Cosmopolitanism Is Also Particularism

It is manifested in particular places, and they also need defending

On Friday, John Ganz published a piece titled “The Trap” at his Substack, Unpopular Front, that resonated with me in many ways notwithstanding the deep differences in our politics and our temperaments. It’s not a very thoughtful piece, and it wasn’t intended to be; it’s a cri de coeur, an emotional outburst, and, contra his apologetic note toward the top where he says “we probably need more thinking and less feeling at the moment,” I think expressions of pure feeling from people like him have their value. The extremists, after all, will always be ready to express their feelings, and we don’t want to cede that ground to them, and let those who feel but don’t know what to think come to the conclusion that everyone but the extremists is unfeeling.

And then, of course, there’s this phenomenon:

Which of these people, the one who thinks or the one who feels, is actually doing something to repair the world rather than tear it to pieces? Which is doing anything to advance any cause but that of their own self-satisfaction?

So I’m glad Ganz vented his feelings. And now, having said that, I’m going to push back hard on the thoughts his feelings ultimately led him to.

Here’s the key section from Ganz’s piece:

I had an argument with a friend: He insisted that Jews were only really safe in Israel among fellow Jews. I pointed out the absurdity of this since Jews were quite evidently not particularly safe in Israel. Then he shifted: “Well, at least if you died there, you’d die amongst your brothers.” This is what I mean about nationalism being a doctrine of despair: ultimately, when you pull back the layers, nationalism is about desiring death, death for others and death for yourself. A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

Though I think he’s being more than a little hyperbolic, I get what Ganz is saying about nationalism. I don’t think nationalism is about the desire for death, but as I’ve argued before, I do think it’s an essentially illiberal force, though not, I also argued, in any way illegitimate on that account. More to the point, New York is also my home, and I don’t feel I’m in any way defective or inferior for not having joined the project of Jewish nationalism as an active participant by making aliyah.

But here’s the thing: New York isn’t a set of principles to be affirmed. It’s a specific place, with a specific history, and that history is what made it what it is. Here’s how David Hackett Fisher describes the culture of New Netherlands:

This culture developed its own special ways of dealing with other ethnic groups. It combined formal toleration, social distance and inequality in high degree. The result was an ethnic pluralism that became more atomistic than in the Delaware Valley and more hierarchical than in New England. The peculiar texture of life in New York City today still preserves qualities which existed in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam—and Old Amsterdam as well.

On Colin Woodard’s map of America’s eleven nations, New York still stands out as a powerful little city state distinct from the rest of the country. It is one of the great cosmopolitan metropolises of world history. It’s where I was born and raised, and where I raised my son, and I never really wanted to live anywhere else. But it did not come into being spontaneously. It had to be built, and it ultimately grew to its splendorous heights in conjunction with and symbiotically with the great nation that sprawled across the continent behind it, a nation that from its origins self-consciously aimed to be an empire. That’s what made New York possible; its wonderful cosmopolitanism is the result, not the cause.

Moreover, loving New York is not enough to assure that it continues to exist, either as itself or at all. Cosmopolitanism as a way of living has its intellectual and emotional enemies, of course; it also has a material basis that can be undermined. But cosmopolitan places, like all other places, can also have literal enemies, people and groups and states that, for various reasons and from time to time, want to do them harm. Against those enemies, those cosmopolitan places must be defended, and mustering that defense has generally required more than an ideological commitment to cosmopolitanism as an idea. It has required the kind of patriotic love of home as home that nationalism taps into as well and transforms into an ideology in its own right.

Ganz doesn’t have to embrace that ideology, much less the degenerate form of that ideology that treats outsiders as subhuman “insects.” But if he cares about living in New York and not just dying in it, he can’t complete reject its emotional core, as indeed he doesn’t. After all, he calls New Yorkers his brothers. They came from all over the world, yes, but they all came here, and by virtue of that they are part of the same Gemeinschaft as Ganz, a chosen family, but no less a family for that.

Finally, the Israel going to war now is, objectively, an incredibly cosmopolitan and diverse society, one that pulled in people from all over the world, and that encompasses an astonishing array of customs, habits, religious identities and political views. It’s also one that, on the eve of Hamas’s slaughter, seemed to be coming apart at the seams. To defend itself, that society needs to rediscover the solidarity it was losing. That may require both real and symbolic changes—painful ones, sometimes, for people on both sides of the country’s various divides. To thrive, it needs to extend that solidarity further, to fully encompass Israel’s Arab citizenry, which will surely require deeper real and symbolic changes.

Rebuilding and extending that solidarity requires more, though, than just affirming that all people have equal rights, more than rejecting the kind of narrow nationalism that the far right would like to impose upon the country. It requires an affirmative building up: of something common, something shared—but also something distinctive and specific. Something that makes Israel, for all its diverse inhabitants, home.

Feel free not to call that nationalism. I’d rather not call it that myself, because I don’t think it’s an ideology so much as a sentiment, a feeling. But it’s a feeling the nationalists understand instinctively because they’ve built their ideology upon it. If we want to defeat them, we cosmopolitans can’t disclaim that feeling. We have to claim it for ourselves.