– P. Kogan –
(New Weekly Magazine, November 18, 1987, pp. 23-25)
The idea of a cosmopolite or citizen of the world can be traced back to classical writers like Cicero and Renaissance philosophers like Sir Francis Bacon. It referred to someone who travelled and explored the world, who rose above regional and ethnic prejudices, and who reported dispassionately to his countrymen what he saw in other lands. “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, he is a Citizen of the World,” observed Bacon in 1625. These travellers praised specific aspects of the cultures they visited and stressed their values and ideals instead of dismissing them as worthless and backward. In this way they disseminated secular and enlightened views and aroused popular sentiment against mystical and supernatural ideas.
In recent years, however, the notion of cosmopolitanism as a cultural ideal has undergone complete change and become synonymous with a supra-national and homogeneous standard of taste represented by a small number of countries. This outlook seeks to undermine national cultures and popularizes decadent and degenerate ways of life. It classifies some countries as the originators of cosmopolitan values and calls upon others to follow the leaders. This theory labels some countries as more advanced than others and puts the less prosperous ones under the control of the rich. The world is one, without boundaries, and the social and aesthetic roots of literature and art do not lie in national experience, according to the exponents of cosmopolitanism. Similarly, some scholars argue that a few countries have the authority to become arbiters of taste in creative work, and whoever does not come up to their level should be rejected as provincial and unsophisticated. Thus they justify the cultural aggression of a few countries against the rest of the world.
The spiritual foundation of cosmopolitanism lies in two erroneous assumptions. Recent advances in communication and technology have turned the globe into one unit, and people are no longer limited by their national boundaries. Hence people have evolved certain values which reflect their cosmopolitan context. Some scholars infer from these mistaken premises that literature and art of the past forty years are postindustrial and international in character. Northrop Frye expresses this view in his comments on Canadian literature:
“The writers of the last decade, at least, have begun to write in a world which is post-Canadian, as it is post-American, post-British, and post everything except the world itself. There are no provinces in the empire of the aeroplane and television, and no physical separation from the centres of culture, such as they are. Sensibility is no longer dependent on a specific environment or even on sense experience itself.”
Critics like Frye try to account for cosmopolitan trends in Canada by detaching literature from national culture.
Since literature and art cannot be detached from a national context and sense experience, it is obvious that cosmopolitan writers deny the significance of cultural and artistic tradition of their own country and negate the particular character of their historical development. By abandoning his national traditions, a writer ceases to represent the hopes and aspirations of his people and becomes a spokesman for degeneration and decadence. He begins to emphasize the superiority of a cosmopolitan artist over the nationalist by underlining the urbanity and catholic taste of the former. A cosmopolitan individual exhibits a certain dash and style. He claims to hate native customs, traditions and values; he disparages local products and idealizes foreign attitudes and objects. He disdains his own literature and prefers to read the works of foreign writers. Instead of examining the conflicts and tensions of his country, a cosmopolitan writer gives abstract images of successful and wealthy persons as examples of intelligence and industry. Their money speaks for their superior qualities, according to these writers. The supra-national literature locates people in exotic places which provide unlimited opportunities for self-indulgence and decadence.
Many writers justify their cosmopolitanism on the ground that their country does not make a big enough market for their books. In their eyes, the true measure of their quality is their ability to appeal to the readers in a few leading countries instead of their own, and they must find publishers abroad. The search for a publisher is not a simple matter of mailing one’s manuscript or circulating it through an agent. It means adopting and expressing the cosmopolitan outlook and discarding one’s national culture and traditions. It means to align oneself with a culture which is alien to one’s own country.
Some critics argue that the present media of communication have rendered the concept of national cultures obsolete and suggest that national histories and traditions hinder a writer’s imagination, but they do not explain the how and why of their thesis. They also do not present the historical background to validate their supra-national hypothesis. It is true that people share and cherish many hopes and aspirations all over the world regardless of their national origin. They oppose wars of aggression and cultural aggression by a few large nations against the majority of the world. They aspire for peace. They disapprove of the exploitation of the working class by the owners of the means of production. They cherish enlightened ideas and speak against mystical and supernatural hypotheses about the world. Most cosmopolitan writers do not espouse these genuinely international ideals which are rooted in the national experience of different countries. Instead, they glorify wars and aggression, praise self-indulgence, foster the attitude of indifference toward one’s country, and offer obscurantist theories of human nature and willpower.
Many cosmopolitan writers pretend to be forward-looking and secular in their outlook, but a closer examination of their position shows that it is merely an abstract posture. They employ this pretence to conceal their motives. Take the complex question of secularism and religion. In some countries, people have gained the support of religious bodies to rid themselves of monarchies and autocracies; most cosmopolitan writers isolate religion as a factor in politics and say that people are becoming fanatics and fundamentalists. At the same time, when people try to eradicate religious superstitions, the same scholars start complaining that people are being persecuted for their beliefs. In taking these positions, they are not being secular or liberal; they are favouring a conservative and religious point of view.
Many writers call themselves cosmopolitan because they want to direct their writing to the whole of humanity by rising above national considerations. Human beings may belong to one human race, but they are also individuals who belong to a family and grow up in a specific country. Their social being is influenced by these factors, none of which can be elevated at the cost of others. The history of enlightenment shows that many scientific ideas like the laws of gravity appeal to everybody because of their universal application, but this is not what cosmopolitan writers wish to focus on. They assume that all human beings, in their judgement, are prone to sexual and other degenerate inclinations; they isolate this kind of self-indulgence from a person’s social life in a specific country and present it as the whole truth in a one-sided manner. Some individuals may drink excessively, others may turn to drugs for stimulation, and still others may be obsessed with expensive pastimes, but one cannot treat these isolated cases as illustrations of the social life of the whole of humanity. Similarly, one cannot say that self-indulgence is part of human nature or that human nature turns people into degenerates. This one-sided and simplified view of human behaviour does not represent the reality of people’s social experience.
Another significant corollary of this outlook is that writers should not depict or delineate people in the context of their social life at a specific point in history; on the other hand, they should place their characters in a homogeneous and conflict-free land in which people have no economic and political problems and have to concern themselves only with their subjective state of mind. According to this logic, a person does not live in a class society and does not suffer from exploitation by the propertied class; he lives in a country without classes, where people are equal. Very certain that he does not have to worry about his basic needs like food and clothing, he makes himself a self-indulgent consumer. The level of a person’s consumption seems to reveal the degree of his success in the world. This noman’s land appeals to cosmopolitan writers because it allows them to concentrate on nothing but the subjective states of different individuals.
By adopting cosmopolitan ideas, writers lose their national identity and pride and make themselves subservient to the values and interests of other countries. They become servile, obsequious and sycophantic in their attitudes. Their slavish mentality impels them to deny their national roots and to see nothing of value and pride in their history. Their willingness to serve cosmopolitan ideas makes them overly submissive to the authority of the dominant countries. Their sycophancy requires that they minimize the cultural and spiritual potential of their own country and seek guidance and direction from the wealthy nations. These authors downgrade the achievements of their countrymen in literature and the arts and raise the alarm that the low standard of their novels or plays reflects the paucity of their imagination and underlines the desirability of aspiring for the skills and techniques of the internationally recognized novelists or poets. They wish to improve their work by imitating their masters and by renouncing their national identity.
By undermining national identity, cosmopolitan writers also imply that the crisis of culture in a country like Canada can be solved by opening it up for foreign influences and by letting it become a free and open marketplace. In this marketplace, writers and artists can make a name for themselves without having to bow to national pressures. But the history of different countries in the past hundred years shows that people are not willing to abandon their identity. The polarities of national traditions and cosmopolitanism cannot be reconciled, even when the governments of these countries are weak and unable to defend their sovereignty. Without being chauvinistic about their past, people expect their writers to analyze their social and political contradictions and to base their writing on an enlightened view of the world.