ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
16-17 Dec 2010
Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
Free of ties with his own people, the foreigner feels completely free’…[A]vailable, freed of everything,
the foreigner has nothing, he is nothing. But he is ready for the absolute, if an absolute could choose
him.” Julia Kristeva
Becoming a Cosmopolitan.
Key note address of Prof. Jason D. Hill.
How do we make an irrevocable global covenant with humanity?
Introduction: The process of becoming a cosmopolitan, I must say, started from as far back as I
can remember myself which was about the age of three I always felt what I would now call an
ontological lack or exigency—a sense of incompleteness, as if there was some higher mountain
to scale from which to view and embrace the lot of humanity in a unified spirit of brotherhood
and sisterhood. I sometimes think it was simply a visceral response to growing up on a tiny
island in the middle of the Caribbean sea, and that this feeling of metaphysical alienation was a
part of the human condition in needing to belong to something greater than both the self and
those who looked like oneself and belonged to the same group as oneself. Sitting on the wroughtiron gates of my grandfather’s seaside estate I would at five or six, or seven years of age feel:
there has to be more than this; there has to be a bigger world. I lacked, of course, the conceptual
vocabulary to anchor such thoughts in a philosophical manner but as I grew a bit older something
strange happened—something that is at the heart of the cosmopolitan morality: I began to feel an
abstract, almost impersonal love for humanity—a fundamental sense of awe for the species
coupled with an intransigent strain of burgeoning individualism that could only find meaning in
human expression by relating to people as individuals qua individuals and not as member of
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ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
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Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
groups. I’ll speak more to this issue in the body of the paper as I explore cosmopolitanism in
more detail. But this inability to love my fellow country persons because we simply shared a
heritage grew until, after meeting several foreigners in my Catholic high school around the time I
was sitting my GCE O’Levels, I realized that value affinities, shared cultural norms and mores
and customs were not sufficient for me to bond and affix my emotional energies to such people. I
rejected the term my people since I felt that at least on the existential level—all human beings
were my people. The importance of extended family began to diminish, only to be replaced with
new-found deep connections with people from different cultures with whom I felt greater kinship
than many of those who by accidents of birth were related to me.
What I was seeking and
willing to reciprocate vis-à-vis others was a profound participation in the radical intersubjectivity of the other. This participation would be both an aesthetic experience as well as an
existentially moral one—a stylized aesthetic form of existence coupled with an informed
principled one. By the former I mean something more of the sublime where one is able to
transcend the specificities and binding strictures of culture in order to relate to the other and treat
her as an equal—honoring one of the constitutive features of moral cosmopolitanism which is
affirming the intrinsic dignity and equal moral worth of all—and enter into a space where
difference becomes an intoxicant but not elevated to the level of a cult; an impetus to penetrate
the subjectivity of the other. Without discounting the place that inter- subjectivity has had and
continues to have in the history of philosophy, for the sake of simplicity I will 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
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socialization to others.—(good judgments prevailing—no murderers here). It means that we see
socialization as ongoing process that does not stop at legal adulthood. It is a humbling and giftgiving aspect of human living. It is the freedom granted oneself to be 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, 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 is,
in effect, one way of making the world more loveable in a twofold manner: first as value-makers
and valuers who love the world and thereby make the world more loveable; and second by loving
in the world because there is much in the world that is loveable and ought to be loved. This
dialectical relation of loving in the world is another way of achieving and practicing creative
moral agency simultaneously.
Radical intersubjectivity is not passive submission, nor is it a form of inactive
spectatorship. The gift-giving feature of our humanity—anathema to the spirit 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
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on which you may inscribe your wisdom, teachings, and generosity—or whatever seeds of it you
may have discovered in your soul.”
Thus as I felt the cosmopolitanization of my ethical sensibilities taking root, two truths
ensconced themselves on in my moral consciousness. The first is: at the heart of personal identity
formation lies the inextricable link of the latter to the inter-subjectivity (subjectivity) of the other
in relation to oneself. In other words, personal identity is inextricably linked to the subjectivity of
the other.
This I would call a cosmopolitan form of creative social intercourse. The second
observation made which I believe is one of the main reasons cosmopolitanism remains an
illusory identity is that this genuflection process I have described where the other modifies one’s
identity is rejected in the name of a nefarious and specious adherence to the logic of contagion. I
think that this gift-giving impulse, or capability, is hijacked by a separatist tribal logic, or an
“Other separatist logic,” where the “separatist” feature again, hangs on factors that are morally
neutral and irrelevant. This defilement occurs not even on the basis of the least attractive actions
or features of the members of groups. Rather, it is done in order to enable some of us to engage
in the massive self-deception that allow us to cling to and practice moral systems that allow this
debasement to continue without even slightly pricking our conscience.
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 inter-subjectivity with nothing
but his raw and naked humanity manages to transcend—is anti-assimilationism.
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Anti-assimilationism, a value staple of 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 cultures different than your own. So, one must ask those who
cower in fear of assimilation, who fear of becoming like them: But what is wrong with them?
Antiassimilationism's logic of contagion is reinforced by fear of a loss of memory. To
adopt the traits of others is to forget your own tastes and the customs that define who you are.
One is interested in interacting only with those who are replicas of oneself. It betrays any
tendency one may have toward inter-subjectivity, 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.
What I observed of those whom I call tribalists—those who are racial and ethnic
particularists—was that they were guilty of a form of psychic infantilism that permitted them to
ride on the social prestige of their tribal identities with a view towards wringing a great deal of
moral self-worth from them. That is, one used one’s ethnicity—especially if it happened to be a
high prestige ethnic identity—to cull a moral identity. This would mean that one would have to
imbue morally neutral terms with moral features. But morality is not a hereditary trait, and
furthermore, racial and ethnic and national identities are not indicators of a person’s moral
character. Hence individuals were attempting to by-pass the moral task of building a moral
identity by riding on the social prestige of their identities, while maiming, killing and denigrating
those who didn’t share their ethnic and racial and national background. It is no secret that
French identity (as does the language) carries a higher social prestige value than say Polish
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identity and that Spanish is the least prestigious language in the United States. Latino identity
weighs low on the social prestige index because a great majority of Latinos are from the
working classes and speak grammatically incorrect Spanish, lending a false impression to most
Americans that Spanish is an easy language to learn and speak and that it is grammatically
inferior to French and even Italian.
The psychic infantilism of ethnic and racial particularists, and encouraged by
multiculturalists, finds them pushing the parental need for protection on to ethnos, the race and
the state. This means that as we wean ourselves from our parental tutelage and control by
moving out of their homes, questioning the values they taught us and challenging them as adults,
the reverse holds true for the individual vis-à-vis the state/culture. They sublimate the need for
this repressed need for parental protection and reify and deify the culture into a commodity and
entity whose imposed instrumentalist goals by tribalists cannot be met. A race or ethnicity is
simply not the kind of phenomenon that can perform the moral work demanded of it adherents.
*****************************
Cosmopolitanism as a normative tradition has at least four distinct strands: 1) the social
subject of how individuals should regard and interact with people who, to borrow Franz Boas’
terminology; belong to “types distinct from our own.” [Ethical or moral cosmopolitanism]; 2)
personal identity development: [Existential cosmopolitan, which, in effect is a corollary of
moral cosmopolitanism]; 3) political cosmopolitanism—ideal and just global structures; 4)
religious and spiritual cosmopolitanism: [which can also be a variant of existential
cosmopolitanism. It should be clear by now that in this talk I intend to explicate the virtues of
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personal identity development cosmopolitanism. My methodology and my goal in developing
personal identity development cosmopolitan I shall discuss shortly. For now I wish to sketch the
preconditions that must be in place for this personal identity development cosmopolitanism to
flourish, and then I shall outline three moral psychological technologies for creating the
cosmopolitan character replete with the cosmopolitan virtues.
A private identity formation may strike some immediately as atomistic, anti-community
and too intransigently individualistic. Given what I have called the genuflection process before
the other and the role that others play in one’s own cosmopolitan moral development I take it
that such concerns will be allayed somewhat. The formation of a private identity entails
embarking upon a narrative quest in which, in concert with her fellow human beings, our agent
develops a unique, indubitable identity that through a dialectics of play and moral dialogue is
always subject (within reason) to revision and modification.
One precondition required of this identity formation is a thorough re-socialization of the
self; an undoing of old vestiges of it in order to make way for the formation of a moral
cosmopolitan personality with the cosmopolitan virtues which are practiced as a style of living;
one that promises an enriched and dignity-promoting way of life with one’s fellow human
beings. Before moving on to how I envision this moral psychological technology that will both
cultivate and maintain the moral cosmopolitan character, I’d like to say more about the
conceptual vacuous nature of tribal identities. To divest the self of its ethnic and racial roots
means that we, in an ethically conscious act, begin the process of ridding ourselves of the
concomitant social prestige that attends certain identity states. To rid oneself in this instance is to
cease (often unconsciously) to regard oneself as having a greater share in humanity than others
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who are different. Ethnic and racial hierarchy gives way to honoring the intrinsic moral value
and equality of all. This task, of course, is not as easy as it sounds. It requires democratizing the
social privilege that comes from a high prestige racial or ethnic identity. For those labeled with
low prestige identities this means transcending them which does not necessarily mean giving
them up. People can and have used their ethnic identities from the standpoint of advocacy. This
means the identity does not function like a metaphysical attribute but a moral and political one
platform used to address universal wrongs committed in societies.
Transcendence here means taking a cognitive stance towards undermining the spirit of
seriousness that is affixed to one’s identity, treated as ontological givens and metaphysical brute
facts when in truth they are negotiable and modifiable. Such identities, as are all racial and ethnic
identities, are as socially constructed as they are existentially lived. Advocates of this spirit of
seriousness accompanying tribal identities would codify such identities into immutable and
unalterable categories which neither experiences nor a conscious, stylized act of self-creation,
can change in anyway.
Transcending tribal identities, which are in effect, group identities, is to embrace the act
of moral becoming, to allow the experiences that one has with one’s fellow human beings to
shape and fashion a new identity that may not have a public vocabulary—very few people would
be understood if they took to wearing T-shirts that read: I am a cosmopolitan—but one that
changes the internal dynamics of the self, orients one differently towards the world and is
liberated from the univocality of identity advocated for example by radical multiculturalists who
are only too happy to reify these social identities and codify them into conceptually distinct and
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neat categories in order to keep the line of demarcation among the various groups very strong.
Multiculturalism and ethnic proprietorship are here synonymous.
Since, as I have argued that ethnic, racial and national identities are not ethical or
normative identities but purely descriptive ones, it should be made more obvious that tribal
identities ensconced as they are in myriad personality types each with competing value
commitments, are too conceptually ambitious and there exists not one necessary or sufficient
condition that could ever be met to typify under some paradigmatic prototype, traits that every
and all persons falling under a particular group identity could possibly hold, a feature that is
unique to them and them alone. All such endeavors have failed philosophical meanings tests
miserably.
So, among other things people live under the illusion that fosters a sense of legitimacy of
the perceived high prestige value of certain ethnic and racial identities, whereas I would argue
that lacking sufficient conceptual information to tell us anything substantively meaningful about
a person’s moral identity we would be better off recognizing the method by which these
Durkheimian social facts acquire the social meanings they have, meanings that are so deep and
significant to people’s lives that one runs the risk of altering the essence of who they take
themselves to be if one challenges the foundation on which their identity rests.
The proclivity for imbuing ethnic, racial and national identities with moral salience
strikes me as a fictive, almost pseudo-religious life world under which the majority of people, in
one form or another, have staked the value and legitimacy of their social and moral lives. Let me
re-iterate once more that the cosmopolitanism that I have developed in my two books, casts a
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suspicious eye on the practitioners of racial and ethnic pride and cultural or ethnic nationalism. I
view them as a form of moral laziness as people try to coast on the social currency they are seen
to have in the public’s eye. This pride rests on a form of social metaphysics where the appraisal
of a person via his or her ethnic, racial or national affiliation becomes paramount. Hence the
emphasis on hyphenated identities (African-American, Greek-American, Italian-American) and
this from people who are unable to speak the language of their far away ancestors. If there is
little ancestral continuity between one’s actual lived life and that of one’s ancestors it would be
better to speak of the symbolic ethnicity that many people practice rather than an authentic and
full-fledged ethnic identity that they claim to possess.
This is all to say that expressions of racial pride whether practiced by the majority culture
or an ethnic or racial minority are inappropriate and morally indolent. Pride comes from
individual achievements, or, from the effort one has exercised in materializing an achievement,
occurrence or accomplishment realized by another. Racial, ethnic and national identities are,
from a moral perspective, (as opposed to say religious identities) empty sets. Anyone trying to
wring moral substance from them is tying to turn a descriptive statement about human beings in
the world into epiphenomena about identity states, and a fortiori, cultures. Nationalists and
ethnic and racial particularists don’t have their tribal impulses regulated by historical facts. They
reach back into an indeterminate past for the symbols and myths that fuel their identities and
ethnic and racial pride. So the cosmopolitan evacuation process of the self that I have talked
about is a clarion call on two accounts. The first is moral defiance; defiance against having had
symbols and metaphors drawn from past eras that have nothing to do with one’s life and
experiences form the crux of one’s existential identity; and second, historical accountability.
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Thus where hybridity is to be found, persons cannot philosophically arbitrarily ground their
identities off of a menu of various kinds because it simply suits their aesthetic sensibilities. If this
becomes the case and one implacably cements one’s identity then something deeply human is
lost: one’s very identity ceases to be a site of both contestation and dialogical reciprocity with the
other, and one’s mode of self-presentation is superseded by a conjured racial, ethnic and national
myth. Authenticity, therefore, is anathema to this style of living in the world.
Now I’d like to turn to the moral psychology of becoming a cosmopolitan. In the two
works mentioned I wanted first of all to erect a moral psychological technology for forming a
cosmopolitan character. I realized that in the Aristotelian sense of character formation through
the virtues that this character formation would have to be infused with the cosmopolitan virtues
and that the reinforcement of said virtues in turn require a cognitive template through which to
observe, evaluate and then judge that which is conducive to the cosmopolitan orientation and
those characteristics which were not. In short, a dialectical interplay of reason—whereby reason
judges certain virtues to be conducive to moral health and cosmopolitan vitality and recommends
that the individual take up the judgment of this evaluative process—and psychological
habituation. This is physical doing and acting in a way that is endorsed by reason and a sense of
what is the right.
This psychological technology responsible for the formation of moral cosmopolitan
character formation is, in a strong sense, a manner of achieving the good in one’s life. It aims to
bring about a structural and ethical change in the individual through identity formation and moral
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character. For when we talk about the cosmopolitan orientation, impulse, sentiment, character
and disposition we are talking about those who, above all, can think and feel beyond the nation.
It does not begin with say Plato and Aristotle, addressing intellectual and social elites.
Cosmopolitans begin with an abstract framework that in principle includes everyone—not just
the rational, ethical and propertied person, but all of humanity.
The moral psychological technology I have devised to both undermine racial/ethnic and
national particularity and to simultaneously develop a cosmopolitan personality is codified under
three categories each of which I shall bring into shaper relief by highlighting their fundamental
attributes.
The first template we may refer to as a dialectics of participation and distanciation—
participation and distanciation that is in one’s culture and society. One has to be a participant in
one’s local culture or one becomes what Aristotle called a social monster. This participation even
for radical cosmopolitans is inescapable if only because spatially they are restricted to being in
only one place at a time. But it is more than that. Participation in a local environment is the place
where one first learns the grammar of morality and, simultaneously, a vocabulary of dissention
and resistance. Participation begins at the local level and works its way outward. Short of this we
could say that one would be displaced in the world since it is often from the local events of our
societies that we gain a perspectival advance on the rest of the world. Participation is what gives
each resident or citizen her sense of civic belonging, her experience of civic harmony and trust
and association with the political values of her country. In other words, we are first formed
locally, not internationally. Participation cultivates the habits of the heart; a muscular adherence
to moral principles and a groundedness that we will need in order to address the plight of citizens
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of the world. It is through participation that we acquire this moral template that we may later
reject but that, nevertheless, provides us with a foundational anchor from which to deliberate and
judge.
These latter qualities come from the process of distanciation by which I mean distancing
oneself in critical ways from the racial mores of one’s culture in order to evaluate and then judge
the nationalistic, racial and ethnic traditions by which one was raised. Distanciation requires
autonomy competency skills since distancing alone is not a sufficient action to ensure critical
scrutiny and revised judgments and conclusions—to say nothing of modifying culture.
Distanciation provides a critical space for us to stand back and question, examine, criticize and
also discover the multiplicity of forces that constitute our background world and situatedness.
This space wrought by distanciation will aid our discernment of what is happening in the
moment and of developments that formed us and played upon us of which we were unaware
because of our intense participation with such forces. Yet our engagement with these forms and
forces are important, for they forge the very conditions and practices that form and play
themselves upon ourselves and others.
Participation without distanciation paves the way for an excessive rule of tradition and
custom—the rule of the obvious and the taken for granted. Distanciation without participation
leads to abstract solipsism devoid of the contextual and interactive play of varied life forms,
experiences with others, and competing value systems. Clearly an element of denying the forces
that constitute one’s identity as a social and historical being would be involved. As a logical
entailment, one would also be denying one’s own self –evolution.
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So, I think that the dialectics of participation and distanciation, along with autonomy
competency creates a space that can see the evolution of some form of healthy autonomy and
moral individualism. It holds great potential for the individual to develop new practices
independent of the mores and norms of her community. In contemplating her future relationship
with her community she may ask: Do I continue to participate but with a critical bent, or do I
engage in further distanciation? Do I opt for another community, one that is more affirming of
the autonomously created cosmopolitan life plan I have created for myself but that can find no
credible expression in this parochial and oppressive society in which I live? Do I forget where I
came from and look toward the future and another more liberating community? Such questions
are legitimate ones that one asks as one is in a state of moral becoming. While realizing the
socio-historical significance of her situatedness within a community along with her sense of selfpossession, she realizes that the base rootedness of her existence is not the equivalent of an
immutable metaphysical substance. It is at best a first draft of what she might be and can be.
The second psychological technology that I wish to articulate as a means of achieving a
moral cosmopolitan personality is what I call the dialectics of remembering and forgetting.
Forgetting, that is where you came from, and remembering selectively the importance of both
historical and contemporary features of life that we are ethically obliged to bear in mind.
To forget where you came from is not a literal form of self-willed amnesia. Rather, it is
an ethically driven attempt to undermine the metaphysical spirit of seriousness that accompanies
tribal norms. It is to realize that all biological racial typologies and taxonomies have failed all
philosophical meaning tests and have been disputed by scientists and biologists. And so, since a
great many people treat these taxonomies as if they are laws of nature—when they are not—
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forgetting means opening up oneself to their contingent nature. They can and have been other
than what they are.
Since one’s tribal identity is often an over-determined identity—it is the first thing people
seem to notice about another person, forgetting, metaphorically speaking, allows for a radical
moral transformation. It is a way of dispensing with certain voices, slogans and rules of the
community. It is the prerogative of the ontological rebel who wants to define her own self. To
forget is an act of moral defiance because in its effrontery to roots and traditions it paves the way
for the individual to invest personal meaning in her actions and her newly forged cosmopolitan
identity. It means forgetting the shibboleth that YOUR tribal mores, norms and characteristics
are constitutive of who you are as a human being; that they define you permanently and that to
modify them in any drastic way is to compromise your authenticity as a human being.
To forget responsibly implies that an ethics of forgetting must act up on the individual’s
moral conscience. A right to forget is not a right to moral amnesia as identity is not possible with
amnesia. And some forgetting breeds moral irresponsibility. So there is a strong case for not ever
forgetting the Holocaust or chattel slavery. The need not to forget is reinforced by the moral
immaturity of those who today practice the ethos that generated both slavery and the Holocaust.
Indeed, the moral cosmopolitan has an ethical obligation to remember clearly historical wrongs
and to remain vigilant against those moral infelicities committed against citizens of the world: I
am particularly thinking here of child labor, slavery, child betrothal, female genital mutilation,
sweat shops, the enforced wearing of the burka and the dehumanization of indigenous peoples by
according them so called indigenous rights to the neglect of their health, literacy and
psychological and physical well-being--to name but just a few. Rather than grant incentives to
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indigenous peoples to join the global commons of humanity, several multiculturalists treat
indigenous identity as if it were irrevocably tied to the land.
To forget is to become, become by de-reifying one’s culture and one’s heritage. It is to
forget the habits of the heart, rules, ways of seeing things and the specious and often nefarious
paradigms of the world in which the old tribal self rests. One comes to know that for the new self
to come into existence the old self must die. And the old self dies partly by forgetting those
resources on which its survival once rested. At the same time, one must remember that racial,
ethnic and national realism rests on the belief that individuals from groups are locked into their
own personal survival and are into the pursuits of their own interests. The cosmopolitan in the
thralls of moral becoming knows that we are all co-imbricated in a nexus of moral relations. In
the space for moral becoming opened up by forgetting she remembers the socio-political systems
that would prevent her from practicing the cosmopolitan virtues indeed. Because for the
cosmopolitan, racial and ethnic realism fabricate a dangerous myth: the idea that locked in their
own personal survival “peoples of the world” ought to survive authentically as distinct peoples
qua peoples. **?But the cosmopolitan knows that moral maturity and autonomy means that
people must be capable of cultivating identities separate and apart from the ones they inherit
from their immediate socialization spheres
The cosmopolitan knows that peoplehood is not a brute fact of nature—it is an aspiration;
an aspiration that at least in most of the civilized democracies is inclusive of persons from
different groups and backgrounds.
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To forget is to dissociate with the psychic infantilism of tribalism-ethnic, racial and
national glorification. This psychic infantilism is the need to transfer the parental need for
protection on to the volk, the ethnos, the race—a sublimated process. The cosmopolitan must
remember the weaning process that began with one’s parents must also continue with the tribe if
one is to open oneself to the world in the spirit of the Stoics and become a citizen of the world.
This psychic sublimation process occurs when one places the need for acceptance, approval,
validation and authentication onto the tribe, with one crucial factor that augments and reinforces
its codification as part of tribal ontology: it is granted societal approval.
The third and final psychological technology that contributes to the making of the moral
cosmopolitan personality is the development of moral imagination. Imagination points to
expanded possibilities and ideates new forms of reality. It invites one to see oneself as an
expression of alternative possibilities and to place oneself in the existential trajectory of
another person where you experience the psychological state of another. That of—a raped and
disfigured woman; a starving child; an unemployed father of six children; a brutalized victim of
war. A person who sees himself in a variety of ways—as peacemaker, passionless, patient,
nerd—prevents a feeling of closure from entombing his self-image. Moral imagination can lift us
out of our prescribed social roles. I think that the moral imaginer is a self-styled portraitist who
discovers that the habit of seeing oneself as x is liberating because imagination is
hermeneutically powerful and serves as an indispensable heuristic device in self-understanding.
It aids becoming that is part of the cosmopolitan’s goal as an ontological rebel in escaping what
we may call the Natural Attitude; that is, as phenomenologist Edward Husserl notes: in its
historical situation humankind or what he terms, the closed community (race/nation) has always
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ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
16-17 Dec 2010
Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
lived inside the paradigm of some attitude whose life expression has a normative orientation.
These attitudes become glorified and ontologized as attitudes. They often function as standards
by which truth is judged and ultimately they serve as paradigmatic markers that relegate others to
their appropriate stations in the social arena.
Tribal mentality, with its obsession with categorization and labels, names us all
authoritatively and dares us to construct self-images outside the socio-factual paradigm it
invokes with a metaphysical authority that is hard to resist. But it is here that moral imagination
can play a role excising from the self, reified ethnic and racial identities. Moral imagination
forces us to ask: why should the primary identity state of a person not be his sexual orientation,
or his professional status, or role as a parent? What exactly is it about race, ethnicity and
nationality of the cultural kind that allow them to be regarded as indubitably constitutive of who
we are. For indeed there are many things we can do to contribute to other social roles such as
parents, doctors and sociologists that actually add something substantively to those identities.
There isn’t, I’m sorry to say, anything that can be done to make one more Swedish, Barbadian,
or Indian outside of a colloquial understanding of a National Character which strikes me as
plausible but not strong enough (on grounds of blood identities) to add anything conceptually
determinate to the tribal identity. There are too many Indians and Americans and Africans and
Russians and English who are swindlers, liars, honest and good, arrogant and humble, irreverent
and iconoclastic and abject conformist for the terms to have the conceptual specificities they
would need to holdup as sociologically tenable. No one who is nasty and evil loses his ethnic or
racial/national identity, so exactly how does he or she contribute to blackness or Indianness by
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ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
16-17 Dec 2010
Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
exercising any number of other traits in his character? Tribal terms are simply too broad for the
kind of racial and ethnic and national specificity they aspire to.
Moral imagination, on the other hand, grants us the freedom to create –the freedom that
liberalism celebrates. It requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent
what we have called our identities. Moral imagination and its concomitant self –transformation,
allow us to tell a different story with our lives by utilizing a different narrative from the one that
functioned as the insignia, the imprimatur of a life unmodified by social roles including those
affixed to tribal ones. Moral imagination grants legitimacy and an almost spiritual currency to
the new infusions of meaning that characterize our lives by means of a re-interpretation of the
narratives that make up the self. In realizing that the self –consists in a series of narratives, that
is, stories about who we are, we are free to understand how we have come to accept the handme-down (second-hand) meanings that others have had the effrontery to label as our narratives.
Moral imagination circumvents alienation and denudes others from dismissing our experiences
in the name of a tribally authenticated script that we have either outgrown, rejected on moral
grounds or simply rejected because of the ways in which they mediate the ways in which we see
others; others who deserve to be seen in their full humanity, and possessing intrinsic dignity and
equal moral worth. Tribal identity for the moral cosmopolitan is one among many identity states
and its holder cannot be cajoled, bullied or, by de-fault, made to accept it as unrestrictedly
binding. Tribal identities mythologize racial and ethnic/national realism, mythologize them and
then pathologize those identities and stories that go against their mythologies. Moral imagination
along with moral becoming weave a different story from the one bequeathed to one, and
represents a way of stripping away the various fictions and myths which have regulated one’s
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ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
16-17 Dec 2010
Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
life. To tell a different story with the real stuff of one’s life—one’s commitments, projects,
values, and desires—is to rely on and in some sense presuppose the contingent nature of the
narrative self.
Not only does moral imagination contribute to the task of making one into an ontological
rebel—one who deflects the Natural Attitude—but, more importantly, for the sake of love of
humanity and becoming a world citizen, it diffuses the stultifying mediation between self and
other where when we look at the other we see not one who is as a member of the human race—
one of my people, but one who is implacably removed from my humanity and from my deepest
sense of who I take myself to be. I do not think we can be lovers of humanity and citizens of the
world possessed of empathy, love and freedom of this is the path we trod. So part of the moral
foundation of global citizenship is that we find ways to ensure that our concerns are expressed in
an explicit ethical language that appeals to self- realization through solidarity.
And now I will end with a quote from Becoming a Cosmopolitan that has always inspired
me. I wrote it to remind myself of the moral self I aspired to become along this incredible
personal and philosophical journey of becoming a moral cosmopolitan:
To come out as a cosmopolitan is to halt the habituated practice of capitulating to the
arbitrary, glib, and specious ends of the labelers and categorizers—vanguards of our
sociocultural and sociopolitical culture. Your interior life ought not to be regulated by such
practices. To come out is to cease pretending that your moral inferiors who have the political
and cultural means of constructing your identity hold a moral good over your head; a good you
cannot fully comprehend, a good that fails to satisfy your highest moral callings but that you will
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ESRC Seminar Series
Global citizenship as a graduate attribute
16-17 Dec 2010
Royal Holloway, Egham, UK
www.wlv.ac.uk.globalcitizen
one day, if you try hard enough, come to grasp and accept. It will never happen. The edification
of your interior moral consciousness has been hijacked by tribalism. The eyes of the tribalist
remains focused on the ground, like the foraging animal that, guided by scent and keen eyesight,
never lift its eyes to the sky for the possibility for glimpsing in the heavens another sense, another
model of radically existing in the world. It cannot and it will never happen. The tribalist is so to
behave. But your constitution is an upright one. It is a constitution that permits you all sorts of
creative ontological leverages from which to devise limitless possibilities outside the world of
your immediate senses. You have not exhausted the range of moral progress. Recommence the
journey of our moral evolution and realize that we have only begun. History has not come to an
end.
Remember, a single solitary act of effrontery does leave the world changed.
Thank you.
Prof. Jason D. Hill
Jason was educated at Purdue University. His areas of specialization are ethics, social and political philosophy, and race theory. He is the author
of three books: Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What it Means to be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Beyond
Blood Identities: Post Humanity in the 21st Centry (Lexington Books, 2009)
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