Very stimulating conversation. My own thought re: rooted cosmopolitanism, to the extent I’ve absorbed the concept, is (and it might be far too late) that it would be far better to embrace a positive, inclusive patriotism (not a blind patriotism or a jingoistic one, or one driven by negative integration) and recultivate a sense of the special privileges and commitments of shared citizenship. Not so that these greater and shared identities should erase or entirely submerge racial or ethnic or other comparatively tribal identities. But so we have a common glue and sense of shared interests and a shared future. The cultural elite is already at a sort of rooted cosmopolitanism: the roots are seen in how identity is promoted as a super-proxy for individual experiences and interests and is either wielded to intimidate and extract or is used to sweepingly delegitimize if not condemn others by their identity (or is used to deflect or performatively extirpate and transfer what is class guilt and class privilege onto people who might have a now very unfashionable skin color and who almost entirely lack the status, connections, and actual material advantages we associate with “privilege”). The cosmopolitanism is seen in an increasingly overt, unapologetic abandonment by credentialed professionals of shared commitments to and with one’s fellow citizens, replaced by a self and class-aggrandizing orientation toward and advocacy of the interests and attitudes of transnational, mobile, globalized credentialed and culturally elite upper middle class (and the MNCs and NGOs they serve). And yet here we all (or nearly all of us) remain, sharing a home; sharing an amazingly rich broader American culture (to which all have contributed profoundly); sharing a nation based at least in principle on citizenship, not blood; sharing founding documents that did become the promissory notes unbelievably courageous civil rights heroes over many decades sacrificed to redeem for all of us. We’re in this boat together - and it’s the only one most of us have ever known. Rooted cosmopolitanism therefore sounds a little too “Jihad vs. McWorld” for me. This polity is the only shared and at least somewhat representative system of government we have. Overly-rooted concerns and institutions are inherently exclusionary, risk flattening actual diversity to a reductive hyper-racialism, and further risk feedback loops of division and polarization between groups increasingly encouraged to see all domestic issues through a tribal affiliation and interests. Meanwhile, who or what abroad or transnationally-focused actually has our people’s interests at heart? All of our people’s interests. Unsurprisingly, I’m going to bring this back to what a rooted or identity-first framing can both innocently and very cynically erase: class. Anyone who uses the term WASP or even “whiteness” should read Albion’s Seed. It’s a basic accounting of the history of the major - and very distinct and often alienated if not antagonistic, regional, ethnic, and social classes who immigrated to the US from Britain. I remember the first time I heard this acronym simplistically defined. I was white (whatever mixing of ethnicities, races, and tribes had taken place among some of my ancestors in the murky Appalachian past). I was sort of Anglo-Saxon (though much more descended from Celts who’d been largely overrun, subjugated, and partially absorbed by invaders in what used to be their own homelands). And we were kinda- sorta, mostly nonreligious people who’d been raised in some kind of watered-down mainline Protestantism (we weren’t Catholic, anyway).
But the dominant meaning of WASP by the 1980s was a guy decked out in Ralph Lauren, driving a BMW, and golfing at a private club. I was the offspring on one side of Welsh immigrants who came here with very little (one ancestor enlisted with the Union Army at Camp Chase very soon after he arrived) and a middle class Scots-Irish family fallen to tragedy and a grandmother orphaned by her late teens on the North Dakota prairie. On the other side, my grandparents were the 3rd and 4th grade educated children of Eastern Kentucky sharecroppers. My dad was their only child who who moved away for a time or went to college. By time I knew what WASP meant we were a fairly traumatized immediate family of three: a single mom and two kids who qualified for federally subsided school lunches. What did impoverished Ulster Scots, consigned to the wilds of Appalachia to serve as a hedge against Indian attacks have to do with the people who came over on the Mayflower, the people who founded Harvard, or the Pennsylvania Quakers or Virginia Tidewater Cavaliers? What did our family have to do with prep school kids back East or even those closer to home handed luxury cars at sixteen?
Have otherwise disadvantaged and demeaned white Americans at times bought into and tried to claim whiteness as some sort of token of if nothing else at least belonging to the majority?
Of not first and foremost being from the wrong side of the tracks or low-class or poor or “trash”? Sure. And I was aware that some stereotypes and injustices even cut my way. I knew that if I was in a rush or it started raining, I could, as a kid, start running, carrying whatever I was carrying and, so long as I projected a sort of polite innocence, I was relatively unlikely to attract the suspicion of the police. I was aware of the persistence of more subtly-perpetuated residential segregation by race which seemed to impact black families more than East or South Asian ones. But the idea that there is a common white experience in America, let alone a hierarchy in which white Americans are uniformly on top is just bonkers to me. And I don’t think it’s just because I grew up amid what was once a substantial racial majority (so that my privilege is somehow ubiquitous - but invisible to me) or, what was once, well before I was born, a formally privileged skin color. No old boy’s club or network of mentors and connections ever existed for me. (There were no adult men around who had any connection to me and I struggled mightily to form connections with anyone who took an interest in me at work and in school.) I am very proud of some of my family’s particular heritage and values - an unpresupposing gentle decency; a love of books and learning. I think the history of the Scots-Irish in America is an interesting one and an important cultural strand in our shared history. But I’m not particularly interested in even the most benign ethnic affinity groups. Nor am I particularly drawn to the ostentatious pretend humility of labeling myself a citizen of the world.
We’re all human beings, we’re all one family. But I’m an American. One thing so many of my black fellow citizens I share is many of our ancestors have simply been in this country for hundreds of years. Think of the mix of unique, shared, and blended cultures and art forms we have created together. I believe we can all honor and explore our own and each other’s differences in ethnicity or heritage in much more positive, constructive ways If we start with what we have in common. We share a country and a home. We are one people. Our country needs to work for all of us, together. Not solely for one group against the rest, nor just for the many other groups juxtaposed against and defined in opposition to one. We need, as much as possible, shared symbols, shared myths, shared heroes. I’m not preaching a stultifying even suffocating cultural uniformity. But if I had to error in one direction it would be toward essentializing our national community of citizens rather than essentializing us into almost unavoidably hostile tribes by identity - or a naive, amorphous one-worldism which would cede most power and moral agency to global elites who feel an affinity only to their own rarefied class.
Glenn, thanks for introducing us to Mr. Thomas and the Institute for Cultural Evolution. From their website, looks like a great project and I am curious to know more about it.
Hi Elizabeth, I love the work of Greg Thomas and follow the work of the Institute for Cultural Evolution. Would be happy to direct you to resources or help with any questions if you are interested.
Well, I already checked out the website and took a fun little quiz to determine my worldview (Integrative)! Came across this, which really mirrors my own process of late: "The “ah ha” moment of cultural intelligence comes when we see how all these values are needed, not only by our larger society, but by each of us personally. And as we come to appreciate and affirm the entire spectrum of positive values, we literally raise our own consciousness." I love that. In fact, it was hard to answer some of the questions in the quiz because I have come to value all these perspectives so much more in the past few years and don't fit as comfortably in any camp. I will check it out more for sure.
I know what you mean about not fitting in any particular camp because you find value in a variety of values, that you span an entire octave (at least one!). I've been noticing a lot of people online saying they've been feeling politically homeless or heterodox who seem to be entering this integral terrain even though they don't have a concept for it.
Yes, Glenn and his guests have been an important part of my path to finding myself in the politically homeless heterodox encampment over the past few years. It was shocking and painful at first, but now I am feeling more hope because of the feeling of having a "raised consciousness," more ability to love and value family and neighbors with different political inclinations, and also deeper empathy and much more humility. So although strange, that is also kind of an awesome place to be, and awesome people seem to be in this space too! And as a professional singer, I love your octave metaphor!
It seems to me that that is the inner and outer work being called for. If you enjoy actively engaging with all sorts of people with different perspectives and haven't already discovered the organization, you might be interested in Braver Angels. They are working to reduce polarization and "build a house united."
Very stimulating conversation. My own thought re: rooted cosmopolitanism, to the extent I’ve absorbed the concept, is (and it might be far too late) that it would be far better to embrace a positive, inclusive patriotism (not a blind patriotism or a jingoistic one, or one driven by negative integration) and recultivate a sense of the special privileges and commitments of shared citizenship. Not so that these greater and shared identities should erase or entirely submerge racial or ethnic or other comparatively tribal identities. But so we have a common glue and sense of shared interests and a shared future. The cultural elite is already at a sort of rooted cosmopolitanism: the roots are seen in how identity is promoted as a super-proxy for individual experiences and interests and is either wielded to intimidate and extract or is used to sweepingly delegitimize if not condemn others by their identity (or is used to deflect or performatively extirpate and transfer what is class guilt and class privilege onto people who might have a now very unfashionable skin color and who almost entirely lack the status, connections, and actual material advantages we associate with “privilege”). The cosmopolitanism is seen in an increasingly overt, unapologetic abandonment by credentialed professionals of shared commitments to and with one’s fellow citizens, replaced by a self and class-aggrandizing orientation toward and advocacy of the interests and attitudes of transnational, mobile, globalized credentialed and culturally elite upper middle class (and the MNCs and NGOs they serve). And yet here we all (or nearly all of us) remain, sharing a home; sharing an amazingly rich broader American culture (to which all have contributed profoundly); sharing a nation based at least in principle on citizenship, not blood; sharing founding documents that did become the promissory notes unbelievably courageous civil rights heroes over many decades sacrificed to redeem for all of us. We’re in this boat together - and it’s the only one most of us have ever known. Rooted cosmopolitanism therefore sounds a little too “Jihad vs. McWorld” for me. This polity is the only shared and at least somewhat representative system of government we have. Overly-rooted concerns and institutions are inherently exclusionary, risk flattening actual diversity to a reductive hyper-racialism, and further risk feedback loops of division and polarization between groups increasingly encouraged to see all domestic issues through a tribal affiliation and interests. Meanwhile, who or what abroad or transnationally-focused actually has our people’s interests at heart? All of our people’s interests. Unsurprisingly, I’m going to bring this back to what a rooted or identity-first framing can both innocently and very cynically erase: class. Anyone who uses the term WASP or even “whiteness” should read Albion’s Seed. It’s a basic accounting of the history of the major - and very distinct and often alienated if not antagonistic, regional, ethnic, and social classes who immigrated to the US from Britain. I remember the first time I heard this acronym simplistically defined. I was white (whatever mixing of ethnicities, races, and tribes had taken place among some of my ancestors in the murky Appalachian past). I was sort of Anglo-Saxon (though much more descended from Celts who’d been largely overrun, subjugated, and partially absorbed by invaders in what used to be their own homelands). And we were kinda- sorta, mostly nonreligious people who’d been raised in some kind of watered-down mainline Protestantism (we weren’t Catholic, anyway).
But the dominant meaning of WASP by the 1980s was a guy decked out in Ralph Lauren, driving a BMW, and golfing at a private club. I was the offspring on one side of Welsh immigrants who came here with very little (one ancestor enlisted with the Union Army at Camp Chase very soon after he arrived) and a middle class Scots-Irish family fallen to tragedy and a grandmother orphaned by her late teens on the North Dakota prairie. On the other side, my grandparents were the 3rd and 4th grade educated children of Eastern Kentucky sharecroppers. My dad was their only child who who moved away for a time or went to college. By time I knew what WASP meant we were a fairly traumatized immediate family of three: a single mom and two kids who qualified for federally subsided school lunches. What did impoverished Ulster Scots, consigned to the wilds of Appalachia to serve as a hedge against Indian attacks have to do with the people who came over on the Mayflower, the people who founded Harvard, or the Pennsylvania Quakers or Virginia Tidewater Cavaliers? What did our family have to do with prep school kids back East or even those closer to home handed luxury cars at sixteen?
Have otherwise disadvantaged and demeaned white Americans at times bought into and tried to claim whiteness as some sort of token of if nothing else at least belonging to the majority?
Of not first and foremost being from the wrong side of the tracks or low-class or poor or “trash”? Sure. And I was aware that some stereotypes and injustices even cut my way. I knew that if I was in a rush or it started raining, I could, as a kid, start running, carrying whatever I was carrying and, so long as I projected a sort of polite innocence, I was relatively unlikely to attract the suspicion of the police. I was aware of the persistence of more subtly-perpetuated residential segregation by race which seemed to impact black families more than East or South Asian ones. But the idea that there is a common white experience in America, let alone a hierarchy in which white Americans are uniformly on top is just bonkers to me. And I don’t think it’s just because I grew up amid what was once a substantial racial majority (so that my privilege is somehow ubiquitous - but invisible to me) or, what was once, well before I was born, a formally privileged skin color. No old boy’s club or network of mentors and connections ever existed for me. (There were no adult men around who had any connection to me and I struggled mightily to form connections with anyone who took an interest in me at work and in school.) I am very proud of some of my family’s particular heritage and values - an unpresupposing gentle decency; a love of books and learning. I think the history of the Scots-Irish in America is an interesting one and an important cultural strand in our shared history. But I’m not particularly interested in even the most benign ethnic affinity groups. Nor am I particularly drawn to the ostentatious pretend humility of labeling myself a citizen of the world.
We’re all human beings, we’re all one family. But I’m an American. One thing so many of my black fellow citizens I share is many of our ancestors have simply been in this country for hundreds of years. Think of the mix of unique, shared, and blended cultures and art forms we have created together. I believe we can all honor and explore our own and each other’s differences in ethnicity or heritage in much more positive, constructive ways If we start with what we have in common. We share a country and a home. We are one people. Our country needs to work for all of us, together. Not solely for one group against the rest, nor just for the many other groups juxtaposed against and defined in opposition to one. We need, as much as possible, shared symbols, shared myths, shared heroes. I’m not preaching a stultifying even suffocating cultural uniformity. But if I had to error in one direction it would be toward essentializing our national community of citizens rather than essentializing us into almost unavoidably hostile tribes by identity - or a naive, amorphous one-worldism which would cede most power and moral agency to global elites who feel an affinity only to their own rarefied class.
A healthy dose of twenty first century Thomas Paine, namely “Common Sense.”
Glenn, thanks for introducing us to Mr. Thomas and the Institute for Cultural Evolution. From their website, looks like a great project and I am curious to know more about it.
Hi Elizabeth, I love the work of Greg Thomas and follow the work of the Institute for Cultural Evolution. Would be happy to direct you to resources or help with any questions if you are interested.
Well, I already checked out the website and took a fun little quiz to determine my worldview (Integrative)! Came across this, which really mirrors my own process of late: "The “ah ha” moment of cultural intelligence comes when we see how all these values are needed, not only by our larger society, but by each of us personally. And as we come to appreciate and affirm the entire spectrum of positive values, we literally raise our own consciousness." I love that. In fact, it was hard to answer some of the questions in the quiz because I have come to value all these perspectives so much more in the past few years and don't fit as comfortably in any camp. I will check it out more for sure.
I know what you mean about not fitting in any particular camp because you find value in a variety of values, that you span an entire octave (at least one!). I've been noticing a lot of people online saying they've been feeling politically homeless or heterodox who seem to be entering this integral terrain even though they don't have a concept for it.
Yes, Glenn and his guests have been an important part of my path to finding myself in the politically homeless heterodox encampment over the past few years. It was shocking and painful at first, but now I am feeling more hope because of the feeling of having a "raised consciousness," more ability to love and value family and neighbors with different political inclinations, and also deeper empathy and much more humility. So although strange, that is also kind of an awesome place to be, and awesome people seem to be in this space too! And as a professional singer, I love your octave metaphor!
It seems to me that that is the inner and outer work being called for. If you enjoy actively engaging with all sorts of people with different perspectives and haven't already discovered the organization, you might be interested in Braver Angels. They are working to reduce polarization and "build a house united."