Ross Douthat had an interesting column in the Sunday Times on the contradictions of today’s cosmopolitans, a global elite that functions more like a transnational tribe which clusters around its own people and cultures. In terms of their affinity for their own, cosmopolitans are like the new nationalists, although certainly the content of both groups ideas and their attachment to place is different. What Douthat is really implying is that the old communitarian position still holds true: people always need a source of collective identity to define themselves separate from the Other. Given these dynamics, claiming loyalty to some global human identity still relies on the exclusion of specific cultures and their unique differences.

But just as strict cosmopolitanism is false, so is the communitarian claim that no global identity is possible. So is the notion that the old ideological categories of liberal and conservative should be ignored.  In fact, the cosmopolitanism that Douthat describes is entirely that of liberalism, but superimposed on a world scale. His global elites base their vision of ‘one world’ on the perfectibility of humanity through technical knowledge and science. For them, individual action is guided entirely by utilitarian self-interest within a global system of capitalism rather than any attachment to communal values.  Liberal reason is what guides these cosmopolitans, and so to assume that old ideological categories are irrelevant is false.

By framing all cosmopolitanism this way, Douthat also ignores other versions that do embrace non-liberal (and non-Western) cultures without a assuming the universal superiority of liberal science, rationality, and individualism. Left-cosmopolitanism is interested in developing new forms of knowledge by learning about new cultures and embracing perspectives within them. This is more of a left-internationalist version of cosmopolitanism which is guided by solidarity with all human beings and an acceptance of pluralism. Left-cosmopolitans would pursue a more authentic way of life that sees truth not in utility, but aesthetic beauty, a value that can’t be universally quantified and known based on scientific measurement. Alessandro Ferrara has written about such an approach can inform political decision making in terms of Kant’s paradigm of judgment. In this way, left-cosmopolitanism understands the world from a more humanistic perspective unlike its universalizing (but alienating) liberal cousin.

One could say that this vision of cosmopolitanism has no bearing today. But that’s not necessarily true since left-cosmopolitans do exist. Take the artist Molly Crabapple, who combats today’s rise of exclusionary violence with art, solidarity, universal ethics, and yes – cosmopolitanism. Her examples are murdered MP Jo Cox, who treated Syrian refugees as British citizens since they were all equally human, and Amjad Sabri, the Sufi musician killed by the Taliban because her religiously inspired art deviated from the Taliban’s vision of Islam. These exemplars of cosmopolitanism demonstrate that individuals do exist who respect all human life while also respecting each culture’s uniqueness. Solidarity demands that we give each other that respect. This is the kind of ethic that Fred Dallmayr discusses as a practical kind of cosmopolitanism, one that allows for our ethical principles to emerge over time by learning about difference instead of drawing upon an existing set of supposedly universal principles.

There are more cosmopolitanisms than the liberal versions rightly criticized by Douthat. We should adopt the post-liberal version that refuses to ignore cultural and pluralism. That’s the cosmopolitanism to which we should subscribe, and it’s the only ideology which can defeat the new nationalism.