Kwame Anthony Appiah had a great article in the New York Times Magazine on New Year's Day that I wanted to include a bit of here.
I think he did an excellent job presenting a counter-paradigm to the cultural purists and preservationists who seem to be dominating the civic dialogue as of late.
He argues that we should begin "...by taking individuals -- not nations, tribes or 'peoples' -- as the proper object of moral concern. It doesn't much matter what we call such a creed, but in homage to Diogenes, the fourth-century Greek Cynic and the first philosopher to call himself a 'citizen of the world,' we could call it cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitans take cultural difference seriously, because they take the choices individual people make seriously."
He also explains clearly the value of acknowledging what one doesn't know instead of creating false certainties:
"A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them."This acknowledging of our inability to understand every perspective leads one to a fundamental acceptance of pluralism:
"To say what, in principle, distinguishes the cosmopolitan from competing universalisms, we plainly need to go beyond talk of truth and tolerance. One distinctively cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism. Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values. Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism -- the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence."
Appiah also argues for "contamination" as the antidote to notions of "cultural purity":
"When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal... The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa 'celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.' No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of 'mixture,' as there is of 'purity' or 'authenticity.' And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination -- that endless process of imitation and revision."
"Contamination" is also the way societies evolve and thought changes over time:
"Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into contamination; change is more a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don't say that we can't change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it's rarely because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done -- or what we plan to do -- are typically made up after the event, rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we cannot become accustomed to doing things differently."
He does a nice historical rundown of the dangers of intolerant universalism:
"...intolerant universalism has often led to murder. It underlay the French Wars of Religion that bloodied the four decades before the Edict of Nantes of 1598, in which Henri IV of France finally granted to the Protestants in his realm the right to practice their faith. In the Thirty Years' War, which ravaged central Europe until 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia, Protestant and Catholic princes from Austria to Sweden struggled with one another, and hundreds of thousands of Germans died in battle. Millions starved or died of disease as roaming armies pillaged the countryside. The period of religious conflict in the British Isles, from the first Bishops' War of 1639 to the end of the English Civil War in 1651, which pitted Protestant armies against the forces of a Catholic king, resulted in the deaths of perhaps 10 percent of the population. All these conflicts involved issues beyond sectarian doctrine, of course. Still, many Enlightenment liberals drew the conclusion that enforcing one vision of universal truth could only lead the world back to the blood baths."
I aspire to Appiah's vision of cosmopolitanism. It lacks the visceral, emotional appeal of the "black and white" worldview, but I think it's fundamentally a much more appropriate frame of reference from which to observe the world.