Having just finished reading my colleague Chana Cox’s Liberty: God’s Gift to Humanity (Rowman & Littlefield 2006), I’ve been reflecting on some of the ways that ethical and political discourse is formed and inflected. Cox’s book traces the American ideal of liberty to the British civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, when sectarian forces were vying for their freedom of conscience and some (depending upon a given group’s precise position) decentralization of both civil and church government. Such a sectarian as John Milton–for whom the Anglican church had not yet purified itself sufficiently of Roman Catholic elements–wrote in favor of “those unwritten laws and ideas which nature hath ingraven in us” (Reason of Church-Government 1642) and the “long-deferred, but much more wonderful and happy reformation of the Church in these latter days” (Of Reformation in England 1641). After the execution of King Charles I, Milton was appointed by the Council of State to be Secretary for the Foreign Tongues, a position that he was able to hold because of his Latin skills. As Chana Cox points out concerning the English sectarians of this era, “Political liberty evolved out of their search for individual salvation.” She then goes on to trace the ideas of liberty in the thought of, for example, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, the American experiment, John stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the twentieth century, and beyond. With each new era, each new set of issues and voices, comes a new way of talking about liberty and what it means.
Along with experimentation in new ways of governing and structuring society comes the need to develop new ways of thinking. Among the more compelling parts of the book are Cox’s considerations of the metaphors in terms of which some of this new thinking developed. Human thought and language are, of course, formed out of metaphor–in fact, the term metaphor (which comes from a Greek root meaning to carry across) is a metaphor of the way metaphors carry significance, associations, and imagery from one realm of discourse to another. As Cox recounts, the eighteenth century saw a deep interest in the idea and imagery of the machine, such as in the case of the city clocks in many parts of Europe: “Every shift in the movements of these jousting knights or dancing ladies was mechanically programmed into the machine. They represented a clockwork technology for a clockwork universe.” At the same time, what was sought after as a model for givernment and society at large was a concept that enforced the idea of self-regulation; and as Cox notes, “mechanistic and deterministic explanations are not particularly fruitful in explaining self-regulating phenomena.” Much more fruitful for conceptualizing a self-regulating, as well as adaptive, system is the paradigm of the ecosystem. Where the idea of the governmental or social machine in which everything is predictable gives rise to a vision of society as a closed system, the idea of government and society as ecosystem–in which controls are limited and not all outcomes are predictable–leads to a vision of an open society. Cox argues that such a view as the latter is what informs Adam Smith’s thinking about society and economics. This view is one that is not determistic but that recognizes the complex interrelatedness of all things in the human lifeworld–from its ways of making a living to its stories, art, rituals, ideals, and honors.
It strikes me that we do well to reflect on the social, political, and ethical metaphors most fitting for our own times and places. Of course, each time and place is likely to have its own distinct cluster of metaphors, and most likely a plurality of metaphors will be most helpful in any instance, but given the extent to which the world is becoming the global village that Marshall McLuhan projected, I think that two important metaphors for our moment are conversation and cosmopolitanism. In fact, as Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it in his Cosmopolitansim: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W. W. Norton 2006), he uses the term “‘conversation’ not only for literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and ideas of others.” Part of the cosmopolitan ideal is that everybody matters, which is not to say that all ideas and ideals are equal–or even true or worth pursuing–though it does mean that all ideas and ideals are part of a vast network of human concerns, beliefs, knowledge, mores, and practices, and that we would do well to learn something of the human networks active across the globe. All are part of a vast ecology–a term at once more expansive and more inclusive than ‘ecosystem.’ Probably the term ‘ecology’–as in the field of study styled “media ecology,” the study of how humans interract with technologies of communication across the globe–will continue to be a more and more influential term in our discourses. In his Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (Hampton Press 2006), Lance Strate writes toward a “not fully realized ecologic” that emphasizes similarity within difference and the dynamic interaction of all things. This vision of an ecology of dynamic interaction is active in Appiah’s book, as well as such studies as Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Routledge 2001) and his “Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism” (Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, Stanford U. Press, 2002).
One of the reasons that I remain in favor of public education, universal access to basic healthcare, and public aid for the needy–making me more or less what Chana Cox would call a “welfare state liberal,” though for myself I would prefer something like the term “cosmopolitan ecologist” were it not for how ponderous the it sounds (Cox identifies herself as a “classical liberal”)–is what I recognize as the basic good of keeping as many persons as possible, among those who care to be included, in the ongoing and extended sense of the conversation, even if only in the sense of walking down the street in a state of relative health and well-being. As Appiah points out quite persuasively, “It is true now, as it was true one and two and three centuries ago, that success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships.” Some persons, often for reasons beyond their control, simply do not have much of a web of relationships, or often enough persons have such a web, though it is one that does more harm than good. Public aid can fill in where one’s opportunities and relationships in an often harsh world fall through.
Besides, as long as persons are engaged in conversation–and here I am still thinking of conversation in Appiah’s extended sense–they are less likely to engage in battle. Conversation is of course no guarantee to forestall fighting forever, but it makes sense to try to bring as many into the conversation as possible, respecting differences and allowing for disagreements within certain limits. For as Appiah points out, there is a cosmopolitan limit to tolerance, for cosmopolitanism holds to–and one will find this in Derrida as well as Appiah–basic human rights. Thus, if one of my dialogue partners attempts to commit acts of violence against another, I have some kind of duty to help mitigate the threat, as I have a duty of avoiding becoming a threat myself, as well as of policing my own motives so that I do not hide unjust behavoir behind a mask of high ideals.
Of course, we can only live in whatever place and time we find ourselves, but cosmopolitanism refers to the attitude in which we live. Cosmopolitanism means seeing human enquiry, action, and pursuits as open-ended, ongoing, interrelated–meaning in part that we avoid the kind of cultural nostalgia that allows a longing for some moment of the past to interefere with enaging in the world we live in now. At the same time, cosmopolitanism means learning from the past. Where else does much of what we know come from than the traditions we have inherited? Cosmopolitanism means always asking further questions, setting out on further investigations, listening to new voices. After I graduated from college, I was excited to attend graduate school and study under a scholar renowned in many parts of the world. I had prepared myself for his classes by reading his work, so I figured that I would know the answers. Among the many things I learned, perhaps the most instructive was how little this scholar was interested in merely repeating what he already knew. It was not that he had rejected what he’d written and discovered in the past, but rather that he was engaged in new work, asking new questions, formulating new answers. It seems to me that cosmopolitanism means similarly carrying one’s convictions into new experiences and conversations, allowing these latter to challenge one’s convictions where it is appropriate that they do so. I remain convinced that nurturing a cosmopolitan atttude remains a worthy ideal, though I also believe that my own understanding of cosmopolitanism must itself continue to develop as I engage in further conversations.