Whilst I read it in the Straits Times, Grygiel's original piece can be found at the Washington Post's site.
The quest for the mythical global citizen
I find it rather disturbing that Dr. Jakub Grygiel’s essay (“The myth of the global citizen”, ST, 14th Dec, 2013) could as easily be repurposed to support racist arguments as nationalist ones. Dr. Grygiel argues that individual policymakers should cling to their own “unique” perspectives as constrained by their local circumstances, and that the quest for a global or objective perspective is quixotic at best and harmful at worst. But if we were to apply this principle to the concept of race, the following paragraph would result:
“I worry, however, that we are giving up on the goal of incubating (sic?) policymakers with a clear sense of racial identity and a powerful belief in the necessity and right to protect racial interests… Students will have a hard time learning the White or the Black perspective on the world… If we train elites to be imbued with a higher esteem for the abstraction of a multiracial community than for the reality of the particular racial group in which they live, we deprive our Race of the ability to defend its interests and maintain its well-being.”
If this sounds like the sort of racist rhetoric which one used to read in white-supremacist pamphlets half a century ago, perhaps Dr. Grygiel’s comments deserve a more incisive examination. Thankfully, they do not hold up under scrutiny at all.
Grygiel makes the assumption that it is beneficial to a nation’s citizens for the nation to defend its interests and its well-being. He fails to make the distinction between the institution of the nation and the citizens of the nation. North Korea, as an institution of government, has arguably defended its interests and its well-being in a truly outstanding manner for the past 60 years, but we can hardly say that its actions have been beneficial to its citizens.
Further, Grygiel assumes that learning a global perspective is mutually exclusive to learning individual cultural perspectives, and that cultural perspectives tend to neatly divide along national lines. He is wrong on both counts. In the first place, a man who has been indoctrinated into his own cultural perspective is less prepared, rather than more so, to consider alternative cultural conceptions. Being saturated with a French perspective on the world, if indeed there is such a thing, does admittedly highlight the differences between the French and the American perspectives, but it does so by throwing them into a grotesque relief which can hardly encourage the policymaker to seek situations of mutual benefit. Considering both perspectives from a global standpoint, by contrast, helps the individual to see the commonalities as well as the differences between the two. In the second place, the idea of a “French perspective” or “American perspective” is, for many nations, as utterly fictional as the Himalayan yeti. If we were to try and find a “Chinese perspective” to contrast the “French” or “American”, for instance, we would discover that a wealthy Shanghainese businesswoman and a poor Uighur farmer have virtually nothing in common with each other, and that the whole quest for a “Chinese perspective” is not only meaningless but insulting. Even in the cases where the nation exhibits substantial cultural homogeneity, such as Japan, Korea and many European nations, the insistence on individuated national perspective can easily translate into individuated racial perspective, which then leads to rampant racism. The phenomena of widespread discrimination against the zainichi, Chinese and Korean immigrants to Japan, and against Middle Eastern immigrants to France, are not difficult to trace back to this poisonous root.
Most damningly, Grygiel takes the simple fact that humans love their families, and draws from it the entirely unwarranted conclusion that they ought to love their nation as well, presumably because a lack of love for the nation implies a lack of love for the family. The absurdity is palpable. For one thing, we live in a globalized age. Virtually every one of the people I know has some family - uncles, aunts, cousins, grandchildren or immediate family - residing in a different country. For another thing, abstracting familial loyalty to national interests makes no more sense than abstracting it to the shared interests of humanity. Indeed, it may even make less sense, because humanity has been a family - genetically linked - since long before kings and politicians tried to make an institution of it. But most importantly, Grygiel fails to make the most straightforward and logical of inferences. Let me spell it out, since the learned doctor seems to have had trouble with it:
(1) Humans naturally love and are loyal to our families. This is a biological imperative.
(2) Humans naturally act in the proximate (rather than long-term) interests of those whom we are loyal to. The same principle that leads humans to be socially myopic, looking to our immediate community first or only, also leads us to be temporally myopic.
(2) Therefore humans naturally will act in a manner that is in our family’s proximate interests.
(3) Therefore humans naturally will act in a manner that is in our nation’s proximate interests, insofar as we realise that those coincide with our family’s proximate interests. In the case of the elite, it is safe to expect that their family’s proximate interests will tend to coincide with those of their nation, and that they will be sufficiently educated to realise that fact.
(4) THEREFORE, humans are naturally biased to act in a manner that serves ourselves and our nation in the short-term, rather than the greater human community OR our nation in the long-term.
(5) Therefore, education on global perspectives is necessary to redress this imbalance. Grygiel seems to think that such education is able to utterly erase “the basic human motivation to sacrifice and make difficult choices”. I think that, being an educator himself, Grygiel gives education too much credit.
Considering all these factors, perhaps Grygiel is right, insofar as it is impossible to achieve the ideal of a truly global citizen. But the same arguments which he trots out to defend partisanship on an international scale only serve to prove that humans are deeply partisan creatures, and that much more work is needed to push back the boundaries of partisanship. We may not be able to break down walls, but we need to at least lower them to a height at which we can see our neighbours’ faces (and vice versa). After all, loyalty to a nation is little more than loyalty to an institution. We cannot lay claim to being “human” until we are able to see beyond the inhuman institutions of nation-states and recognize that we are part of a larger family: humanity.
