Our Tech Cosmopolitans’ Selective Outrage

Michael Brendan Dougherty

In her famous post-Cold War essay, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Martha Nussbaum lays out the cosmopolitan ethic succinctly. Cosmopolitans are those “whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.” She contrasts it to nationalism:

Once one has said, “I am an Indian first, a citizen of the world second,” once one has made that morally questionable move of self-definition by a morally irrelevant characteristic, then what, indeed, will stop one from saying, as Tagore’s characters so quickly learn to say, “I am a Hindu first, and an Indian second,” or “I am an upper-caste landlord first, and a Hindu second”? Only the cosmopolitan stance of the landlord Nikhil—so boringly flat in the eyes of his young wife Bimala and his passionate nationalist friend Sandip—has the promise of transcending these divisions, because only this stance asks us to give our first allegiance to what is morally good—and that which, being good, I can commend as such to all human beings.

Nussbaum would eventually go on to ground her theory of cosmopolitanism in the ancient ethic of Cynics and Stoics, though she wanted to make Cicero a little less interested in self-sufficiency, and a little more interested in social do-goodism.

Something like Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism and its critique of nationalism is the unofficial ethic of the ruling class, corporate and political. For most members of this class, cosmopolitanism of this sort has been held, breezily and without much reflection. Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism can’t bear much. But the cosmopolitan identity became more serious after 2016, when Trump and Brexit happened. Prime Minister Theresa May, in the only truly memorable piece of nationalist oratory of the past five years, said, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.”

But, it turns out to be enormously hard to practice with any consistency.

Twitter has hoped to save us from the outrageous lies of Donald Trump and his incitements. They put warnings on his tweets. They blocked those they thought led to violence. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, has talked about how painful and difficult the decision to ban the president was. He framed his mission in cosmopolitan terms: “It’s important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world. Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth.” Cue the music track: We are the world.

But it’s weird that Twitter’s paternalistic policies of cancellation and fact-checking seem to apply only to Americans, mostly to Donald Trump and his supporters, and a few other people — even leftists — that cosmopolitan liberals don’t like.

It doesn’t work this way beyond America. In the hours after an Islamist terrorist attack in France featuring a gruesome beheading, the former prime minister of Malaysia said that Muslims have “a right to be angry and kill millions of French people.” His Twitter account is still active.

In recent days, the Chinese government is using its spokesmen, its paid trolls, and even government social media accounts, to flaunt their ability to say what pleases them. Here’s an example:

Now, the “population change” is a policy of ethnic cleansing in which Han Chinese are being encouraged to move in, while Uighur Muslims are being put in reeducation camps, sterilized, or shipped off to work in factories across China. The final line on personal development is a not-so-subtle form of bragging about the elimination of religious practice. The tweet is still live, of course. There is no fact-checking note from Twitter about what human-rights experts think is happening in China. None needed.

We saw a similar development in the New York Times. When the paper ran an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell riots, the Times went into an uproar, with staff members telling their bosses they felt unsafe. The Opinion editor was given a daylong struggle-session before he was fired. The news section ran a story that falsely claimed in its first line that the op-ed was in favor of suppressing protests. A true uproar. A few months later, the Opinion page ran a piece by a Chinese official endorsing the crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, which effectively ended legal political freedom on that island and has led to mass arrests and the expulsion of Western journalists. In a long piece in New York Magazine, a Times employee explained, “The China op-ed didn’t hit home because everyone is exhausted. . . . You can’t be mad all the time.”

Indeed you can’t. Some things really do hit closer to home.

The English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton had another term that might apply to many cosmopolitans. He called them “oikophobes” — those who fear and detest their homes. He described oikophobia as

the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested.

Oikophobia and xenophobia have a certain affinity, in that both tend to caricature the objects of their fear, and often caricature them in precisely the same way. The oikophobe and the xenophobe both, in recent decades, portray the object of their fear as an unreasoning religious zealot and bigot, one especially prone to violence and either possessing an authoritarian personality, or in thrall to those who have one.

Twitter and other Silicon Valley companies used to spread something like American values across the world. Social media has a speech culture that was basically unregulated and roughly followed America’s own First Amendment. But as these companies become more politically conscious, they have tended to censor Americans more, while allowing the mullahs of Iran and the Chinese government to call for ethnic cleansing and genocide relatively unmolested.

You couldn’t have accused Cicero of being a breezy thinker or soft-headed. But maybe it’s precisely the gauziness and unreflective nature of the modern cosmopolitan “ethic” that makes it such a patsy for actual authoritarians in real life. Confronting them can be exhausting. And you can’t be mad all the time.

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