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Cockamamie Cosmopolitanism

There’s a great little opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times by Gregory Rodriguez bemoaning the negative effects of globalization on community and parochialism. Rodriguez predictably prefaces his argument by glorifying the “clear” benefits of globalization, especially in regards to “high-level transnational exchange and trade.” He also celebrates the presence of workers and entrepreneurs from […]

There’s a great little opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times by Gregory Rodriguez bemoaning the negative effects of globalization on community and parochialism. Rodriguez predictably prefaces his argument by glorifying the “clear” benefits of globalization, especially in regards to “high-level transnational exchange and trade.” He also celebrates the presence of workers and entrepreneurs from around the world, citing the “vibrant cosmopolitanism that broadens our collective concern for people who live beyond our borders.” That being said, Rodriguez makes some cultural observations on this type of cosmopolitanism that, although not uncommon among cultural traditionalists, read as absolutely brilliant coming from the pages of a major American media outlet:

Increasingly, many of our big cities’ creative elites — both native and foreign-born — see themselves as citizens of the world. Our intellectuals are exploring the declining significance of place in the new globalized world order. And this brave new world cries out for an answer to the question: Does a person who swears loyalty to all cities and nations have any loyalties at all? I’ve always been struck by the fact that the same people who rightly criticize multinational corporations for having no sense of responsibility to place never seem to express the same concern about the equally “unplaced” creative elite.

It’s long been a sociological axiom that homeowners take better care of their houses and their neighborhoods than do renters. I think the same principle applies to cities and nations.

It is good to see that good-hearted provincialism is catching on. Indeed, although writers such as Bill Kauffman have written effectively on the loss of our “land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live” due to empire and militarism, often lost is the effect of New World Order globalism on that same land.

Rodriguez ends on a warm note:

For as much as globalization will continue to change the way we live, it will likely always be true (as quaint as it sounds) that home is where the heart is. At least it should be.

Indeed, it should.

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