Home
Previous letters
Subscribe
Useful links
About me
Contact me
|
WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 513
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
WCL 513 April 2006
How to become a world citizen
In one sense, the choice is made for us. Almost everyone born in the 20th and even more the 21st century is launched, willy-nilly into the world as a fledgling world citizen. The societies into which we are born are inextricably mixed up with others around the planet. The ties that bind them compel all of them and by consequence their individual citizens, to be world citizens, whether or not they recognize the facts of modern life. No parts are exempt from the compulsions: the environment is a whole and cannot be sectioned off, unlike the temporal and physical boundaries of states and their legal systems.
But conscious choice can be made to accept and welcome this modern situation. We may, instead of following traditional patterns of thought, see the implications of this closeness, this integral linkage throughout the planetary environment and work to make it beneficent rather than menacing, as some see it. This may come about from teaching with curricula designed to suit a new age, breaking out of the nationalist strait-jackets that were fashioned in and before the 19th century or copied world-wide in ex-colonies of the 20th. The battle of ideas has been waged in classrooms all over the world, with some still resisting the new ideas of tolerance and acceptance of diversity which go with the ideology of world citizenship.
We may come to the idea through learning of other languages, although past examples of brilliant linguists sent as diplomats "to lie abroad for their countries", shows this to be no guarantee. Yet it is difficult to complete an education without at least an acquaintance with a further language apart from our mother-tongue. Perhaps the safest course is via an international language: the users of Esperanto are naturally inclined to “homaranismo”, the world citizenship religious ideology devised by the creator of the language.
Young people of our time may start early, with travel across continents, that has scope for instructing them very quickly. Meeting and mixing with others from lands beyond the sea or beyond their own national borders can, but will not necessarily, bring the education needed to settle one into world citizenship. Those who have spent lives working in an international agency such as the United Nations are highly likely to have turned naturally into world citizens, if indeed feeling such citizenship had not set them on their career path in the first place.
Some politically-minded folk may work for the adoption of policies by parties and governments to shift the world into a more peaceful and rational orbit. By doing so they can come into the frame of mind needful to turn them into complete world citizens. But the majority of people do not see things like that, and even if Plato and other ancient philosophers made such an approach a sine qua non of the proper life the majority of humans happily restrict themselves to a minimum of political action and even less analytic thought.
But far more numerous will be those who fall into world citizenship by working for good causes, usually with international aims. The ending of slavery (still current in many corners of our dark continents); the saving of children from starvation, torture, conscription or war (which may be promoted in some of the most "advanced" countries); the ending of the arms-trade (blessed by the leaders of all the "best" countries); protecting the environment (officially endorsed but not much forwarded by the same leaders); and even saving endangered creatures such as whales - after all they are intent on saving them to be enjoyed or at least appreciated by world citizens of the future. All these create more world citizens, often unwitting of their own conversion.
But we are all likely to retain numerous relics of our own particular starting points. We do not lose our past, or our identities, by enlarging our sympathies. Nor should we. Loyalty to one's home and native land is not a bar to loyalty to the human community: it should be naturally complementary and fitting. We live in a world where we are, each of us, members of a minority and the only way to live is to rejoice in the diversity and welcome it.
John Roberts
Comment on this letter
View full list of previous letters
Receive future letters by email
Comments on this letter
|
|