I have of late been following The New York Times columnist David Brooks’s powerful writing about the social and political climate in America. One column from early April caught my eye: “How to Destroy What Makes America Great.” President Trump’s decision to levy more tariffs occasioned the article, in which Brooks noted that “great nations throughout the history of Western civilization have been crossroads nations.” He added, “This used to be America. A crossroads nation, we attracted highly driven immigrants who wanted to be where the action was.” Yet today, “the essence of the Trump agenda might be: We don’t like those damn foreigners.”
Cosmopolitan Interventions
Brooks was asking his readers: Are we letting American connectedness, creativity and ambitious networking shrivel up? He reminded us that when we were a crossroads nation, our “shared culture of confidence naturally infused people with social courage, a venturing spirit.”
He named what he feared we were losing:
There’s a name for the values and posture I’m describing here: cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan has roots in one town and one nation but treasures and learns from many other national streams. In a phrase I’ve used here before, her life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.
It is that cosmopolitanism that is really under attack today, argues Brooks:
Sometimes it seems like the 21st century has witnessed one attack after another upon cosmopolitanism—from Sept. 11 onward. Leader after leader appeals to fear of impurity and threat. This mean world vibe not only reduces contact between peoples but also squelches the venturesomeness that has been America’s best defining trait. Trump called Wednesday Liberation Day, but Stagnation Day might be more like it.
The Trump administration’s first salvo against American cosmopolitanism was its extraordinarily quick dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. Many of America’s staff and contributors noted the significance of the undoing of U.S.A.I.D.: Sam Sawyer, Kevin Clarke, Gerard O’Connell, Kate Scanlon with OSV News, Luke Messac, Robert Buckland and Carolyn Woo. Each of these authors noted the tragic impact that the shutdown had on a variety of populations.
But this action harmed not only the recipients of the assistance, but also ourselves—as suppliers of U.S.A.I.D. In the name of so-called national interests, our government clipped the spirit of the United States that has long been inclined to care not only for our citizens, but also for those in need abroad.
This is why Brooks’s argument is so powerful: He is marking not how these decisions affect others, but how they affect us. And that is another reason why we can’t be silent.
This is a wake-up call that we hear whenever America loses its way. During the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy made a similar intervention when he famously opposed that war not only because it destroyed the lives of the Vietnamese people and American soldiers, but also because it profoundly compromised our moral agency in the world. On “Face the Nation” on Nov. 26, 1967, he said:
But we should also consider the price that we are paying. It is not just the Americans that are being killed, the Americans that are being wounded, and the price that we are paying so that we can’t do the kinds of things that we should, but we have a moral position around the world …We can’t lose that, as it appears to be that we are doing in Vietnam.
So too do we need to stave off the reckless attack on the cosmopolitan spirit of the United States today. Not only are the lives of so many in need around the world, but we are losing our own identity as a people.
Cosmopolitan Foundations
Cosmopolitanism drives far more than relief work. In May, I was on a panel of ethicists at the Global Observatory International Summit for Genome Editing held at Harvard University, discussing how to address the emerging moral issues of such editing through the use of norms and virtues. The host of the Summit, Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff, intervened to suggest that our norms and virtues needed to be directed by a true cosmopolitanism. Rather than arguing that gene editing should arise from interests to promote U.S. scientific research or its corporate expansionism, Ms. Jasanoff, who writes rather brilliantly on cosmopolitanism as “Global Civic Epistemology,” suggested the work of genetics should be primarily informed by a cosmopolitan foundation that seeks to benefit all of humanity.
What Harvard’s Jasanoff brings to geneticists, Princeton’s Kwame Anthony Appiah wants to bring to all human beings. In launching his book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, at the University of California at Santa Barbara on Feb. 1, 2006, Mr. Appiah noted that “cosmopolitanism not only asks us to accept the strangeness of strangers but it asks us to recognize the demands of the stranger.”
More recently, in the Wall Street Journal, Appiah espoused a more inclusive invitation to cosmopolitanism, noting that there is “a false divide between locals and citizens of the world.” He challenges those who argue, as President Trump has, that “the future does not belong to the globalists,” but rather “belongs to the patriots.” For Mr. Appiah, “Loyalty isn’t a zero-sum sentiment, and most of us manage to combine devotion to community with global concerns.”
The University of Chicago’s Martha C. Nussbaum has also weighed in on the subject in her The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Like Appiah, she sees cosmopolitanism as more than a disposition, but rather a sustained practice of responsiveness to actual need throughout the world. She sees it as a universal summons to recognize we are each related to one another and that we have a responsibility to meet the needs of all and especially those most in need.
Christian Cosmopolitanism
The first cosmopolitan moment in world history is often attributed to the fourth-century B.C.E. Cynic Diogenes. When asked where he came from, he did not reply “I am from Sinope,” his Turkish hometown, but rather “I am a citizen of the world [kosmopolitês].” Despite the attribution, we do not know much more about what he thought of the matter. Was his answer simply an attempt to free himself from responsibilities to his own Sinopean people, or was he extending his civic responsibilities beyond the local level?
Later in history, however, the Stoics did endorse a more positive civic responsibility for the world. Still, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy highlights, “Nowhere was Stoic cosmopolitanism itself more influential than in early Christianity.” Christian love in its scriptural expressions and historical nature is cosmopolitan, leaving no one behind.
Cosmopolitanism has been in the Christian makeup ever since we began to answer who our neighbor was by reciting the parable of the good Samaritan. As I wrote last year in America, it was the works of mercy that early cosmopolitan Christians practiced for anyone. That for anyone was a defining mark of Christian moral agency. Christians were merciful not only to fellow Christians but to all in need. As Rodney Stark noted in the The Rise of Christianity, in the miserable, anonymous world of the Roman empire, where newly arrived migrants came looking for labor, the Christian mandate to love all because the God of Jesus Christ commanded it was especially Good News.
For instance, no less than the emperor Julian contended that one of the factors favoring the growth of Christianity was the great care Christians took in burying these unknown dead. As Gerard Uhlhorn noted in Christian Charity in the Ancient Church, though individuals often performed the task, the church as a community assigned it to the deacons, and, as Tertullian tells us, the expenses were assumed by the community. Lactantius reminds us further that not only did Christians bury the Christian dead, but they buried all of the abandoned:
We will not therefore allow the image and workmanship of God to lie as prey for beasts and birds, but we shall return it to the earth, whence it sprang: although we will fulfill this duty of kinsmen on an unknown man, humaneness will take over and fill the place of kinsmen who are lacking.
The Need for a Cosmopolitan Ethic
The concern for Christian agency in the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. arose again in the aftermath of Vice President JD Vance’s attempt to explain St. Thomas Aquinas’s conception of the “ordo amoris.” In February, the ethicist Stephen Pope of Boston College wrote a brilliant reply to Mr. Vance’s claim that Aquinas’s order of love means that “we should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”
Pope replied: “No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern.” Pope emphasized eight different issues that Vance failed to address in his order of love, including any reference to need. He concluded that “the Catholic ethic is both personal and social, open to the world rather than turned inward, and marked by compassion and justice rather than indifference or hostility. It offers a distinctively Christian vision of the order of love that tries to do justice to responsibilities to loved ones and to strangers in need, both individual and collective.”
But Pope’s interests were not only about how those recipients of that love might be affected by Mr. Vance’s claims. He also worried how we Americans might also be affected. Mr. Pope’s pushback was also a challenge to Mr. Vance’s nationalization of Christian love.
In challenging that nationalization of Christian love, the term “cosmopolitanism” serves, I think, as a needed summons for our time and a helpful reminder about who we Christians actually are.
