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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 182
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WCL 182 October 2002
Letter to an English world citizen
Dear Georgie
You said you were undoubtedly a world citizen and also English. That's no contradiction. Very few world citizens are brought up equipped with anything other than some large national language which they use to communicate with everyone else. Usually that language comes with a culture - Francophone, Hispanic, American, for example - and so all of us start out from some base or other. We do not usually spend out formative years with a grasp of global culture: that comes with time and experience.
But just as we can choose between right and wrong - something we learn about inside our society - so we can choose between narrowness and breadth. We can decide to be nationalistic or we can accept our humanity and make known our world citizenship. We do not have to renounce our culture to do that: we need to recognize that it is an essential part of everyone to have a base rooted in the society that above all gave us language, for language is one of the distinguishing marks of humanity.
However, it is the diversity of human cultures and the blending of that diversity which leads to the richness and amplitude of our earth and human history. If we all spoke only one language, whichever it was, the world community would be far poorer. And equally, if we all pretended to be of one mind, rather than individuals with different tastes, views and experiences, the whole race would lose immensely. It is the total of our different ideas and feelings that creates human culture, not the sum total of a mindless adherence to one set pattern, the ideal of the autocrat and the fascist.
So how do we reconcile the need for us to be different, even of different nationalities, with the need to transcend nationalism? The simple answer is - by abandoning exclusivity. The deadliest aspect of nationalism comes with the pernicious doctrine that it is all or nothing, the myth that the model citizen is one who believes in “my country right or wrong” and exalts his own nation above all other groups - family, friends, city and other nations.
That is what has doomed so many in the 20th and previous centuries to lives of conflict and conquest, mayhem and misery.
The human way is otherwise. It is to see ourselves as part of many groups, many communities. We may live in a village, and feel ourselves also citizens of the neighbouring town: at the same time we have ties to the county and perhaps to our region of the country. We are now, if European, likely to have reasons for feeling part of a continental unity and even part of a still larger whole, while still recognizing our part as world citizens.
It all boils down, in the end, to loyalty. We have feelings of responsibility to our family, our locality, our country and beyond. To be human means to have social ties: living in community with others evokes the sense of loyalty that makes society cohesive and enables it to function effectively.
Without that sense the whole society suffers. But the way to make it a practical proposition in the 21st century is to recognize that the size of the community that will make sense for its citizens is no longer what was suitable in the 18th or 19th centuries. We must adapt to life in a world that is one as it has never been before.
Chinese science, Russian literature, Indian architecture, Arab poetry, English history, Italian painting, Geek philosophy, Jewish religion, the traditions of the Basque, Catalan, Tirolese, Yoruba and other peoples; these and a multitude of lesser or greater inheritances, swell the human sum of civilization. If we were to imagine a single human civilization, which is not improbable, it would need to embrace all these and more, because during the coming century, when the new global civilization is being forged, there will be further creations to be brought within its ambit.
So... although an auxiliary non-national language would be of benefit, by lifting that oppression by English which is steam-rollering other linguistic traditions and may finish by conquering the world, we cannot rely on one being adopted. We must however, not imagine that the likely supremacy of the English language will lead to the dominance of English ideas.
Already the dominant language is American rather than English and as it becomes used by a majority of non-native English speakers, the inevitability is that, like Latin in antiquity, it will be swallowed up in a vast sea of dialectal and fragmented linguistic communities, which will reflect their own traditions and culture rather than the original language of the European off-shore islanders.
That seems to me unfortunate, but to revert to our original question, you will not be asked to abandon your nationality because you are a world citizen. It may have that effect for some outside this country, if they choose, as immigrant Americans did in large numbers in the 19th and early 20th century, to abandon their native culture and become part of a melting-pot. But my guess is that within a generation or two there will be a massive rejection of such paths by native Chinese, Indian and Russian speakers. Then the battle may recommence and a neutral second language will appear more necessary than ever.
This very considerable problem is one that will concern us more and more as the century proceeds.
John Roberts
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