Taking Back the Cosmopolis (A DEBATE ON LOCALISM & Cosmopolitanism) (Essay‪)‬

In the early years of the new century, an ideological fault line cuts across the globe. It does not divide some regions of the world from others, as those who talk of a "clash of civilizations" would have us believe. Instead, it recurs within each society and cleaves humanity in two. On one side stand those at home in liberal modernity. We can think of liberal modernity as a package that has gained ground over the last century or two: secularism, relativism, an ease with self-interest and self-invention, an urge to dismantle supposedly suffocating traditions, and so on. Political groups as different as neo-conservatives, libertarians, and social democrats subscribe to parts of this package, if not all of it. We have to go to the margins of the modern Western political spectrum to find any people without these habits of mind.