Volume 2
Editor Jennifer Jopp
Assistant Professor of History
Willamette University
108 Smullin
900 State Street
Salem, Oregon 97301
(503) 375-5341
Do I want to be your neighbor? An Essay in Three Parts.
David S. Gutterman, Assistant Professor of Politics, Associate Director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy
"No need to let the neighbors run my life"
- Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
I have been thinking about the question of neighbors quite intensely for the last couple of years. This reflection on the issue of neighbors and neighborliness has, I warn you, not brought me to any decisive conclusions. Being a good neighbor is hard. I find my sentiments shifting to balance out deficiencies I sense in my world. When confronted by the needs of strangers far away, I think "yes, but what of the needs of strangers who live close by?" When I speak with a friend struggling with a relationship or nagging injury, I want to both acknowledge the challenge and give comfort, but also temper the acuteness of this immediate pain with the perspective of what life must be like in Baghdad or Guantánamo Bay. When I feel despair at how little I can do - or have tried to do - to ease another's plight, I can retreat to my private world - only to soon feel the dissatisfaction of isolation, alienation, and selfishness. Proximate and distant, stranger and friend, self and other: my efforts not just to understand the concept of "neighbor" and the responsibilities entailed by that category, but even more to live by these conclusions, have been difficult. Accordingly, I want to acknowledge that this exploration has not brought resolution, but only, one hopes, more insight into the tensions and complexities of the question: "Who is my neighbor?"
To think about neighbors is to be immediately confronted by two questions: who is my neighbor, and what are my responsibilities to my neighbors? The temptation is to answer the questions sequentially. Such a process offers moral clarity. If I can define "neighbor" in a neutral manner, then what I owe my neighbor follows inclusively to all people who fit in that category. However, this clarity is soon compromised; the more inclusive my definition of neighbor, the thinner my responsibilities to those individuals must be. The narrower the definition of "neighbor," the more I might owe or be responsible for in my neighborliness. The clarity of my definition of "neighbor" is thus tarnished by the sense of my own capacity. In fact, there is a great intersection of principles and practices that compel these decisions to be considered not sequentially, but simultaneously. What is lost in moral clarity is perhaps balanced by what is gained in honesty.
These types of decisions may not always be conscious or rational and certainly rarely are simple. They affect our interactions, however, at the intimate, personal level, at the level of social and political relations, and at the level of universal moral claims. This essay, then, proceeds in three parts, moving from the personal and local out to the global and cosmopolitan. This path is intended to highlight the different ways notions of neighborliness tug at us, challenge us, shame us, inspire us.
I.
In August 2007 my family moved to a communal farm on the outskirts of McMinnville, Oregon. Welcomed onto 120 acres by the collective owners, we settled into a double-wide and learned how to care for goats and chickens and to tend and reap the abundant garden. Beyond such tasks, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. How did the other members of the community relate to one another? Were we simply renters who paid needed cash for the community? Friends? Field laborers (as our official tax status stipulated)? Community members? Did our opinions count? Would our needs be honored or respected? What sacrifices would be required of us? What rewards - if any - would we discover?
Upon our arrival, counting the five members of my family, there were now twelve people living on the farm - six adults, six children; three generations. We gathered most Mondays for group dinners. Chores were shared, decisions were made collaboratively, children played. Every adult was employed at least part-time off the farm. The work on the farm was more than a hobby, different than a job, not simply labor, although there was always plenty to be done. Neighborliness quickly evolved into friendship and even almost familial relationships.[1] We supported and cared for one another with a pronounced sense of intimacy. The obligations we had to one another were likewise more pronounced and specific: chickens needed to be tended, meals needed to be cooked, young children needed to be watched. And yet the obligations were not burdensome or rather did not impinge on the individual expression of anyone on the farm, despite the half-serious talk of naming the community "Six Opinions Farm."[2] It was clear to me early on that the members of the community not only chose to be there in the first place, but reaffirmed their commitments every day in ways big and small. We all wanted to be a part of something bigger than ourselves or our own families and this communal life provided it. We recognized each other's particular abilities, inclinations, and limitations. As neighbors - at least for the short time we lived there - our relationships were defined by a camaraderie that supplemented but did not supercede either our individual identities or the particular familial ties present among members of the farm.
In On the Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes of such themes and the potential of especially small states to have a clear sense of the collective "general will." In his idealized depiction, the general will is composed of the overlapping consensus of the wills of individual members of the community with regard to common interest, with all contrary desires subsumed.
"The general will," Rousseau writes:
alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good: for if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist. It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed. (Book II, Chapter 1)
The success of such a community or state guided by a general will is predicated on two features: equality among citizens such that each individual contributes to, benefits from, and is limited by the general will to the same degree, and smallness and relative homogeneity such that every member of the community could "know" and trust each other. The bigger, more complex, more diverse, more unequal a community, the harder it is to sustain a sense of the general will - if it can be cultivated at all. The desires of those we do not know or those with whom we do not share equal status quickly become understood as a burden upon us rather than as a fellow citizen's legitimate contributions to, or claims from, the state. Neighborliness, in Rousseau's account, requires proximity, intimacy, and equality. Rousseau would have loved the farm.
This summer, my family moved once again, this time to a neighborhood in Salem two miles south of Willamette. New on the block, we found ourselves faced with decisions: what color should we paint the house, how quickly do we put up lawn signs supporting Obama, do we lock our house and cars at night, do we build a fence - and if so, how high? We had just left a collective farm and now we faced decisions where there are few formal rules and fewer established patterns for collaboration and discussion. In the absence of zoning restrictions, surely I don't need to survey my new neighbors on their preferences for the color of my house or what to plant in my garden? What obligations do I have to frame my decisions within the collective general will of my neighbors - these strangers who live next door to me?
"There is no need to let the neighbors run my life," sings Jonathan Richman in a paean to the freedom of personal expression. It is difficult to think of a sentiment more expressive of a fierce strain of American individualism. This sentiment is manifested in many ways: I will drive my big car as fast as I can, I will not wear deodorant or any other "corporate scent" that masks my natural odor, I will break international treaties if it suits "national interest." I will maximize my profit, fulfill my desires and appetites as best I can, swing my arms right up to the point just before they hit someone directly in the face. There is no general will; I am obligated only to fulfill my desires - Rousseau be damned.
At least this is one stereotypical strain of Americanism. The story is, of course, more complex. In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop argues that over the last forty years Americans have increasingly moved into niches of like-minded people. It is increasingly rare that we have a meaningful encounter with people with whom we disagree about politics, social mores, or religious beliefs. Thus, rather than worrying about the neighbors running our lives, we deliberately move into areas where all the neighbors run their lives in markedly similar ways. I need not worry about painting my house an "inappropriate" color because I have likely pre-selected my palette simply based on the neighborhoods I found appealing. Likewise, I can go ahead and add my Obama sign to the chorus of similar signs already posted on my block. The homogeneity of lifestyles in neighborhoods has expanded even as the phenomenon is masked by the broader social and political divisions within the nation. As Bishop writes:
The last five presidential elections have been closer than any comparable period in the last century. At the same time, an increasing number of communities have developed overwhelming, and stable, local majorities. In 1992...37.7 percent of American voters lived in counties where the margin was greater than 20 points. By 2000, it was 45.3 percent. The 2004 vote between John Kerry and George Bush was one of the closest in history nationally, but where people lived, the election wasn't close at all. In six out of 10 U.S. counties, the margin (for one party or the other) was 20 percentage points or more. And nearly half of all voters lived in a community where the local results were a landslide. (Bishop 2008, np)
Nationally we may be divided on values, habits, lifestyle and political inclinations, but, at least on a local neighborhood level, Rousseau has a chance to shine after all.
Of course, Bishop's assessment also has problems. His model assumes, for example, a sense of free mobility coupled with a relatively static sense of personal taste and opinion. That is, Bishop suggests that individuals rarely change perspective or opinion - and if they do, they have the capacity to move to a different, more fitting, neighborhood. This first presumption has some merit; Bishop demonstrates the presence of "groupthink" in neighborhoods, which like groupthink in companies, governments, or houses of worship, tends to reinforce more extreme rather than moderate convictions. He explains: "the social insularity created in these increasingly homogenous communities, churches, and clubs reinforces political partisanship. We hear and believe what our group hears and believes. Dissent is squelched, extremism is rewarded and allegiance to the group is enforced." (2008, np) That said, often driven by such external forces as an economic collapse, the illness of a loved one, or the birth of a child, individuals change behavior and attitudes and their capacity to be suitably mobile and find a new home in a new niche varies over time and across socio-economic circumstances. The external circumstances that might change our lifestyle practices are often more fluid than our capacity to move into and out of "appropriate" neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, Bishop's study offers a caution for those moving from a communal farm to a suburban neighborhood or those moving into or out of a college dorm: we run the risk of living in neighborhoods and taking part in neighborly relations that act as mirrors reflecting back at us comforting images of who we think we are and want to be. Being a neighbor in this sense means belonging. As we move through a narrowcasted, provincial world - from school to church to yoga class to Wal-Mart - the people we encounter but do not actually know take on the status of familiar strangers. We may not know their names, but their presence is reassuring, affirming what we think we know about our selves. Indeed, these neighborly relationships are far more comfortable at the level of "familiar strangers" where we can project simple presumptive identities upon them, than they might be at a heightened level of intimacy. If the lovely man next to me in the local yoga studio is also a member of the NRA and the charming family in the next pew at church are also vegans then the comforting familiarity of my neighborhood might be fundamentally troubled - and fundamentally enriched - or at least that is the promise of cosmopolitanism (a subject I will turn to in the third section of this essay).
II.
Thus far, I have been writing about the concept of neighbor in familiar terms. The focus has been on an individual's relationships with the people with whom he or she lives in close proximity. The tension present has been on the determination of where the concept of "neighbor" sits on the scale between the poles of stranger and friend. Even more than the delineation of what is "proximate" geographically, the determination of whether my neighbors are strangers or friends determines in turn the obligations I have to my neighbor. What sacrifices of my own desires should I make to feed my neighbors' dog, look after their kids, or attend to their aesthetic tastes? How much do I want to or should I have to qualify the freedom of my personal expression out of respect or consideration for my neighbors? What are my obligations here? Will I resent these qualifications and obligations more or less if the neighbor is a stranger or a friend? Can Rousseau be a guide here or have ties to the common good become so attenuated that the intimacy and particularity of life on a communal farm is wholly foreign to suburbia (except as a romantic exercise in nostalgia)?
Consideration of these questions (at least in the American context) is enriched by reflecting on religious traditions and how these traditions have shaped American public life. Indeed, the question "who is my neighbor?" has deep religious significance and the various answers given to this question have shaped expectations regarding neighborliness in the United States. In this section of the essay, I am going to address Christian teachings about neighborliness and how these lessons have been manifested at a couple of key moments in American history.[3]
There are two critical passages in the Gospel According to Matthew that serve as foundational - and disarmingly complex - lessons about neighborliness. The first is from Matthew 22:36-40:
One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.[4]
Confronted by a lawyer seeking to catch him in contradictory claims, Jesus draws together the central Jewish edict to love God (see Deut 5:4-9) and the social teaching from Leviticus about how to deal with one's neighbors. In Leviticus, the command of God to "love your neighbor as yourself" initially seems to apply only to fellow Israelites, but the category of "neighbor" is expanded in Lev. 19:33-34: "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God."
The new conceptual challenge in the New Testament is the way Jesus links the love of God - "and the second is like it" - with the command to "love your neighbor as yourself." Both facets of these foundational teachings rest on the recognition of the limits of one's own status as a human. The imperative to not just love God, but to do so with one's whole heart, soul, and mind is even clearer in Deuteronomy. There the text emphasizes that to love God as one ought requires constant discipline and teaching, a dependence on habit to supplement the limits of human will and reason:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. (Deut. 6:5-9)
This teaching about human limitations, then, feeds into our understanding of loving one's neighbor as oneself.
Indeed, we should ask what does it mean to love in this way? The lesson can be taken in two directions. First, we can begin by acknowledging that we tend to love ourselves robustly and in light of our own particularity. That is, people do not love themselves as an abstract human, but as a specific being with all of their attributes and flaws. Is the lesson being imparted by Jesus in Matthew 22 that we should love our neighbors thusly, robustly and in all of their particularity? Certainly we can and do love some people in this way - but how many, how often, how thoroughly can we love neighbors in the same way we are accustomed to loving ourselves? The other way of reading this lesson from Jesus is that we must learn to love ourselves as we do our neighbors; that is, we must learn to love ourselves less robustly and more abstractly than we typically love ourselves. In this calculation, the more robust and particular our love of self is, the less likely we are to be able to love our neighbors in a like manner. Loving our neighbors as ourselves thus requires a weakening of self-love - or rather a transformation from a love of self based on our particularity and toward love of self in the abstract, the self like the neighbor being no more or less than another of God's infinite creations, a lily in the field.
The first option raises the challenge of our limited capacity to know and love all others as particular beings. The second option raises the challenge of letting go of our particular affection for ourselves and accepting our anonymity, our generality, our abstract status as a child of God. Both may be impossible to sustain, although when we recall the affiliation between the two facets of the Great Commandment - the love of God rooted in the recognition of human limitations as compared to the divine and loving the neighbor as oneself - I am inclined to think that the lesson Jesus intends is the second, that we ought to love ourselves more abstractly as one human among many. This line of reasoning is enhanced when we ask the question of the Gospel of Matthew: "Who is my neighbor?"
To answer this question we must turn to the second crucial passage from the Gospel of Matthew on the subject of neighbors. In Chapter 5, after delivering the Beatitudes, Jesus turns to explications and interpretations of the laws of the ancient Hebrews. In these teachings Jesus proclaims:
You have heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matt. 5:43-48)
The definition of "neighbor" here is expansive and all-inclusive, reaching beyond the admonition to love the stranger in your midst from Leviticus 20:33. If everyone is my neighbor and I am supposed to love my neighbor as myself, what kind of love is possible for any human to express in these terms? Generations of Christians have sought to resolve the challenges of this fundamental command to love.
Again, the key to understanding these lessons is to remember to keep these commandments entwined. Together they both remind the individual about the limits of his or her life, especially in relation to the divine, and also pull us out of ourselves and into an interdependent relationship with the lives of others. This second tenet is not always easy to remember or sustain, even among devout Christians. On board the Arbella on the way to America, John Winthrop delivered his sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" that instructed his fellow Puritan immigrants:
Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
For Winthrop, the measure of a Christian community is the degree to which love of God is expressed through love of one's neighbor, measured by a selfless generosity of spirit in which struggles are shared and delight is found in the well-being of one's neighbor ("each other") and the collective well-being of the neighborhood ("always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work").
Yet, despite the instruction of Winthrop, the Purtians earned a much different reputation: "A Puritan," it was said "is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart." This sentiment about the Puritans emphasizes both their fierce tribalism (indeed it begs the question of the definition of "neighbor") and their conviction that their lives were held in the hands of a capricious God whose offer of grace could not be moved by individual behavior - including the way one treated one's neighbor. Nevertheless, Winthrop could also proclaim: "to love and live beloved is the soul's paradise." (Quoted in DelBanco 1999, 36) And to be clear, it is not merely God's love that Winthrop is celebrating here, but the love of and for family, friends and neighbors. Indeed, keeping the love of God and loving one's neighbor as oneself closely bound serves to resist the temptation of self-absorption and egotism that is unleashed in a new land replete with possibilities and dangers, untethered from customs and traditions that locate individuals in social, religious, and political boundaries. Keeping the admonition to love God and love one's neighbor as oneself entwined, as historian Andrew Delbanco writes, teaches that "your only deliverance is to discover and submit to something larger and more enduring than yourself...that the radical helplessness disclosed by self-love can only be transcended by loving God, and that love of God is manifest in love of other persons" (Delbanco 1999, 37).
This vision of the interdependence of the love of God and the love of one's neighbor was at the heart of the theological and political philosophy that served as the foundation for the efforts of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King spoke and wrote often about the concept of neighborliness; the concept could in some ways be considered the most important political contribution Christianity makes to democratic political engagement. In his essay, "On Being a Good Neighbor," King elaborates on this theme through a retelling of the story of the good Samaritan. King proclaims that the lesson Jesus teaches us in this parable from Luke 10 is that our neighbor is "anyone to whom you are neighborly. He is anyone who lies in need by life's roadside. He is neither Jew nor Gentile; he is neither Russian nor American; he is neither Negro nor white" (King 1981, 31). King makes clear that we need to transcend mere tribalism, whether that tribalism be a product of race, nation, or social class. Strikingly, this Christian ethic of neighborliness grounded King's critique of capitalism. In a remarkable passage (and one that resonates in our own era of war, economic trouble, and gross disparity in the distribution of wealth), King writes:
Our unswerving devotion to monopolistic capitalism makes us more concerned about the economic security of the captains of industry than for the laboring men whose sweat and skill keep industry functioning. What are the devastating consequences of this narrow group-centered attitude? It means that one does not really mind what happens to the people outside his group. If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own country is a crime, but the murder of the citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue...The real tragedy of such narrow provincialism is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents...The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers. (King 1981, 32-3)
There is a transformative process taking place here: we turn enemies into neighbors, turn neighbors into brothers, and then turn brothers into ourselves. Such a process is expressed by "dangerous" and "excessive altruism" and it is sustained by love. "These dark and demonic responses [of tribalism and segregation], King writes, "will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love is mankind's most potent weapon for personal and social transformation...I must not ignore the wounded man on the side of Jericho Road, because he is a part of me and I am a part of him. His agony diminishes me and his salvation enlarges me" (King, 1981, 38).
King often cited the passage from Matthew 5, in which Jesus calls on his followers to "love thine enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you." In his 1957 sermon, "Loving your Enemies," King acknowledges that many people have argued that this "glorious command" is impossible, that it is "proof that Jesus was an impractical idealist who never quite came down to earth" (King 1988, 41-2). King argues to the contrary that Jesus is a "practical realist," that indeed, "this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization" (King 1988, 42). Now notice first, that King's defense of this idea is not just loving your neighbors, but also loving your enemies - indeed the implosion of the definition of neighbor so that it includes "enemies" - is not based on finding a path for personal salvation. King does not say that this type of love will get you into heaven. Instead, he asserts that this love is necessary to "save our world" (King 1988, 42). King proceeds in this sermon to delineate different forms/modes of love and asserts that Jesus is calling for us to offer agape to our enemies, a love that rests on the "understanding, creative redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love...you look at every man and you love him because you know God loves him" (King 1988, 48-9). For King, here is the lesson of the Great Commandment. But is agape enough to sustain political commitments? Do I need to love people more robustly in their particularity in order to face the challenges of political dissent and engagement? Will I be disciplined enough to sustain the loving struggle for an abstraction? If I, too, am merely a lily in God's immeasurable field, why put myself at risk of being plucked - if, that is, I can even conceive of myself as a political actor, an agent for change?
III.
The Christian ideal of neighborliness is thus replete with tensions that are not easily reconcilable. One implication of the commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself is that, despite the Biblical imperative toward inclusivity, there has been a narrowing of the category "neighbor," a retreat into the tribalism present for example in Puritan New England. To be sure, such tribalism is not only a Christian pitfall; Bill Bishop suggests that the "big sort" taking place in the United States has the effect of turning neighborhoods throughout the nation into sites of lifestyle tribes.
Moreover, the expansive and inclusive Christian love - agape - encourages individuals to focus less on themselves or their specific attachments to others and focus instead on our shared, generalized status as humans, and creations of God. If such agape proves too abstract a form of love to sustain, the result need not be a retreat to the self, but can instead result in the development of particular attachments to people and cultures, overcoming the limits of tribe or proximity. In this regard, Christian notions of neighborliness can serve as one entry into what we might think of as cosmopolitanism, the sensibility that is the subject of this third section of the essay.
Martin Luther King, Jr. serves as a telling example of the capacity to link Christian neighborliness with the cosmopolitan impulse not just to express concern for neighbors broadly understood, but to appreciate such fellow humans in their particularity. While the cosmopolitan ethos was present in King's work throughout his life in the public eye, the sentiment was perhaps never more vivid than in his 1967 sermon, "A Time to Break Silence," at New York City's historic Riverside Church. In this sermon, King links his opposition to the war in Vietnam with domestic indifference to systematic racism and economic inequality. Among the many striking elements of this sermon is the manner in which King's political analysis is rooted in a cosmopolitan willingness to seek to understand the life and perspective of a Vietnamese peasant. He asks:
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?...What do they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped bring them into being as a resistance group in the south?...How can they trust us when we now charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence after we pour every new weapon of death into their land?...Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. From his point of view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. (King 1986, 236-237).[5]
King captures many of the vital attributes of cosmopolitanism in this passage. One's own position in the world is decentered such that the perspectives, lives, and needs of others are allowed to share the stage. The posture is one of question asking rather than claim making. The answers one finds, coupled with the dislocation of the self, as the source of universal norms and truths enables us to get a critical and reflective purchase on "our own condition." The expectation is not the adaptation of the beliefs, principles, and practices of another in the place of one's own, but rather an enriched understanding of oneself and one's neighbor. Such a cosmopolitan posture depends on an attitude of presumptive generosity towards others. We expect to face challenges, even sometimes hostility, but not violence or destruction that would send us retreating into a defensive crouch. Indeed, the cosmopolitan impulse begins, Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches, with courage - the courage to risk the comfort of our prejudices and habits and the courage to acknowledge our responsibility to the people with whom we might enter into new neighborly relations.
Appiah stands as one of the leading theorists and proponents of cosmopolitanism today. His vision, delineated most clearly in his fascinating book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, is neither utopian nor pessimistic, but is a clear assessment of the need for, and challenges posed by, cosmopolitanism. In a world getting smaller and more interdependent in the face of a globalized economy and the development of rapid travel and information technology, people across the world are faced both with traumatic challenges to customs and traditions and with conflicts of increasing potency over diminishing resources. Cosmopolitan education and experience offer a way to temper the most dangerous practices that are the product of a grave ignorance we have about one another - and about ourselves. "We should learn about people in other places," Appiah counsels, "not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another" and this familiarity with difference, with pluralism, will make others seem less strange - and maybe that we will seem more strange - and thus more open to change - to ourselves (Appiah 2006, 78). In conditions in which the world is shrinking, we have a lot more to "get used to" and a lot less time to do it. This speed is a fundamental challenge to the conservative ethos that relies on practice of familiarity. Capitalism - especially global capitalism - makes us neighbors and competitors. Marx's assessment of the revolutionary power of capitalism resonates here. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously writes that bourgeois capitalism results in conditions in which "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind" (Marx 1988, 58) Habits, customs, and traditions are undone with great speed. All those practices which marked stability over time melt away as the bourgeoisie remakes the world in its own image. McDonalds, movies, and military hardware spread across the globe.
In the face of this shrinking world, in which borders are porous, and the pace of change comes at a dizzying speed, there is one basic path of resistance: retreat into a private realm, bunker or enclave, from which we can strike out against intruders real and imagined. This is a world in which "good fences make good neighbors" and thus a great amount of energy is dedicated to building walls that are both physical - at the Mexican-American border, in the Gaza Strip, around a gated community - and social and psychological - through English-only initiatives, a commitment to get "news of the world" only through Jon Stewart or NPR, and resistance to support for public schools or public health initiatives. If the world is coming at me from all directions and much too fast for comfort, there is a great incentive to exercise the privilege to retreat to a comforting realm of personal seclusion away from the maddening crowd. To an extent, we all do this: resisting the intrusion of the world with my ipod, attending private or home-school, walking past our neighbor lying at the side of life's road. That is to say, in the face of the confrontations wrought by the speed of globalization, there is an impulse for comfort-seeking resistance that crosses political, religious, and economic backgrounds - although to be sure there is a spectrum of the degree and intensity of the desire to retreat into the private realm.
The challenge of cosmopolitanism is not simply to resist this temptation of privatizing retreat from the world, but to celebrate the benefits of a more expansive and inclusive sensibility, without over-promising the ease or glories of cosmopolitanism. The end of cosmopolitanism is not a mythic era of harmony and consensus; the goals must be much more modest. We need not "love our neighbors as ourself" - certainly not if this love is robust, particular, and universal. But we do have to acknowledge and accept our interdependence and that our differences will remain unresolved. For Appiah this process - and cosmopolitanism is a process for living in the world - begins with the basic act of countenancing one another and engaging in conversation:
Conversation...is hardly guaranteed to lead to agreement about what to think and feel. Yet we go wrong if we think the point of conversation is to persuade, and imagine it proceeding as a debate in which points are scored for the Proposition and Opposition...practices and not principles are what enable us to live together in peace. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another. (Appiah 2006, 84-5)
Getting used to living with one another sounds much easier than it actually is, but in the end I think there is little choice. There is no way to build a wall high enough, no place in this shrinking world to retreat, to keep our neighbors away for very long.
So then, how do we get used to living with one another? King, in a previously cited passage, longs for the moment when "the invisible inner law" of neighborliness is "etche[d] on our "hearts." Who is to do this etching? At one level, King might answer this question with a nod to God's hand holding the stylus of the soul.[6] But at another level, King, the community organizer, might suggest that it is the neighbors themselves who will do the writing on individuals' hearts. Such a sentiment is also present in Rousseau. In a crucial section of On the Social Contract, Rousseau is discussing the various forms of law necessary for a viable political order: "The most important [law] of all," Rousseau writes, "is not engraved on marble or brass, but in the hearts of the citizens; which is the true constitution of the State; which gains fresh force each day; which...preserves a people in the spirit of its institution, and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority. I am speaking of mores, customs, and especially of opinion..." (Rousseau 1978, 77). Three aspects of this passage are vital for our purposes. First, Rousseau asserts that the mores in our hearts, and not external institutions, sustain the social order. Second, these mores are etched daily by our fellow citizens. Third, these mores - including centrally a certain form of neighborliness - are strengthened through habit. Being a good neighbor, in other words, can and should be habit forming. As Appiah writes, "practices and not principles are what enable us to live together in peace" (Appiah 2006, 85).
We thus can return to the question "who is my neighbor" more pointedly. Who, we might ask, will I allow to write upon my heart? Who will I allow to help form my habits and my disposition to the world of which I am a part? Should I retreat and close myself to the etching power of strangers, familiar and otherwise? Yes, I must begin, as Appiah suggests, with courage and a sense of presumptive generosity toward my neighbors with their stylus, but is this initial posture sufficient? Will people write an ethos of presumptive generosity upon my heart? Will they help cultivate habits of courage in me? And will I in turn be able to etch in a similar fashion upon the hearts of my neighbors? Framed in this way, neighborliness becomes less a matter of individual will and discipline and more a matter of collective creation. I cannot do the etching without allowing myself to be etched. I cannot love without allowing myself to be loved. I cannot be your neighbor without allowing you to be mine.
[1] Crucial to this development was our respective dispositions, but the first step to achieving this easy, reciprocal, informal intimacy, was to pass over more formal hurdles. Our first rent check did not bounce, we sought and accepted chores, we abided by the rules (such as they were) of the community.
[2] To be sure, it was not all idyllic: there were inevitable interpersonal tensions, long commutes, lots of mice.
[3] Let me note that in what follows I am going to focus on Christian teachings in part because of the centrality of the issues of neighborliness in the Gospels and in part because of the significance of Christianity in the American context. I intend to suggest neither that other religious traditions do not contain teachings about neighborliness, nor that other non-Christian traditions have not, let alone should not, play an important role teaching Americans about neighborliness.
[4] In this passage from Matthew 22, as well as in the passage from Matthew 5 that I discuss below, the word "love" is the translation of the Greek word agapao, the verb form of the word agape.
[5] King concludes:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative of the war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours (King, 1986, 238).
[6] Here King would be echoing the Book of Jeremiah:
The time is coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the LORD. This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the LORD. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. (Jer. 31:31-34.)
References
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
- Bishop, Bill. "2008 Is Now a Big Sort Election" Slate. http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/bigsort/archive/2008/09/15/2008-is-now-a-big-sort-election.aspx. Accessed October 31, 2008.
- Delbanco, Andrew. 1999. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1988. A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran. New York: Warner Books.
- -------. 1986. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. James M. Washington. San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers.
- --------. 1981. Strength to Love. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
- Marx, Karl. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. Ed. F. Bender. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
- Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1978. On the Social Contract. New York: St. Martin's.
- Winthrop, John. "A Model of Christian Charity." http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html. Accessed October 31, 2008.