#21: On Connectivity
Airline pretzels, anyone?
Hi friends,
This week I want to talk about travel, and connectivity, and privilege, and community.
A couple months back, I read a piece by Elvia Wilk in the Baffler called The World of Yesterday: Waking from the Cosmopolitan Daydream. In it, Wilk describes reading the 1941 memoir of Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. Zweig (author of popular short stories in his time; perhaps best known today as the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel) was part of the pan-European creative scene of the Weimar years. Everyone in his circles believed that borders would soon cease to be relevant. Pre-war, Zweig and his compatriots ‘thought in European terms and forged fraternal links internationally, stating in our own sphere—which had only indirect influence on current events—that we were in favor of the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood crossing linguistic and national borders.’ He hadn’t spent enough time at home to see just how bad things had gotten, and so the onset of World War II was not only devastating and terrifying, but took Zweig genuinely by surprise. Later, writing his memoir from exile in Brazil, he sought to understand how he and his cohort had so persistently defended the idea of an enlightened pan-European cultural project—even as looming fascism stared them in the face. (Hannah Arendt once sharply criticised Zweig and co’s failure to exhibit any ‘concern for the political realities’ of their era in their creative output. For his part, Zweig was loathe to politicise his art and—once he had escaped the Nazi threat—believed that to condemn it in writing from his place of removed safety would be dishonourably toothless.)
Wilk writes that ‘Pan-European mobility a hundred years ago allowed for a filter bubble of sorts: an international community of like-minded, mostly white people, mostly of a certain class.’ Kinda sounds familiar. As a writer based between Berlin and New York and immersed in the tech and art spheres of both cities, Wilk admits that she is part of the ‘self-aware target demographic for the cringeworthy “easyJet Generation” marketing campaign’ and all that it entails. So, too, am I.
All of this compelled me to reread parts of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. The book is one volume of the ‘Issues of Our Time’ series, each penned by various intellectuals and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. ‘Cosmopolitan’ is a loaded word, often used by various far-right politicians as a pejorative—a dog-whistle for the anti-Semitic global cabal/Soros/Jews-run-Hollywood conspiracy theories that have proliferated in some iteration or another for centuries: from Mediaeval Europe to the Soviet Union’s ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ campaign to Stephen Miller. It bears noting, however, that the way the word has been bastardised as such for rhetorical hate speech is separate from (though obviously connected to!) what the concept of cosmopolitanism actually means per its sociological definition. That is: the idea that all humanity is, or ought to be, members of one global community. Appiah, a Ghanaian-British philosopher, explains the baggage around the term:
‘From the right, as you know, [the term] was used as a term of anti-Semitic abuse, and their point was that people who had a sense of responsibility to the human community as a whole were going to be bad nationalists, bad patriots. The other direction of attack, from the left, was that cosmopolitanism was something very elitist. It came to mean a kind of free-floating attitude of the rich person who can afford to travel all over the world tasting a little bit of this culture and that one and not being very responsible about any of it.
I don’t think that cosmopolitanism has to be either elitist or unpatriotic; I think it’s perfectly possible to combine a sense of real responsibility for other human beings as human beings with a deeper sense of commitment to a political community. As far as I’m concerned, the key things in cosmopolitanism are, first, that global concern–the acceptance that we’re all responsible for the human community, which is the fundamental idea of morality. What’s distinctive about the cosmopolitan attitude is that it comes with a recognition that encounters with other people aren’t about making them like us.’
Appiah makes the case that in a world that is cosmopolitan in the truly authentic meaning of the word, there ought not to be a binary choice between ‘local partialities and a universal morality—between being part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community.’ The trouble is when either one is sacrificed in a misguided quest for the other. ‘Cosmopolitanism isn’t hard work,’ Appiah writes. ‘Repudiating it is.’
I first read Cosmopolitanism during university. The same year I read Appiah, my friends and I flew on budget pan-European airlines, such as easyJet, to at least 7 countries for long weekends or holiday breaks. Dimly, I was interested in local Scottish politics. But I was considerably more invested in national British politics, specifically foreign relations, because I felt the international stage was what mattered. In July of that year I was in South Africa—my first stretch in Cape Town as a starry-eyed NGO intern—when I woke up to the Brexit vote results. Back in the UK a few months later, I went out for a beer with a bunch of Norwegian friends on a chilly November evening. The night started out festive and got progressively less so. I got in to my flat in the early morning hours and watched in shock as Donald Trump won the presidency on TV. (Now, the naïveté embedded in that sense of shock seems quaint, even embarrassing, to recall.) My Canadian flatmate put the kettle on for tea.
In the intervening years since I sat in a Scottish coffeeshop reading Appiah between tutorials, my friends and I graduated university and left our seaside microcosm behind. I immigrated to Cape Town: settled in more fully and tried to understand my position in a place where my presence is inherently political, even colonial. The facts of my built environments (and my role in them) have shifted my polarities over the past few years in what I want to think is a healthy and productive way. As a storyteller I am always learning more about which stories are not mine to tell. I hold both my otherness and my community, and the boundaries of each, though I brush up against them in a constant negotiating act.
The world has shifted too, these past several years. But it seems to me that the solution commonly put forth—at least pre-pandemic—as an antidote to the concerning rise of alt-right ethnonationalism is a sort of amorphous hodgepodge of technocratic, globalised cooperation. (Who needs to worry about the headache of borders when you’ve got an arsenal of buzzy concepts at your disposal i.e. cheap flights/startup seed funding/Schengen visas/Airbnb super-hosts/international art fairs/etc?) But the pursuit of this ideal is possibly what allowed the ethnonationalistic, isolationist nightmare to foment before our eyes. Wilk writes:
‘As the story goes, nobody is really “from” Berlin; everyone gets by in English; the party never stops; you only need a part-time job. But these are myths, myths that exist to serve people like me—white, entitled, and in possession of a U.S. passport. In reality, plenty of people are from Berlin; plenty are from elsewhere but do not work in the arts or for a start-up; plenty do not come by choice; plenty can’t afford to live remotely close to the city center; and plenty speak no English (and maybe no German, either). Anyone aware of these truths probably noticed the resurgence of intense nationalistic, racist tendencies in Germany and across the hemisphere long before we did.’
Covid threw a spanner into that bubble’s worldview, or proved it less airtight than it seemed from within. For the first time in my life a combination of hustle and privilege were unable to buy me the geographic freedom I was accustomed to enjoying. This sent me into a tailspin of identity crisis—understandable but also mortifying—which I’m only recently crawling out of. Immigration, and the personal cost-benefit analysis it requires, is more fraught at present than the effortless way I’ve been fortunate enough to experience it in the past. For many people it always has been this way and will continue this way. This forced reckoning that Covid has triggered could cause a large-scale rethink of the dream of globalised community, and whether—in actual, down-to-the-wire global crisis terms—it holds up to its professed aims. I’m not sure I believe that will happen, though. (Just look at the Global North/South disparities when it comes to the vaccine rollout.)
The globe is populated with these parallel ecosystems. After grad, my Canadian flatmate moved down to London; I crash with her when I’m in town. The Norwegians have scattered, some to Oslo and others to London. Most of the Londoners are back in London, the New Yorkers back in New York, because people who grew up in London or New York tend to have a homing mechanism like a deeply ferocious pigeon. A handful of uni friends wound up in Hong Kong. People are doing art world and art-adjacent things; others do digital marketing, or work in the tech or sustainable development spaces. Some have gone to grad school for social entrepreneurship, or international policy. For the most part, we’re all happy and feel like we’re doing useful, conscious, and valuable things. Within our individual axes, we are. In this milieu, English is the lingua franca, startups are king, and we all own monstera plants. Here, any city we might pass through on a layover is a city where we have an old friend or friend-of-friend to phone who will invite us to stay for a day or two: entering into their particular city’s equivalent sphere. We have the same self-flagellating, idealistic conversations about the perils of gentrification over beers in our artistically ramshackle homes in Brooklyn, Brixton, Bo-Kaap. Iterations of Generation easyJet are anywhere, and everywhere: no matter what city I choose to settle down in at a point in my life, I’ll be cushioned by this network. So it goes.
Wilk writes that the pandemic has revealed (or created) certain paradoxical structures when it comes to solidarity, resistance, and community. Rampant nationalism can’t be defeated by the jet-setting of a mobile, hyper-connected class—crossing borders doesn’t make those borders no longer exist. But staying home doesn’t solve the problem either: then there’s the risk of veering into NIMBYism, and its own brand of exclusionary tribalism. And on the one hand a remote/digital world presents difficulty for allyship: how can one leverage one’s privilege in support of a struggle when there is no literal frontline to stand at? On the other hand, activism in a socially distant world means the removal of geographical barriers; it opens the floodgates to ‘clicktivism,’ but also for true community kinship and collective action across borders. As Wilk asks, largely wondering for herself: ‘Do you have to have a personal stake in struggle to wage it? Can you share responsibility if you don’t share risk? Or is participating in struggles that don’t affect you precisely what solidarity means?’
There’s one particular passage in Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism that resonated with me when I first read it:
‘Thoroughgoing ignorance about the ways of others is largely a privilege of the powerful. The well-traveled polyglot is as likely to be among the worst off as among the best off—as likely to be found in a shantytown as the Sorbonne. So cosmopolitanism shouldn't be seen as some exalted attainment: it begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association.’
Rereading it now, I hear a starker warning in Appiah’s words. How do we begin to live together, truly, in the human community? I hear a call to action to double down on our smaller scale communities and direct networks, in which cosmopolitanism can indeed always be found and nurtured. Not at the expense of larger-scale, global, thinking—but merely as a process from the ground up, not the other way round. And I extrapolate a wariness about the false impact of superficial connectivity: the fallacy of confusing internationalist sentiment for political or social action that truly supports it. Perhaps the whole paradigm of internationalism vs nationalism—of seeing these as antipodean—is faulty. Perhaps they are actually superego and id of the same whole. Who’s to say?
Lil things:
How History, Wealth and Nepotism Determine Access in South Africa’s Segregated Dance Music Industry: A fascinating long read on the issues of race and class underpinning SA’s music industry landscape. Lookin @ u, white boi Cape Town techno DJs.
The way that this was published seven years ago yet rings truer than ever is just…. hmm.
Naomi Fry for the New Yorker on the complicated case of Juergen Teller and his new, controversial shoot for W Magazine. My first introduction to Teller’s photography was back in 2008 or so when he did all that work for Marc Jacobs—the perfume ads, and that photo of Victoria Beckham sitting in the shopping bag. I’ve always been simultaneously drawn to and also perplexed/irritated by his too-cool aesthetic. I think Fry does a good job here of unpacking what’s both appealing and frustrating about Teller and his oeuvre.
Just rediscovered the joy of Danish feta cheese, which is LITERALLY the best thing ever. I’m telling you, this shit slaps.
On that note, that’s all for today. See you next week,
Maddy