ADAM K. WEBB is a lecturer at Harvard University.
He is the author of Beyond the Global Culture War
(Routledge, 2006) and A Path of Our Own: An
Andean Village and Tomorrow’s Economy of Values (ISI
Books, forthcoming).
In the early years of the new century, an
ideological fault line cuts across the globe.
It does not divide some regions of the world
from others, as those who talk of a “clash of
civilizations” would have us believe. Instead,
it recurs within each society and cleaves
humanity in two.
On one side stand those at home in liberal
modernity. We can think of liberal modernity
as a package that has gained ground over
the last century or two: secularism, relativism,
an ease with self-interest and self-invention,
an urge to dismantle supposedly suffocating
traditions, and so on. Political groups
as different as neo-conservatives, libertarians,
and social democrats subscribe to parts
of this package, if not all of it. We have to go
to the margins of the modern Western political
spectrum to find any people without these
habits of mind.
On the other side of the fault line, we find
a menagerie of critics. They range from
religious fundamentalists, to communitarians,
to those who denounce mass consumer culture.
Of course, to group them together
might exaggerate their common ground. In
the United States, “right-wing” populists
and “left-wing” communitarians hardly see
themselves as bedfellows. And corresponding
groups from different parts of the world
usually overlook their common enemy, liberal
modernity, and spend much of their time
bashing one another instead. Christian conservatives
and Islamists put forth parallel
complaints at home about secularism and
moral decay. When they speak of one another,
however, they show little but mutual
rancor fueled by recent geopolitical events.
Still, whether or not they acknowledge it,
critics of liberal modernity do occupy much
the same intellectual space, wherever we find
them. They all take issue with liberalism’s
emphasis on rights over duties, with the
uprooted self-indulgence of the global upper-
middle class, with the erosion of communities
that once anchored human affairs.
This global clash between liberal modernity
and its opponents plays out on another
level too: that of scale. Seemingly, to be a
liberal (in the broad sense of the word) means
to be a cosmopolitan, and vice versa. Conversely,
to be an antiliberal of any flavor
means to be a provincial. The very terms of
debate make cosmopolitan antiliberalism an
contradiction in terms.
This assumption oddly has the consent of
both camps in the global culture war. Liberals
take it for granted because it confirms their
supposed triumph. They alone can lay claim
to the widest horizons. In this spirit, a decade
ago Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of
History, confidently observed that “liberal
democracy remains the only coherent political
aspiration that spans different regions and
cultures around the globe.” And the novelist
and social critic V. S. Naipaul has proclaimed
liberal modernity “our universal
civilization.”1 The story such people tell is
quite simple. Technology forces once insulated
civilizations into contact. Those civilizations—
or, rather, individuals formed within
them—can meet peacefully only on the terrain
of markets, personal choice, and selfnegating
irony. Their encounter has an inherently
liberal coloring, we hear. Exposure to
the world’s diversity sets individuals free
from the claims of tradition. It turns them
into self-fashioning consumers and relativists.
They become, as the philosopher Peter
Sloterdijk puts it, “nomads” in the “transitzone”
deserts of a globalized world ever
more distant from the “agrarian patriotism”
of centuries past.2
So too do critics of liberal modernity
assume that to challenge it means invoking
the name of a place. To restore harmony to
the self, to enrich public life, supposedly
means falling back on one or another selfcontained
tradition or community. For
communitarians and civic republicans in the
West, it is a polity small and engaging
enough to demand much of its citizens. For
Islamic fundamentalists, it is the pious orthodoxy
of the ummah. And for revivalists in
China, India, and elsewhere, it is the fellowfeeling
that binds together a country or a
civilization. Whatever the language they
use, such reactions against the present order
have much in common. They take for granted
that the narrower a community, the denser
its ethical content. They all mark off a
community, flatten diversity within it, and
then give it full purchase on how its citizens
or faithful must live. Only in this way,
allegedly, can they keep at bay the corrosive
influence of liberal modernity. This mentality
ends up erecting high walls around such
identities. Insularity is the price of depth.
I think this habit of mind is misguided.
While certain ways of understanding truth
do involve boundaries, to equate antiliberalism
with provincialism is a recipe for defeat.
Indeed, it would behoove critics of liberal
modernity everywhere, including moral conservatives
in the West, to try turning this
assumption upside down. The right kind of
cosmopolitanism is now the likeliest way for
us to gain intellectual and strategic ground
against the liberal order we oppose. We must
abandon an undue attachment to the
boundedness of the traditions for which many
now claim to speak. Doing so offers the last,
best hope of saving the core of what those
traditions represent. True loyalty sometimes
requires expanding one’s horizons. Only
taking back the cosmopolis will let us meet
liberalism on its own scale.
How to imagine such a cosmopolitan alternative
to liberalism, when none now seems
on offer? History affords plenty of inspiration
if we look in the right places. Two
universalisms cut across cultures and eras,
locked in an ongoing contest. One, whose
mantle the liberal enthusiasts of “globalization”
have inherited, is the atomistic universalism
of the merchant and the functionary. The
other, which I believe needs reviving today,
is the substantive universalism of the philosophers,
literati, and broad-minded clerics.
What, then, are atomistic universalism
and substantive universalism? It bears stressing
that both these currents are timeless
mentalities. Just as substantive universalism
flourished mainly before modern times but
has much to teach us now, so too did the
atomistic universalism of the present have
forerunners, however obscure and swiftly
suppressed. Much of modern liberalism was
foreshadowed in ancient times by the Sophists
and Cynics of Greece, the Charvaka
nihilists of India, the Legalists of China, and
other groups rightly disdained by history.
Such sects showed a recognizably modern
irreverence towards religion and philosophy.
They saw diversity of beliefs—across
either time or space—as proof that beliefs
were but the whims of charlatans and softhearted
idealists. Only self-interest and material
needs could count, therefore. These
ancient atomists held quite bland visions of
public life. Rather than putting souls in
order, the polity would ensure order and
prosperity, by prodding human nature with
rewards and punishments. Forming character
was beside the point. As the Legalist
emperor Qin Shi’s executions of Confucian
scholars in the third century B.C. showed,
atomists thought people who urged morality
into statecraft would just cause disorder.
Looking outward, atomists offered the universalism
of market exchange or infinitely
expandable administrative machinery. Their
missionaries: the sharp trader and hardheaded
bureaucrat.
But let us recall the substantive universalism
that the apparent triumph of liberal
globalization has obscured. Atomistic universalism
dissolves a society’s truths by exposing
them to the truths claimed by other
societies. Arbitrary myths collapse when they
collide. Their arbitrariness means they lack
enough content either to merge or to generate
a higher synthesis. Substantive universalism,
by contrast, aims at refining truths when
they meet. It wants a serious encounter of
substance, a constructive engagement across diversity.
It might see the same truth cropping
up in different forms here and there. Or it
might piece together parts of truth into a
whole. Either way, common ground lies on
the level of truth itself. As its social base,
substantive universalism before modern times
had those literati, philosophers, and priests
who at times matched sturdy character with
broad horizons.
Take two examples. In the ancient Mediterranean
world, the Stoic philosophers held
that a virtuous minority existed in each
polity. As a consequence, that élite’s wisdom
knew no borders. As the Stoic-influenced
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius put it, the
wise man lived “as a citizen of that higher
city, of which all other cities are mere
households.” A millennium later and farther
east, Abu Nasr al-Farabi drew on mystical
themes of hidden truth to argue that religions
differed on the surface but not at their core.
What the masses could grasp only through
concrete imagery that varied from place to
place, the discerning few could appreciate in
higher form.3 These and other variants of
substantive universalism revolved around the
idea that truth comes in layers. One layer was
easily accessible but fragmented by institutions
and symbolism. The other layer was
harder to see, but universal. The few who saw
past the details had a special rôle in history.
Prophets and inspired statesmen acted where
eternal truth met the concrete raw material of
their own time.
Substantive universalism did not languish
as idle philosophy. It colored some of the
richest encounters of centuries past. When
Jesuit missionaries entered China in the 1500s
and met the mandarin élite, for example,
they bridged differences just this way. Under
Matteo Ricci’s leadership, they strove to
master the Chinese classics. They sought
common ground between Catholicism and
Confucianism on the plane of natural law. In
putting forth the best of post-Renaissance
European culture and taking on the habits of
the Confucian literati, they engaged their
counterparts as fellow gentlemen. Both sides
took for granted a layer of virtue and spiritual
insight that cut across civilizations. They
bridged differences not by bracketing them,
but by translating across them.
Substantive universalism is a minority project,
an élite-centered cosmopolitanism. It at least
holds that a cultivated few can best relate to
the higher layers of truth that transcend
civilizations. Most plain folk prefer the comfort
of the familiar and concrete. Now this
observation will instantly raise liberals’ hackles.
Any talk of different types of people
always does. But substantive universalism
really poses less of a threat to plain folk than
atomistic universalism does. Atomistic universalism
wages war on plain folk just as
much as it wages war on priests and philosophers.
It dismisses smaller pieties just as it
mocks high-culture truth-seekers. It dissolves
all identities, “unmasks” all ethical
commitments. Substantive universalism, by
contrast, hardly disdains most people. It
leaves intact their more bounded spheres of
human flourishing: their communities, their
sturdy foundations of faith and ritual, their
sense of belonging on a human scale. While
saying that that layer of experience is not the
whole story, it acknowledges it as a layer in
itself. Need the egalitarian really denounce
Marcus Aurelius, al-Farabi, Ricci, and those
like them? None of those exemplary figures
sneered at humbler souls’ attachment to their
own rituals, folk, and polity.
Over the last century and a half, the
atomistic sort of universalism has gained
ground. Liberal modernity has dissolved the
world’s traditions as no premodern atomist
could have hoped. This upending of history
has many causes: the social vertigo of rapid
technological change, a loss of nerve on the
part of older ruling strata, the recasting of
atomism away from the vinegar of hardheaded
realism and towards the honey of
indulgence and liberation. We have also seen
a series of ideological maneuvers in which
liberal modernity has evaded backlashes again
and again. Against populism it has preached
freedom, against high culture it has preached
democracy, and so on. But above all, the
classes most committed to liberal modernity
have gained strength from linking up with
one another across the world, and laying
claim to a monopoly on universalism. Only
the bedrock of self-interest and relativism
can offer a sure footing amid the swirling
diversity of globalization, they tell us. And
only the technocrats and entrepreneurs and
culture-nihilists are fit to rule the global
public sphere.
Such people face little resistance nowadays.
Certainly no resistance has met them
adequately on all battlefields at once. The
social base of substantive universalism has
vanished. Before modern times, that social
base was quite specific: the more broadminded
clergy, the philosophical literati, and
the educated classes aligned with them. While
marginal most of the time, those who really
contemplated truth in such universal terms
brought a healthy pressure to bear on all
traditions. Twentieth-century history has
been a tale of how those groups mostly died
off, and with them substantive universalism
itself. The old-style humanistic intelligentsia
in the West faded gradually, with the postwar
remaking of higher education. Beyond the
West, counterparts like the Confucian scholargentry
lost power more abruptly in revolutions.
By and large, today’s intellectuals side
with atomism and mock age-old truths.
Not since the early decades of the twentieth
century, the era of T. S. Eliot and José
Ortega y Gasset, have leading public intellectuals
merged cosmopolitanism with a sophisticated
critique of liberal modernity.
Such people did not reach out much to
kindred spirits outside the West—thinkers
like Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad
Iqbal, and Liang Shuming—but they were
substantive universalists in spirit. They blamed
modernity not for its scale, but for its content.
In defending timeless and placeless principles
of human flourishing, they looked forward to
a renaissance that would shed the worst
rigidity of the past.
That high-culture challenge to liberal
modernity has fallen mute. In recent decades,
what have traditionalists put up against the
technocrats and skeptics? The most visible
antiliberalism in the West is that of conservative
populists, evangelicals, and their allies.
Elsewhere, much the same temper appears
among Islamists, Hindu nationalists, Chinese
anti-Western moralists, and the like. The
tone does differ from place to place, but not
by as much as some people assume. All these
currents claim to speak for a definite bloc of
humanity. They offer little to outsiders except
distant respect—at best—and wish even
less to learn from them. Each ignores other
such blocs, or expects their conversion, or
dreams of dominating them. Moreover, in
the flattened vision of their own traditions, a
demanding high culture has no real place.
Western moral conservatives often praise the
Victorians or the 1950s. They rarely speak of
the glories of medieval and Renaissance
Europe, or of lessons from the now vanished
clerisy and aristocracy. Chinese antiliberals
see in Confucianism only the mundane virtues,
and an amorphous national soul that has
survived their country’s sell-out to commerce.
And Islamists talk of shariah as a
ready-made package of divine sanctions:
flog alcoholics to restore the golden age. In all
this insularity and shrieking of vitriol, higher
philosophical reflection on what each of the
great traditions means has been pushed to the
margins. Antiliberal politics today is the
consensus of the village, albeit swollen and
less forgiving.
Do not get me wrong. Popular resistance
to liberal modernity has its place. The voice
of plain folk is just as vital politically as highculture
traditionalism. Even those of different
temper should take the grievances of
today’s populists and fundamentalists seriously.
Plain folk have not fared well under
liberal modernity. They have less control
over their own communities, and less space
for many of the kinds of human flourishing
that earlier societies, despite their imperfections,
did accommodate. And they have
every reason to complain of the self-indulgence
and public vacuity that reign, trends
that any high-culture critic deplores too.
The problem arises when resistance comes
only from a popular direction, as it does now.
Solidarity and the simple virtues, however
worthy on one level, lack appeal to the full
range of human types. Those of independent
spirit often end up siding with liberalism by
default. They think the obvious alternatives
to it would suffocate them. However much
the world now would appall figures like Eliot
and Ortega y Gasset, they would probably
not side with the loudest malcontents of our
time either. Moreover, flattened orthodoxy
leaves little room to discern underlying principles
and how best to apply them nowadays.
One can wish to revise a tradition out of
motives far better than just letting individuals
off the hook from its stricter demands. To
wall it off robs it of that vitality. It reinforces
the less helpful elements within and allows no
invigorating encounters without.
Scale is the Achilles heel of resistance to
liberalism today. The high walls that give a
sense of solidarity and slow invasion by a
rootless consumer culture also make it hard to
offer much to outsiders. Fortresses become
prisons. None of these antiliberalisms put
forth an alternative vision of world order. At
most, they would leave each tradition in
peace with its own vision of the good.
Western moral conservatives affirm their
Judæo-Christian heritage, against the schemes
of secular one-worlders. Islamists denounce
the West and their local strongmen, with no
clear sense of what a twenty-first century
ummah means. And Chinese and Indian nationalists
dream of keeping the present global
hierarchy but moving their own civilization
up within it. Hegemony would pass from
Washington to Beijing or New Delhi, while
the shantytowns of Africa and elsewhere
endure under new masters.
Some of these clusters of resistance are
stronger than others, but none have an obviously
promising future. To be sure, most of
humanity aligns more with them than with
the enthusiasts of liberal modernity. But
those on the numerically weaker side of the
global fault line—those enamored of technocracy
and consumer culture—have visibility
far beyond their real weight. They
have convinced everyone that they alone
speak to all cultures. By leaving that assumption
unchallenged, traditionalists around the
world doom themselves to failure. Whether
in the West or elsewhere, the last thing we
can afford is insularity. History shows that
those who do not claim the widest horizons
always lose ground to those who do. Whether
in politics, economics, or culture, provincials
live at the mercy of cosmopolitans. Liberals
need not fear resistance of this sort. History’s
end may indeed afflict us, if not now then
some decades hence.
On a strategic level alone, even if the
present resistances changed nothing else, lowering
these barriers that divide them could
hardly hurt. In their numbers lie untapped
strength. An unapologetically global agenda
of resistance would make some of liberalism’s
confidence crumble. But beyond these strategic
realities, a cosmopolitan turn would
have deeper advantages.
First, critics of liberalism would gain intellectual
leverage they now lack. Liberalism,
like earlier atomistic ideologies, uses diversity
as an argument against truth. It holds that
the more rapid change brings different ways
of life, different belief systems, into chaotic
contact with one another, the better. Atomism
feeds on cultural vertigo. Diversity unmasks
all commitments as arbitrary myths.
The sort of strident traditionalists who react
to modern nihilism by shouting of selfevident
truths slip easily into this trap. For
example, liberals readily answer devout Christians
or Muslims by saying their doctrines
smack of mere assertion. Rival assertions
have floated around for millennia, liberals
gravely intone. Strident affirmers find it hard
to deal with this argument from diversity, at
least in a way convincing to those who do not
share their assumptions. Indeed, although
liberals would never admit it, they much
prefer things that way. Far better for them
that traditionalists keep hurling strident
affirmations at one another. Nothing comes
from that but mutual discrediting, after all.
When ideas collide and generate naught but
sound and fury, it seems they were just
arbitrary myths to begin with. Liberals conclude,
with satisfaction, that it comes down
by default to individual tastes and a secular
public sphere.
But a substantive universalism bypasses
this kind of easy answer. It probes beneath
diversity, maps recurring patterns of thought,
and translates those patterns into more placeless
language. The ancient philosophers hoped
for a consensus on the contours of human
flourishing. We need not aim so high. But we
can observe a few time-tested dimensions of
human flourishing, among which individuals
have always navigated. For example,
peasants in hamlets the world over have
always lived out, on a small scale, the goods
of community and human fellowship. Likewise,
esoteric mysticism in the world religions
has overlapped a good deal. And the
visions of statesmanship that Cicero and
Mencius outlined differ far less from each
another than both do from the watereddown
liberal “statesmanship” of poll-monitoring
and business-cycle stimuli. Each of
these three examples—folk solidarity, spiritual
transcendence, and virtuous stewardship
of the republic—has its own emphasis, of
course. Peasants and mystics and statesmen are
hardly engaged in the same exercise. They
need not be so, to complement one another
in an ordered society. Above all, these and
other poles of human flourishing can become
real points of contact across civilizations.
Peasants and mystics and statesmen, or people
practicing other virtuous ways of life, can all
find counterparts elsewhere.
Second, seeking points of contact among
traditions in this way would not mean just a
shift upward in scale. It could also spark a
renaissance in all traditions. Properly understood,
no tradition centers on complacency
and chauvinism. If the insular sort of traditionalists
wish, they can go on fighting a
battle for parochialism. But would they accomplish
anything? Surely the tradition that
includes Plato, Aquinas, and Dante has value
not because it once held sway over the
peoples of greater Europe, but because it
reflects the nature of things. To sing its praises
in isolation nowadays, without engaging its
counterparts, means it will ossify and keep
losing ground. Renaissances have happened
historically because the field of inspiration
has widened, and because lights have shone
on the human experience from more angles.
A renewed cosmopolitanism is thus about
much more than matching the scale of one’s
enemy, important though that may be. It is
also about an encounter that restores life to all
the traditions involved in it. Truth can be
refined in the fire of comparison and dialogue.
Such a renaissance would help traditions
shed some of the rigidity that now
makes patterns like shariah law so repressive.
Third, what happens when we breach the
walls around civilizations, religions, or nations?
A loosening of boundaries would let
aspirations shift upward and downward in
scale, as appropriate. Human flourishing
does not attach to political or cultural units as
such. It attaches to certain activities and
habits of mind, wherever found and on
whatever scale. At one extreme, take the
rarefied virtues of a high-culture minority,
of those who seek the highest human truths.
Such pursuits, almost by definition, work
best on universal terrain. The cultivated
universalisms that once radiated out from
each civilization, as “Civilization” itself—
whether of a Greco-Roman, Confucian,
Sanskritic, or Islamic flavor—can now meet
more fully than ever before. Despite obvious
differences in cosmology, they have more in
common on the plane of self-cultivation and
basic decency than many people now appreciate.
Their ideals of statesmanship, for example,
could season an alternative world
political culture quite unlike the bland soup
of technocracy and egoism that liberalism
offers humanity at large. Bearing responsibility
to one’s soul and to transcendent principles
that intersect with history might strengthen
political leaders everywhere against the pressures
of television-besotted mass opinion.
At the other end, sentiments of solidarity
and duty could settle back on the smaller
communities suited to them. Modernity has
displaced such worthy human instincts on to
abstract collectivities, and made a mockery
of them. Faith and fatherland are large enough
to fuel bloodshed and ill will. But they are too
large to generate anything like the warmth of
villages and kinship networks. Premodern
civilizations had a richer sense of layered
human experience, in which the universal
and the rooted could coexist, without having
to merge in a single mass identity. Philosophy
and religion and custom reinforced one
another, even if they often spoke to different
audiences, in different sized theaters. These
ideas are a natural resource for imagining a
rival to humanity’s presumed future of markets,
media inanity, and ironic indulgence.
By displacing universalist truth-seeking on
to the world as a whole, we would not erode
more parochial pursuits. Rather, we would
loose them from the stamped orthodoxy of
modern nationalism. Local communities were
probably never stronger in Europe than
when mediæval Christendom encompassed
all its peoples, for example. Cosmopolitanism
of the right sort leaves more room for
rootedness, not less.
Fourth and finally, let us remember that
the political is personal, in a different sense
than the activists of the 1960s meant. Each of
the old high-culture traditions revolved
around self-cultivation. To try reclaiming
the cosmopolis in their name, we must walk
before we can run. We must do things like
read the classic works of other traditions, and
reach out sincerely to our counterparts around
the world. Western cultural conservatives
occasionally remark, when defending the
canon, that Aristotle speaks to humanity, not
just to Europe and its offshoots. They should
take that claim seriously. They should also
take seriously the notion that Xunzi speaks to
them, and not just to the Chinese, and so on.
Some will undoubtedly always feel more at
home with the familiar canon of their own
civilization. That need not pose a problem.
Substantive universalism need not mean abandoning
all particularity. But we now need a
critical mass of intellectuals who deliberately
set out to engage the classics of all the
major traditions at the same time, and in a
sincere search for common ground. All
these voices should strengthen our resolve to
combat the global malaise of our time. The
character forged by such a cosmopolitan
adventure would undoubtedly turn out much
richer than the kaleidoscopic “identity”
that the world’s upper middle class now
pieces together from random fragments of
culture.
What critics of liberal modernity have
lacked is the confidence that we can win the
culture war in all theaters at once. We have
surrendered, in effect, to the grand strategy
of liberal modernity: staying one step above
its opponents’ provincialism. This could
change if we appreciated more fully the
common foundations on which all the great
traditions rest. Let the Aristotelians and neo-
Confucians and Islamists meet as natural
allies. American and European moral conservatives
should appreciate that Western power
has often been ill used, to promote abroad
many of the cultural ills they lament at home.
And non-Western traditionalists, instead of
denouncing the West as such, should find it
proper to reach out to those Westerners who
lament the direction of Western culture.
After all, the modern West laid waste the real
European tradition, which shares more in
spirit with the Bhagavad Gita than with the
bourse and the B-52. Together, Westerners
and non-Westerners can again live out some
of what has receded into mere historical
memory. Restoration, not novelty, is the
banner to wield.
To imagine any of this is, of course, to peer
far ahead. Reviving a substantive universalism
must be a long-term project, on the order
of decades if not generations. It is an intellectual
project, a cultural project, and not least
a political project. It must reframe the clash
within each society as part of a truly global
culture war, over the contours of an emerging
world civilization and the structures to
sustain it.
Humanity deserves that profound choice.
Defenders of liberal modernity will cling to
the present asymmetry: the expectation that
this century will see turbulence and terror but
no real alternatives, that a single enlightenment
will shrug off many benighted backlashes,
and that when the dust settles history
will end on liberal terms. The global order
now rests on the unwitting consent of its
opponents to these fictions. No celebration of
one tradition alone, no matter how sincere
and how vigorous, will change the people
who rule the world in 2050. Only seeking
likeminded allies worldwide holds out any
such hope. To heal the cultural damage of the
last century means taking back the cosmopolis.
For, as Benjamin Franklin said in a different
context, “We must indeed all hang together,
or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
NOTES
- Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Free Press, 1992), xiii; V. S. Naipaul, “Our
Universal Civilisation,” New York Times (November 5,
1990). - Peter Sloterdijk, “From Agrarian Patriotism to
the Global Self,” New Perspectives Quarterly 17:1 (Winter
2000). - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations trans. Gregory
Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 3:11; Abk
Nasr al-Farabi, On the Perfect State, trans. Richard Walzer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chapters 15–
17.
