When I was about fifteen years old I was presented with a brain teaser of sorts. At church one Sunday, God’s number one salesman brought up the idea of God’s divine perfection; that is all knowing, all powerful, all loving. However, he made an error in his argument alluding to the fact that the one power that may be denied to even God is the inability to undo what has been done. To either turn back time, cast a mulligan or whatever, and start anew. At first sin in the garden, he could have done some smiting, eliminated this whole Adam and Eve project and started over. Spent another seven days on the assignment with some tweaks added. Instead he chose wrath, punishment, exile from the holy domain. Then there’s the whole flood thing, again choosing wrath over just snapping his fingers and undoing all the wickedness. Then again sending his only son to be some kind of sin eater for all mankind. This time though, much less wrathful. I mean humanity didn’t get it the first few times, maybe a more subtle approach would have worked. God learns. Some theological scholars I’ve spoken with present some sort of center-based justification for this. On one, God gave humanity freewill, and this binding freedom prevents him from acting to undo a free act even if it’s sinning. Second, maybe he can but just doesn’t want to undo anything. You don’t know, you haven’t talked to him. Or sometimes lastly, God is a creator thus necessitating some great destroyer. Either some mechanism created to strike this balance, or another less omnipotent but still pretty damn powerful being, i.e., Death.
This singular event singlehandedly drove me to stop attending church. Probably a large percentage of the reason I chose to get a degree in philosophy. I perhaps foolishly believed that I could tackle this and other grandiose problems. I didn’t, I focused on ethics and culture.
Whenever I think about the concept of what I term the Cosmopolitan Liberal, I think back to this question. If you’ve spent any time studying political identity outside of what American society reduces to a binary (democrat or republican, right or left, etc.) you’ll probably know some of this already. Even if you don’t you’ll probably have already been exposed to it. American political identity is more than just two parties. We have rural republicans, coastal liberals, urban libertarians, beach rat socialists, centrist extremists, second amendment liberals, hardline conservatives, and on and on. The list seems to never exhaust itself. All of these nebulous identities stake themselves as being somewhere on a spectrum no two people can really agree on the shape or composition of.
As I observe over time the changing landscape of the city I live in, I confront my own psyche daily with questions as to why these changes seem to be so worrying. For the outside world, it appears that we are told things are getting better. Yet, we still have so many social issues it appears as though we’re backsliding. The ways in which we get information now are somehow both unlimited yet centered on the whims of a small group of powerful oligarchs whose very survival depends on their ability to control what we know. The economy is doing great but eggs are the price of bottled water, no one can find a job, and I like many others was laid off from a private sector gig so our precious CEO’s can preserve their right to infinite yacht money. A new war seems to start every month or so spurred by a guy who really really yearns for the days of the Cold War and a group of people he really doesn’t like because [insert reason]. We’re still having daily arguments over whether or not Transgender People are valid. It continues.
The Cosmolib yearns to undo the past while somehow, some way, preserving their state of the present. They demonstrate this by acknowledging that white flight, the rise of slum lords, and creating of American Ghettos were bad things but it did ensure future home prices were low enough for them to swoop into places like South Central and buy homes. The fundamentalist firstly centers the end of the world at their argument for all things. They then plot the best course for bringing it about. They see democracy as both a project but also as an attitude. They can understand problems and maybe empathize but they lack imagination and initiative. The fundamentalist aspect prevents this. This is not to say imagination is overly important in shaping the world but it helps. We haven’t failed to solve homelessness because we lack imagination. We’ve failed to solve it because of competing forces that get us to stake our future interests on present comfort in a zero sum game. They want to present themselves as persuadable and as someone who can change their mind, but the problem is they center their interests on a line between extremes. They cannot be persuaded with any systemic thought or theory that challenges their present day comfort. Nor are they willing to bear the risk of attempting to bring about change.
In practice their beliefs are sometimes paradoxical. They demand public transportation as they recognize this is a public good and therefore good, yet they would never be caught dead riding the metro. They want affordable housing and recognize this as a public good, therefore good, but see gentrification as a tool to “revitalize” communities. They love small businesses yet say nothing about the reality of small business owners, as a lobby, are the single greatest opponent of wage increases for working people. So what you’re left with is a person who agrees with many of the ideas of the ideological left/center-left, but drives a Tesla, and is outraged when teachers go on strike.
I hesitate to center race on this issue because there’s no way for me to definitively investigate whether or not that factors into a Cosmolib. Perhaps it does. More likely, the creation of an urban dwelling centrist with liberal tendencies is a factor moderated more by class. I tend to encounter this type of person more in older people than in young. At a somewhat recent community meeting an older woman delighted in talking to me about the politics of a city I had never heard of. She brought up how our neighborhood, formerly all black, was seeing an influx of more and more non-black residents. Mainly White people from Texas, the Midwest, and the like. I surmised that this was because a lot of Black residents are selling their homes and moving elsewhere leaving only those with considerable means capable of buying the homes here. If that weren’t the case, if where we live was not desireable, then our neighborhood would have a high vacancy rate which it does not. She continued to state that she can always recognize them because they put up a ‘BLM’ sign in the front yard, install a security camera at the front of the house, have a little dog, and invite you to join NextDoor. I told her if she sees this as a problem the solution is to tell Black people to stop selling their homes, build wealth where they are, and strengthen that community we always pretend we have. She informed me she isn’t even a resident of my neighborhood, she comes to support, lives about 18 miles away and sold her home in South LA some time in the late 90s.
One reason I suspect the cosmolib comes into being is that they at their core see themselves as apolitical, if not possess a strong yearning to be. To be apolitical is to reside in a position of privilege in which politics does not affect them. In essence, they believe they have found a way to transcend political reality and choose the neutral position. they do not benefit from being outwardly liberal, except as a way to form social cohesion, and only participate in politics inasmuch as one or more of their marginalized identities are affected. They are cosplayers. Whereas classical liberalism assumes society gets better through social cooperation and development, the cosmolib is inherently a fundamentalist. The work is done, things can’t get better than they are. Participation is pointless. We aren’t the ones really in control, voting doesn’t matter, why support causes, and on and on.
In this way they are no different from the radical centrist. Both believe themselves to be unaffected by the greater political project. Both inherently support the status quo. Both seem to have nothing to lose if things go wrong.
I very much wish to someday know what it’s like to be a cosmopolitan liberal much in the same way I want to know what it’s like to be a centrist. It must be bliss. To be able to reside in society with zero outside political accountability but to reap all of the gains of liberal attitude.
Way Past Policy 