« Calm, Worried, Or Optimistic? | Main | Culture Clash »

25 Jul 2008 09:33 am

"World Citizen As Nonsense"

By Patrick Appel
Poulos expands upon his remarks about Obama's use of the term "world citizen":

Our yearning for pan-human solidarity is an absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition, and the most utopian of all utopian ideas is the idea of a Brotherhood of Man: because the human race is not a family, just like it isn’t one big polity. We are stuck with differentiation; there is no metaphor that allows us to redefine humanity as a closer relationship than it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Indeed, the only trope that allows us to develop closer amicable relationships with strangers is the trope of friendship, and the only way to close the relationship with a stranger is to make friends. Not to ‘make citizens’; not to ‘make brothers’. This is crazy European talk — the discredited language of the bloody French and German experiments in various kinds of border-busting solidarity. (The genius of the EU is how it functions best without an ounce of romanticism about solidarity; its inability to even generate its own preamble to its own constitution is proof that our apparently pan-human longing for pan-human solidarity may actually be a parochially European hang-up which it can only resolve by forgetting.)

Permalink :: Trackback (0) :: Sphere It! ::

Share This