On The Tribalism of Cosmopolitans

I’m teaching a course to prepare my students for the upcoming Arendt Center Conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism. For the first class, we read a 2016 column in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. He argues that modern day cosmopolitans are actually a modern-day tribe of racially diverse yet intellectually and economically homogenous global citizens. Douthat sees hypocrisy and self-interest behind the self-image of cosmopolitan objectivity. The great divide in modern society is neither racial nor economic; it is, Douthat believes, between those who, on the one side, “love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools,” and those others who see the cosmopolitan elite as a “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”

Douthat opposes so-called cosmopolitans to “real cosmopolitans” who search out meaningfully different cultures and persons, who are comfortable with—or at least intrigued by—“real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one’s own.” In contrast to those like Lawrence of Arabia or Richard Francis Burton who threw themselves into strange and foreign cultures out of intellectual curiosity and a yearning for challenging their own limits, modern cosmopolitans transform “difference into similarity, by plucking the best and brightest from everywhere and homogenizing them into the peculiar species that we call “global citizens.””

Most of us are familiar with modern cosmopolitans. Douthat is one, I am one, and it is very likely that so are you as well. We are typically liberal minded, college educated, have faith in reason and technology, at home in the world of the internet, believe we should listen to qualified experts, and are confident in our openness and worldliness. Above all, we cosmopolitans look down on those who are tribal, those who value loyalty to their family, or region, or ethnicity, or religion, or race over a kind of open-minded universalism, and those who prefer local wisdom to tested facts. We can be dismissive of tribalists who embrace nationalist or ethnic prejudices as well as those whose opinions we see as backwards and retrograde. 

What is controversial in Douthat’s essay is that he sees contemporary cosmopolitans as just another tribe. Like any tribe, cosmopolitans hang out with other cosmopolitans and avoid outgroups like MAGA voters, evangelicals, and those who read the New York Post or watch Fox News. Today's so-called cosmopolitans do not see themselves as a tribe. They don't see that those who vote for the AFD in Germany or for Donald Trump, that those who question climate change or value guns, and those who fear immigration, they see cosmopolitans as close-minded and arrogant elites, as a closed guild of media mavens, lawyers, politicians and financiers who run the world guided by their own narrow interests.  

Beyond the political critique of usually democratic cosmopolitan elites, Douthat’s essay suggests that all of us are more tribal than we care to admit. There is a deeply human need to belong, to embrace loyalty over openness, to put the interests of “my people” over others, and to value chauvinism and prejudice. It may be that respect for others is praiseworthy, but it is rarer and more difficult than most so-called cosmopolitans imagine. A truly pluralistic society, Douthat suggests, is one that must be more honest about our tribalism, more courageous in its encounter with others, and more thoughtful in our efforts to open ourselves to those who are different. 

The exploration of our tribalist impulses and our desire to transcend tribalism is at the heart of the Hannah Arendt Center’s conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism: How Can We Imagine a Pluralistic Politics. You can read Douthat’s essay here. And you can register for the conference here.