Country of Exiles (23 page)

These groups, he observes, are “diasporic,” in touch with their “homelands” only in their fantasies, and they make ideal entrepreneurs because they possess “the traditional diaspora values of enterprise and self-help.”
⁷⁶

Like Appadurai and Bhabha, Kotkin sees America as merely one node in a network of global diasporas, not as a country in any conventional sense. He even thinks that the British settlers on this continent were not settlers at all but the “most important and enduring diaspora” in American history, never connecting with America and never ceasing to dream about Westminster Abbey or the white cliffs of Dover.
⁷⁷

A few years after writing
Tribes
, Kotkin dealt directly with the changing character of place in America, recognizing that some kind of adjustment had to be made if people were to accept the cosmopolitan order. “For ten years, the idea of place has taken a beating,” he said in a 1997 op-ed piece for the
Los Angeles Times
, yet “many Americans still crave some sense of identity unique to the places where they live”; and today, only big cities, rather than homogeneous suburbs, have the wherewithal to supply this sense of identity. But Kotkin has almost no historical imagination, and his approach resembles the strategies of the tourist industry. The Old World is dead, according to him, so we must create a “new sense of place” out of “the new economy,” not out of the past. Here Los Angeles especially shines for its many “place options,” including “Koreatown, Little Tokyo, the San Gabriel Valley and Westminster’s Little Saigon,” “the Latino shopping districts,” Venice Beach and Burbank, and such “shopping areas” as “the Fashion District, Los Feliz Village, and Sherman Village in the Valley.”
⁷⁸

Rosabeth Kanter, besides advising firms and teaching at Harvard, has written many books of guidance for businesspeople. In her 1995
World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy
, perhaps the most tendentious statement of business cosmopolitanism of the decade, she attempts to prove that global companies do not destroy local communities so much as build them up.
⁷⁹
She also distinguishes “cosmopolitan” businessmen from what she calls “the locals” (people with unneeded skills) and “the isolates” (the unskilled), both of whom have experienced the pain of dislocation and layoffs.

Kanter’s cosmopolitans have all the characteristics mentioned above, especially “flexibility, mobility, and change.” They “value choices over loyalties,” seek to “tear down the invisible walls between countries,” and long to “break
through the barriers” that limit choice. They “respect differences” and understand “the elusive” and “elastic boundaries of identity.”

The locals, on the other hand, “value loyalties over choices,” “define” themselves “primarily by particular places,” and pursue “opportunities confined to their own communities.” Opposed to letting the outside inside, they “try to preserve and even erect new barriers, most often through political means.”

Kanter shows little sympathy for the locals, and even less for the isolates, those without any skills at all. These people, she says, are “provincial.” They “fear invasion” and “dread the power of cosmopolitans, they fear their mobility.” The locals “take pride in being Americans,” which only masks “envy” of “outsiders or foreigners,” who “are seen as doing better than insiders.” The locals and isolates also seem to want to deny themselves what “most people” desire—“quality goods,” the “best goods” from “the global shopping mall.”

Kanter claims that communities throughout America, if they want success, must yield to the power of the cosmopolitans. Firms, too, of course, should contribute to their communities and be good “citizens”; but the larger burden falls on the locals. “Stay-put workers” who have “dug in roots” “must” accommodate “the migrant managers who are comfortable moving operations—and themselves—anywhere.” The locals must, in other words, make way for those who do not value context except as a means for achieving more and more wealth.

Kanter believes that everywhere, not just somewhere, must be cosmopolitan. “Cities need their own foreign policy.” They “must open their connections to the world” and “destroy” the “walls in the mind.” “Those who lack the mental flexibility to think across boundaries,” Kanter concludes, “will find it harder and harder to hold their own, let alone prosper.”

Corporate executives, academics, and postcolonialists have together brought cosmopolitanism into the mainstream. They seem unified in their views—above all, in their phobia for place. They see place and everything associated with it (memory, the past, tradition) as confining and as negatively discriminatory. In every case, they prefer weak fluid boundaries that exclude no one and encourage transgression to the maintenance of old neighborhoods or the protection of established communities, both local and national.

The multicultural side of cosmopolitanism appears to support place, but what it supports is not place but communities based on “essences” that pretend to “unite” people into identities only vaguely or uncomfortably tied to place.

In light of the new cosmopolitanism, America emerges more than ever as a transparency without a history and as a land of free-floating individuals without strong loyalties who view life as a theater of never-ending options. So, too, the apostles of this approach tend to look on Americans who have “too much interest” in their own localities as intractable and limited, if not dangerous. These cosmopolitans, in other words, form an ideological threat to the interests and well-being of most Americans.

This convergence of views is remarkable, but what is even more remarkable is how both liberal and left-wing thinkers concede to market dominance and, in the process, bring into question some of their dearest positions. Liberal cosmopolitan academics have espoused views worth defending: inclusion of those peoples unjustly shut out from positions of power; compassion for strangers ruthlessly torn from their homelands; historical study of those groups (working-class, minority women and men) who have been ignored by historians and other analysts
in the past; and respect for the cultures and philosophies foreign to our own. A great deal, too, is worth saying in defense of moving across boundaries (both in and over time) to experience the unfamiliar, the new. All these qualities keep us alive as well as humble; they need to have (and
do
have) a place in nearly every conceivable sphere of life, from politics and business to music and sex. Cosmopolitanism generally, especially when cultivated within specific places, or when harmonized with traditions of place, can only enrich the character of the whole culture in which it exists.

But many liberals and leftists have often seen nothing but this side of the equation and sacrifice too much to market ideology, because that ideology, as many of them know, has become the vehicle for the realization of their dreams. Their emphasis on difference and identity, insistent as it is, has helped undermine the assimilationist achievements of the period between 1920 and 1975. Liberal academics have also worked to abolish the very category of the outsider, to say nothing of the condition itself. Some outsiders, however, should remain outsiders, not only the obvious ones (criminals) but all those who have felt like outsiders and who might wish to remain outsiders if only because such a perspective might make them critics, observers, or artists. (The problem is, of course, outsiderness cannot be created or managed into existence.)

By the late nineties the constant drumbeat for flexibility and self-invention had gone too far, not only because it blotted out the merits of place but because it failed to address how few Americans could really invent themselves and to what degree their “mobility” and “flexibility” had nothing to do with their own free will but had been imposed on them by others. Nationalism, without a doubt, had menaced the world, especially
in the hands of centralizing elites or, as historian John Lukacs has said, in the fascist case, as it was “rooted in the racial and tribal bonds of the people.”
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But love of country or patriotism “rooted in a particular place” (rather than in any race or biological grouping) was quite another matter; it was a necessity for social health. Patriotism at its best, inspired by a history of shared sacrifice in a shared country, was not racist or exclusionary; it was democratic, civic-minded, and inclusive, devoid of the hatred that so often arises out of communities based on race or ethnicity.

Most Americans, it could be argued, want or need some kind of bond to the country (or region in the country) they know and have grown up in, some larger sense of place among all places to admire, love, and defend.

Today, many people look on cosmopolitan consumerism as a good thing, the best we have or can expect to have, because it keeps people to themselves in their pursuit of wealth and forces them to live peaceably with others and to withhold judgment. But market cosmopolitanism, unchecked by any countervailing power, is the most exclusionary of all cosmopolitanisms. Whole worlds that do not have market value are exiled as more “places” are contained within the reach of the invisible hand. Thus, in the name of freedom and choice, market cosmopolitanism tends to exclude those things that give the most meaning to life for most people—the fullest possible sensual experience of the world; vocation; spiritual life; pursuing a goal or truth regardless of costs; friendship, family, children; and, of course, place itself.
⁸¹
The profit motive may facilitate innovation, but unfettered markets merely extend the shrinking of choice—more goods and money but fewer real choices—to a wider canvas.

The market world of choice boils down to this: on the
micro level, it
does
mean, as Kanter says, that consumer choice rules; but on the macro level, it means that those with the capital and the agenda create the context, the boundaries, the entire culture within which ordinary people make their choices. Most Americans, in other words, have little control over the larger arena in which they choose their goods and services. In the mid-sixties, sociologist Milton Gordon wrote that educated Americans talked constantly about universal man when in fact the world was extremely diverse. Today, conversely, we babble on about diversity when, in fact, we are all becoming more and more alike, especially in global cities where the capitalist market exerts its fullest impact.
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It is in this context, then, that the liberal, left-wing forms of cosmopolitanism seem to be playing their most significant historical role, for by denigrating place and fostering everything connected to mobility and choice, they actually fortify the context for more market expansion, cheer on the strategies of opportunistic migrants, and mop up after unscrupulous developers and politicians have bulldozed neighborhoods, regions, and whole countries.

Current cosmopolitanism seeks a world in which long-lived attachments (to family, home, town, city, country) mean little or nothing and must be swept away or tailored to suit the tourist industry. Is this the kind of cosmopolitanism to which we are all now heir, not one animated by one civilization but driven by many civilizations, the fluid mentality of everywhere and nowhere?

But there can be no culture built under unstable protean conditions, mainly at the borders, or by strangers. Any culture that hopes to endure, to say nothing of thrive, must be formed and sustained at the centers not at the edges. America cannot be reimagined out of the materials spawned by geographical
frontiers and urban edges, because it is at those very edges and frontiers where the world’s pimps and con artists congregate the most and where the market forces are most Darwinian, most virulent, and most subversive to the making of any kind of decent, collective life.

T
he building of highways and gateways, the rush of trucks and trains, the spread of temporariness in work and life, the reliance on such service industries as gambling and tourism, the place-hostile activities of universities and government, and the rise of a new cosmopolitanism have all come at the cost of ties to towns, cities, and regions, and to the country itself.

Many valuable things we take for granted and which give to life much that makes it worthwhile, however, cannot flourish without a sense of place. Artistic creativity, for instance, requires it. While artistic performance of the highest quality can happen anywhere, the best of art has been created by people living in a particular place. The examples of this are so legion—from Yasunari Kawabata to Johannes Brahms—that they hardly bear reciting. Can world art or world music be art or music in any way that matters?
¹
Novelist William Trevor, in his
Excursions in the Real World
, writes that “fiction insists on universality, then equally insists that a degree of parochialism
can often best achieve this.” One hundred years ago, Alice James, recluse sister of William and Henry James, put the same matter another way, if more roughly, in her diary: “The paralytic on his couch can have, if he wants them, wider experiences than Stanley’s slaughtering savages.” These are commonsensical notions, but in today’s climate they might pass as profundities as well as warnings.
²

A strong sense of place, along with the boundaries that shape it and give it meaning, not only fosters creativity but also helps to provide people—especially children—with an assurance that they will be protected and not abandoned. In our time, many people are riveted by the worst kinds of sexual predation, by child abuse especially. But in a society or culture bent on dismantling boundaries as a regular fact of life and inclined to exalt a borderless mentality, no one should be surprised that other boundaries—especially those shielding children—should provide so little power to defend. Yet it is indisputable that children need a sense of place (along with an acceptance of boundaries that define and establish the safeness of place) in order to become self-reliant. This sense of place should be ideally created by parents (not by state authorities or by police), who care for and love their children and who give to place the feeling of “indestructibility” which every child needs. “Where firm boundaries are needed to give meaning to content and control to spontaneity, and do not hold,” observed child analyst D.W. Winnicott, “there will be an increase in the number and power of antisocial individuals, tipping the balance against the mature in society.”
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