Cultural Beings in Context: Reassessing the Individual Locus of Cosmopolitanism

Image Credit: Shuo Jiang

马海天 (Haitian Ma)

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As we navigate this diverse and changing world, our interactions with one other always include cultural encounters of values and perspectives. Determining how to live with differences in these values and perspectives then becomes a task that we constantly perform, the urgency of which significantly increases in the modern era, where cultures interact in more direct and confrontational manners. In the attempt to construct a healthy, non-hierarchical manner of interaction, cosmopolitanism has risen as a promising vision. We may literally interpret cosmopolitanism as a culture of the cosmos, or the world. Beyond the literal designation, however, the essential conceptualization of this cosmopolitan vision remains under debate. In “The Case for Contamination,” author Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques and differentiates cosmopolitanism from three candidate ways of interaction: cultural preservationism, anti-colonialism, and neo-fundamentalism. In juxtaposition, Appiah proposes his version of cosmopolitanism based on what he calls the “contamination model,” where individuals get accustomed to new cultural phenomena and gradually merge them into the existing cultural norms. Cultures contaminate each other through progressive mergence starting from the individual level. Now the question arises: has Appiah truly grasped cosmopolitanism in its entirety through this model?

Just as Appiah critiques the three alternative ways of interaction, I argue that Appiah’s project contains its own flaw as well. The primary problem with his contamination model rests in its underlying presumption of universal individual autonomy when it comes to cultural adaptation. In reality, collective entities always interfere with and restrain individual autonomy by bringing in social hierarchies. Argumentative negligence of such collective influence can lead to alienating individuals from the concrete cultural contexts they inhabit, turning them into homogeneous abstractions. In view of this universalist pitfall, I suggest the alternative approach of contemporary author Ross Douthat’s idea of “disappearance,” where we strive to understand other individuals’ perspectives precisely by associating them with their surrounding cultures and comprehending the way these particular cultural conditions shape individual identity. With this empathetic approach in mind, we can better transform that understanding into a wholehearted embrace of diverse individual experiences.

Before we analyze Appiah’s project, let us first look more carefully into his view of cosmopolitanism. Appiah describes the core of cosmopolitanism as “contamination—that endless process of imitation and revision.” Achieving this contamination requires everyone to “take an interest in their [other] civilizations,” which, according to Appiah, will enable us to “get used to one another.” Upon closer analysis, this process contains two steps: first to acknowledge and tolerate a different culture, and second to integrate the originally peculiar differences into the ordinariness of one’s cultural community.

Within this mechanism lies an important premise—that the fundamental agents of contamination are individuals as autonomous members within any given culture. Although situated within a particular cultural context, individuals in Appiah’s model reserve the autonomy to make choices—to acknowledge and accept rather than reject and alienate other cultures. For Appiah, it is the accumulation of “perspectival shift[s]” on the individual level that initiates cultural contamination in a broader sense, and, in affirming the individual origination of such “perspectival shift[s],” he undeniably presumes the individual autonomy of deciding for oneself what attitude to adopt towards any cultural representation.

However, this cosmopolitan vision based on individual adaptation overlooks the non-linear struggles throughout the actual process of cultural hybridization, where various collective institutions take form to influence individual agency. Appiah’s explication of the eradication of footbinding in China, for instance, manifests such negligence by generalizing the revolutionary details, assuming the rapid change in customs as rationally unexplainable: “What had been beautiful became ugly; ornamentation became disfigurement. The appeal to reason can explain neither the custom nor its abolition.” Correspondingly, the only plausible explanation lands on “the consequence of our getting used to new ways of doing things” (Appiah). Yet this explanation is a relatively rough one. Appiah solely stresses the result of people getting used to footbinding, while leaving out many painstaking details in the struggling process. In his essay “From Cultural Capital to National Stigma: The Anti-Footbinding Movements in China and Taiwan,” scholar Yen-Wei Miao thoroughly represents the violent political endeavors during the revolutionary period. According to Miao, despite the groundbreaking establishment of anti-footbinding institutions, the first-documented Nanhai Jie Chanzu Hui (Foot Emancipation Society) in 1883 was soon dismissed due to “huge pressure from the community” (Miao 220). In 1898, government conservatives forcefully suppressed early anti-footbinding movements following the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform (Miao 232). Even Appiah himself mentions numerous “older women with bound feet” who suffered greatly from “the agonies of unbinding.” Taking these factors and occurrences into consideration, what triggers the “perspectival shift” here cannot simply be an individual choice of getting used to natural feet. Social institutions and cultural communities impacted individual reactions at all times.

To some extent, Appiah does acknowledge the collective influences within struggle and their contradictory moral implications. He mentions this contradiction in discussing women’s equality in Islamic cultural communities, where “liberty,” displayed mostly in Western human rights treaties, and “diversity,” referring to the respect for Islamic cultural traditions, may “well be at odds” (Appiah). But Appiah does not provide a resolution to the dilemma. Collective influence seems something easily ignored once individuals become the “proper object of moral concern.” This confidence—that individual autonomy outweighs collective influences—is most conspicuously displayed in Appiah’s reference to Zulu viewers of American soap dramas. Appiah contends that these viewers in the periphery do not necessarily suffer from cultural imperialism as cultural preservationists often claim, for they are not powerless “blank slates” susceptible to intrusive cultural influences. Put differently, individuals do not passively submit to higher forms of institutional impacts, but instead hold a considerable degree of autonomy in their choice-making. Nevertheless, if the rhetoric of cultural imperialism fails to recognize individual autonomy in cultural interaction, Appiah’s unmitigated affirmation of individual agency does not ultimately explain the cultural reaction of Zulu viewers either. The two seemingly oppositional perceptions—submission to imperial imposition and agency in cultural self-determination—are in fact compatible and, moreover, often co-exist and work together. As individuals are “[deciding] for themselves what they do and do not approve of,” their conscious responses can also reflect and indicate the changing dynamics of the imperialistic cultural framework. Given the historical trajectory of colonialism and its present influence on South African societies, these individual audiences may well have participated in constructing and reproducing the cultural othering of themselves without without their own realization. Therefore, we must bear in mind the possibility that they inhabit the accompanying cultural discourses as they approve messages in the soap drama, just as we should equally attune ourselves to the inherent political statement of anti-colonialism in their disapproval as such. That imperialist ideologies largely embed themselves in personal values is what puts individual autonomy onto the precipice.

Manifested in this television-drama example is the omnipresence of collective influences. While individuals do possess agency in their choices to embrace or reject cultural values, collective influences still tend to predominate over individual autonomy. This is because individuals do not interact with cultures the way workers operate machines; individuals are themselves part of the culture—they are inside the community of a particular culture, or a collection of mutual-influencing cultures. Furthermore, as contemporary American writer and The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat points out in his article “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism,” it is human nature to “seek community.” This intrinsic desire to belong predetermines the confinement of individual agency to collective wills and standards.

Even if individual autonomy manages to overcome collective influences, the subsequent question comes to whether every individual can access that degree of autonomy. The answer is apparently negative, for both real (realistically existing) and imagined (organized upon shared social identities) communities hierarchize their members on the spectrum of social mobility. Take class as an example. An individual’s degree of autonomy depends extensively upon their possession of economic and social capital; people with different socio-economic conditions thus constitute different communities of classes. This variation limits the right of making autonomous choices mostly to upper-class individuals, turning this right into a sign of privilege instead of freedom. The prestigious background of pioneering figures in the anti-footbinding movement evidences this point. As American scholar Brent Whitefield introduces in his essay “The Tian Zu Hui (Natural Foot Society): Christian Women in China and the Fight against Footbinding,” founder of Natural Foot Society, Alicia Little, was the “wife of a prominent British merchant and writer”; Kang Youwei, who founded the Anti-footbinding Society in Canton, enjoyed high reputation in the political domain in addition to status as a “famous literus and writer” (206). With many others, these progressive elites shared commonality in possessing superior family backgrounds and higher social status to back them in their activist work. People lower down on the social ladder, by contrast, are often “too poor to live the life they want to lead” at all, for they do not possess the basic financial means to attain political leverage such that their demands can receive legitimization and satisfaction (Appiah). Moreover, lack of economic and social capital brings about subsequent poverty in cultural capital, making the poor not only unable to afford autonomy, but also unaware of the notion at all given their limited access to education.  

We can formulate similar analyses upon other realms of social identities such as race, gender, religion and upon historical trajectories to uncover their hierarchizing impact on individual autonomy. The reality can display further complications since these identities often interlock and burden one another. We will not discuss intersectionality in detail, but the main point here is that hierarchical divisions in collective communities make it almost impossible for equal individual autonomy in choice-making. Together with humans’ instinctive urge for community belonging, these two factors demonstrate Appiah’s confidence in individual autonomy as idealistic and lacking contextual considerations. Returning to the specific process of the anti-footbinding campaign, we see that whether they were government officials, progressive pioneers, or the general masses, all sought transformative power as members of collective entities rather than separate individuals; aggressive power struggles continued throughout the movement until reformers attained sustainable power dominance over other collective forces and, consequently, eradicated footbinding. Apparently, these collective struggles went beyond the individual level, or at least tied individual choices to underlying social impositions.

Moving to the contemporary global context, one may argue that Appiah’s project centering on the individual actually attains more promise given social development through time and a cultural environment that is correspondingly more open. Yet we must also note that such openness simultaneously entails more direct confrontation of diverging beliefs and values among different cultural groups as well. In the face of these confrontations, individuals are more inclined to attach themselves to collective influences in search of security and legitimacy. In this sense, the power of the collective may matter more than we think and, given the trend of globalization, can operate on more subtle ideological levels. Cosmopolitan elitism serves as a paradigmatic example here. The more that privileged individuals seemingly detach themselves from their local communities, the more they tend to aggregate into a new community that Douthat calls the elite tribe. “Global citizens,” as they often refer to themselves, these elitists still have their own “distinctive worldview” and “shared values” that alienate other communities and individual experiences (Douthat). What engenders further stake, moreover, is individuals’ unawareness of such collective enclosure: the sharpening collective influences have accumulated more power by becoming invisible. Douthat himself is deeply concerned with this unnoticed congregation: “[I]t’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe.” Following Douthat’s line of argument, we may find this exact elitist pitfall in Appiah’s cosmopolitan project of contamination. His underlying affirmation of “individual freedom” in the contaminating process is substantially an aristocratic by-product available to “insider” elites alone: only they are entitled to exercise the contamination model of cosmopolitanism because of their privilege in choice-making. When Appiah humbly claims that “cosmopolitans don’t insist that everyone become cosmopolitan,” he already ignores and marginalizes the majority of individuals who have no agency to choose that vision.

Does this mean that we should not take individuals “as the proper object of moral concern” in comprehending cosmopolitanism (Appiah)? Of course not. Appiah’s highlighting of individuals is still significant and illuminating in its humanistic value. It is important for us to note that this statement comes primarily as a critical response to three other claims: cultural preservationalism, cultural imperialism, and neo-fundamentalism. While cultural preservationism rigidifies cultural representations into fixations and blocks their development, the fight against cultural imperialism often enters the pitfall of prioritizing socio-political agendas over cultural analysis. Neo-fundamentalism, on the other hand, imposes exclusive values in the name of universal truth upon communities and individuals. All three claims tend to overlook or distort the individual will for their own ideological ends. With its acknowledgment of cultural interactions and its allowance for plurality of values, contamination therefore carves a respectful space for individual voices.

However, the pitfall that Appiah enters in endorsing individual agency is that he confuses moral concern anchored in the individual with complete personal autonomy in addressing cultural differences; correspondingly, the cosmopolitan ideal of contamination relies entirely upon individuals of different cultural backgrounds “get[ting] used to one another” (Appiah). Having acknowledged the individual will, this claim still fails to take into account the multiplicity of contexts in which the individual is situated and whose influences they often internalize. In fact, the decisions that individuals make towards new and old cultures do carry cultural imprints in the past and inform ongoing cultural dynamics, and therefore must not be treated as random, personal choices alone. Positioning individuals “as the proper object of moral concern” does not mean that we completely dismiss the roles of “nations, tribes or ‘peoples’”; instead, communities and groups as such are essential clues for us to comprehend and evaluate the choices that individuals make, to unpack the broader socio-cultural transformations in place, as well as the challenges they bring to individual lives. Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism wipes off this contextual analysis in place of a plurality of autonomous choice-making actions on the individual level.

Beneath this interpretation lies a universalist approach that I want to place on alert. Note that Appiah himself does distinguish cosmopolitanism from the “intolerant universalism” of neo-fundamentalism, whose members share a faith containing particular values that exclude others. In refinement, he affirms a faith in “universal truth,” yet also claims to be “less certain that we already have all of it” (Appiah). The universalism that I intend to pinpoint, however, alludes less to the principles and values that Appiah conceives of tentatively, but more to the conceptualization of individual participants who live with these values, which is that individuals in the cosmopolitan vision of contamination exist as abstractions, homogeneously possessing the attributes of autonomy and independence. We have seen Appiah’s refutation of the “blank slate” presumption, where individuals are seen as susceptible to the graffiti of global capitalism and neo-colonialism; yet ironically, by undermining the complexity of social impacts, Appiah envisions a form of cultural interaction that potentially formulates “blank slates” of another kind—an imagined, depersonalized individual as a pure social member, perpetually cut off from specific cultural contexts, and forever unmarked by any historical imprints.

To clarify, this abstraction does not mean that Appiah fails to take individual experiences into account; in fact, the entire investigation is predominantly anchored in individual perspectives, from his personal observation of the modern-traditional juxtaposition in the old Kumasi Royal Palace to the exemplification of ordinary television audience in Kumasi. What I want to call into question is his theorization of personal responses to cultural phenomena. Rather than preserve them as individual representations of diverse socio-cultural dynamics, Appiah attributes these responses to a generic and homogeneous attribute of individual will, the authenticity of which, as we have discussed above, remains at stake. This totalizing theorization, as Douthat expresses, can oftentimes make the “experience of genuine cultural difference [become] far more superficial.” Put differently, unifying cultural responses into an imagined political mechanism of individual freedom risks erasing cultural complexities and their rich expressions.

Concerned with this potential cultural erasure, Douthat challenges us to “disappear into someone else’s culture”—to look more closely into individual responses and uncover the embedded socio-cultural signals in broader social contexts. To exemplify, Douthat particularly includes his own peaking cosmopolitan experiences at age eleven, “attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services” and “playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood.” Different from Appiah, however, Douthat does not make any theorizing move in these experiences; he leaves these experiences to speak for themselves. Behind this strategic disposition, I would argue, lies Douthat’s alternative conceptualization of cosmopolitanism in a broader sense. Instead of systemizing varied cultural experiences and encounters into a universal explication, Douthat prompts us to analyze culture with the approach of “disappearance,” where the explorer is “ready to be transformed by what it [the cosmopolitan attitude] finds.” In one way, this statement finds common ground Appiah’s affirmation of pluralism. Yet, by “disappear,” Douthat highlights an irreducible intertwinement between individual representations and the cultural contexts in which they are immersed. Disappearing into one’s culture, accordingly, accentuates the cultural conditions as much as the individual lens. This irreducible intertwinement is what Appiah’s project lacks. When Appiah’s contamination model detaches individuals from their cultural contexts to better enact cultural accustoming, Douthat parts company to argue that individuals are never apart from cultures. Symbolically speaking, individuals are their cultures: they carry, represent, and receive deeply-imprinted impacts from their cultural surroundings. Hence, a cosmopolitan vision that values humanity, that claims “every human being has obligations to every other,” must not reside in the human individual level alone, but dig deeper into the specific socio-cultural forces that both empower and restrain the individual (Appiah).

As we have discussed, Appiah’s contamination model of cosmopolitanism fails to capture the inseparable correlation between individuals and the collective entities that they embed themselves in. Douthat’s cosmopolitan critique, from this perspective, revises our understanding of cosmopolitanism by positioning individuals and cultural contexts as an organic whole. This revision attains significance in that it manages to acknowledge and manifest the struggles facing every individual in complex cultural conditions; at the same time, the vision does not sacrifice this individual locus, but ultimately lands upon a unique  perspective by bringing cultural dimensions to one’s individual identity.
This vision has yet to achieve perfection. Conflicts such as the one that Appiah raises about “liberty and diversity” remain unclear: having acknowledged the other culture and understood individuals within that culture, we may still face fundamental moral conflicts embedded in cultural differences. Do we decide, then, to respect or to abandon that cultural representation? Is there a third alternative to cope with the conflicts? Can cosmopolitanism offer a linear answer or solution? These questions may pertain to the study of cosmopolitanism with broader indications about human empathy in the globalized-yet-fragmented contemporary era.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Case for Contamination.” The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company, 1 Jan. 2006.

Douthat, Ross. “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 2 Jul. 2016.

Miao, Yen-Wei. From Cultural Capital to National Stigma: The Anti-Footbinding Movements in China and Taiwan. Sep. 2004. New York University, PhD dissertation.

Whitefield, Brent. “The Tian Zu Hui (Natural Foot Society): Christian Women in China and the Fight against Footbinding.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 30, 2008, pp. 203-212. EBSCOhost, eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=96d8885b-3a13-4a5f-838d-0f9643b3af2a%40sessionmgr4009.