own truth and logic and distinct method of reasoning. Each group has a unique mental structure that is valid for its own group and invalid for other groups. What is most noteworthy is that thinkers from the same race will ask similar questions and seek answers and solutions in the exact same direction.42 This sense of belonging to a different kind is the intractable belief that is tenaciously held by strong tribalists. This is the reason why those persons in Waters’s study reacted with shame when they found out they were a mishmash of different ethnic types. Psychologically, to belong to a different kind is to be existentially ensconced in a world with ready-made meaning, values, and purpose. One can invest the world with an assemblage of who one is, but that assemblage is already drawn from the ethnoracial/national caste of which one is a part. The strong tribalist is spared the burden of having to be original. He is original, but his originality comes from the sui generis nature of his tribe—his particular kind. Because there is no other tribe like his tribe and because membership in it is a constitutive feature of his identity and he is a constitutive member of the tribe, the existential burden of cosmic

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insignificance that is the lot of many persons, is one that he is spared. He lives in a cosmos without which life would be unimaginable, and also one in which without him there would be a loss since he comes to see himself as a valuable part that makes up the type that is his particular kind. To belong to multiple “different kinds” is to exist in an existential wasteland; it is to be everywhere and nowhere in particular. One is not only lost; there is no real home to find since one’s mind and body are allocated and dispersed among different kinds.

VII. Moral Masochism and Black Identity: A Tragic Tale There is one noticeable exception to this kind of resistance to belonging to multiple kinds. The exception is blacks and their attendant black identity. Although any black person with mixed ancestry is still regarded as black by the one-drop rule criterion in the United States, individual blacks do not feel sullied, ashamed of, or embarrassed by mixed ancestry. In point of fact, it is welcomed by most blacks who will actually proudly declare their mixed race or ethnic ancestry. For blacks to find out that they have Native American, Jewish, white, or Asian ancestry becomes a source of pride. The fact is that socially, black identity is the least prestigious identity on the ethnoracial hierarchy. Immigrants who came to America at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century measured their socioeconomic progress by how far ahead they were from blacks and how much their cultural distinctness separated them from blacks. Social success in America was, in other words, measured by the associative distance between blacks and European groups, a distance that European immigrants saw no need to shorten. When the individual with the blackest skin is interpreted as occupying the lowest rung on the ethnoracial ladder, then any share in a particular kind that not only lightens skin color but—given the specious logic that governs ethnoracial identity—that imbues one with a share of an ethnicity with high social prestige value is also welcomed. One is happy to have mixed ancestry here because one is given an infusion of “good blood.” Since pure blackness is viewed as antithetical to whiteness—a naturalized whiteness—any nonblack addition to black identity can only, according to racialist and racist logic, improve on an already sorry state of affairs. Blackness, while remaining just that, would still be given an ontological hoist according to the schemata of racial hermeneutics of the United States. Since English, German, and Swedish identities are regarded as having high social prestige, the black person who discovers that he or she has any of these identities is forced to make a unspeakably symbolic and tragic declaration to the world—literally: I am not so black and, therefore, morally and cognitively immature as you think I am.

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I am closer to your kind than you think because I have a small share in it. I also have a small share in another kind. This might make me mishmash and a mutt, but in being an assemblage of different kinds I incorporate the positive traits associated with those special kinds. It is a tragedy because in the minds of his listeners, blackness is such a pollutant, such a potent disruptor of presence, of purity, cohesion, and coherence that it cancels out whatever advantages and good traits those different kinds might have. Black blood with any kind of other blood equals bad blood. Blacks are in a no-win situation. When boasting about his mixed heritage, he may get a sympathetic nod, a small smile, and sometimes genuine interest. But he will not be put into the category of a different kind. By the racial taxonomies of the United States, blackness remains forever blackness with very, very rare exceptions. Hence blacks are placed in a psychologically untenable position. No Jew on discovering in midlife that she had both Arab and black ancestry would make a point of broadcasting this. If she did—for whatever reason—it is simply not likely that she would feel pride in this discovery. For a black person the reverse is the case. It is not that the black individual wants to be something other than black. He wants his listener to know that besides being black he is also something else in addition to being black. While no other identity—at least in the United States—can cancel out his black identity, others can bring him closer to those other “different kinds” that enjoy high prestige social value. The black person does not feel he can reach that level of high prestige by possessing multiple ethnic identities. He wants to approximate them and feel in his heart what others feel: that they are a hard-to-define special kind of person because they are associated with their kind. They can’t conceptually define how and why they are more special than others. They feel this viscerally. And this is what the black individual wants to feel too. He does not want to start feeling like a Swede or a German. What he wants is the recognition and affirmation from others that his social ontological status has risen in their eyes; not that he is absolutely related to them, but that he is more closely related to them than they think. This is the desolate side of a certain cosmopolitan impulse that seeks to break through the solidified accretions of tribal ontology. Moral masochism and abject humiliation are the fate of blacks in the United States. With very few exceptions, most blacks can never live up to the artificial ethnoracial ideal of the external culture. They can never experience the nonracializing of the various behavioral traits that constitute their identity. But the special pride several blacks feel in having mixed ancestry comes from, in part, embodying the very values and traits that make whites

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and other “respectable” nonwhites socially and ontologically privileged. Values descend from the realm of morality into that of biology. And it is blacks who are seen as having the least monopoly on the values that make one a full-fledged moral agent. To be black in the eyes of white and nonblack Americans is to live at the bottom of the ethnic and racial totem pole. This is an indisputable fact. And because of this fact there is a primordial shame that lies at the heart of black identity—not pride. Militant racial pride is almost always a consequence of an emasculated identity. If we look at racial pride under the Nazis we see how much of it was a response to the emasculation and evisceration of their human dignity under the onslaught of defeat during World War I. Militant black pride, an often healthy response to chronic racism and debasement, still belies intractable shame at one’s basic impotence. One is impotent to alter social facts, disrupt the bloated social ontology that overdetermines identity, and change the categories that define who one is. Black identity is and always has been disputatious. It is as much an oppositional response to whiteness as it is a narrative quest for autonomy, selfrealization, and ontological freedom. But once whiteness exists black identity can never exist in its own right. It is only with the passing of whiteness that black identity can cease being surreptitiously reactionary. It is everything whiteness is not, and it continues to retain its edge, so to speak, to the extent that whiteness exists as a standpoint of completion. Even a writer like Toni Morrison, for whom whites as primary players play a minimalist role in her world as a novelist, can only create black characters as symbolic tropes who wager a secretive bargain with whites. And it is, stay away so I can unravel this story which is my story, and stay in the background so that I foreground my story that is inextricably intertwined with yours. Blacks and whites, even in the United States when it was illegal to touch one another but legal for whites to kill blacks, have been entwined in a transactional romance. What do I mean when I say that blacks and whites are mired in a transactional romance? I am not suggesting anything as mawkishly sentimental as the idea that black identity functions largely to appease white fear, contempt, and disdain. Rather, in its most elemental form this transactional romance constitutes black identity as strategic and instrumentalist. It functions to disrupt whiteness as the ontotheological attribute of whites. In its strategic mode it is oppositional and wants to, in that mode, have the freedom to hide from itself the social envy it feels toward a white world whose values it needs to appropriate in order to live a fully realized life. Even the most militantly black identity is engaged in a transactional romance with whiteness. In placing itself at the opposite spectrum of whiteness it appears to

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place itself beyond the corrupting and deauthenticating influences of whiteness. What it does, however, is to make a dramatic and conspicuous spectacle of itself. In the same way that whites feel whiter when they are the minority in a crowd of blacks, so whiteness is shorn up and becomes whiter while facing off against militant blackness. Black identity in its militant form, therefore, increases white pathos. In the midst of nonviolent black militancy most whites do not actually fear, disdain, or feel contempt for blacks, rather, they experience sympathetic pity. Against the backdrop of white normativity, militant blackness reveals itself as a form of theatrical burlesque rather than revolutionary activism. This is the moral masochism and tragedy of black identity. So long as whiteness is naturalized and functions as the standpoint of completion then not only will black identity be reactionary, but it will also lack full autonomy. The white imaginary foregrounds black agency in such a way that its truthgauging point of reference will always be those biologized values, norms, and social ethos of a white world it can never escape from.  Whites have a coercive monopoly on naming, labeling, and identifying nonwhites. Contrary to Afro-centric concepts of self-identification, not one single black person—or any black person for that matter—has the social capital or the authority to identify him or herself as anything other than black. So long as no black person, regardless of skin pigmentation, can declare herself white (unlike several individuals belonging to white groups who were regarded as “off white” and even black in the mid-nineteenth century), then black identity is still an enslaved one. Freedom of choice is a nonstarter in this issue. Blacks, unlike different types of whites, cannot be anything other than black—by white decree. Whites in general—unconsciously—need a stark standpoint of opposition to both complement and complete their own whiteness. Blacks who approximate and then embody the behavioral traits associated with whiteness are a threat because they cheat whites of their indubitable cannot-be-imitated pseudoessence. Contrary to popular wisdom they do not cease being a threat to whites in that they defy the threatening racial stereotypes of black violence. Such blacks represent the gravest threat because they call into doubt the belief that authentic whiteness is a protected nonmimetic trait that only real whites, regardless of class and socioeconomic status, can possess. Blacks, who, in the eyes of whites, embody stereotypical black traits, may incur the contempt of whites, but the artificial threat they pose cannot in any way undermine their whiteness. Fears of being mugged

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and shouted at by blacks aside, the existential composure of inhabiting whiteness can only be disrupted by one who causes the white individual to think, but I don’t even see you as black at all. It is precisely for such a person that race holds invaluable salience. And the tragedy of this dilemma is that the black individual is expected to be grateful for this “compliment”; grateful for not being what he is, and confused about how much of perceived whiteness he can trespass on without being regarded as an impostor. And we know how impostors are dealt with.  The Jews became white after World War II; the Irish stopped being the different race that many considered them to be in the United States for a long time and joined the pantheon of the white community, as did the Italians. Blacks remain landlocked in a closed system that forces each, despite the nonmonolithicity of the group, to adhere to a homogeneous racial identity that relies on an underlying historical psychology for its authenticity. Given the structural exclusion of blacks from loci of power and from numerous institutions in the United States, even when accompanied by moral indignation at the injustices leveled against them, is the psychological default emotional response to one’s very embodiment as a racialized subject, a subject whose existence, codified into racial categories, retains a nature that is as unchangeable and unalterable as that of an animal’s. This inalterability of racial identity leaves one with a crushing ontological lack. Black agency is damaged by this exigency not because blacks cannot lead fulfilling lives and grow like other people, but because their changes, growth, and fulfillment do not and cannot alter the fundamental racial contract to which they are not signatories, and which regulates their lives structurally and existentially. Lack is the result of a deep-seated feeling of inefficacy born out of an inability to change the nefarious racial categories by any means of navigating and maneuvering oneself in the world. Ontological lack is the admission that one’s racialized body is impotent to alter what many consider to be among the greatest of evils on earth: the unauthorized, systemic organization of human bodies into codified racial taxonomies that persist in dehumanizing human beings and treating them like objects.  The tribalist lives with the image of what the other lacks. As he interacts with anyone deemed an Other, this basic tenet interfaces with and then hijacks his

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perception of the individual. The Other’s capacity for spontaneity is denied. Existentially speaking, when the tribalist looks at an Other, he is looking at the walking dead. Because, at heart, the tribalist is filled with annihilation anxiety, it is only safe encasement in the tribe that can seal him off from death. What he wants is species standardization, bodies like his to identify with, not always sexually but metaphysically. In fact, the freedom from this psychic entombment is often to be found in sexual release with persons outside his tribe. Racists and ethnoracial particularists are often sexually attracted to the ethnic and racial Other whose group members they despise. They are often repulsed by the Other and insatiably drawn to him or her as a sexual object at the same time. Why is this the case and what does it tell us about human relationships? I explicitly reject explanations on the order of defilement, exoticism, and objectification as too literalist and psychologically uninteresting. While they are plausible and may possess more than a modicum of truth, they do not get at the heart of the sexual motivation of the enthoracial particularist and racist. I offer, instead, a psychoanalytic interpretation that sees this phenomenon as an act of restoration. There is something restorative in the act of copulating with a repulsive racialized and ethnicized Other. There is an organic movement in the unconscious and, most importantly, in the body, to find a lost unity, a primal cohesion and inseparability that was our condition before racial and ethnic socialization along tribal lines marked human beings as irrevocably distinct. Copulation with a racially and ethnically repulsive Other is an act of deep integrity. It is the body’s way of getting back to original relatedness that was disrupted by the social ontology of ethnoracial particularism and its logical concomitants: misframing of the humanity of the Other and misrecognition of her agency as a subject. The coercive imposition of homoraciality and homoethnicity on a subject from this perspective is a traumatic event because it forces the body to conform itself to a mentalistic construct that stands in stark contrast to the desires and logic of the body. On this account, repulsion toward the racial and ethnic Other is a form of neurosis since it is a repressed sexual impulse whose destructive symptom is radical alienation from both self and Other.

VIII. Jim in Africa A white American tourist named Jim is part of a tour group in Africa. He has never regarded himself as an outright racist, but he will tell you that he doesn’t have any black friends and that he would rather his children marry individuals from their own background—life’s less complicated that way, and the kids won’t be as confused as they would be if his daughters intermarried.

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Jim finds himself in a peculiar situation. Somehow, after using a small station bathroom, he gets lost from his all-white tour group among the plethora of buses in the overcrowed parking lot. He boards a bus that looks similar to the one he has been riding for three hours. He is the only person on the bus for about fifteen minutes. Suddenly, a barrage of black Africans bombards the bus. Before he knows what to do, the bus pulls out of the terminal while the jocular individuals scramble for seats, some falling on top of each other. Eventually he learns from one of the passengers that their bus will make a stop at the same destination where his own tour group is scheduled to arrive. In fact, he’ll get there a full thirty minutes before it does. For now, he has to content himself with a bus filled with thirty strangers, all black, all speaking in strange accents. Someone from the back begins singing. The women start to clap their hands and then the men do some combination of hooting and whistling to accompany the women’s singing and clapping. Jim begins to feel anxious. His heart races and he feels completely alone in the universe. His sense of himself as a white person becomes more acute. He feels embarrassment and the gut-wrenching sense of being dislocated from his own consciousness. But why? This is a popular song. Just yesterday he and his touring companions—whom he’d met only the day before—had clapped along to the folk song, taking special delight in the exoticism of it all. A woman asks him his name. He answers: Jim. “Jim,” she shouts to everyone. They laugh good-naturedly and tell him that he has to either sing with the men or clap along with the women. He smiles nervously. He doesn’t know the words. Then you will have to clap. The men laugh, and one of them offers him a swig from the bottle he is drinking. Jim shyly says, “No thanks. I’m alright.” He’s never felt more constricted in his behavior than he does in this moment. The absurdity of the formality in the midst of such gaiety stands out in his consciousness. It is as starkly inappropriate as raucous laughter would be at a funeral. There is more clapping, and to his amazement he sings along. He has picked up a few of the words. He sings in a low voice while he claps. When it is all over, they applaud him. There is laughter and a lot of chatter about the political rally they are going to. The bus is hot and stuffy, not like the air-conditioned one he’s been touring in. And the seats are hard. Curling springs of metal buried under the dingy leather seats poke him often in his buttocks, so he has to sit on the edge of his seat. One of the men tells a woman to let Jim sit in her lap; it’s better than the seat. She gets up, says something cheeky to the man and they all laugh. She asks Jim if he wants to sit in her lap. There is more raucous laughter. Jim blushes and eases back into his seat where the loose wires, bursting out of bright yellow foam poke indiscriminately at his soft buttocks.

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After an hour or so into the drive the women distribute a light lunch among the passengers. Jim is fed a tasty variety of fruits, roasted corn, and slices of corn meal pudding. “Sorry Jim, no drinks to wash it down with,” one of the women says with a wide smile. After what seems like hours, the bus grinds to a halt alongside a parched road behind another bus. This is where they all get off to relieve themselves. Jim needs to go, he’s been thinking about it for a while. His original tour bus had a bathroom in it. He discreetly walks into the wooded area adjacent to the road. Behind him he hears the laughter of three men urinating openly by the road. Jim is possessed of an urge to run as far as he can. Eventually he thinks he has walked far enough. No one will be able to see him relieving himself. On his way back, about fifty yards to his left, Jim spots a man zipping up his trousers. He is white, perhaps in his mid-fifties, just about Jim’s age. Thick blond hair interspersed with patches of gray at the sides and around his temple gives him a distinguished air. Jim finds himself walking rapidly toward the man, filled with a sense of relief. He trips once and doesn’t even bother to brush the dust off of his trousers. “Man! Am I glad to see you!” Jim bursts out. He smiles and extends his hand to the stranger. The latter nods and with a somber look on his face says something Jim doesn’t understand. He says it in some foreign language. Jim looks confused. It sounds like German, Norwegian . . . he doesn’t know. The man indicates, somewhat indifferently, that he does not speak English. Jim realizes that he must be traveling with the other tour group. He follows the man back to the road where a busload of white people, some with cameras, others with sticks, are standing around speaking in some weird language. They look at Jim with blank expressions; one or two nod politely as he moves among them. Many of them are wearing khaki shorts, hiking boots, black or navy-blue socks, and nondescript shirts. None of them is wearing a baseball cap like he is. It hits him quickly, and the minute it does, he feels a stab of anxiety: None of them, not one is an American! “Jim! Jim!” one of the men from the bus with the Africans calls. “There is more food. The women have been hiding it.” He pushes a whole fish, dried and fried through the window, and makes as if to throw it at Jim. A cacophony of laughter follows. One of the men helps Jim inside the bus. Jim barely realizes that he’s limping. When he stumbled he must have twisted his ankle. There is a small scar on his cheek and one of the older women looks around for something to wipe away the blood, fussing over him like a mother. He’s in another seat, this one closer to the front. As the bus pulls away, his anxieties subside, but not fully. He cannot get out of his mind the look of condescension the man in the woods gave him as he approached

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him, hand outstretched and all. Jim had never felt more alone and confused in that brief solitary moment. He had felt like both stranger and impostor. And weeks later, he realized that in coming upon the man who had been relieving himself that was exactly what he was—an intrusive and alien impostor.

Notes 1. Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), 19. 2. Waters, Ethnic Options, 23. 3. Herbert Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, no. 2 (January 1979): 1–20. 4. Waters, Ethnic Options, 23. Italics are mine. 5. For full details of this, see Naomi Zack, Race and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Routledge, 2002). 6. Waters, Ethnic Options, 23. 7. Waters, Ethnic Options, 91. 8. Waters, Ethnic Options, 66–67. 9. Waters, Ethnic Options, 45. 10. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 290. 11. Waters, Ethnic Options, 131. The study being referred to here is one by Edwin Friedman. See Edwin H. Friedman, “The Myth of the Shiska,” in Ethnicity and Family Therapy, ed. Monica McGoldrick et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 1982), 499–526. 12. Waters, Ethnic Options, 131. 13. Waters, Ethnic Options, 133. 14. Waters, Ethnic Options, 142. 15. Waters, Ethnic Options, 134. 16. Waters, Ethnic Options, 18. 17. Waters, Ethnic Options, 18. 18. I thank Jerry Piven for these beautiful terms that he himself used to describe characters in Forbidden Colors, a novel by the late Japanese author Yukio Mishima. See Jack Piven, “Phallic Narcissism, Anal Sadism, and Oral Discord: The Case of Yukio Mishima, Part 1,” Psychoanalytic Review 88, no. 6 (December 2001): 778. 19. Waters, Ethnic Options, 133. 20. Waters, Ethnic Options, 73. Italics are mine. 21. For a concise discussion of the caste system in India, see Jeremy Seabrook, The No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste, and Hierarchies (London: Verso Books, 2002). 22. Seabrook, Class, Caste, and Hierarchies, 120. 23. Seabrook, Class, Caste, and Hierarchies, 122. 24. The reader should again note that when I use the term tribe I am referring to affiliations that fall under the categories of racial, ethnic, and national. 25. Waters, Ethnic Options, 133. 26. Waters, Ethnic Options, 134.

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27. Quoted in Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 135. 28. Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe, 135. 29. See Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan, chapter 1. 30. Peter Shabad, Despair and the Return of Hope: Echoes of Mourning in Psychotherapy (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 2001), 298. The patient referred to in this case had told his mother that her legs were fat when he was eight years old. They had looked puffy, and the comment did indeed hurt his mother. A few months later she was hospitalized and later died. He never forgave himself for the pain he imagined his comment had caused her. 31. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of Death (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 284. 32. Brown, Life Against Death, 285. 33. G. Róheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream (New York: International Universities Press, 1945). Cited by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death, 285. 34. Shabad, Despair and the Return of Hope, 176. 35. Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, selected by members of the Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado (Athens: Shallow Press / University of Ohio Press, 1952), 71. 36. Hannah Arendt, Thinking, vol. 1 of The Life of the Mind (New York: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 106. 37. Anthony Quinton, Hume (London: Phoenix, 1998), 12. 38. For an interesting and often comical account of this phenomenon, see Michael Ignatieff’s documentary The Road to Nowhere. This film is the documentary version of his book Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. There is a scene in the film where a Serbian and Croatian soldier who are exchanging fire engage in conversation on a CB radio. Each jokingly tells the other that he is going to blow up his house. The Serbian soldier tells Ignatieff all the ways in which Croats are different from Serbs. He says the problem with Croats is that they want to be gentlemen. In a poignant moment, one that drives home Freud’s theory of the narcissism of minor differences, the soldier says almost despondently that the Croats can never become gentlemen. “They are like us,” he says. All of us Slavs are alike. This outlines the dilemma of the tribalist. In spite of his own fabricated world of metaphysical-like differences between himself and strangers, reality asserts itself in his own consciousness and asserts the fundamental truth he is desperate to avoid. The poignancy is aborted with the renewal of gunfire exchange between two people who, save their respective religions—Serbians are predominantly Eastern Orthodox, Croatians are Catholic—are ethnically very similar if not identical. 39. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Meridan, 1982), 64. 40. Peikoff, Ominous Parallels, 64. 41. Peikoff quoting Schmitt in Ominous Parallels, 65. 42. Peikoff summarizing the viewpoint of Lothar Gottlieb Tirala, a leading philosophically trained Nazi theorist and ideologist in Ominous Parallels, 65.

CHAPTER FIVE

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Theorizing Posthumanity Radical Inclusion, Jews as the Chosen People, and the Identity Politics of St. Paul

The concept of community is fast becoming obsolete. Community, in the classical sense of the term, comprises a group of people who live in a common territory, have a common history and shared values, participate together in various activities, and enjoy a high degree of solidarity.1 It is a people who constitute a shared ethnicity; shared cultural life; shared religion, nationality, and language; as well as a perceived shared ethnoracial identity. Aside from that, persons who form a community are thought to share a conception of how a life should be lived. Communities function like systems of appraisal. How virtuous you are is the result of a positive evaluation of your character, how well you have fulfilled your role obligations, and how judiciously you have discovered and practiced who you are in relation to your ends in the community. The communitarian definition of community has been empirically dominant throughout much of human history with periodic exceptions. That is, for the most part, human habitation has centered on persons of common ancestry sharing spaces—from sparsely populated plots of land, to large swaths of territory forming what we may call the communitarian imaginary. By communitarian imaginary is meant the manufacturing of Great Past myths to sustain a coherent narrative about the substantive nature of one’s culture, the belief in a sustainable blood line, the prescriptive values and customs that constitute a tradition that is believed to be indigenous to one’s culture, and the attribution of an altered ontological status to outsiders that pits their humanity against that of those inside one’s culture. The communitarian imaginary, the theoretical counterpart to the existential conception of 177

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community, is also reluctant to consider ways in which diversity over time has altered the socioethnic status of the community in ways that rob it of its distinctiveness. This communitarian imaginary gained considerable traction in the modern world under the Westphalian conception of the nation and, a fortiori, the community. An examination of the social ontology of the Westphalian conception of community should bring this idea into sharper relief. The nation is the community and the community constitutes the identity of the nation. The question of who is a member in the national community is a problem that, until recently, was seemingly unproblematic for the Westphalian imaginary.2 Those relatively homogenized members of the body politic counted as members; those who were not members of homogenized groups counted as visitors, foreigners and guests. But today, the moral grammar of hegemony vis-à-vis the Westphalian community has been challenged. Its flawed social epistemology—which consists in the misframing of an outsiders and insiders binary frame of reference—has lead to a crisis in subjectidentification, that is, where subjects vie for recognition as full-fledged members of the community while not necessarily sharing the outlook of the community, nor, obviously, its history. Given the definition of community, then, the question that arises out of this flawed social epistemology is, who is to count as a subject-member, and what methodology do we employ to determine the knowing of the “who”? The Westphalian model of community appeared to assume that those residing within the territorial confines of a bounded polity were the legitimate subjects of justice and community— foreigners and other aliens notwithstanding. Since its inception in the seventeenth century, however, the Westphalian model concealed subjects within the bounded polity who were never formally part of the ethnic identity of the Westphalian nation-state. Westphalianism and ethnic identity have always gone hand in hand, and this marriage has kept outsiders from not just being full-fledged members, but from being affirmed participants in the community. Recognition and affirmation, two values required by individuals from their fellow human beings for self-respect and self-esteem, were denied the outsider in the Westphalian ethnic state. Recognition and affirmation, we might add, are required for cultivation. This flawed conception of subject-membership led not just to a misframing of the “who” of membership, but also to an egregious error in the construction of social ontology: “who” among all the residents of nation-states should count as a qualified member of the national community? The Westphalian model in some sense spawned this problem by pretending that all those whom one could ostensibly point to in the bounded

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community were the actual subjects of legitimate membership in communities, a unit of moral concern, while surreptitiously excluding many persons who did not count as a “who” of membership. With its hierarchy of being that demoted broad swaths of human kind to subspecies levels, the Westphalian framing of community-membership saw many human beings as peripheral members of the national community and as outright outsiders. Such has been the case with Jews in every nation-state in which they have sought membership; blacks from colonized and former colonized countries, Turks, until recently, in Germany, Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and some Muslims in India. The list could continue indefinitely. But the theoretical point is that the very analytic definition of a nation—especially the component stressing an ethnic and cultural identity—is one that cannot accommodate the twenty-first century where a plethora of “strange” bodies that are vying not just for residence, but permanent membership in the communities of the nation-states of the modern world is growing in unprecedented numbers. Even developing African states such as South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria are competing centers for an alarming number of refugees on the continent. The nation cannot accommodate these bodies as potential communal members— by the logic of the communitarian imaginary—in the sense that these Others come with customs, traditions, and worldviews and values that are often at odds with those of the nation-state. Within these bounded polities, each trying to accommodate the strangers, while retaining its national identity and communal integrity, there arises what I shall term perspectival mania. Perspectival mania can only take place in bounded communities where values are fixed, customs and traditions attached to an ethic of preservation and of memory, and human relationships are mediated by the need to maintain tribal authenticity. If we view classical communities as instantiations and manifestations of a national and ethnic identity, then all communities become reified. Perspectival mania is partially the clash of a nation’s selfconception—which includes its national memory—with the worldviews of outsiders such as those of Arabs, North Africans, and Turks in their host countries of England, France, and Germany. Here we have a standoff between outsiders determined not only to bring their memories and their past with them with a view to transplanting identity out of nostalgia and a need for continuity of ethnic identity. These outsiders also challenge the values of their host countries. Perspectival mania involves the institutionalized disruption of the notion of community in the name of equality and fairness. Acknowledging that the analytic conception of community is disrupted by foreign bodies, nation-states now attempt to create parallel communities within the polity by protecting the identities of the strangers in the

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name of respect for cultural identity, which is seen as tied to human dignity. Not comfortable with the empirical fact that communities are dissolving organically—in the ways religious sects die—as cultural communities collapse into overlapping spheres with other cultures, the state seeks to psychologize identity by teaching memory and by conjuring nostalgia in children, children whose culture is English and whose memory is not of a historic past but of their friends of varied hues and of what they have concretely practiced in their lives. They have never “lost their culture” because they never had it. Perspectival mania is an attempt to make sacred and spiritual the notion of biological collectivism. This peripatetic move on the part of the state to protect the ethno-specific aspects of a group and to build group identity in an individual whose identity is already multitiered is a form of perspectival mania. The synonym we may give to this concept is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a well-meaning attempt on the part of the state to correct the exclusionary practices of classical communities. What has been described above is the multicultural education that children who are “cultural Others” receive in several nation-states including England. The multicultural slot allows each child to have his distinct culture exhibited publicly, while he himself is subjected to viewing, in museum pointing style, the cultures of others. Multicultural perspectival mania culminates in a valorization of pluralism as an unassailable value of modern society. This pluralism is, above all, intent on preserving the demarcation of group identities and favors the rigidity and conceptually neat distinctness of such identities. It supports tight and separate communities and a unitary self within traditional cultural limits. While, existentially speaking, human lives in the democratic polity are complex and not susceptible to easy categorization—the Muslim is, after all, a member of a secular state—the perspectival mania of multiculturalism and its commitment to pluralism is bent on ignoring the changes in personal identity over time. It is determined to foist a coherent and consistent identity reference onto those whose identities are anything but univocal and which have evolved beyond the conceptually neat politics of identity. Multiculturalism’s complicity in this perpetuation of myth making, in cultural distinctiveness and in the commodification of identity, makes it synonymous with cultural, ethnic, and racial monism. It is synonymous with ethnic and racial monism because pluralism in general and cultural pluralism are forms of identity essentialism.3 Multiculturalism, therefore, is a form of group politics veiled as a very partial plea for the state to usher in the goals and aims of a particular people, or an imagined peoples in competition with other peoples. Hence multiculturalism has lost its once-honorable goal of

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advocacy, which was committed to achieving democratic citizenship and equal liberties among all groups to a guarantee that scripted group identities will survive over time. This survival over time will ensure the cultural authenticity of all persons who belong to distinct groups. Rather than risk the organic unfolding of a new self that will emerge from dynamic interactions with outsiders, this multicultural perspectival mania seeks to efface reality via a top-down approach to identity formation. A monological approach to communication and value appraisal ensure that an authoritatively scripted role identity is fulfilled and generationally passed on. What must be stressed is that both the enforcement of a multicultural educational model with its emphatic commitment to pluralism and state patronization of one or more cultures over others are equally responsible for this perspectival mania and commitment to the multicultural state with its competing parallel societies predicated on historical communities and segregation by memory—real or imagined. England is the most tribal country in Europe. It is also the most multicultural. The latter is not inconsequential to the former; in fact, it is its direct cause. Never was a country so traumatized by race riots as quick to effect a pseudopolitical solution to a misdiagnosed problem as was England. England in the 1980s was rocked by a series of riots. The first of the riots broke out in April 1980 in St. Paul, Bristol. This was followed by the Brixton riot in April 1981—perhaps the most serious riot in England in the twentieth century. Hundreds of vehicles were burned and buildings burned, looted, and destroyed. Massive civilian and police injuries were sustained. Goaded by this riot, British blacks of Caribbean origin vented their frustrations at the increase in Asian-owned businesses that were prospering in the area by initiating a riot in July of 1981 in Handsworth, Birmingham. The second Handsworth riot occurred between the 9th and 11th of September of 1985. In alarmist mode, Britain embarked on what Bryan Appleyard calls a multicultural strategy. This strategy demanded that respect be accorded to different ways of life and that such ways of life were to be classified as communities, each with its own community leaders.4 Appleyard argues that the creation of communities by local and national governments replaced racism with tribalism. In 2005 tribal riots again broke out between blacks and Asians. Before the state and the councils told them they were members of distinct communities with separate heritages and histories, before the state, laboring under perspectival mania, gave them a sense of false communal distinctness and its concomitant solidarity ethos, they were just plain folks living and moving among and with the crowd.

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Multiculturalism, laboring under the universalistic and neutral trope of population profiling, is itself a dubious form of racial and ethnic profiling. In bypassing the caveat: “no representation without authorization,” a political slogan that reminds us of the birthright of self-respecting autonomous agents to select and appoint their own leaders, the multicultural strategy offers council men the paternalistic duty to indirectly choose for the “dark ones,” any self-appointed vanguard with enough charisma and persuasive appeal to convince those in power that he has the means to transform ordinary bodies into electoral units. Multiculturalism in the hands of a community leader bent on preserving ethnoracial distinctness becomes a method of unleashing the unrestrained tribal impulses that may lie dormant in human beings. These impulses, when cordoned off and organized into an assembly of competing cultural hordes, accomplish what every civilized liberal state fights against: cultural apartheid. Multiculturalism, like its genetic antecedent, pluralism, has as its goal the manufacturing, recognition, and sustenance of difference qua difference at any cost. Cultural apartheid is the corollary of multiculturalism because although cultures may live (even peacefully) side by side, they cannot interact in a way that will compromise the absolute spirit of the various cultures. Although there may be both deviations in cultural practices and deviants who will not concur with the authorized script of the cultural body-politic, there still remains, albeit in some Platonic realm, an authentic prototype of the cultural unit. It’s not that members of the cultures cannot interact with each other; it is that the interaction cannot compromise the alleged ethnoracial integrity of the unit. But this integrity is based on a lie at worst or a misconception at best. It assumes that every person in the alleged distinct community belongs to one and only one homogenous tradition. Many persons classified as Caribbean blacks whose ancestors were indigenous to Africa also hail from multiple traditions. They have European and Jewish and East Indian ancestry. Why then does multiculturalism attempt to decouple individuals from their multiple origins and speak a rhetoric of distinct traditions? Multiculturalism is premodern in its social ontology. Its sensibilities are similar to early forms of tribal units where contact between groups were instrumental and fear based—mutual cooperation and reciprocal fear kept each group intact and maintained an ethos of kin-based solidarity for both strategic and ontological purposes. But instrumental cooperation must not be confused with civic solidarity, which is what the councils put an end to in creating the multicultural strategy. The surest proof of this end to civic solidarity is to be found in the alarming autonomy that community leaders and religious leaders exercise over their

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“distinct peoples,” in the name of religious and cultural deference. In France several Islamist patriarchs have gotten their way in keeping government officials outside of their communities when a cultural or religious practice has conflicted with the law. Given the reluctance of several European countries to severely apply the law of the land to anything that smacks of an Islamic identity, given the fact that, in the name of multicultural religious equality, several women are permitted to be beaten everyday in Europe for not comporting themselves as proper Islamic women in the eyes of their husbands while the multicultural state agonizes over what to do, we may say that a common political language that would be the lingua franca of a truly egalitarian multiculturalism is being slowly eroded. Conventions of conduct and a common political vocabulary are the ostensible absences in such multicultural societies.5  Given the intimate relationship between community and tyranny in the history of humankind and, in recent memory, in the twentieth century, and given the role states have played in creating identities based on boundary manipulations, one may logically conclude that a separation of state and culture might be the best option for civic harmony and peaceful coexistence among various waning communities still predicating their identities on blood—real or imagined. The state may play no role in the manufacturing of group identities, nor should the state play any role in protecting any group identities from atrophying as a result of mass migrations, cross-cultural infiltrations, and the organic dissolution of communities.

I. Laissez-Faire Existential Engagement One should ask the question: If communities as we have come to know them are becoming obsolete, then what is it that should replace them? Where exactly would or should human beings live? To live a life beyond blood is to live in a state of the unknown, a state that is a far more accurate description of reality than is the manufactured rectitude and certainty of communitarian life where individuals believe that completed and finished societies can carve out a future with predictable results that will make life safe. What sort of milieu best captures how twenty-first-century modern life seems destined to unfold given mass migrations, the intake of millions of refugees and the transformation of European national identity and society in general under the European Union? Before attempting to formulate an answer we may say that it is a society beyond pluralism and multiculturalism.

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I submit that in place of traditional communities—which the emerging Polish populations in France do not inhabit—we engage the concepts of sociality and sodality as successor terms. By sociality is meant the large general spheres in which human social intercourse and civic life take place.6 One’s social ethos extends beyond one’s immediate social environment. By sodality is meant a spirit of camaraderie and friendship. Sociality can and invariably does include community but is a broader concept in that it captures a feature of the public domain that transcends community. Wherever human social intercourse takes place, from an airplane to the supermarket, to one’s neighborhood or the train station, sociality maps that terrain as the domain in which human life is authentically lived and experienced. Cosmopolitan advocates of sociality and sodality argue that human socialization arises from the open-ended domain of sociality. Community strives for an ideal born out of nostalgia and conjured historical memory. Its public space is politicized and psychologized especially when expressed in the form of nationalism. Communities are surveillance based because the efficacy of their collectivized identities rests on how well each fulfills the role that he or she inherits or discovers in some instances. Communities need to be apprised of what their members are doing and how they express themselves, lest the exercise of their agency calls into question both the resilience and the very nature of the communities’ identity. Observe the French government’s surveillance of its county’s linguistic “strayings,” inundating the country with special laws to protect the integrity of the French language from Americanization. Surveillance-based communities result in the individual having a thirdperson stance toward herself. One’s system of appraisal is the community, not one’s own and standards that one has cultivated for oneself. Cosmopolitan sociality strives for the exercise of creative agency without the hinders of memory—real or imagined—blood, real or imagined, and even the comforting presence of custom and tradition. What was described as a creative dance previously and a genuflection before the Other is an unmediated act of interaction in a sociality. In these cosmopolitan dalliances, if you will, a hybrid culture of organic customs and traditions is created. In the cosmopolitan sociality and sodality there are direct face-to-face relations with people with no protective barriers.7 Sociality is both a site of contestation and reflective occupation. It includes but surpasses the formal boundaries that constitute citizenship. It deratifies the communitarian mapping of social and political space. Sociality and sodality are not mere geographic metaphors but, rather, real multiterritorialities that link individuals to social units.8 We may call this new form of social interaction laissez-faire existential engagement. Its milieu is the dense social grounding of the cosmopolitan

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sociality and sodality. Laissez-faire existential engagement is marked by segregation by memory. Each person is a bearer of a past. Agreed. And the historicity of that person is not effaced by this engagement. But the link of memory, real or imagined, is absent, and it is to be argued that in the absence of memory civic praxis takes its place. Deprived of the social ease that reliance on shared memory guarantees, human beings are forced to cultivate in the imaginative crucibles of a new humanity an ethic of engagement that forges a new way of approaching the Other, listening to the Other, and knowing the Other. Laissez-faire engagement in the cosmopolitan sodality is not bound by the rules of engagement of communal life where, although one may interact with others, one engages in psychic distanciation of the sort such that one retains a purified version of one’s ethnic identity. Consider the Bengali who works with Americans and foreigners. She may even have some of them as friends, but despite her interactions with them, they do not and cannot touch an integral part of her that we may call her authentic cultural self. She would be appalled to have her son marry any of the daughters of the women in her small circle of American friends. Those friends cannot penetrate her inner core. They dance on the periphery of her public persona, a persona that consists in the social masks of everyday life, the image-conscious self that presents the self it knows others expect of it, and in return it is gratified by the response of the corresponding public persona masks of others. There is comfort in this type of engagement via memory and history because it is safe. Even in the once-segregated South in the United States blacks and whites played at this peripheral dance. None of the unspoken rules are broken because to do so would be to call the other’s as well as one’s own bluff. It would mean that the pretense involved in acting as though one considered the other’s humanity as equal to one’s own would be challenged. Breaking the rules dissolves the persona mask and forces one to confront the Other in her naked singularity, unadorned by cultural accoutrements and by a tribal persona. Going beyond this method of relating to each other, laissez-faire existential engagement is the breeding ground for a new humanity that travels along a path without blinders. Raising his head and heightening his perceptive skills to absorb all that is around him, he is an awaiting receptacle of the new and the untried. This is what it means to be, among other things, the new cosmopolitan. It must be remembered that in the case of our Bengali character and perhaps even more so in, say, an English aristocrat, it was not the case that she did not necessarily perceive all that was around her. Rather, that perception was

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filtered through lenses that already pre-judged the characters around her, and it was not necessarily a mean-spirited and ungenerous perception. It was one of quality, and fondness was the concomitant emotion felt in this perception. But those tribal filters rendered the individuals outside of her kin group as being beyond belonging. Governed by a tribal ethology, her perception of the Other did not reflect the real changes that took place in him. Her perceptive apparatus is selective, intransigent, and implacable. This attitude of implacability is best captured by one of my student’s story about his Russian mother. He describes her as a racist who once said to him, “I like the blacks, but they should be segregated.” If one likes a group of persons and would have them subjected to a social caste system, what might one advocate for those whom one dislikes? Thus we may note that communities traditionally conceived exclude a priori. They do so both physically and/or psychically. But the new cosmopolitan residing in a cosmopolitan sociality and sodality cannot perceive others in such a fashion—and it is not because he does not have to grapple with his own tribal filters—but because he knows that human identity, existentially, is made and then lived, not inherited and passed on. Ascriptive identities factor below achieved identities because the former are inheritances that come with social prestige or lack thereof, while the latter involve the creative exercise of one’s agency, one’s humanity if you will. This knowing makes the person with the ascriptive identity vigilant. This constant knowing functions like a form of self-surveillance. When he violates his knowing this self-surveillance allows him to take advantage of the self-revisable clause that is part of what it means to possess moral consciousness. The new cosmopolitan, posthuman, twenty-first-century person knows that socialites and sodalities demand the constant negotiation of borders, the access to borders, and an ongoing investigation of how arbitrary definitions of people grant some an unqualified access to community and others an unfair exclusion from even the margins of community. If we may ground the constitutionality of humanness within a paradigmatic ontology of indeterminacy and contingency, then one may reasonably wonder why the milieu in which human intercourse takes place does not reflect this state of the human condition. One answer falls back on the communitarian conception of community, which would see, for example, duties and responsibilities preceding the individual in the community. In a cosmopolitan sodality duties are not predetermined but arise out of the voluntary exchanges and transactions among human beings. Since the cosmopolitan sodality is always in a state of renewal in the midst of often peripatetic in/out movements among not its members, but participants, the sociality faces a

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challenge. Given the flexible entrance and exit clause that is the distinguished mark of the sociality/sodality, what guarantee is there that duties and obligations will be fulfilled in a sustained fashion? In this respect we should note that the cosmopolitan sociality/sodality is anchored within matrices of liberalism as opposed to communitarianism. Even under sixteenth-century social contractarianism citizens undertook their responsibilities and duties. There is an abundance of literature that attests to the fact that sixteenth-century social contractarianism was a flourishing enterprise. Liberalism, therefore, has never severed with its precontractual traditions and customs. The very existential coherency of liberal society attests to this. Laissez-faire existential engagement in the cosmopolitan sociality/sodality can involve no obligations and responsibilities that the individual has not undertaken for herself. This violates the spirit of freedom and benevolent reciprocity that is at the heart of this existential engagement. The truth is that the cosmopolitan sociality/sodality will not lack coherence and consistency because individuals might fail to fulfill their duties and obligations. Human enhancement and satisfaction are structurally built into the nature of duty fulfillment. To fulfill a duty is not just an exercise in moral agency; it involves being esteemed in the eyes of others for having performed a function that is uniquely one’s function to perform. Regardless of the potential peripatetic nature of the cosmopolitan sociality/sodality, persons need not be motivated by sacrifice of self for the good of the sociality. Rather each sees herself as performing a task that is more like giving a gift to a friend. This friend’s benefit and well-being are in the individual’s rational self-interest because the friend is a value that one wishes to keep and maintain. Because of the radical freedom and capacity to infuse meaning into the choices, duties, and obligations one makes and accepts, individuals still have a choice to accept or reject the sociocultural creation of duties and responsibilities. Persons have a chance to evaluate and then reject as binding, inappropriate, and agency-restrictive features such duties and responsibilities as may have been thrust on them. Such is the nature of the liberal cosmopolitan sociality/sodality. And such is the nature of friendships among equals who engage the humanity of each other out of, among other things, the sheer pleasure one gets from engaging the soul of another. Prioritizing the present and the future over the past, the not-yet-self over the historicized self, cohesion and coherence come from mutual commitment to maintaining the well-being of a life lived inside the ever-evolving sociality where each sees himself containing the whole human potential.

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II. Posthuman in the Flesh: Jews and the Fragility of Chosenness I have been implicitly describing a new type of lived humanity throughout this book, one that can be as enriching as communal life but one that is inclusive of all variations of humanity and harbors none of the illusions of a nostalgic past with reified meanings and inherited roles. I have not in any one section painted a definitive picture of the moral psychology of the new posthuman cosmopolitan. Glimpses of the portrait can be found in the various articulations of a cosmopolitan response given to several contemporary challenges outlined in this book. But now one may logically ask, as a friend of mine did a few years ago while I was starting this project, what would a posthuman cosmopolitan look like in reality? How would we recognize such a person or persons and by what means did they become posthuman cosmopolitans? My philosopher friend was not satisfied with a theoretical account of a posthuman twentyfirst-century cosmopolitan. He wanted a posthuman in the flesh. How would I identify such a person or persons? The answer lies in identifying the very antithesis of cosmopolitanism— tribalism—and in identifying, arguably, the most tribal of living peoples. Such a people enjoy an incredible and awe-inspiring civilization that has survived twenty centuries of Diaspora. There is a paradoxical and dialectical relationship between their tribalism and their universal natures. Their civilization has survived and transcended linguistic and national differences but has retained its ethnic bearing. Their civilization has survived because of an unbreakable national spirit that each may be said to possess. Exiled from every country they have ever lived in from France, Germany, Spain, and England to Russia, they are among the most resilient of peoples. Their cities and towns have been destroyed and they have been beaten and killed throughout history almost as a rite of passage among those inflicting the hate and crimes against them. One could logically ask, how in the face of seemingly insurmountable persecution could such a people survive with their faith, religion, and civilization intact? Other groups such as blacks in the Americas who were bought and sold into chattel slavery saw their African cultures and identities obliterated. Traditions were lost, never to be recovered, customs forgotten with the passing of generations and the legal means of transmitting and practicing them curtailed. How then did the Jews do it? How did they retain a religious and ethnic identity in spite of the existential, political, and material challenges—to say nothing of a Holocaust executed with the efficiency and precision of

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a single-minded fanatic—that they faced? Talk of perseverance, resilience, tenacity, and moral goodness aside, one may speculate that when you occupy an audacious position among the children of the God of Abraham, then you are psychologically endowed with a disposition that equips you to carry on in the midst of destruction and chaos. One has no choice because carrying on means being special priests of God, emissaries on earth to alleviate injustice and to be models of ethical excellence for others to follow. The history of chosenness is not relevant for this discussion. It exists. It is real. It is an appointment. God unconditionally declares the Jews as his chosen people: Deuteronomy 14:2, “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all nations that are upon the earth.” This God promises that if they obey his voice and keep his covenant that they will be a treasured people unto him, one above all people. In Exodus 19:5–6, this God promises, “Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.” In Deuteronomy 7:6 we read, “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.”9 Rabbinic Jews proffer two interpretations of chosenness. One interpretation sees God choosing the Israelites. The other advocates the idea that the Israelites chose God. They chose him by giving up their pagan deities and became, all things considered, the first authentic monotheistic people. For indeed one can say that the God of Abraham came into his own and became publicly visible by Jewish embracement of monotheism. Since the Jews chose their God it must be remembered that they have enjoyed the longest historical relation of a people to a monotheistic religion than any other people in recorded history. Sure there was monotheism under Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt. He was a fierce monotheist, but his monotheism was short-lived and cannot count in the annals of history of sustained monotheism. Zoroastrianism, another monotheistic attempt, started out and still remains a relatively minor religion when compared to the Abrahimic religions, which gave and administered codified laws that wholly constituted a people’s identity. The Jews, according to some Talmudic and Torahnic readings, were chosen for bringing God’s message of goodness and righteousness to the world as defined by the Mitzvoth in the Torah.

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We must begin by acknowledging that Judaic identity has stood outside of humanity in several ways. If a group is singled out and chosen by God, stamped with the imprimatur of his metaontological insignia, then that group and its members are both structurally and ontologically outside the domain of the ordinary. If one is exceptionalized in this robust ontological manner, then one is both dehumanized and unhumanized because one is taken outside the world. Dehumanization is articulated nonpejoratively. It suggests that one is evacuated of one’s own personal and ordinary humanity and singled out as the paradigmatic example of moral excellence. Even prior to creation, according to Tanya and Kabbalah, the Jewish soul was chosen. This metaphysical sleight of hand places a reciprocal burden on Jewish agency, which deprives it of its freedom to make its way toward its own humanity. Jews have been historically prehuman in the sense that the chosen “Jewish Soul” had been singled out for exceptional investment long before God actually made man in his own image. This prehuman identity is a metaphysically built-in holy identity that one does not have to achieve. It is even preascriptive since it applies before birth. Humanity is preempted. Humanity and its achievements are a social enterprise. It is through our collective socialization and interactions with each other that we achieve our humanity. Made in God’s image, notwithstanding, moral agency is a cultivated social good. We make our humanity in concert with others. If the soul of a people is a priori chosen, if their lot is not like the lot of the multitudes, if the creator has not made them like the nations of the world and has not placed them like families of the earth, if he has designated their destinies to be unlike ours, then a presocial, prebrotherhood, nonhuman to human intercourse is forged in the crucibles of the exalted creator’s will. Dehumanization is the result of gaining an ontological head start in the process of making one’s humanity outside the process of creative social intercourse. Why refer to this process as dehumanization? A coveted soul is not one that is free. Like tribal societies—historical and contemporary—in which a woman covets the womb of another woman’s and lays claim to the offspring therein as the bride for her son—the Jewish soul has been coveted by a God who needs an earthly imagistic representation of his will, his laws, and covenants. The humanization of oneself always involves choices and mistakes, voluntary undertakings and enforced actions. But more than anything else, it involves the freedom to be and to do. A child, coveted in a womb and married off to a stranger before she is even fully conceived, is a dehumanized creature. Her will, her capacity for choosing and for refusing, the role of her practical reason in performing evaluative exercises of competing life plans are all foreclosed. The human capabilities

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that reside in her are preempted by the choices made by another who has total jurisdiction over her life and her future. The dehumanization of Jews under the aegis of their God is accomplished via a claustrophobic relationship with him in which they are vessels and carriers of law. Moral automatons whose souls have been preordained as worthy of transmission, they never had the chance to, say, ponder, deliberate, and perhaps say no. The genuflection process that I have described in a previous chapter as being a crucial part of continued socialization performed in a spirit of egalitarian respect for Others is bypassed by virtue of this metaphysical sleight of hand. Jewish identity is never achieved. It is already made. This metaphysical head start allows a chosen people to be structurally and ontologically advanced in the race toward moral excellence. Actually, it is not that Jews as a chosen people are given a head start in this race by living a holy life so they may graduate from natural to moral creatures. It is that they are the standpoint of completion. At the end of the race there they already stand—winners before the race has even begun. There is no need for moral competition because God himself has stacked the deck so that their rightful place is at the end of the line. This, I would argue, is a metaphoric suggestion for how to frame the race toward moral agency. Jews like everyone else still have to do good acts as God’s special priestly people. But nothing they do can make them become unchosen. The favorite children of parents still remain the favorites even when they behave badly because they not only hold a special place in the parent’s heart, but also honor a sacred covenant between themselves and the parent: I will continue loving you and belonging to you if I remain the favorite. And conversely from the parent: I will love you, but you must never leave me. The covenant with God covers the progeny of those claused under the original covenant. Hereditary chosenness, then, is the conferral of specialness by virtue of blood, ancestry, and history. It allows descendants to ride on the largesse of a gift from God in which God sees no need to discriminate among moral actors and immoral actors. Chosenness by association violates the cosmopolitan spirit of intrinsic moral equality. Born not with a greater share of humanity but of divinity, Judaic identity is an unhumanized one because chosenness has meant that Jews were never constituted to achieve an ordinary humanity. Talk of humanity being achieved in the robust sense notwithstanding, all of us enjoy de facto humanity simply by virtue of being born and, according to some religionists, by virtue of being conceived. They have instead initially enjoyed an extraordinary de jure humanity. The children of Jews also enjoy de jure and de facto

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moral agency and are heirs to a kingdom of priests in which they have their rightful place. Judaic identity is immortal. To be stamped with the imprimatur of chosen and favored children means that the “Jewish Soul” can never die. Long after the souls of others have faded and been forgotten, the Jewish soul, the paradigmatic prototype of moral excellence, lives on in a two-pronged way: in the individual souls of its people, who are expected to aspire to its ideal type; and in the rest of humankind, who participate with its representatives in solving injustices in the world. God’s favoritism was not only an act of love but also the embodiment of a disturbing principle that bound him to his people and that would later pit him against the major people of humankind—Christians. From a monotheistic beginning-of-history reading, Jews are the oldest historical people, Christians the middle children, and Muslims the youngest. One people was born in the ravages of a dead man’s divinized body that would liberate them from original sin, the other, beginning with Abraham, in obedience to God’s laws and a rejection of their pagan gods. Their vocation was handed to them as a birthright—albeit one not without turmoil and heartbreak. Christians discovered theirs as a way out of damnation. There has always been mankind and then there have been Jews. Always. As a homeless, exilic, Diasporic wandering people they have stood outside of mainstream humanity as models for a new humanity, or a posthumanity. As God’s chosen people and his priests on earth, they have been, from a vocational standpoint, transmitters of moral efficacy. They were the first to annihilate their gods definitively and choose Yahweh as the one true God. Vetted and deemed worthy as purveyors of goodness, as paradigmatic examples of model human beings, Jews are constitutively tethered to this sacred responsibility. They had to be both for the world and beings in the world, but not of the world. There is a curious paradox at work in Judaic identity that speaks to their potential if not actual posthuman status. They are the most tribal of people whose bloodline is traceable to Abraham, and they are also the most universal people. Hereditary chosenness is their children’s birthright. It is a tribal ascriptive identity that no Jew—atheist or religious—can undo anymore than a cat can cease being a cat. By this hereditary chosenness alone, Judaic identity can function as the prototype of all forms of tribalism. If one were to give an ostensive definition of tribalism one need only point to Judaic identity. It is, arguably, the longest living civilized tribe in recorded history today. It is not being suggested that chosenness is a biological category, but to throw it off would involve a revolt of sorts, a metaphysical rebellion against God, who elected them above all other peoples and nations.

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At the same time Jews are a universal people—perhaps the most universal of all peoples. They are universal in two fundamental senses. As a historically persecuted people they have been forced to adapt to foreign cultures, countries, and overcome linguistic barriers. They have assimilated and still kept the basics and the fundamentals of their religion intact by living by a strange double-consciousness that has permitted them to see and perceive the societies they have taken refuge in, and also to see themselves as the Other has seen them. Thus Jews, like blacks in the Americas, have been privy to the consciousness of their hosts and oppressors. They inhabit this double-consciousness and look at themselves from the third-person perspective. No other living people has had to inhabit this alienating space for as long as the Jews have. Their double-consciousness mode of living predates that of any oppressed people living today. Jews are among the most universal of people because in their chosen status lies a daunting task that is the partial justification for their chosenness: emissaries of justice and moral excellence. Charged with righting the wrongs of the world and with repairing the world, Jews have had a historical obligation not just to maintain their own tribe, but also, unlike any other form of existential tribalism, to be the moral custodians of those without voice, those without shelter, and those oppressed. Either a cruel God or one with lofty ambitions for his chosen children would himself have decreed these obligations to a people who have been, throughout history, dispossessed, without political voice, exiled, and without a home. Expected to toil on behalf of the dispossessed because it is their special obligation, Jews in return could expect no special rewards from their favored Father. In the heart of Judaic missionary work lies the very soul of altruism.

III. How God Became a Cosmopolitan Jews stand as aestheticized models. Although they may work on behalf of others, and although others may emulate their moral excellence, others can never be like them—conversion notwithstanding—because they do not share a bloodline that links them directly to God’s ordination. To be a Jew is to be a special creature with a special legend to refer to, and a special access to a special God. No one else can have that legend. Ever. Aestheticized as chosen people, and iconicized as the Messiah, as the Son of God, Jews are the only human beings on earth who have a blood relationship with God. Jews are not just chosen, but after they were chosen they became related to the son of their Hebraic God. If ever there was a God who wished to consummate the bond with a people—his people—there would have been no better

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way to have done this than to have his Son be born as one of them. He who sits at the right hand of the Father is a Jew. Christians who pray to this God that Jews do not believe is God are indeed praying to a Jewish God. AntiSemitic Christians who strike against the Jew are spitting in the face of their own Jewish Lord and Savior. Chosenness, therefore, of the Jewish people as God’s special kin is reified through the birth of his son, a son who had a dual ontological nature: he was the son of David according to the flesh, and the son of God according to the spirit. Up to the birth of Jesus, his son, this was not a God who ruled beyond blood identities. It would take the divinized dead body of his Jewish son to make him a true cosmopolitan tripartite God, one in whom the existential categories of male and female, Jew and Gentile, Greek and sinner, prostitute and saint would all collapse with the death of his son. He was very much a tribal God, but it took the blood of his son to transform Him and the world simultaneously into a universal Being, one who, in the form of his son, favored no tribe, no group, and no chosen people over any other. It was a God who through the divinized body of his son accepted and included those who, of their own free will, chose his Jewish son as their savior. While Jews rejected the salvific figure of God the Son, on an unconscious level it must have reinforced in their own eyes their status of favored children. For God had not only chosen them as his people, but one of their own as his Son, albeit, one in their eyes who made illegitimate claims to godhead. If one wanted to be analytically correct one could say that God did not become a cosmopolitan God even after the death of his son. Nor did he become a cosmopolitan God by choice. It took the feisty and revolutionary rabbinical scion Saul of Tarsus, turned Paul, who turned a small Palestinian sect into the world’s leading religion to transform God himself from a particularistic patriarch of a tribal people into a universal deity. Perhaps this phenomenon of chosenness was one that was made more prescient to Christians than to Jews with the passing of Jesus. And perhaps, speaking conjecturally, much Christian anti-Semitism has been an unconscious revolt at both God and the Jews for their God’s favoritism—a meanspirited jealousy at never being singled out as special emissaries, a sense of impotence at not enjoying hereditary chosenness and specialness (at being a peculiar treasure). The resentment stems from knowing that the most immoral Jew is still chosen, as are her descendents. Even the immoralist born a Jew holds a default moral status that can never be revoked. And with specialness and favored status comes the implication of innate innocence. She and her descendants are chosen by blood, and because of that special blood she belongs by association of a special kind, to God. The angry ones,

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like children who cannot bring to consciousness their hatred of their parents, take it out on their siblings. After all, Jews were born with good blood and the rest of humankind was born with bad blood. But the burden of good blood is not always easy to bear. Jean-Paul Sartre intimates this “unbearable” burden of good blood, which incurs the envy of rivalrous siblings. He writes: What weighed upon him [the Jew] originally was that he was the assassin of Christ. Have we ever stopped to consider the intolerable situation of men condemned to live in a society that adores the God they killed? Originally, the Jew was therefore a murderer or the son of a murderer—which in the eyes of the community with a pre-logical concept of responsibility amounts inevitably to the same thing—it was such that he was a taboo. It is evident that we cannot find the explanation for modern anti-Semitism here; but if the anti-Semite has chosen the Jew as the object of his hate, it is because of the religious horror that the latter has always inspired.10

But what is the essential nature of this religious horror that the Jew inspires in the non-Jew? The partial cause is the sibling rivalry I mentioned. But truth be told, siblings are prone to resentment and resignation over the pecking order they occupy on the hierarchical parental chain of being. Horror is not an especially common emotion that siblings feel toward the favored one in the organic family. They are not surprised that they are not the favorite because their own ambiguous relationship with the parent gives them some clue as to how they came to occupy the position they do. As they are not the favored child, so the favoring parent is not the highest-ranking member on their list of favorites. Despite this state of tension, they will spend a lifetime jockeying for the parent’s devotion and some sign that they matter in the world. They are not horrified—they sensed it all along—they are wounded. But is this sufficient to explain the religious horror that Sartre places at the heart of anti-Semitism? An anonymous writer claims that Jewish existence invalidates the essential tenet of Christian theology. It is not just Jewish existence; it is the literal Jewish body—this one and that one—that evokes this immature horror. The Jews fill the non-Jew with religious horror for Jews because besides being the chosen people they are also a dignified and aspirational people. Whereas the Christian is a peripatetic fear-filled proselyte, the Jew is inert. She needs no converts because each of her kind is related to one of the original tribes, and each reproduces the tribe in the regenerative act of reproduction. Each becomes a literal stand-in for Israel. There is no need to proselytize since Judaic efficacy has nothing to do with successfully

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convincing anyone that Judaism is the Light and the Way. She has no fear of her God. Shaking her fists toward heaven and spewing invectives, she curses, argues with, and cajoles her God—all in an effort to understand her fate, his seemingly contradictory will, and once more, the terms of the covenant. She does this without fear of committing blasphemy or of losing favor with God. She approaches God at times as an equal. And this is precisely the status of special children. In some sense they can get away with murder for they are, in the eyes of the parent, beyond good and evil. The symbiosis between God and his chosen children is worth noting. Because they chose him, and because they voluntarily legitimized his laws and commandments, they were the first people to have granted a monotheistic God full psychological visibility and validation. They were his first people whom he tested and abandoned and then found again. Jews and their God/Father have the longest and oldest mythologically recognizable parent/offspring relationship in history. This is part of the religious horror that they inspire in anti-Semites and non-anti-Semites who are awed by this eternal relationship. They exist at a farther removal from the divine source. Jews have instant access to their God. Religious scholar Karen Armstrong notes that one night in Auschwitz a group of Jews put God on trial and found him guilty for permitting the obscenity of the camps. They condemned God dead and when the trial was over the presiding rabbi announced that it was time for evening prayer. After the Holocaust many Jews came to the conclusion that the personalized, benevolent, and omnipotent God of classical theism had died in Auschwitz.11 But he didn’t die. And they knew that. The trials were cathartic and symbolic gestures of holding a deadbeat father accountable. It was a revenge fantasy enacted against the backdrop of an apocalyptic drama. Jews inspire religious horror because more than any other religious people they have come closest to accepting the existence of evil in God. That God carries evil in his heart is a most audacious position to hold, but it can only be held by children who are also secure in their love of the parent and in the fact that the acknowledgment cannot undermine the closeness between them and God. Jews have, at times, loved God the way a woman loves a bad man. But through the disappointments, the abandonment to slavery for centuries, the need to be constantly on the move and to break with past attachments, Jews have never abandoned the search for meaning in their elusive God. He, after all, spoke directly to them and they heard his voice. As is well known, one of the ways in which the God of Israel distinguished himself from the pagan deities was by revealing himself in very concrete current events as opposed to mythology and liturgy.12

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The Christian shivers in fright at the thought of shaking his fist and hurling invectives at a sacred and punitive God. Knowing God first as an abstraction and then as a personalized deity only through the body of his son, Christians lack the intimacy with tyranny and love, and success and failure associated with the Jewish God. Their Christian God never attempted to exterminate the human race through a flood, utter the words “never again” as a sacred promise, and then, in the mid-twentieth century watched while his people were subjected to extermination from the human race by a monster who elevated violence to a horrifying level of technical mastery. “Never again,” were the words they repeated as a biting reminder to God of what he said after Noah’s flood and almost as a veiled threat against him to never permit this evil another time. Jews are an audacious people and this is what the anti-Semite and the begrudging Christian resent. He is one of us, the Jew must say, and we can do to him exactly what we want. Yahweh is a reasoning and at times reasonable God. The Jews show up the Christian to be effete, weak, and incapable of holding God accountable for what he does and for what he said he would do and did not do. The Christian resigns himself to the will of God. The Jew challenges that will. She needs to make sense of it in reason and through argumentation Judaism, by all accounts, is a self-contained and closed system. Because each living Jew is a literal stand-in for Israel, every Jew can become a part of the state of Israel. In this respect it is not a conceptual religion like Christianity, Hinduism, or Islam. It is arguable whether there would be such a thing as Judaism if every Jew had been killed. Can a religion embodied in the personage of a people survive if the people die? Hitler suspected the ambiguity of this answer and so attempted not only to exterminate all Jews but to annihilate the religion itself. It is not the Talmudic and Torahnic and rabbinical scholars who establish the fundamental parameters of the religion and thus shape the identity of the people. It is the literal ethnic/racial bodies of Jews who exist, not as carriers of a message, but as the embodiment of an unprecedented ontological structure. The rabbinate are mere extensions of that body. This is the horror, the horror for the anti-Semite and the Christian whose ascetic, deprived body seems weak and impotent when compared to the living power of the Jewish body and what it represents. For while Christians wait passively for the Second Coming—which, by all Evangelical accounts, should have come and gone—radical Jews attempted to bypass conventional rabbinic doctrine that held that Jews wait patiently for the Messiah to lead them back to the Holy Land.13 They were attempting to initiate redemption independently of the Messiah by organizing a mass return. It was, as Milton Viorst describes, “the bypassing of the divine—‘forcing the End,’ in rabbinic terms.”14

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Proactive and audacious, not waiting for the Messiah who is obviously late in launching himself on the scene, a significant number of Jews attempted to force a redemption, one of their own making, one made in their own time, and in their own place—a nation-state in Palestine. Who is the master, and who is the slave? Only a stiff-necked people who selectively learned lessons from the past could bypass rules and preempt God in his discretionary role as their leader. But why would one have expected anything different from a people who were lead into a wilderness, enslaved for centuries and then left to wander the faces of the earth for thousands of years? This is not just an issue of survival skills, although it is that. This involves thinking along with God and thinking like God as the rabbinate were wont to do. Jewish passivity toward their rabbis notwithstanding and Jewish passivity in the face of persecution, a given Jewish eschatology, at times dwarfed their triumphalist yet agonistic spirit. Jewish passivity secured by the Three Oaths has been seen by some as a crime against the heroic spirit itself. In the early Talmudic era, rabbis trying to establish their credentials as the leaders of an exile community chose a route that required Jews to swear to a set of “Three Oaths.” They would wield a powerful effect over the resilient and feisty Jewish soul for over two thousand years. The oaths were: first, not to return en masse to the Holy Land; second, not to rebel against the nations in which they lived; third, in return for the second, to entreat their hosts not to oppress them unduly.15 It was a pact that forced an alliance between the Jews and their hosts in an effort to ward off the evil eye and outside aggression. Survival strategy or strategic one-upmanship? The worst lay behind them, the enslavement and the years in the wilderness. What could their hosts do to them that was worse than what they had endured? And besides, God had promised: never again. By all accounts if a father had done to his children what the sadomasochistic Yahweh did to his adopted chosen children, he would have been labeled a child abuser. It was only with the birth of his son that we saw a softer God but one who, nevertheless, gave him up and had him crucified. The sadomasochistic relationship between Jews and their God inspires religious horror because it hides from the anti-Semite and the Christian the illusion of safety, that they too are special and that their guardian would not lead them into danger, let alone have danger engulf them. The Jewish historical narrative is a deconstruction of the most treasured belief of the Christian—faith, prayer, and a pious life will deliver you from all evil. The Jewish narrative says there is no direct deliverance from evil. The Jew in her chosenness is condemned to live only for history. Even with eyes fixed on Palestine, it was always in the context of a justificatory

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narrative that what was promised to her was retrievable only through history. Because she is condemned to live only for history she lives in a perpetual relationship to the past. However much interpretational latitude Talmudic and Torahnic references assume, Judaic identity is an imprisoned one since no organic changes in life on earth can ever release the Jew from her historical bondage. The average Christians have no history of themselves as tied constitutively to epochal moments in their religion’s evolution. Their bodies are secular vessels made holy though the Word and are not the repository of a sacralized past that they may biologically pass on to their descendants. Since this entire project associates the posthuman with the cosmopolitan man or woman, one who stands in the geographical terrain of the nationstate but stands above it also, despises it, perhaps, always wishing to transcend it, and one who is always the paradigmatic example of one who can be in the state but not of it, we must look to the pejorative Jew as the one who has always adhered to a tribal ethos but who is a cosmopolitan existential aberration in her host country. As Ulrich Beck points out, “The Nazis said ‘Jew’ and meant ‘cosmopolitan’; the Stalinists said ‘cosmopolitan’ and meant ‘Jew.’ Consequently, ‘cosmopolitans’ are to this day regarded in many countries as something between vagabonds, enemies and insects who can or must even be banished, demonized or destroyed.”16 Jews have always had one foot set on the path to moral excellence and one set in Babylon. That has always been their burden and compromise as an exilic people. Jews, therefore, have never been cosmopolitan by choice but by default. It is not that they have identified with the world as home, seen themselves as citizens of the world. Jerusalem next year was always the prize to keep the unwavering eye focused on. It is rather that Jews have been swallowed up by multiple worlds where they became layered with regional identities. No other people have had this incredible mythological identity and at the same time mastered the cultures of their hosts. One is not saying here that Jews made path-breaking contributions to cultural life of all the countries in which they were guests and residents. Until the nineteenth century this was not to be the case. But they mastered the ways of their host cultures by understanding deeply their mores, traditions, and aesthetics of existence. They were always a people of profound wisdom dedicated to rational speculation. They are the most tribal of peoples and yet cosmopolitan by default because their absence of anonymity forced them to live as Jews while ensconced in pagan, Christian, and Muslim worlds, worlds in which their very visibility—even when they were locked away in ghettos—forced them as inassimilables to complicate the national identities of others wherever they lived.

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Jewish presence has always destabilized the grammar of hegemony. These mythological creatures would always be there, existing in a state of irreconcilable tension, and upsetting the unified, coherent, and cohesive worldview of their hosts. Jews have always been haunting as this type of cosmopolitan. And the cosmopolitan is a haunting spectacle because he dares to reimagine after nationalism, mythologies, and closed systems have dulled imagination and deadened perception. The cosmopolitan tribal Jew has always been there as a sore reminder that there is another narrative to that of the local nation-state’s, and that there is a mythological system that predates the one that takes itself to be the beginning and the end—Christianity. The power of mythology is never to be underestimated. The Jew has never been swallowed up by the cultures within which she has sought refuge. Persecuted, yes, but never overwhelmed. In remaining impervious to the deep ways of her adopted cultures by first asserting her national spirit, she has pointed to the impotence of these cultures. That she moved as best as she did through their worlds, remaining who she was qua Jew without becoming a schizophrenic anomaly, is a source of her inimitable resilience and a confirmation of herself and her people as exceptionally special. The Jewish body has always been a cultural disrupter in the midst of its host countries that took themselves to constitute a homogenous body-politic. Cultural disrupters such as the birth control pill in our time graft themselves on to local cultures and forever change them. When a culture encounters one of these it changes forever how it sees itself. The Jews have been disrupters par excellence because they force the host to rewrite his own history. It is not exactly a rewriting of his history per se, but rather a rewriting of a history of presence. This rewriting of a history of presence is a radical disruption because it makes the host an abject Other to the Jew and, by default, a stranger to himself. The host’s body-politic identity can never be reflected back to him in a way that mirrors how he sees himself and his compatriots. To see oneself reflected as an Other when confronting an impenetrable stranger is the result of a destabilization of the wholly unified and coherent person one takes oneself to be. The Jew has always been a cultural disrupter not because he alters the religious or deeply held social worldview of his host culture. Rather, the Jew arrives on the scene with a metanarrative few other cultures, religions, and societies can compete with. First of the monotheistic religions to emerge, his religion is the fountainhead of the civilized and civilizing religions. It gave law and administered morals. The Jew is a melancholic figure because he reminds others just how indebted they are to his kind and his religion. He is the earthly representative of the God they take to be uniquely theirs but is

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not. Indebtedness is not a feeling that can be tolerated for long periods in a person’s or nation’s life. It changes into shame, inferiority, guilt, and finally anger in relation to the debtor. Coming from a nonproselytizing people, the Jew’s reluctance to seek converts only shores up, in the mind of the host, a deep-seated sense of confidence and certainty about his identity and relationship to God. The proselyte knows that his religion appears more real to him the more he can persuade others that he is right. But the Jew doesn’t care whether people think her religion is right. She wants to be left alone, and she wants to leave others alone, too. Her religion has nothing to do with them at all but everything to do with her and her chosen God. The Jew has been like a closed system, and this is partially why she functions as a cultural disrupter. Her impenetrability is proof of the host’s impotence—physical and cultural. The Jew cannot be changed. All she needs are her people, her narrative, and a space to be left in private. Historically, Jews have been more of a traveling theatre troupe than a revolutionary force. Their protracted drama with their sadomasochistic God is one in which they are cast in a perpetual medieval morality play even when they are involved in contemporary social dramas. Few, if any other people, have navigated among the triadic registers of hope, memory, and dialogue as have the Jews so heroically. And few national narratives replete with mythological beginning of first peoples can compete with the Jewish narrative of chosenness and unparalleled intimacy with God.  Given all that has been said about Jews and their embodied history, it may appear clear why I have been intimating that they are indeed a posthuman people. Born with the magical property of good blood and a special association to God, they are posited outside the realm of ordinary humanity. A singular endowment makes them poised for a destiny of greatness. So how does a posthuman people situate itself in the midst of humanity? Does this situatedness involve a regression? To go beyond humanity and come back seems to require a turning around of sorts, a circling back to what one never was. And why should such a people join the pantheon of ordinary humanity when it has enjoyed an extraordinary one? It is not just the Jewish people who are heirs to a posthuman legacy. I have been arguing implicitly that to be a cosmopolitan is not just to be a nontribal human being. It involves going beyond the strictures of conventional humanity in favor of something untried, new, unexpected, untested, and inexplicable. It is to resist the comfortable and the comforting in favor of

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an unnerving experiment. To live this weaned life away from the lure of the tribe is to again live an unprotected life—unprotected, that is, from the illusion that in our nakedness there lies a boogeyman in the person of the Other that is ready to consume us and expose us as strangers to ourselves. The cosmopolitan has experienced the posthuman by treating with intimacy the many selves he bears within. Going beyond the mold and form that are his origins, he revolts against the one dimensional character of established reality and aspires to the self of his ambition. This self is one that knows its life must be earned metaphysically through invention, action, moral imagination, and courage in willing to try the untried. He knows that humanity is two-pronged. There is the base humanity that we are born with and from which is derived our intrinsic moral worth and dignity. That base humanity we do not have to achieve. It is a natural endowment. But that bare endowment is not a source of engagement with the world. That engagement is developed through the humanity that must be metaphysically earned, made, and then lived. That humanity is part sociohistoric, but to go beyond its tribal sociohistoricity it must forget the significance of roots to make a transcendental leap beyond roots to achieve soul maturity by wedding itself to the world at large. It is only in this sphere of generality that authentic cosmopolitan particularism can be achieved. All humane universalisms have to be expressed in particular ways. And it is in this new form of particularity that a new humanity is formed. But cosmopolitan particularism speaks more to a method of achieving particularity rather than the actual form it takes. The radical engagement with the world and the Other, the open stance toward the world and others all lead to the creation of a self beyond that which one is now. It leads, above all, to a compound self that cannot be a conceptually neat instantiation of the tribal self. It is a self that meets the world face to face, unmediated, as it encounters it, and follows the organic and unscripted unfolding of a human drama that is sacred because it is of the human individual and not the tribe. Those who worship at the altar of the tribe can never experience such moments. Those moments would be conceptually and existentially out of order. So what do the posthuman cosmopolitan and the posthuman Jew have in common, and why should the latter abandon a constitutive feature of her particularism—chosenness—to fit the posthuman cosmopolitan mold? On the surface they would seem to have very little in common. One earns his metaphysical posthuman status by choosing to live beyond the strictures of the tribe and established reality. That is, the posthuman cosmopolitan is an ontological rebel. Out of conviction and a temperament suited for the new and experimental, the posthuman cosmopolitan is a self-created person, like

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a willed stylized work of art. Particularity is the union between his own subjectivity and this alliance with the new and untried. This new particularity is one beyond conventional humanity. Its actual identity does not correspond to any social category. It has no social name, but it has identity. The Jew starts with a metaphysical identity that brands her as indelibly particular. She has a name and a unique, particular identity whose historical significance lies in a rare relationship to God—a special God who singled her out to be among his special people. Posthumanness means that Jews never had the choice to make this leap over who and what they are. Who they were and are has been fixed by the seemingly unalterable imprimatur of God’s signature. It is this specialness, then, that has put them beyond the pale of humankind. One group earns its identity on its own chosen terms; the other inherits its identity metaphysically. Its essence precedes its existence. What they have in common, then, is an identity that circumvents the conventional humanity most of us find ourselves inhabiting. To return to our initial question, why should such a people join the pantheon of ordinary humanity when they have enjoyed an extraordinary one? The most compelling answer I can find is this: the age of their extraordinary humanity is over. They are quite ordinary now, they are nothing special anymore, and they have served their purpose, and, above all, their history is over. Jews as a people with a three-millennia recorded history have come to the end of their extraordinary history. The issue they now face at the end of their history is the surrendering of chosenness as a symbolic gesture of equality among all God’s children, to undo the favoritism bestowed by God upon them which have made them the favorite children. My reason for saying that Jewish history has come to an end is twofold. And the two parts are as follows: first, dissenting Jews notwithstanding who refuse to recognize Israel because the Messiah has not yet launched himself on the scene, the state exists and it is very real. Jews no longer need to be occupants of anyone’s foreign soil except by choice. And should they face a threat from any source, they have a homeland to which they can seek refuge. From the mythological perspective one could ask where else is there for Jewish history to go? The Diaspora has ended and the Promised Land has been delivered; it is alive and bustling, and Jews have symbolically become “an indigenous people” who rightfully belong there. Some would say they have achieved eschatological restoration. Second, if Jewish history has come to an end then Jews are finally free from their agonistic relationship with God. They may renegotiate the relationship on their own terms in the wake of Israel and the end of their mythological history. The Jew may ask: where do we go from here? And the

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answers could lie in the continued duty to repair the world and to be an embodiment of excellence. But one does not need a continued mythological history in order to achieve this. Jewish historian Norman F. Canton agrees that Jews have fulfilled their role in history. They have been a light to the world by giving it monotheism and puritanical ethics. They spawned the two world religions—Christianity and Islam—and offered the Western world its scheme of genesis, destiny, and eschatology. They provided a prophetic preaching and social justice.17 Cantor notes that the history of the Jews as we have known it and them is probably coming to an end. He writes, “The Jews served their own purpose, and God’s purpose, and mankind’s purpose. Pragmatically, they are no longer very much needed as a distinct race. The Jewish heritage would endure if the Jews disappeared as a major group in the world in the twenty-first century.”18 In what reads like a doleful farewell to Jewish history he declares, “The Jews are going home now in the mist of history, into the remembrance of times long past, to rest with their God.”19 If the Jews have repaired the world and have fulfilled the obligations imposed upon them, then we are the historical beneficiaries of their actions. What’s left for them to do is to rehumanize their identity that was reified long before any Jew alive today was born. If we take seriously the claim that in the wake of the end of the Diaspora, Jewish history has come to its mythological end, then the desire to cling to a favored status seems to be one born out of immaturity and neurosis. Through all their travails, the promise of a homeland has made this heroic Diasporic people the greatest exemplars of faith and hope. A homeland, the Promised Land paradoxically frees them from this relationship and gives to them what God has given, in some manner, to the other tribes, hordes, groups, and clans under which his other children have organized their lives: a makeshift model of his external womb. Every country and state is a cradle and every cradle as we well know is a makeshift womb, a substitute for the real mother. Israel is the deliverance of that external womb the chosen people were denied. The Promise Land becomes for the Jews one of many among a lot. With the end of Jewish history and the move to graduate from chosenness and most favored status, Jews join not just the ranks of humankind in a cosmopolitan spirit of respect and equality. They become an autonomous people who can renegotiate the terms of a new relationship with God, a bottom-up as opposed to a top-down relationship. In this case they recover their lost humanity and forge, with a cosmopolitan ethos, a new common human agency. Because of their historicity, Jews can never entirely lose their posthuman edge, and nor should they. But they can make a powerful symbolic gesture of camaraderie and join the cosmopolitan sociality and thus truly become a

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universal people not by default, but by choice and moral conviction. Some may view this as a form of ontological demotion, and racial suicide, but on another reading one could say that as far as the Jews are concerned God has already gone into early retirement. This does not mean that he has stopped being their God. It means that his formal mission for them and his multimillennia historical relationship with them has changed form. The disproportionate care he felt for them in relation to his other children ended with the rise of Christianity. Because their God has retired from them, they must join the cosmopolitan sociality as equals and confront a modern world that has already retired God from much of its life.

IV. The Identity Politics of St. Paul When Rabbi Saul of Tarsus met his fateful new beginning as a Christianized Jew on the road to Damascus, few knew at the time that Paul, as he was to become known to the world thereafter, was about to embark upon one of the most audacious historical acts on record: the transformation of an insignificant Palestinian sect into the world’s first cosmopolitan religion and dominant monotheistic faith in Western history. This cultural cosmopolitan who was both an elite Hebrew and a linguistic Hellene was about to catapult the notion of universality and the essential oneness of all humanity into the stratosphere and then bring it back to earth in the form of a new religion. Saul, a Christian-persecuting Shammaite Pharisee, was walking down the road to Damascus on a long seven-day journey with a list of suspected Christians in his pocket. By some accounts he is said to have seen a blinding light after which the Lord appeared on to him and told him to stop persecuting his followers. Temporarily blinded by this shining light, he was commanded to become an apostle and preach his divine message. This revolutionary retrograde was disturbed by the fact “that a particular people could ever be the children of God to the exclusion of other peoples.”20 A firebrand visionary who at times seems to have forgotten where he came from as a strategic method of undermining his own privileged status as a Hebrew among Hebrews, Paul was upset at the contradiction between the universal content of the Torah and the ethnic particularity of its form.21 This once fierce persecutor of Christians who lived in the age of Christ sought reconciliation between Judaic obedience to the Law and faithful participation in it that would involve all of humanity. Using the body of Christ as both an allegorical and literal means of erasing human difference, primarily the difference between male and female and Jew and Gentile, Paul’s theological philosophy of universal cosmopolitan is thusly stated:

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For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor freeman; there is no male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:26–29)

There are several interpretations in Pauline scholarship as to what motivated Paul after his conversion to transform a tiny sect of Judaism into a nontribal monotheistic religion. Some scholars even wonder about the intellectual and personal issues that Saul was grappling with as he walked down that road. One plausible interpretation sees Paul as being inspired by the man, Christ himself, that he was motivated by the love of Christ inspired in others as well as the gospel of love that Christ preached. This man, touched by the nondiscriminating nature of Jesus who walked among prostitutes and the God-fearing alike, wanted an upheaval of thought and a new social ethos that would see the love of Christ dramatized and made history here on earth. This gospel of love was not one simply directed at God but at root at neighbor, stranger, foreigner, poor and rich compatriot, sinner and pious alike. A distinctly nonnationalistic brand of agape, this social gospel was the one Paul seems to have been touched by as he attempted to come to terms with the parochialism of his own identity. Another plausible interpretation I shall offer centers on the personal. My reading sees the middle-class Saul as existentially alienated from his genealogical origins (his father was from the tribe of Benjamin) and from his community in general. His zealous persecution of the Christians betrayed an envious evil eye coveting the passionate devotion and love the Christian Jews had for their dearly departed Lord, many of whom had seem him up close and personal. Indeed, Paul came to Jerusalem to study around fifteen years after the death of Jesus. Paul had never had such fierce and passionate feelings for his own religion and for his community. The tribal love and exaltation of kith and kin was an emotion the searching Saul did not possess. Already tormented by the abstract universal content of the Law against the corporeal, earthly body of its form in the Jew, Saul was, on that fateful journey on the road to Damascus, struck by the intensely personal way God loved him through the flesh in a way that united him with the rest of humankind. For in fact, given the dual ontology of Christ as the son of David in the flesh, and Christ the Son of God in the spirit, Paul found a way out of his existential angst and loneliness by finding kinship in God’s nonchosen people: the gentiles, the Greeks, the Christian Jews. This intensely personal satisfaction also spoke to Paul the renegade, the social activist, and cultural critic who found the rituals of his Judaic community trivial in the ontologi-

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cal manner Jews affixed to them. Paul was a most interesting beneficiary of Jesus’s death. And that benefaction was an awareness of the painful absence of species solidarity. Paul saw it as his job to reconcile the alienated communities on earth. Paul, it must be emphasized, was as motivated to unify humankind as he was to preach a new social gospel. Since reconciliation implies alienation we may properly view Paul’s gargantuan mission as transgendered, transocioeconomic, transnational, transethnic, and transreligious. Paul took the meals Christ held with his disciples and with the poor of the community as a metaphor for social relations. In such social engagements Paul underscored a crucial social dictum that was both Christ-like and universal in its scope of application—we support the most vulnerable in this world, and it is through the contemplation of the bleeding, torn, and vulnerable body of Christ that Paul sought to vindicate his commitment to the vulnerable. During his own missionary work Paul saw the presence of symbolic meals of reconciliation as often cause for concern. Those who came with displays of their social status against the pitiful backdrop of those who had little food and few material possessions were violating the very nature of human social relationships, relationships that ought to be based on an egalitarian principle.22 Through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, Paul came home, so to speak, to a community of like-minded folks who not only understood the theological significance of Jesus’s death, but saw in it a means to engage in social activism of just the sort that God himself had sent his son on earth to do. Paul’s existential isolation from his fellow human beings was relieved in his realization that God sent his son to redeem humankind—which included him. Not only were Jews as a chosen people singled out for a special kind of love, but also a more egalitarian love was to be found in universal salvation in the risen cast of God the flesh turned spirit. This God who manifested himself incarnate in the flesh had revealed himself as the Father who loved all his children equally through the expiation of the blood of his son.23 Paul’s fate was to become the executor of the estate of Jesus. It was a task that he would perform both dutifully and out of eternal gratefulness for the profound love he felt from God in this newfound spirit. Pauline scholar Daniel Boyarin argues that Paul, the avid cultural critic, was motivated by a Hellenistic desire for Oneness. This resulted in the creation of the idea of an ideal universal human essence beyond hierarchy and difference. The motivating force behind Paul’s ministry was a profound commitment to achieving a new humanity undivided by ethnos, class, and sex.24 This new humanity, Boyarin underscores, was one that called for autonomy, equality, and species-wide solidarity. This involved the very transformation

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of Israel from a place of flesh, circumcision, and ascriptive identity into a transcendent one of faith and grace. What Paul wanted to do was recast the entire Judaic identity from one of ethnic particularism into one that was not marked by the flesh but by a transformed and transformative spirit. This universal humanity is one that is predicated on the dualism of flesh and spirit. One set of bodies gets marked as Jew or Greek through practice and through anatomy as male and female. The spirit transposed across the resurrected and divinized body of Christ is universal.25 The circumcision that occurs in the flesh but not in the spirit is not sufficient to mark one off as a new man who joins in cosmopolitan brotherhood with all those who do not share the mark of the flesh and which separates him from eating, bathing, and communing with his fellow human being. So how to bridge the divide? How do the Christians and Jews and Greeks become the actual heirs of Abraham, and the legitimate children of the God who is the Father of the chosen people? It is through baptismal entrance into the spiritual body of the risen Christ. Boyarin notes that by entering into the body of Christ in the spirit, people become one with the seed to which the promise was made. In so doing they become heirs of Abraham and children of God according to the promise.26 Paul’s entire system and motivational vocation was one that called for the cultural specificities that shape human identity to be eradicated whether or not, as Boyarin points out, the people in question were willing. But Paul’s move was in many ways an assault against traditional Jewish identity. Paul’s suspicion and eventual rejection of the law as primarily works was a radical move in that it called into question the very features of Jewish life that gave it its distinctive identity: table customs, circumcision, diet, and Sabbath. These very customs functioned in such a way that their adherents ended up living by what I would call a separatist tribal logic. Paul had been, throughout his conversion, upset that in spite of living in the midst of each other, Jewish Christians, gentiles, and Jews were socially separated by markers of the body and customs in ways that offended not only his religious convictions, but also his Hellenistic sensibilities, which were marked by a spirit of universalism. Those born outside the historical ethnic group with which the Law was associated and out of which it arose, were, in effect, left outside the pantheon of God’s community. Already disturbed by the concept of chosenness because it deeply affected, in his view, the way Jews both saw and related to the stranger, Paul sought to radically reposition the law in ways that would make it more inclusive. When the law becomes interpreted in terms of faith then it is open to all who are not direct members of the group out of which the law emerged. Emphasis on faith as the allegorical interpretation of the

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law creates a universal People of God.27 In the words of Boyarin, “Corporeal difference yields to spiritual universalism.”28 The scion Paul was not just content to widen the domain of the human community and include a new people into its gates. He was a demographic linesman who also reinterpreted the Israel of the Jews as a new spiritual homeland, one in which God’s new people become the true Israel of God himself. With none being discriminated against—Jews were still able to define their lives through works (table customs, diets, circumcision), but they were just not prerequisites for a life in the spirit of the law—Paul the accomodationist and assimilationist uses the crucifixion of Christ to bring about the fulfillment of Israel in the flesh by Israel in the spirit. Paul erases the difference between Jew and Greek and oversees “their reconstitution as the new single People of God.”29 This internationalist with a background in the Diaspora and who yearned for a community of like-minded believers came of age in the midst of religious change. Paganism was on the decline in the Greco-Roman empire, and according to Norman Cantor, the masses of the Roman Empire wanted a different kind of religion. He writes: They wanted religion in which a savior-god gave them security in this life and eternal bliss after death. The mystery religions such as Isis offered that, but Paul must have noticed how popular Judaism was, with its holy scriptures, its historical myth and its puritan ethics. This is what attracted these “God fearing” uncircumcised Gentiles to attend the synagogue services offered in Greek. If Judaism would offer a dying and reborn savior-god incarnated in human form, and if it dropped the severe requirement of circumcision, it would gain vast numbers of new members from among the Gentiles and possibly become the dominant religion of the Roman world.30

And become the dominant religion it did, although Paul could scarcely have imagined at the time of his beheading at the orders of Nero that his annoyance at particularistic and exclusionary practices of Jews would culminate in the dominance of the most theologically—though not sectarian— hegemonic religion in the Western hemisphere. What Paul started was more than a revolutionary movement; he ended up by being the ultimate imagemanagement publicist for both the Old Testament God and the newly risen Christ. He modernized Judaism while transforming an obscure religious sect within its order into a universal force to be contended with. This modernization was not so much the revitalization of a tribal religion as it was first and foremost the radical remaking of the individual by means of, among other things, a devaluation of difference. And the difference that is being referenced

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here is Jewish difference. Paul would, in the process of Christianizing his new world, strip the Jew of every feature that marked him off as special and highly differentiated from his fellow human being. This process of what we may call deracination was a constitutive feature of soul modernization. Paul we may say was a racial eliminativist and a rejecter of biological collectivism. In addition, Paul’s modernization extended to Israel. He would not undermine the significance of Israel to God’s chosen people. But he would, in the wake of the risen Christ, and the growing community of faith in Christ, denationalize the concept of Israel in a most interesting way. Paul was not interested in deterritorializing the Jews vis-à-vis Israel. Rather, he was interested in repositioning their spiritual status as they faced a new competitor: the newly Christianized Jews and gentiles. Israel of the flesh would slowly come to be replaced by an Israel of grace and faith—of transformation. This new community of faith and grace—of those who have embraced transformation, would supersede the Israel of flesh. Paul remains rooted to the idea and existential reality of Israel. The new community of faith has a rightful place there. In his quest for universality and the unification of humankind, a spiritual location in one respect matters. Jews who do not convert in this new community are not to be displaced, nor does Israel cease belonging to them. But those who are faithful to and have faith in the risen Christ take the best seats in the house, so to speak. The unconverted, without doubt, are mere social ballasts. As Boyarin writes, “Paul holds out to the Jews the possibility of re-inclusion in the community of faith by renouncing their ‘difference’ and becoming the same and one with the grafted Israel of gentile and Jewish believers in Christ, but if they do not, they can only be figured as the dead and discarded branches of the original olive tree.”31 Israel is denationalized in the sense that its socioreligious foundations, predicated on blood and tribal affiliation, have been destabilized, evacuated, and replaced with a new eschatological narrative. It is a narrative that speaks not just to the salvation of the Christian Jews and gentiles, but to the Jews that reject conversion. Their lot shall not be a favorable one if they do not convert. Faith in Christ made the Torah irrelevant as a means for salvation. The sacred book that had served as the cornerstone of religious life was being disregarded as a text that shored up Jewish particularity at the expense of human unification through Jesus. Paul’s imperious logic was devastating to Jewish identity based on difference, features of the body, and religious kinship through common ancestry. That a New Israel was being posited as successor for the Old Israel—if not literally, then metasymbolically—was an audacious move that could only have deratified, in one sense, the covenantal people’s liturgical relationship to

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their special God. Albert Camus once wrote, “Surgeons have this in common with prophets: they think and operate in terms of the future.”32 Paul, in his quest to unify humankind and to establish solidarity within the human community, was a man of and for the future. And it was this message of the future, of a future coming that would alter the lives of all who would be judged, that resulted in the desacralization of the Jews. When two oppositional religions stand in competition with each other, any encroachments made by one into the domain of the other will be experienced by the overwhelmed religion as desacralization. Another way of putting the matter is to say that to redirect the religious orientation of a group is to take its members outside the sacralized version of their lives, to resecularize them in their own eyes. But this is the wrong way of looking at this tendentious relationship between Paul and his fellow Jews. As an opponent of biological collectivism, Paul was on a mission to resocialize his religious and ethnic brethren into a new way of existing in the world. This was not just an issue of proselytizing with a view to conversion. Nor was Paul committed to an agenda of achieving sameness among all human beings. In a shared agapaic sentiment with Christ, Paul was motivated by a newfound love of humanity. This love of humanity in its corporeal embodiment and in the form of a new humanity founded in unity with the body of Christ was based on solidarity. Ernst Käsemann writes, “For Paul, unity in the body of Christ does not mean the sameness of all members; it means the solidarity which can endure the strain of the differences—the different gifts and different weaknesses of the different members.”33 Deracination and racial eliminatavism were not aimed at achieving a bland homogeneity among the people. They were based on revealing the triviality of markers marked by a hubristic spirit of metaphysical seriousness toward those markers and distinguishing features. Rather than run the risk of having identity markers devolve into politicized units of differentiators, Paul needed to resocialize the individual into a larger community in which she would become a member. Gentiles and Christian Jews, Greeks and unconverted Jews and women were all heirs to this new community sanctified through baptism in Christ. On my reading of Paul’s anthropology, this newfound love of humanity—a love he never had as a parochial Jew—takes on a secular form of preparation. That is, apart from the theological significance of resocialization and divestment of arbitrary feature distinction, Paul’s task had moral value even if the individual never converted and never accepted his place in the pantheon of a saved community. Moral resocialization, I would argue, would take place on the micro level even if its ultimate goal bypassed the moral orientation of the individual. In dissolving gender

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hierarchy through baptism in Christ, in teaching the Jews that emphasis on bodily markers (circumcision) and external rituals (table customs and dietary laws) were trivial separators between them and the rest of humanity, Paul’s mission was as focused on starting a new religion as it was on creating a new humanity—a cosmopolitan posthumanity. This is a second humanity in which all are offered the chance to become a new people, a posthuman people beyond blood and beyond particularistic identity. Paul’s cosmopolitan touch transformed a hard, jealous, and vindictive Judaic God into a mellow, forgiving God of compassion, one who welcomed into his fold peoples from disparate lands and individuals with idiosyncratic orientations. This God of a tribal people would love the prostitute and the adulterer as much as he loved the righteous and observer. Gone were the people of blood and closed-ended belonging as exclusive heirs to this God. Here was a God who sent a Jewish Messiah into the world to be the new Adam, the forger of a second new humanity. All would have the chance to be a part of the covenantal people. None would necessarily be left out because of any external marker that distinguished one as different and unique in the social sense. Paul’s indisputable legacy is that he forged a humanistic revolution as both a sociological and religious experiment. His audacious hermeneutical gestures are ones that offered both a new interpretation of community and a new interpretation of the individual as the inheritor of this second new humanity. Dispersing the love he felt through his Lord into the world, he posited the individual as being set forth in a not-yet-realized future where, in the words of Ernst Käsemann, “Man’s position is still open.”34 Today, that position still remains open. It remains a cosmopolitan space in important respects. It is open-ended, it is hybridized and pluricultural and the criterion for joining it is one left to personal choice. This second humanity, articulated by Paul, but forged in the wounds of a Jewish Messiah’s body, is one that remains an open canvas in which a reinscribed new humanity in a postcommunity—a sociality—is left open to those previously excluded. This Messiah would shed his blood precisely so that a new community, a new humanity, and, in Paul’s words, a new man and a new woman could move beyond blood identities and into a new future.

Notes 1. Derek Phillips, Looking Backward: A Critical Appraisal of Communitarian Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14. 2. I am grateful to Nancy Fraser for bringing this term, albeit in a different context, to my attention. To the best of my knowledge the term Westphalian Imaginary was coined by Fraser in her treatment of abnormal justice.

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3. Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2007). 4. Bryan Appleyard, “From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy by Kenan Malik,” Sunday Times, April 5, 2009. 5. On this issue and on a defense of multiculturalism, see Joseph Raz in “Multiculturalism,” Dissent, Winter 1994. 6. Jack Crittenden, Beyond Individualism: Reconstructing the Liberal Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 7. This is a worry of Robert Booth Fowler. See his “Community: Reflections on Definition,” in New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities, ed. Amitai Etzioni (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 93. 8. Nancy Fraser applies this analysis to the Westphalian model. I have borrowed some of her analytic terminologies here to apply to my own analysis of communitarianism and sociality. See Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 9. Italics are mine. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 67–68. 11. Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (New York: Random House, 1996), 46–47. 12. Karen Armstrong, A History of God (New York: Ballantine Books 1994), 43. 13. Milton Viorst, What Shall I Do with This People? Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism (New York: The Free Press, 2002), 169. 14. Viorst, What Shall I Do? 169. 15. Viorst, What Shall I Do? 169. 16. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press 2006), 3. 17. Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: A History of Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 434. 18. Cantor, The Sacred Chain, 434. 19. Cantor, The Sacred Chain, 437. 20. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Los Angeles: University of California University Press), 23. 21. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 39. 22. Boyarin, A Radical Jew. 23. There is much debate as to whether or not Paul believed that Jesus was God incarnate. Some scholars believe that he was much too Jewish to believe this. Other scholars hold that his entire missionary was based on recognition of the divinity of Christ. I am going to hold to the view that regardless of whether or not Paul believed that Jesus was God incarnate, that it is irrelevant to my case. Jesus was a messiah through whom salvation could be found. 24. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 181. 25. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 7. 26. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 24. 27. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 55.

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28. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 75. 29. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 76. 30. Cantor, The Sacred Chain, 100–101. 31. Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 204. The olive tree being referred to here is Israel onto which has been grafted a new community, the Christian community of faith and grace. 32. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage International Books, 1984), 65. 33. Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 3. 34. Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 31.

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Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism A Response

Objections continue to be raised against cosmopolitanism and are likely to continue given the rising popularity of nationalism against what many perceive to be the leveling effect of globalization. In this chapter I have abstracted from the popular objections against cosmopolitanism and the premises on which they rest. The objections here are distilled versions of wider and, in several cases, compelling objections against cosmopolitanism.  Objection One: Cosmopolitanism advocates homogeneity of people. The rise of cosmopolitan societies would see the disappearance of cultural uniqueness and would lead to homogeneity among human beings. Response: It is tribalists, especially those who fall in the ethnic/nationalist camp, whose goal is the achievement and maintenance of ethnic and/or racial homogenous peoplehood. Nazi Germany, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, and all forms of ethnic nationalism were and are predicated on this ideal. Cosmopolitanism defends the uniqueness of individuals as individuals and recognizes their unique singularity. Even identical twins, genetically homogenous as they are, are indubitably unique: They do not share the same consciousness and, hence, their perception of the world, however similar, varies sufficiently to give each her own distinctness, a distinctness that is not at all reducible to culture. There is not any tribal label that can exhaust such singularity and uniqueness. 215

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The posthuman cosmopolitan’s position against tribal homogeneity should be brought into sharper relief by the following example. Moral cosmopolitanism is a proindividual morality. If numerous intermarriages lead to the disintegration of a group, a culture, and its traditional heritage, the cosmopolitan would say, “Quite fine.” Why? Because human beings are not reducible to their cultures and moral cosmopolitans cannot devalue the experiential lived life of the individual. In that space where two who are regarded as tribally distinct are brought together lies an area in which humanity is vouchsafed; it grows, it becomes something that cannot be authentically subsumed under ethnic or racial labels. Therein lies its beauty. Its identity is deeper and more unique and, above all, subtler than one that aspires to be subsumed under crude tribal labels—the worst of them being race, since such a phenomenon does not actually exist in the biological sense. It is now a consensus among biologists and anthropologists that human biological races do not exist. The 1998 American Anthropological Association asserts in its statement on race that the falsity of biological racial essentialism makes it unnecessary to argue against links between racial biology and culture—meaning cultural racial essentialism.1 The nonexistence of race from a biological perspective is not meant to disqualify the existence of race as a social fact, nor is it meant to deny the real injustices that follow from race prejudice. Cosmopolitan justice draws attention to the ways in which the invention of race and the categorization of persons under its taxonomies have structurally excluded them from inclusion in the wider pantheon of the human community. Cosmopolitanism stands in contrast to pluralism. The latter views the world as a place where identities are neatly carved into distinct categories— groups based on race, ethnicity, or nationality. Homogenous peoplehood was achieved almost perfectly in the twentieth century in Nazi Germany and in Japan. Cosmopolitanism would question the merit of homogeneity that is achieved by a process of discrimination on the basis of nonmoral criteria: accidents of birth such as skin pigmentation, nationality, and ethnicity. These are nonmoral characteristics for which human beings have historically been persecuted. Today, because of the spread of political liberalism and its cosmopolitan ethos (consider the distinction between civic nationalism and cultural nationalism where political liberalism champions the former), a Jew can also claim Polish nationality. This is a privilege that Jews living in Poland under the Ottoman Empire, for example, could not have enjoyed.  Objection Two: Cosmopolitanism is too high a goal for humanity. The cosmopolitan demand that human beings wean themselves from their tribal

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affiliations is psychologically untenable. It is untenable because group identity is a constitutive feature of personal identity. It is natural for human beings to organize their civic, psychological, and emotional lives around the basic units that constitute group identity—race, ethnicity, and nationality. Response: This claim dismisses the essential function of morality: a command to rise to the best within oneself according to the precepts of a code of ethics one has accepted as proper and rational for the life of a human being. One is convinced that the edicts that guide one’s life are not inimical to a quality life. Instead, they are essential for the realization of such a life. All moral systems, including religious ones, are demanding because they require persons to challenge their beliefs, practices, and attitudes toward others and to effect a change in their lives. The Christian imperative that requires one to turn the other cheek when slapped is predicated on a belief that violence begets violence. If this is true, then one cannot in any way practice values that are the antithesis of nonviolence. It is only a self strong enough to withstand the violence inflicted by another, one who turns his cheek toward an aggressor and who, in doing so, permits his body to function as a meditative site for moral reflection, that could practice such a morality. This expression of pacifism is not a form of passivity. Rather, it is a skilled form of political activism that reveals the nature of the attackers in their naked and unabashed brutality. Physical abuse that is inflicted against one who does not defend himself isolates the nature of the abuse by allowing others to focus exclusively on two phenomena that become heightened into what Baudrillard would call hyperreality: the naked brutality of physical violence; and human vulnerability in its most intimate form. Resisting the impulse to retaliate in this instance is a conscious endorsement of one’s highest moral convictions. Gandhi’s nonviolent principle of Satyagraha and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights philosophy are examples of persons committed to this line of moral reasoning. Indeed, aside from the utility and social justice of the nonviolent imperative, as an edict in a moral system, it might be very difficult for most people in the empirical world to practice. The seemingly natural response after being slapped is to defend oneself by fighting back or at least by trying to escape. Turning one’s cheek in order to receive another slap seems too demanding an option for most people. This, however, does not diminish the moral correctness of the principle that justifies the imperative. One could argue that human beings should then challenge themselves to be as resilient in the pursuit of their moral perfection as the marathon runner is tenacious in her pursuit of victory. Human beings driven by moral ambitiousness are dedicated to win the moral competitions they face in life.

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I have elaborated on the above point in order to establish a parallel between it and cosmopolitanism. If people find it psychologically too hard to practice, then an argument could be made that like all moral systems—especially those with a perfectionist goal—cosmopolitanism is no more demanding of the individual than other moral systems. As a reformist and an expansionist doctrine, cosmopolitanism must remain a high goal for human beings to accomplish if it is to achieve conceptual distinctness and moral credibility. Anything less demotes cosmopolitanism to a mere viewpoint, or to a sentiment rather than a comprehensive system. Although they may contain explicit imperatives and may be demanding in what they require of human beings, viewpoints, and sentiments can never be as compelling as moral systems. My second response to the charge that cosmopolitanism is too high a goal for humanity is that the objection rests on a dilemma worth resolving before the objection can be made. The dilemma is: how does one abstract from the alleged capabilities of a select number of individuals as we observe them in the world, to a claim about humanity in general? This problem is not easy to resolve. It is, however, one that the objectors ignore. Another example is in order. We know from various reports as of this writing that vegetarianism is increasing in various parts of the world. The reasons for becoming vegetarian vary from person to person. They range from the political—political vegetarians—who might in principle object to the killing of any animal because they believe they have a right to their own existence and ought to be treated as ends in themselves and left free to live—to reasons of health. People chose a vegetarian lifestyle because they believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier than one that includes eating meat. Even vegetarians vary in their choice of diet. Some vegetarians are strictly nonmeat eaters but eat seafood, eggs, and dairy products. Others are vegans. They abstain from ingesting any substance that comes from the body of any nonhuman organism. They do not consume honey, milk, or cheese of any sort. Within the vegetarian camp, therefore, there is much variation among consumers. Therefore, on what grounds could we say that vegetarianism is too demanding an option for people, given the fact that several persons who never imagined it possible, given their constitutional makeup, have voluntarily opted for a noncarnivorous diet? Objections that rest on claims that certain principles are too high for humanity fail to establish strong empirical bases on which to ground their claims. Instead, they operate on some intuitive sense of what is or is not difficult based on their perception of a limited number of individuals. Proper judgments about the efficacy and rightness of moral values, however, cannot be made in such a manner. The too-high-for-humanity objection, therefore, fails to establish the empirical basis of its own claims: how many people have tried to be good cosmo-

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politans but have failed because they find it too psychologically demanding? Merely pointing out that most people adhere to strong tribal notions of the self, or that they themselves have strong tribal identities, is not sufficient for securing a plausible too-high-for-humanity objection. Such persons may hold on to their identities because they have never been offered a viable alternative that secures for them the fulfillment of needs they believe their tribal identities are successful in fulfilling. My last response to the too-high-for-humanity objection is that the objectors making this claim fail to examine other versions of cosmopolitanism. There are, as one philosopher pointed out to me, several cosmopolitanisms. Some of these cosmopolitanisms claim to be compatible with racial, ethnic, and national group identities. “Rooted cosmopolitanism,” “internationalism,” and strands of globalist theories that identify as cosmopolitanism are cases in point. Since these cosmopolitanisms lack a strong conceptual base but, nevertheless, identify as cosmopolitanism, the objectors ought to examine ways in which they might not be too high for humanity given the concerns expressed in the objection regarding the need for strong group identities based on ethnic, racial, and national ties. There is a moderate or weak cosmopolitanism that does have a historical perspective dating from the ancient Stoics up to the Enlightenment era. Its basic outlines are to be found in the works of philosophers Alain Locke, Martha Nussbaum, and Anthony Appiah.2 In two texts, Nussbaum sketched out a version of cosmopolitanism that she argues is compatible with local identities.3 There are crucial distinctions to be made between the moderate version of cosmopolitanism developed by Nussbaum and Appiah, and the more robust version being developed by the version I have here called posthuman cosmopolitanism.4 Although posthuman cosmopolitanism does pragmatically endorse particular racial and ethnic identities on strictly political grounds, that is, from the standpoint of advocacy where persons holding such identities have been marginalized or politically and economically disenfranchised for no other reason than that they are the holders of their marginalized identities, there is still room for debate about whether the different versions of cosmopolitanism constitute a difference in degree or a difference in kind. I think that because of its radical departure from tribal identities as a cultural right, its antagonism toward pluralism, multiculturalism, and communitarianism, and because it regards strong tribalism as a mental distortion, that posthuman cosmopolitanism exists as difference in kind rather than degree from moderate cosmopolitanism. 

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Objection Three: There are those who object to cosmopolitanism on the grounds that it contradicts a feature of human identity that is so central to human flourishing that it appears to be as fixed as a law of nature. Ethnicity, race, national consciousness of a cultural kind, and the identities created out of them are constitutive features of any human identity. Since the end of the sixteenth century, according to this argument, national self-consciousness has been an increasingly familiar and legitimate manner in which people make sense of who they are. It is also a way that individuals make sense of the inevitable group identities that they inherit. To argue against group identity is to argue against psychological realism where realism describes psychologically tenable forms of self-construction. The second objection is twofold. It is a corollary of the first. Indeed, the objector will say, desirable political goals such as justice and the protection of individual rights—staples of any free and democratic society—are ones conferred by the nation-state. The erosion of sovereignty advocated by supranational cosmopolitan institutions such as the United Nations, the World Court, and the International Court of Justice does not begin with the implementation of cosmopolitan justice and international law by supranational bodies with coercive powers. It starts with the diminution of the nation/state in the person of each individual who is required to renounce what cosmopolitanism calls tribal identity. Moreover, cosmopolitanism lacks the pragmatic political machinery for assuming the demands of justice and individual protection of rights that is the de facto duty of the nation/state. Response: I will respond to the first part of the objection by two methods; one empirical, the other analytical. The belief that ethnic identities are intractable features of human identity is due to historical ignorance. People have, historically, defined themselves in ways other than being proud members of the nation-state. Before the rise of the nation-state, individuals organized their lives around smaller units of association. Their associative and ascriptive identities were not and could not have been national ones. Their identities were organized around regional geographic units. Italy is a simple case in point. Long after the unification of what is today modern Italy, thousands of individuals refrained from possessing what today would be called a strong Italian identity. The history of Italian unification is an interesting one. I will not attempt to discuss any part of it except to say that the ancestors of those alive today who either regard themselves as Italians, or more interestingly—their North American transatlantic peers who view their hyphenated Euro-American identities very seriously—would be shocked to have seen how national self-consciousness was achieved. A person from Naples in the

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sixteenth century could no more have imagined himself as an Italian any more than a modern-day Caribbean black could recognize himself as Chinese. If this is stretching the analogy too far, then the point should be well taken. An Italian consciousness did not and could not have existed before unification. Individuals can and do develop alternative identities that supercede prior ones that were regarded as sacrosanct and nonnegotiable. Again, one ought to remember that the notion of a racial identity is a modern one, one that simply did not exist before the invention of racial taxonomies. Identities like those in the city poleis in ancient Greece may plausibly be regarded as tribal. Membership was based on criteria that were largely inherited. More importantly for cosmopolitan morality, those born outside the city polis were viewed unfavorably. The attribution of barbarism to outsiders captures the way in which the humanity of outsiders was deemed to be inferior to those in the city-state for reasons that were morally irrelevant. The Greek individual in the city-state was regarded as superior, not because he possessed the admirable virtues of character that were consistently exercised in a life devoted to reason and moderation. Indeed, there might have been countless individuals outside the city-state who might have possessed different but morally comparable virtues. Such virtues need not have been so qualitatively different from those prized by the Greeks as to earn them such a disreputable status. The rational Greek response would have been one that recognized the difference in polis affiliation but, nevertheless, one that acknowledged the shared humanity that arises from value affinities. This, incidentally, is just what the cosmopolitan Stoics and Cynics did. They, however, were exceptional. The individual in the Greek city-state was considered superior to outsiders simply because he was a member of this or that polis. Individuals today as we find them in the empirical world have multiple identities. I think this holds true even for those outside Western democracies— anthropological objections notwithstanding. These identities are both group based and singular. They give meaning and coherence to people’s lives. Individuals have religious identities, professional identities, parental identities, and, perhaps very importantly for individuals in several countries, strong political identities on which their moral political values and principles are defended and maintained. Such identities are, in principle, not foreclosed to people who do not currently hold them. The choice-option clause in groups is important. It means that the affiliations, institutions, and experiences out of which identities are born are derived from choice based on shared values and experiences that are also available to others. There is an exit clause to such institutions, assuming they are just ones. The capacity to modify or change one’s identity remains a possibility for free and interested parties.

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There is no insurmountable psychological impediment that prevents individuals from gaining more meaning from the identities they have as parents, as Catholics, as artists, or as academics than from their tribal identities. Actually, some people do feel that their professional identity, to the extent that it is an expression of a vocational calling, is more meaningful than their hereditary tribal identity that, on close analysis, is so broad that it is undefinable in any conceptually meaningful way. Refugees and various classes of immigrants are empirical examples of people who are often unable to literally express their tribal identities. To the extent that they practice those customs, norms, and mores derived substantially from their tribal background, they are still retainers and practitioners of a tribal identity. The objectors to cosmopolitanism, however, fail to fully comprehend the extent to which such persons radically reorient themselves to their new milieu in ways that are deeply at odds with the tribal identity they once held when living in their original societies. The objectors fail to comprehend fully the following: a partial evacuation of the self takes places in myriad cases where one’s principles and customs are challenged by the customs of a host environment that are at odds with those dearest to ones’ heart. Consensual polygamy and polyandry come to mind. No Western democracy permits consensual polygamy despite the fact that it is capable of existing without violating the individual rights of others, or that it passes John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. The latter is a reliable criterion used to determine the extent to which morality may be legislated by the state. The second part of the objection—that the nation-state is the primary conferrer of justice and defender of individual rights, and that cosmopolitanism lacks the legal and political machinery to assume such responsibilities— results from two questionable factors. The first is an exaggeration of the sphere of cosmopolitan influence in affairs that are traditionally the responsibility of the state. The second is encoded in an implicit assumption held by the objectors. While it is not part of the objection itself it, nevertheless, colors the nature of the objection. The assumption is as follows: nonnational or supranational institutions are inherently disqualified from exercising moral jurisdiction over the lives of those outside the legal boundaries of the nation-state. The challenge to sovereignty is, therefore, regarded first not just as a political offense. In light of this let us ask ourselves the following: what premise would have to be presupposed for an unchallengeable notion of de facto sovereignty to be legitimate? The premise would be some political principle that secures the indisputable right of nation-states to exercise authority over those who fall within their geographical demarcations. This principle is rooted in a

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concept that is the justification for the exercise of political rulership by states over individuals: the will and consent of the people. To the extent that we are dealing with cases in which individuals elect officials who represent their interests and protect their rights, any challenge to the sovereign body whose duty is to protect such rights is, a fortiori, an assault against the will of the people. This further violates another moral principle that is the linchpin of liberal democracy: each person possesses intrinsic dignity and autonomy. To trump the will of a people is to disregard their capacity as rational agents to choose those whom they wish to govern them. The posthuman cosmopolitan’s response is that cosmopolitan interference presupposes that a violation of the people’s will has already taken place by political actors who have reneged on their responsibility to protect the people’s rights. Since no person has the right to will another’s enslavement, and further, since no reasonable person ought to will his own enslavement— such a state is inimical to human flourishing and contradicts the goal of any rational human being—cosmopolitan intervention upholds the will of the people. That is, when the primary duty bearer who has the responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals—in this case, the state—fails to perform its duties, then some third party assumes the default duty of protecting the rights of individuals. There is no secure moral principle that can legitimately bar individuals from protecting the moral rights of persons because they are functioning as agents outside the jurisdiction of the traditional nation-state. Political morality could never succeed if it relied on the reverse principle. Think here, for example, of the many objectors to slavery who acted as moral resisters. They were often moral and political actors outside the domain in which slavery occurred. The answer to the question of when and how such a third party may act as the default defender of rights of citizens of the world is a strategic one. It depends on political factors that consider whether at any given moment an intervention is one that would yield the best results and one that measures the contribution that intervention makes against the harm it might do at a particular time. Such harm comes from a failure to strategically consider the relevant factors that need to be in place to secure the best results. This is especially true of humanitarian interventions. The moral principle of defending the rights of citizens is morally unchallenged when a nation-state, enjoying the privileges of de facto sovereignty, violates its own moral precepts.5 The same moral principle applies to an individual bystander or, more formally, the police in cases where the primary duty bearers—individual citizens—fail to uphold the right of each individual not to be harmed. So I have a right not to be harmed. Everyone else has the prima facie obligation to honor that right as I do in regard to the same right of

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others. When I as the primary duty bearer fail to uphold John Doe’s right not be harmed by stabbing him because we disagree over a philosophical point, the police (as an authorized law-enforcing actor) assumes the default duty of protecting Doe’s rights. I am, justifiably, carted off to jail. As an unauthorized law-enforcing actor, a stranger would lack the political authority to arrest me.6 She would, however, have the moral right to do what is within her power to prevent me from being harmed. The range of activities that she could, or ought to, undertake, is wide and varied. Some of them are debatable. What remains a moral axiom for the posthuman cosmopolitan is that moral obligations in this sphere are neither justified by nor dependent on tribal affiliations. Once one has accepted that the value of the humanity of every person cannot be tied to any accident of birth, the dilemma of intervention is resolved. The first part of the second objection exaggerates the sphere of influence of cosmopolitan agents. The assumption that cosmopolitan institutions would attempt to overtake the traditional responsibilities of the state is false and empirically implausible. It is in the interest of the various organs of cosmopolitan democracy to ensure that local, legal, and political institutions that protect rights be utilized. This includes all legal challenges in the courts and, when possible, various nongovernmental local organizations that act as advocates for those violated. Once more, the default duty of protecting the rights of citizens of the world lies with local institutions whose legalese ought to insure the rights protection of those who fall within their geographic boundaries. Cosmopolitan institutions, when necessary, provide the moral and political apparatus that anchors the defense of rights of citizens of the world. Institutions such as the World Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and its organs such as the Security Council, function in cooperation with the moral mantra of universal human rights, which is, below a certain level we may not permit human life to fall.7 The level of involvement depends on the degree and scope of rights violations and the extent of harms caused by such violations. Conditions that meet the requirements of the harm principle—those situations in which there is widespread suffering caused by the violation of rights of the people by the state—are those that oblige supranational agents to intervene. Such would have occurred in the case of the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia by Serbia, the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Tutsis at the hand of Hutu murderers in Rwanda, and the systematic genocide of black Sudanese in Darfur by the Janjaweed Arab militia, had nonnational political actors—including nation-states—intervened on a principled platform.

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Whenever the primary institutions whose responsibility is to protect the rights of citizens fail in their obligations—such as when the state discriminates against citizens on the basis of nonmoral and accidental features of birth—then, in the absence of well-founded reasons for such discrimination, cosmopolitanism defends the intrinsic dignity of all persons by pointing to the immorality of such a practice. It secures a principle of intervention on behalf of the disenfranchised citizens of the world. As a necessary aside, it will be helpful to qualify what is meant by implying that there can be well-founded reasons for discriminating on the basis of nonmoral accidental features of birth. I leave this question open for further debate and will, in fleshing out the conceptual contours of cosmopolitanism, assert that cosmopolitans might have reason to ponder such “principled discrimination” and that this might affect the degree of intervention by cosmopolitan actors. The moral discriminator who discriminates on the basis of accidental features of birth, (ethnicity, race, and nationality) may say that such discrimination can be contextually necessary. She may go further than this and argue that failure to discriminate on such bases may be immoral and harmful. If one were to find almost insurmountable barriers between two cultural traditions on a particular issue, then discrimination may prove to be necessary, the cosmopolitan might suggest. As an example, she will point to women from culture A in a refugee camp who have been systematically raped and tortured over a period of months by a marauding group of guerillas from culture B. The men in culture B are ethnically identical to the women in culture A. Moreover, the women in culture A are governed by modest religious norms pertaining to dress, nudity, and sexuality. There is a huge shaming stigma attached to rape. Where rape occurs, women in culture A are expected to refrain from any contact with men for at least one year. It would be unwise, argues the moral discriminator, to send a male doctor from culture B to treat and/or counsel the raped women. Cosmopolitan agents may understand how trauma can suspend rational and reasonable comprehension in the person of the afflicted who, ashamed and humiliated as she is, would be more deeply humiliated in the presence of a male doctor who might just happen to bear a similar resemblance to the perpetrators who attacked her. The sense of reason that is exercised when, say, women from other cultures are raped and are also treated by male doctors and are thus able to not have their medical and psychological treatment colored by their experience, which has been inflicted on them by a man, is absent in the case of the women from culture A. The ability to differentiate between the assailant and the innocent doctor needs to be secured for them to be treated successfully. In this instance such

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ability is absent because of rigid gender roles and prevailing views of sex and sexuality that govern the women’s culture. Might it be wise to have Orthodox Muslim women raped by American soldiers treated by American male military doctors? The moral objector might agree that the moral cosmopolitan can both reject discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and nationality tout court while being open to compelling contextual cases where the moral presumption is discrimination. Such discrimination is strategically relevant given the goals of the cosmopolitan.  Objection Four: A fourth objection to cosmopolitanism is one often made by communitarians. It accuses cosmopolitans of doctrinal schizophrenia and of philosophical solipsism. It gains its legitimacy by yet another appeal to brute empiricism. It doesn’t stop there, however. The centrality of tribal markers—an undisputed fact in the modern world—is to be respected because they appeal to commonsense notions of race and ethnicity, to name two restricted examples of tribal markers. Commonsense understanding of these concepts, according to the objector, is what gives them their status as social facts. Cosmopolitanism, a concept that has little, if any, social currency among the public, entreats individuals to embrace a cosmopolitan identity that can only be intuited by the individual who is the holder of it. Because it lacks a visible public face, argues the objector, it is an imaginative ideal that cannot allow persons to live in a recognizable, and therefore affirmative, manner among their fellow world inhabitants. Cosmopolitans, in crafting identities radically at odds with those bequeathed to them, which maintain strength and staying power through social conventions, behave solipsistically in that they fail to take seriously, the power of naming conventions. Naming conventions are necessary for binding people together as cohesive and comprehensible members of a community. Individuals are encouraged to hold private identities—cosmopolitan ones—that still retain features crucial for civic-mindedness and egalitarianism, while being forced by the naming conventions of society to maintain their recognizable public ethnic, racial, and national ascriptive identities. Response: To the objector: Yes. And the same holds true for people accused of being criminals who are actually innocent, or for any person who holds an identity that we have good reason to believe is a sincere one, but which differs radically from his being-for-others identity. That is, the person he is taken to be by others.

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The view of radical intersubjectivity advocated in the previous response should cancel any charge of solipsism against cosmopolitanism. Intersubjectivity is not indulged in mindlessly. It presupposes some rational standard of morally evaluating those with whom one is engaging. All things being equal, those who engage in intersubjectivity do not engage with murderers, rapists, criminals, deceptive agents, and so on. Assuming that the agents cosmopolitans have in mind are individuals who are not psychotic, we may say that this decent intersubjectivity, with the submissive agency of the individual at the center of human transactions—where such transactions have the capacity to modify, influence, and change human identity—is a process of creative social intercourse. If by solipsistic the objectors mean that cosmopolitans locate the proper study of society with the individual first, then it is an inescapable form of solipsism. As any astronomer could not allow himself to seriously look at the starry sky above without examining individual stars and planets, so the cosmopolitan begins his exploration of human subjectivity with the individual as an individual, with the requirements of her nature as a human being that equip her to live a life of flourishing, value-affinity, and deep admiration for her fellow human beings. That aggregate known as society is like an ineffable entity—opaque and impenetrable—if one does not first start with a study of its most important and inviolable phenomenon: the human individual. The implicit and unchallenged premise of the communitarian is that because of their function in communities, tribal identities along with the markers that validate them are an instantiation of the common good. This premise, however, besides being the lingua franca of tribal oficialese, leaves unanswered the following questions: What is the good in this context? How do we determine it? Certain features of an individual’s existence are fixed, stubbornly so by the tribal markers she inherits. Cosmopolitans echo the voice of Dewey that says, “we take names always as namings, as living behaviors in an evolving world of men and things.”8 Cosmopolitanism is an opportunity for the individual to navigate her way through the world and to live authentically, to take ownership of those experiences and the identities culled from them. This she can do despite the fact that the larger culture not only has no public vernacular for such an identity, but also resists them by making all identities subsumable under tribal ones. The individual is, therefore, provided with an alternative armor, a second skeleton, if you will, in which she can grow and realize her experiences without always conceptualizing them into some coherent narrative. Some of these experiences transcend concepts. They leave impressions on the mind without an exact tribal linguistic prism through which to filter them. There

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is no tribal vocabulary to identify either the experiences or the concomitant identity that is developed as a result of them. But it exists. This psychic space is the space where free living dwells. We may refer to that identity developed in that space as cosmopolitan in spirit. Simultaneously, human subjectivity, as it is partially constituted by a multiplicity of experiences, interior locutions and hereditary traits, contains an infinite capacity for becoming and for the creation of “subtle identities” that fall outside public terminologies. The success of the latter make human subjectivity both containable and, consequently, more manageable. If we can name something, we can affix a nature to it. If we can conceptually patent the identity ascribed to that nature by prescribing the behavior appropriate for its upkeep, and if we can identify any behavior that seems contrary to the spirit of its nature as an aberration, then we have foreclosed any capacity for subjectivity to evolve beyond the locally sanctioned form we chose to recognize it in. This is not an antiessentialist argument. It is a caveat against attempting to circumscribe the infinite capacity for becoming by means of restrictive naming and false identification. Tribal identities do just that. Cosmopolitanism approaches subjectivity in the Wildean aesthetic spirit: recognition that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors the individual in all her infinite variety. This infinite variety is achieved by a human being fully interacting with her world. We are not describing an attitude of someone looking for experience or variety in life. It is the attitude of one who, understanding that variety and experience are inevitable features of a heterogeneous world, does not prematurely filter those experiences that lead to an infinitely variable character through tribal lenses. The latter can only bias the nature of her experiences and prevent an authentic incarnation of who she is, who she has become, and who she is becoming from coming into existence. As for the accusation that cosmopolitanism is guilty of ignoring social facts, we ought to remember that social facts, in the strict sense in which social scientists such as Weber and Durkheim understood them, are contingent features of the natural world to which particular meanings have been cemented though historical and traditional usage and function. Social facts are not metaphysical truisms. They are not fixed like laws of nature are. Their value is gauged by some standard that relates to human existence. But such a standard is neither necessarily intrinsically good, nor subjectively good, that is, good because one simply desires it. The meaning attributed to social facts has deep ontological status in public consciousness. It matters to those interlocutors, communicators, or anyone whose relationship to its meaning influences their perception of

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reality. That said, I will add: cosmopolitanism is one social fact competing against others. For whom is it a social fact? For self-identified cosmopolitans, and for any number of unidentified individuals whose lives are guided by cosmopolitan virtues. If the objectors insist that this understanding of cosmopolitanism falls below a social popularity threshold that ceases to qualify it as a social fact, then it is fair to respond by saying that cosmopolitanism is a preliminary attempt to establish itself as a social fact through its engagement with human moral agency. It achieves this goal by establishing rules and attaching conceptual significance to a term whose usage and practical application is not widespread. But observe that in the early period of Christianity, in the age where Paul transformed a tiny Palestinian sect into what would become the major world religion, Christians did not necessarily capitulate to terminological characterization of their religion as heretic. A social fact need not satisfy the strong criterion that it be widely recognized as a fact by a public. There will be notable exceptions to the alleged consensus surrounding the phenomenon regarded as a social fact. And since we know that the numeric adherents to a theory or belief is no guarantee of its infallibility we may say that the popularity criterion is not too demanding but, instead, unnecessary. People’s beliefs are determined by several social facts that they are not aware of. Any sphere in which human cognition renders an evaluative judgment on phenomena and in which human social intercourse occurs—regardless of size—constitutes a sociality. A sociality is a social sphere that need not be a community or a society. It is simply any sphere where human social intercourse takes place. There one can also assess and evaluate whatever it is that is regarded as a social fact. A sociality, again, is a site of creation and contestation. It is a sphere where cultures and subcultures form and intersect with each other. In light of what has been discussed consider the following: racial terms are applied to those who may not have a strong racial identity and for whom the taxonomy of race is completely useless from a cognitive, psychological, and moral standpoint. It may, however, serve as standpoint of political advocacy, which interestingly, makes it a strategic identity. Consider also that several persons in the United States who are currently classified as black would have been classified in a different time in America’s history as mulatto, octoroon, quadroon, and any other term deemed vital for a ruling class that exploited such terms for its own ends. Comparative racial taxonomies with those in Argentina, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States reveal not only a great deal of variation among applied racial labels, but also the historical variations that reveal more than just case studies of nominalism in action.

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They expose the sociality and, therefore, modifiable nature of social facts. In some societies there is the marked absence of a biological understanding of race. People are identified according to a direct perceptive formula: the visual correlation between actual skin color and personal attribution: brown, white, yellow, and black skins denote the respective individuals who match them. Pigmentocracy, therefore, cancels biological race taxonomies. If we ponder this phenomenon long enough and devote ourselves to comparative ethnic and racial taxonomies,9 we realize that social facts have a birthday, or, a series of birth dates. Their dissemination into the natural world began as all human artifices do—as inventions of the human imagination. They do not possess any metaphysically essential attribute that makes them any more real than others of their kind. The objection—residing as it does on commonsense notions of race and ethnicity—avoids a simple question whose answer would turn it on its back: common sense to whom? Commonsense notions of race beg the question. They assume that the folk or commonsense notion is already correct precisely because it is a commonsense notion. We find similar question begging tacitly concealed in the communitarian defense of tribal markers. Tribal markers are defended because it is believed that their function in communities is an instantiation of the good. This premise, however, leaves unanswered the following questions: What is the good? How do we determine it?  Objection Five: The final objection is the anthropological version of moral relativism. It goes further than pointing to multiculturalism as a basic feature of our contemporary world. It argues that the existence of multiculturalism makes it impossible to discriminate rationally among cultural differences. The existence of different cultures makes a moot point of qualitative distinctions among cultures. Any such attempt results largely from nefarious moralistic, economically motivated, or value-biased impulses on the part of reactionary anti-multiculturalists, goes the objection. Pluralism and multiculturalism are, in effect, the best checks and balances against the moral imperialism of cosmopolitanism. The latter, while not directly attacking multiculturalism, adduces itself as evidence of multiculturalism’s shortcomings. The objector’s most succinct criticism against cosmopolitanism may be found in a classic study of tribalism that woefully dismisses as naïve and unrealistic the cosmopolitan goals of human unification and the concomitant decreased importance of roots and ancestry in people’s lives. Harold Isaacs, in his classic study

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of political anthropology, Idols of the Tribe, writes, “Here to stay, then, are the idols of the tribes, full of their enchanting beauties and crushing brutalities . . . group membership organized around ethnic, national and racial lines in one form of another have been the essential order of human existence . . . our tribal separateness are here to stay. Barring total extermination, they cannot be indefinitely contained.”10 Response: Moral relativism has already been proven to be an untenable doctrine. Enough logicians and moral philosophers have revealed its fallacies. Suffice it to say that a statement about a state of affairs in the world— multiculturalism exists—does not constitute either a proof about its moral value, nor does it preclude philosophers from making qualitative judgments about it. Difference in and of itself is not synonymous with equality, nor does it provide us with automatic recourse to qualitative distinctions that exist and need to be acknowledged. Some independent evaluative criterion or criteria is needed to make sense of qualitative judgments. Because cosmopolitanism’s premises secure a standard of value of human life for the individual as an individual, and further, because it starts out with an unbiased standard for judging human life competency, it is the best evaluative rubric under which the truthfulness of qualitative judgments about culture and cultural differences can be gauged. What do I mean by saying that cosmopolitanism assumes an unbiased standard for judging human life competency? I mean that cosmopolitans do not begin their moral evaluation with preferential treatment to any culture regarding its value, worth, and essentiality in human development. Cosmopolitans agree that culture is the milieu in which human socialization takes places and that it is the place in which human beings learn their moral vocabularies. Cosmopolitans, however, in realizing that human beings can and do matriculate under multiple systems and that no human being is hardwired for any one culture but is, instead, equipped to develop organically under any culture, evaluate the worth and value of cultures according to how well they qualify individuals to live flourishing lives. The sphere of the good is left sufficiently open for different lifestyles and values to count as manifestations of the good. This is the gift of political liberalism that prioritizes the right over the good. However, cosmopolitans, like any value maker and value judge, proceed from moral axioms that are the basis of any good human life. Such axioms are those that provide the moral foundation of political liberalism: freedom, autonomy, and human dignity. Freedom, therefore, is best protected under the basic rights system that we find under liberal constitutional republics and representative democracies in general.

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Those few axioms that we inherit from political liberalism highlight the nature of those terms—freedom, autonomy, and human dignity—and their indispensability for a type of life that is the best life for a human being. That is, our treatment of each other and the degree to which our interactions are classified as civil, presuppose dignity, freedom, and autonomy. Certain classes of behavior are a priori wrong on the grounds that they violate principles of autonomy. To violate the bodily integrity of a person implies that we have ownership of her. It indicates that one is treating her like a means to one’s ends and never as an end in herself. If we had ownership of her then she would be unable, as an individual, to maintain her own existence. If she is unable to maintain her existence then her own nature as a human being turns impotent. Ratiocination of a type that is undoubtedly Aristotelian in nature shores up the necessity of these moral axioms with which cosmopolitans begin their moral judgments. Suffice it to say that cosmopolitans are required to abstract themselves from their own cultural background when making moral judgments about other cultures. This is not a superfluous point. At the heart of the debate centered around identity politics and multiculturalism is, as I have argued in previous work, the fact that moral reasoning and judgment are clouded—hijacked, one could say—by a logic of tribal separatism.11 This means that persons making moral judgments not just about cultures, but about human beings in general, tend to have their judgments filtered through tribal lenses. Human beings have their humanity tied to such markers, each of which is ranked according to some index of value and worth. Therefore, because certain human beings fall under certain tribal markers that are ranked below others, they are robbed of the intrinsic value and dignity they possess simply by virtue of being human. Although ethical systems entreat us not to commit to this state of affairs, very few ethical systems—if any—have exhorted us to divest ourselves of tribal markers as meaningful indicators of personal and moral distinction. In the absence of this imperative, posthuman cosmopolitans argue that moral reasoning will be stymied given the collaboration between psychological states that are indexed to tribal affiliation and moral reasoning.12 In response to Isaacs’s testimony to the ineradicable nature of tribal identities, I submit that human creative agency can fruitfully effect change by the exercise of moral imagination of value makers who invite us to higher forms of living. Innovative scholarship in evolutionary morality by Neil Levy suggests that morality evolves as a result of our evolutionary history. This was a history that favored genetic selfish behavior and did away with altruism. Morality, however, also gives us the very concept that leads us to condemn

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selfishness and approve of selflessness. From the mindless and mindlessly selfish rose beings capable of rationality and morality.13 The history of moral development is not only concerned with moral evolution, but also the type of evolution that this form of moral development assumes. Group formation and identity seem an uncontroversial prerequisite for human development and moral matriculation. But the cosmopolitan is concerned with the criterion for membership and the negotiability of membership. Historians can readily point to the evolution of group identities from small clans to the largest that we have today—the nation-state, with moral philosophers pointing out the moral dimensions inherent in various modes of group formation. The history of social contract theory dating to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau does exactly this. Why is it that today, given our twenty-first-century sociopolitical sensibilities that are undoubtedly influenced by phenomena such as racial/ethnic cleansing and National Socialism in Germany, we favor civic nationalism over ethnic or cultural nationalism? Could it have anything to do with the fact that somewhere in our moral epicenter we understand that a person’s racial or ethnic background ought never to disqualify her from becoming the citizen of a foreign country? It is on this premise that the civic nationalism of the United States, Canada, and France has distinguished itself from cultural or ethnic nationalism, where for the latter, the criterion for membership is blood. What was good for our anthropoid ancestors need not and cannot be good for us, since we have evolved beyond the conditions and moral schemata that was their reality. This is the abiding mantra of the posthuman cosmopolitan. It is a mantra that, when followed and taken to its logical terminus, could see the emergence of a new posthuman humanity.

Notes 1. Naomi Zack, Race and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88. Zack does an excellent job of examining racial taxonomies throughout history and shows how they have failed all philosophical meaning tests as well as scientific verification. It is actually worth spelling out the 1998 AAA statement on “Race.” The first part of the text reads: “In the US both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct group. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them. This means that most physical variation, about 94% lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic racial groupings

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differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. In neighboring populations there is much over-lapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species. . . . Today scholars in many fields argue that race as it is understood in the USA was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian people, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.” American Anthropological Association, “1998 AAA Statement on ‘Race,’” Anthropology Newsletter 39, no. 9 (1998): 3. 2. Alain Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 633. 3. Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4. For a thorough discussion of moderate cosmopolitanism, see chapter 5 of my Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). There I steadfastly defended Nussbaum against a number of critics who criticized her moderate version of cosmopolitanism on several grounds. I also offer an explanation in that same chapter for why I believe moderate cosmopolitanism does an excellent job from the standpoint of advocacy, of addressing racial injustice. I discuss my own understanding of how political racial identities can be compatible with cosmopolitanism when such identities operate from the position of advocacy and are not upheld as robustly cultural ones. 5. I remind the reader that de facto sovereignty is not a political given. For a full view of the conditions that determine and then place restraints on sovereignty, see Darrell Moelendorf’s Cosmopolitan Justice. Also for a rich discussion of differences between domestic and international sovereignty, see Harvard Review (Spring 2002). International sovereignty is largely based on the willingness of the political actors of countries to recognize a particular country as sovereign. South Africa under apartheid and Afghanistan under the Taliban did not have international sovereignty, although they had powerful domestic sovereignty. 6. There might be reasonable exceptions where citizen arrests are permitted. Even then, a law enforcement agent is required to formally enact the arrest. 7. See Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 8. John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood Press, 1976). 9. See F. James Davis, Who Is Black: One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), for an excellent discussion of this topic. 10. Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 205, 216. 11. See Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan. 12. I appreciate the fact that for several persons, especially those with strong religious identities, there might be no distinction between personal identity and moral

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identity. The personal is the moral, and the moral is the personal for such individuals. They do not have what moral psychologists would call a bifurcated identity, one that is compartmentalized and in which one can live within various moral domains. One can exercise more moral consistency in some domains—those dealing with one’s identity as a parent, for example—and less in others: one’s role as a husband. Because one’s role as a parent might be more central to one’s overall sense of self, this bifurcation allows some leniency and a more overall relaxed moral life. 13. Neil Levy, What Makes Us Moral: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oxford: One World Publications, 2004), 88.

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Index

Aborigine, of Australia, 57; as artists, 69–71; legal battles in court, 69–72 Abraham, 189, 192, 208 affective mirroring, 127–29 affirmative action, for indigenous peoples, 86 African Americans, 131, 138, 146. See also black identity; blacks Africans, 172–74; and mortality rates of tribes in, 91 agape, 206 Alexander the Great, 48 ancestry, 1–3; black, 161–66; mixed, European American, 140–50. See also identity; symbolic ethnicity antiassimilationism, 12, 120–26 Appiah, Anthony, 219, 105n52 Appleyard, Brian, 181 archaic man, definition of, 159 Arendt, Hannah, 161 The Argument from Trivialization, 114–15 aristocrat, meaning of, 122 Aristotle, 24; and virtue theory, 27 Armstrong, Karen, 196 assimilation, 12, 31

Augustine, Saint, 12, 58, 59, 60 Auschwitz, 111 authenticity, 83 Bacon, Sir Francis, 80 Beck, Ulrich, 199 Becker, Ernest, 134n8 Berkeley, George, 161 Bhagavad-Gita, 152 Bill of Rights, 86, 88 biological collectivism, 88, 180, 210 black identity, 2–3, 62, 114, 138, 169; compared to gay identity, 113–15; and primordial shame, 168; and the racial contract, 170; as seen as bad ancestry, 148; and social envy, 168; and social prestige of, 168; as theatrical burlesque, 169; as tragic 166–70, 168; versus whiteness, 168–69 blackness, 21, 132 blacks: and commonalities with Jews, 193; in Diaspora, 188; in transactional romance with whites, 168; various names affixed to in history, 138 bodily integrity, 94, 97, 232

243

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Index

Boyarin, Daniel, 207, 208, 210 Brahmin, 151, 152 British monarchy, as a tribal institution, 81, 122–23 Bromwich, David, 35–36 Brown, Michael, 66–69, 70, 71, 72 Brown, Norman O., 158 Camus, Albert, 211 Cantor, Norman, 204, 209 capabilities approach: goal of, 92; and human nature, 93; justification for, 93; list of, 94–95 Caribbeans, 1–3, 163, 181, 221 Catholic/Catholicism, 74–75 child betrothal, as a form of rape, 10, 89, 98, 100 choice: and moral beliefs, 51; and religious convictions, 51 Christianity/Christians, 27, 46, 59, 194–95, 192, 199, 205–12 clitoridectomy, 67, 89, 98 collective well-being versus individual well-being, 97–98 communitarian/communitarianism, 38; conception of community 178, 186; and defense of tribal markers, 230; definition of, 177 community: communitarian conception of, 181, 182, 183, 186; definition of, 177; and domestic violence in indigenous populations, 97; and the good, 230; as obsolete, 177; and social categories, 99; as surveillance based, 184 compound self, 41, 202. See also Crittenden, Jack Confucianism, 46 contagion/contamination, fear of, 12, 120–26 cosmopolis, and natural law, 48 cosmopolitan: democracy, 10, 11; law, 49; notion of subjectivity, 16; as

ontological rebel, 202; posthuman, 126, 185, 186, 199, 202, 203; radical definition of, 21–23, 47; and radical engagement with the world, 202; sociality, 184; stoic version of, 28; threshold of decency, 44–45; as value makers, 13, 116, 117 cosmopolitanism: definition of, 9–10, 43, 47–50; democracy, 10, 11; ethos of, 118; and expansionist doctrine, 218; and homogeneity, 215; and human dignity, 22; and moral efficacy, 22; and multiculturalism, 48–49, 180–82; the new 185; and nonviolence, 217; and as a personal identity, 21, 22; versus pluralism, 216; posthuman, 9, 202, 203, 219, 224; and principled intervention, 224–225; and the public domain, 226; and racial taxonomies, 229–30; as reformist refugees and immigrants, 222; rooted, 219; separation of state and culture, 84, 183; sodality/ sociality, 184, 187; and Stoic version of, 28; strategic importance of racial and ethnic identities, 219–20; and subjectivity, 228; threshold of decency, 44–45; and univocality of identity, 22; virtues, 118 Cowen, Tyler, 74–78, 105n44 Cree Indians, 57 Crittenden, Jack, 41 Croatians, 130 cultural: apartheid, 182; authenticity, 35; disrupters, 200–201 culturalist/culturalism, 10, 35, 36, 37 culture: as competitive, 81; complexity of, 23; constitutive features of, 79; definition of, 24, 29, 31, 42, 58, 78, 79, 107; folk idea of, 20, 32; function of, 58; and group identity, 39; and harm done to people, 60; as human phenotype, 78; making of, 110–11;

Index

and making of ethnic groups, 39; moral contemplation of, 23; as nationalism, 61; and privacy, 11, 12; as a protected commodity, 78–79; and public space, 107; and race, nation, and self-evacuation, 14; and threat from outsiders, 58, 79; and threat of extinction, 40; as universal, 107. See also pluralism; symbolic ethnicity Cynics, 47, 48, 221 Dalit, 150 Derrida Jacques, 49–50 Descartes, René, 80 Dewey, John, 38, 227 Diaspora, 188, 192, 203, 204 dignity, of the individual, 28, 48 Diogenes, 47, 49 disgust, and antiassimilationist reasoning, 15, 124–25 Doi, Takeo, 154 Donnelly, Jack, 28 enculturation, 132 Epicureanism, 48 epistemological hubris, 60 essentialism: identity, 180, 216; tribal, 15 esthetic incommensurability, 109 ethnic: cleansing, 224; stereotypes, 140–50 ethnicity: as biological category, 146; criteria for determining, 15, 139–44; definition of, 14; and identity as created by the United States, 140– 50; low and high prestige, 140–50; as neurosis, 147; romantics/revivalists, 138; social construction of, 15. See also symbolic ethnicity ethnocracy, 123 Fascist, 99, 213n8 Fleischacker, Samuel, 58–60, 61; theory of culture, 65

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folklores, 72 Franklin, Benjamin, 10 Fraser, Nancy, 99, 213n8 Freud, Sigmund, 34, 122, 142 Galileo, 80 Ganalbingu people, 69 Gandhi, Mahatma, 45, 217 Gans, Herbert, 140 gay bashing, 114–15 gender apartheid, 33; in Saudi Arabia, 43, 61 genocide: of Jews 133; in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, 11 Germanness, 132 Germany, 123; blood, 133, 160; ethnic Russians in, 123, 133; and past citizenry laws, 123, 133; and treatment of Turks, 123; tribes of, 123 global conservatism, 52 globalization, 17 God, 59, 61, 62, 110, 142, 189–212; of Abraham 189; and dehumanization of the Jewish people, 190 Great Past Myths among Cultures, 138, 153–55, 177 Greek polis, 48 group disintegration, 128 group enfeeblement and grandiosity, 128 health, life expectancy, and mortality rates among indigenous tribes, 90–92, 96, 97 Hellenism, 205, 207, 208 hereditary monarchy and moral character, 122–23; ethnocentrism of, 123; as form of tribalism, 122–24 Hinduism, 45; and caste system, 150–53 historical revisionism, 131 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 46, 63, 197 Holocaust, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113; as a public phenomenon, 112; as voyeuristic phenomenon, 113

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Index

homogeneity, 78 homoraciality/homoethnicity, 171 Hopis, 57 Horney, Karen, 153 Horowitz, Donald, 39 humanity, 3, 8, 33, 38, 9, 119, 120, 126, 129, 188, 190, 191, 201, 202; and human nature, 63; love of, 42, 211; the new, 207, 212 human rights, 28, 88–89; cosmopolitan, 96 Hume, David, 10, 161 Huygens, Thomas, 80 identity/identities, 21, 22, 41, 76, 127; of African Americans, 138, 146; in ancient Greece, 221; ascriptive/ associational, 144, 220; of AustrianAmericans, 141; of Chinese, 155; of Czechs, 140, 145, 148; of English, 140, 141; essentialism of, 180; evolution of 233; as fixed, 41; of German-Americans, 138, 140, 141; group versus personal, 217; historical, 130, 203; of Irish-Americans, 131, 138, 141–49; of Italian-Americans, 138, 140, 165; and Japaneseness, 155; Judaic, 190, 192, 193; of Lithuanians, 141; in nation-state, 220; of Native Americans, 68–77, 138, 141, 146; of Portuguese-Americans, 145; of Slovenians, 141. See also symbolic ethnicity identity politics, 11, 76, 113, 115, 122; and amorality of, 77; and religion, 76 Ignatieff, Michael, 130 indigenous peoples: abolition of the term of, 12; identity of, 11, 57; as a patronizing term, 82; as secondclass citizens, 12. See also Native American identity/tribes indigenous tribes: education of, 101–2; as endangered species, 84–85; and

female subjugation, 76; and group rights, 86; humanity of, 85; and morphological distinctness, 89 intermarriage, 31, 126, 131, 216; among various ethnic groups, 138, 140, 149 International Court of Justice, 220, 224 International Criminal Court, 224 international law, 52, 88; definition of, 49 intersubjectivity, 12, 111, 112, 118, 119, 126, 133 interventionism, 224–25 Isaacs, Harold, 138, 154, 155, 230–32 Islam, 183, 204 Israel: denationalized by St. Paul, 210; as sacred relation to Jews, 16–17, 197, 199, 204, 209, 210 Jamaica: ethnic groups in, 1, 2, 3; homophobia in, 2; as a raceless society, 1–3 Jesus Christ: as blood relation to Jews, 194; as creator of a new humanity, 212; as inspiration to St. Paul, 206 Jews: becoming white, 170; as chosen people, 16; as cultural disrupters, 201, 202, 220; as definition of tribalism, 192; and dehumanization, 190, 191; education of, 96, 97; and end of history, 203, 204; as esthetic model, 193; and good blood, 195; as heirs to a posthuman legacy, 201, 202; and identity, 132; and moral seriousness, 142; as most universal, 193, 205, 212; as posthuman people, 16, 188–205, 212, 116, 201–3, 204, 212; as prehuman, 190; relation to God, 142; and religious horror, 195– 97. See also identity/identities Judaic identity, 190–93, 204; as immortal, 192; modernization by Paul, 210; as outside of humanity, 190; as prototype for tribalism, 192; soul of, 190, 192

Index

Judaism: conversion to, 142, 143–44; modernization by St. Paul, 209 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 28; and universal human reason, 27 Käsemann, Ernst, 211, 212 Kennewick Man, 68–69, 72, 74, 75, 76; as ancestral property, 68, 72, 77, 83 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 21, 217 Kohut, Heinz, 148 Kristeva, Julia, 49 Kshatriya, 151–52 Kultur, 83 Kumin Maxine, 110 Kymlicka, Will, 86, 88 laissez-faire existential engagement, 16, 184, 185, 187 Levy, Neil, 232 liberalism, 52, 58; political, 24, 216; and religious claims, 75; and religious sects, 75 Locke, Alain, 219 Locke, John, 161 magical thinking, 127, 162 McWhorter, Ladelle, 113–16, 119 metaphor, 107–13; and the Holocaust, 108, 109, 110 Mill, John Stuart, 222 Milosevic, Slobodan, 7, 215 Mitzvoth, 189 modernization, 95, 101 monotheism, 189 Montaigne, Michele de, 10, 17n4 Moody-Adams, Michele, 24–26, 42 moral: barriers, 30; becoming, 12, 22; beliefs, 50–51; competition among cultures, 116; culture, creation of, 60, 115; ethnography, 25, 45; inquirers, 24–26; insiderism, 30; socialization, 211; value of persons, 43; vocabulary among cultures, 30. See also Stoics

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morality, 232–33; function of, 217 Morrison, Toni, 168 multiculturalism, 48–49, 230, 231; and cultural authenticity, 181; in England, 181–82; failures of, 180–83; and group politics, 180; as identity essentialism, 180; and monological approach to community, 181; and racial monism, 180; as racial profiling, 182; and social disorder, 181–83; and social ontology, 182; strategy of, 181 Mumford, Lewis, 121 narcissism, 122, 126–34, 148, 150 nationalism, 15, 76, 68–69, 82; civic, 216; cultural, 119 Native American identity/tribes, 57, 68, 69; abolition of term, 82, 83; and battle with scientists, 77; as defined by United States, 68, 71, 77 Nazis/Nazism, 12, 43, 81, 82, 108, 109, 121–22, 160; and racial pride, 168 neurotic personality, features of, 153 Newton, Isaac, 80–81 nonviolent resistance, and cosmopolitanism, 217 Novak, Michael, 29 Nussbaum, Martha, 12–13, 27, 44–45, 90, 92–96, 99, 100, 124–25, 219 Oates, Joyce Carol, 109 omnipotence, and tribal identity, 127 ontological lack, 170 ontological rebel, 202 oral transmission of culture, 79, 80 pacifism versus passivity, 217 Paul, Saint: creator of a posthuman people, 212; as creator of universal cosmopolitanism, 205–6; and egalitarian practices, 207; and erasure of ethnic differences,

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Index

209; and human solidarity, 16; and love of humanity, 211; as racial eliminativist, 210, 211; and resocialization of Jews, 211 Peikoff, Leonard, 165 perspectival equilibrium, 101, 102 perspectival mania, 179, 180, 181 Pharaoh Akhenaten, as avid monotheist, 189 Philip of Macedonia, 48 physiology, as marker of authenticity, 81 Pinker, Steven, 78, 83 Plath, Sylvia, 14, 108–11 pluralism, 26, 48, 49, 82, 216, 230 Pogge, Thomas, 50 polylogism, 165 posthuman, 188, 199, 201, 202, 203, 212, 223. See also Jews: as posthuman people preservationist ethic, 83 Promised Land, 203–4 psychoanalysis, 113

Schmitt Carl, 16, 165 separatist tribal logic, 5, 10, 12, 20, 119, 120, 146, 208, 232 Serbia, 76, 81 Sexton, Anne, 110–11 Shabad, Peter, 157, 159 slavery, 223; as rape culture, 98 social facts, definition of, 228–29, 230 sociality/sodality, 9, 16, 84, 121, 184, 185, 186, 187, 212, 229, 230 social ontology, 14, 126, 178, 182 solidarity, 16, 86; civic, 182–83; in clan, 159; species-wide, 207; tribal, 5 Sontag, Susan, 142 Sowell, Thomas, 79 Stalin, Josef, 63, 131 standpoint epistemology, 14 Stoics, 22, 27, 28, 43, 48, 221 subjectivity. See intersubjectivity Sudras, 15, 151–52 symbolic ethnicity, 140–44; definition of, 14. See also ethnicity

race, 61; and the Jews becoming white, 111, 119; and Native American identity, 68–69, 75. See also black identity; Kennewick Man; racial memory racial alienation, dramatized, 171–74 racial memory, 81 racial subjectivist, 15, 165 Rand, Ayn, 143 Raz, Joseph, 35, 36, 213n5 relativism, 25, 30, 31, 32, 44, 66, 231 religious beliefs, and respect, 50–51 Róheim, G., 159 Roma, 109, 165 Rose, Jacqueline, 108–9 Rozin, Paul, 124–25 Rule, James, 39

Tatar people, 131–32 Taylor, Charles, 24, 35 technology, and public culture and cosmopolitanism, 80, 100 tribal ethnology, 133 tribalism, 8; and British monarchy, 81; as constitutive of humanity, 4; ethos of, 41; evolutionary role of, 4; of Nazi Germany, 82; as ontology, 82 tribes: and capabilities, 95; and exemption from respecting Bill of Rights, 86–87; Ganalbingu people, 69; Himba, 91; Hopis, 57; as legal owners of art, 70, 71; Mek, 90; Murngin, 159; Piripkura, 91; Umatilla Indians, 68; Zia pueblo, 71

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 38, 63, 75, 95 Satyagraha, 217

United Nations, 220 United States of America: and construction of ethnic/racial identity,

Index

77, 139; and illiberality, 86. See also black identity Untouchables, 150–53; and relation to general public, 153 Vaishyas, 151, 152 values, of various ethnic groups, 145 Varnas, 151, 152 violence, to female agency, 51 Viorst, Milton, 197 Waldron, Jeremy, 37, 40

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Walzer, Michael, 35 Waters, Mary C., 139–50, 165 Westphalian conception of community, 178, 179; of nation, 178 Westphalianism and ethnic identity, 178 whiteness, 166–69; and threat of blackness, 169–70 World Court, 220, 224 Zack, Naomi, 104n27, 233n1 Zia Pueblo, 71 Zoroastrianism, 189

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About the Author

Jason D. Hill is associate professor of philosophy at De Paul University and the author of Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be Human in the New Millennium (2002).

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