The Who of Classic and New (Educational) Cosmopolitanism

In the opening words of his book Cosmopolitan Vision, Ulrich Beck (2006) looks to nineteenth century writers Heinrich Heine and Heinrich Laube’s seemingly disparate articulations of and attitudes toward cosmopolitanism when laying the groundwork for his own analysis of the “cosmopolitan outlook” (p. 1). For Heine, cosmopolitanism stood in contrast to (German) patriotism and chauvinism. He believed that the greatest German thinkers in history thought in broad-minded terms about and held open hearts toward human difference. Heine also “regarded himself as an embodiment of cosmopolitanism” in a cultural context of increasing intolerance which would a century later reach an apex in the event of the Holocaust. Somewhat differently, Laube (as cited in Beck 2006) critiqued cosmopolitanism as a grandiose and unrealistic vision for a humanity not in touch with the practical and “therapeutic value of the fatherland” (p. 1). Cosmopolitanism, Laube maintains, is a “beautiful idea” but will remain only an idea “if it does not take on concrete individual form, [indeed,] it might as well have never existed.”

While these two enunciations of cosmopolitanism might strike one as disparate in attitude and outlook—i.e., the former underscores cosmopolitanism in the particular as a sensibility that embodies worldliness and that embraces the idea of global citizenship; the latter critiques cosmopolitanism as a universal principle that has little to no real meaning for the fact of “conflagrations, cannons and fiery speeches” that constitute humanity in Laube’s lifetime—they, nevertheless, can be seen as largely compatible. Both Heine and Laube understand cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and/or cosmopolitanism is a peaceful idea to be (unsuccessfully) exercised upon unpeaceful people. Whether cosmopolitanism is perceived in negative or positive terms does not detract from the fact that it is human beings who are or are not cosmopolitan, and it is human beings who have created affective identities wrapped up in geographical territories which can and do rub up against visions of a shared humanity.

While Heine and Laube’s anthropocentric orientation toward the meaning of cosmopolitanism might be understandable given the historical time period and cultural context from which they were writing—one which no doubt was influenced in the positive or negative by German Enlightenment philosopher Kant’s (1983) foundational text Perpetual Peace and the need for “a cosmopolitan constitution” (p. 118) to protect “the public rights of men in general” (p. 119)—understanding cosmopolitanism as, or for, a who has likewise predisposed emerging scholarship on what Hansen (2008) has recently termed “educational cosmopolitanism” despite the fact that cosmopolitan scholarship in other disciplines has not fallen prey to the predictable binary of a dynamic human culture and passive un/natural environment (see Clark 2002, p. 101; see also Beck 2009). This predisposition in educational cosmopolitanism, moreover, has influenced both modern and postmodern refashionings of the subject. As Todd (2009) explains, the difference between “classic cosmopolitanism” (p. 25) and “new cosmopolitanism” (pp. 25–27) is as follows: “revivals of classic cosmopolitanism base their views on appeals to universal humanity, rights, and/or world citizenship” (p. 25); these revivals take a top-down approach to human rights and global justice reflective of Kant’s modernist vision and of which “most educational initiatives” (p. 29) have bore the brunt (see also Popkewitz 2008). New cosmopolitanism responds to the “mounting pluralism in societies around the globe” (Todd 2009, p. 25) by way of postcolonial and poststructural critiques of humanity articulated as a universal abstraction. These critiques are largely theoretical in nature, emphasize the importance of the particular, and endorse bottom-up practices for human rights and global justice (e.g., Todd 2009; Papastephanou 2012). Aligned with the latter, a third educational cosmopolitan manifestation performs the particular by artistically actualizing the lives of persons deemed cosmopolitan (e.g., Pinar 2009; Hansen 2011). In other words, whether in its classic or new strand, educational cosmopolitanism is devoted, by and large, to the world of human beings and/or human emergencies.

Educational cosmopolitanism’s anthropocentricism—despite or in spite of the fact that homo sapiens cannot be expunged from the surrounding environment; indeed, “the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition” (Arendt 1998, p. 2), a condition which is ineradicably linked not only to all other earthly creatures but to the entire ecosystem—is keenly illustrated in the major texts written on the subject. These texts are referenced in the previous paragraph and will be attended to in more detail in the followings sections of this paper. For it follows that who is cosmopolitan cannot nor should not be excised from the what of cosmopolitanism however much the latter has been overlooked by educationalists thus far. Such is a striking irony particularly in postmodern reformulations which critique classic cosmopolitanism’s tendency toward Humanism. Indeed, the inseparability of who is cosmopolitan and what is cosmopolitan makes it necessary to attend to both concurrently.

To this point, twenty-first century world emergencies are marked not only by intended human atrocities such as acts of terrorism, war, and genocide. As Beck (2009) illuminates in his conception of the “cosmopolitan outlook” (p. 161), today, like no other time period in history, the world is experiencing “unintended [emphasis added] side-effects catastrophes” (p. 41) resulting from successful modernization. One might speculate that intended human atrocities and human affairs in general have received more attention in educational cosmopolitanism not only because humans can become educated, so to speak, but also because humans are visible to the naked eye and human atrocities are painfully real. From a philosophical-normative perspective, cosmopolitanism advocates a shared human experience in which differences ought to be tolerated rather than inspire various forms of violence against one another. In the words of cosmopolitan philosopher Appiah (2006), the “challenge” of cosmopolitanism “is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become” (p. xiii).

Side effects of unintended global catastrophes, on the other hand, are not necessarily visible and can be quite painless to human beings, at least in a direct sense. Perhaps because of this painlessness, the unintended side effect corollary has received far less attention in the educational strand of cosmopolitanism. Beck (2006) draws a distinction between normative-philosophical cosmopolitanism and descriptive-analytical cosmopolitanism that is the cosmopolitan outlook. While the former conception of cosmopolitanism emphasizes how human beings should act toward others, the latter aims to describe “the cosmopolitanization of reality” or “really existing cosmopolitanism” (p. 18) which come by way of world risks (turned catastrophe) that cannot be satisfactorily responded to from within a national outlook. Following Beck, a cosmopolitan outlook is necessary when faced with risks that threaten the survival of the planet. Individuals and individual nation-states cannot attempt to address (let alone resolve) dangers of such in/comprehensible magnitude when resolving them is still possible, which is not to say that individuals and localities lack the agency to help instill global change. A collective effort is still required.

To be examined further in this paper, environmental degradation as a consequence of modernity’s triumphs—e.g., via climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion—have largely been part of an expert discourse, leaving the lay person to feel generally helpless or apathetic to its veracity. While there is almost complete scientific agreement that climate change is real and due to human impact, only 25 % of Americans perceive it to be a serious threat (Paramaguru 2013). This is an un/surprising irony given that the United States is one of two countries most responsible for climate change (see Clark 2011). Radioactive poisoning of the planet, most recently coming by way of the Fukushima Daiichi triple nuclear plant meltdown in Japan, is clearly invisible and physically painless to those not locally affected by it despite evidence that the world should be quite alarmed (Spector 2012). Even when Japanese citizens have attempted to take their health into their own hands by buying Geiger counters as a response to fallout from Fukushima, the Japanese government has called for its citizens to stop measuring radiation levels because they claim that the instruments might not show accurate readings (Mochizuki 2011). Regarding bioinvasion, global trade and tourism has intensified un/intended introductions of new species to environments; along with habitat loss, invasive species is “the planet’s prime cause of ecological disintegration” (Clark 2002, p. 102). While each of these environmental crises is part an expert discourse, even the experts are often unsure how to effectively deal with these and other manufactured world risks. More alarming is the fact that “no one takes responsibility or is even expected to take responsibility” for creating “monsters of technology and its byproducts,” as environmental educator David Orr (1994, p. 13) appreciates. The byproduct effect makes assigning blame increasingly difficult given that there are often multiple parties at fault in one way or another for their happenings, a point to be returned to later in this paper. Beck (2009) refers to these boundary-defying harms as the “organized irresponsibility” (p. 28) of world risk society. Irresponsible, yes; organized, I am not so sure.

Further to this point, intentional crimes against humanity have helped inspire the formation of the United Nations and an international criminal court due to the proliferation of genocides since the Holocaust. This inter-governmental organization and permanent international tribunal along with Kant’s (1983) writings calling for peaceful relations in the form of a cosmopolitan constitution have been instrumental in laying the groundwork for scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism in both direct (see Popkewitz 2008; Todd 2009; Papastephanou 2012) and indirect ways (see Pinar 2009; Hansen 2011). The who of and for educational cosmopolitanism as explored in these texts act as a foundation for an examination of the “‘cosmopolitan moment’…of the environmental catastrophe” (Beck 2009, p. 63), a moment that requires thinking about and working toward reconfiguring our role in the world as responsible guardians of the planet rather than unaccountable actors.

Unintentional side effects of successful modernization, which have greatly contributed to environmental degradation, place human beings as the ultimate exploiters-destroyers of the ecosystem, too. In other words, human agency can hardly be left out of an analysis of cosmopolitanism as a what regardless of the fact that there is no inter-governmental organization or international criminal court in place for responding to inadvertent outcomes of modernity’s triumphs. This international juridical failure might be due to the fact that the “established rules for allocating responsibility” for the ecological crisis, assigning “causality and blame—are breaking down” (Beck 2009, p. 91) and criminals are subsequently let off the hook. It is the hope that attending to manufactured risks that ignite “empirical cosmopolitanization” (p. 189) function not only as a “wake-up call in the face of the failure of governments and the possibility of alternative forms of governance in a globalized world” (p. 56). Also to be examined are those arguments calling for a radical reimagining of education, specifically the “modern curriculum…[which] fragment the world into bits and pieces” (Orr 1994, p. 11) via disciplinary and specialized knowledge and in such a way that the educated person feels little responsibility for the health of the planet as a whole dynamic system. Whatever alternative governmental and/or educational form might be taken, it is critical that educators across fields of study yet especially those invested in cosmopolitan concerns think thoughtfully and act carefully on an eco-ethical commitment to a biosphere that is the only natural habitat conducive to earthly life.

Cosmopolitan People

Theorizing the Who

Following in the footsteps of other cosmopolitan-minded thinkers aligned with theorizing new cosmopolitanism as a bottom-up practice for human rights and global justice such as Kurasawa (2007) and Todd (2009), Papastephanou (2012) argues that “a new conception of cosmopolitanism is needed” (p. 1) and one which is formulated by theorizing an “ethico-political ideal” that demands higher respect for human difference. Such respect gets short-changed, she says, in modern (classic) conceptions of cosmopolitanism given its reintroduction of “pathologies” such as “toxic universalism” which aim to destroy plurality, or that which makes us human. Also critiqued in the 19th century by Heinrich Laube (as cited in Beck 2006) but likely under-theorized at the time he was writing, (classic) cosmopolitanism, he says as if foreshadowing Papastephanou, “loses sight of human beings” (p. 1) in their particular form. In this way, cosmopolitanism is nothing other than a fantasy.

However, since Laube’s lifetime, it has been argued that the idea of cosmopolitanism in its classic form has been exercised upon human beings as a social engineering strategy aimed at domesticating “savage” subjects through the enlightening process of schooling (Popkewitz 2008, p. 77). Enlightenment, however ironically, comes about by “engineering through replication” (p. 154). Along these same lines, Papastephanou (2012) contends that “educational philosophical globalism” promotes “culturalist cosmopolitanism” (p. 4) which resembles an idealized rather than realistic “global self” that “domesticate[s] otherness.” Papastephanou criticizes the culturalist conception of the “‘cosmopolitan’ student” (p. 94) who knows nothing of historical details. S/he sits “[b]ehind a façade of rootlessness…learns all the stereotypes and preferences of the homeland” and reproduces the values of homeland and culture without the slightest understanding of ethico-political duties because s/he has not been schooled to think about and participate in the world from an ethico-political perspective. What is important is that s/he “does his [sic] homework” and, I would add, passes the standardized tests. S/he is the most desirable kind of student under the dominant global educational paradigm. To counter such domestication as part of her recasting of cosmopolitanism, Papastephanou recalls historical personages who embody an ethico-political cosmopolitan self (p. 4) including revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara (p. 95) and lesser well-known professors Kurt Hubner and Pedro Albizu Campos (p. 97). In their own distinct ways, these three figures engage in ethico-political cosmopolitanism that is “embodied and corporeal” (p. 96) and that is aligned with identity formations engaged in political activities such as resistance to hegemonic powers.

These brief biographical sketches set up her more in-depth theoretical analysis of “Who’s Cosmopolitan?” (pp. 111–133). In this latter exploration, Papastephanou places attention on the oft cited binary of rootedness/rootlessness in cosmopolitan thematics. This binary will also act as a springboard for my own investigations into what is cosmopolitan, specifically that of bioinvasion and its intolerances. To this point, Papastephanou provides a comprehensive critique of Waldron’s (2000) article “What is Cosmopolitan?” when exploring rootedness and rootlessness as a cultural phenomenon. For Waldron, however, the what of cosmopolitan is tied exclusively to “culture, and the Kantian idea of cosmopolitan right” (p. 230). In other words, while Papastephanou asks the question of who and Waldron asks the question of what, both thinkers interpret cosmopolitanism as something human and as something to help humans become more humane to other humans. As Papastephanou (2012) explains, “globalization is an empirical phenomenon, whereas cosmopolitanism should refer to an ideal about how the world and human(s) should relate and to the virtues that would correspond to, or facilitate, such an ideal” (p. 129).Footnote 1

What troubles Papastephanou (2012) about Waldron’s study is that it underscores cosmopolitanism as a culture rather than as an ethico-political stance. If one thinks of cosmopolitanism in cultural terms, a problem arises that brings up a deeper historical concern having to do with cosmopolitans being equated with parasites—that a cosmopolitan dabbles in but does not show deep appreciation for various cultural identities, freely incorporating aspects of otherness when forming his/her own fabricated identity (see Waldron 2000, p. 227). Indeed, perceiving cosmopolitans as parasitic—and akin to invasive vermin (Shain et al. 2004), a metaphor to be returned to when engaging the subject of bioinvasion—resurrects a “much older prejudice against rootlessness” (Papastephanou 2012, p. 112). Historically speaking, a “rootless cosmopolitan” is a pejorative for the Jewish people as illustrated in Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan propaganda campaigns (Azadovskii and Egorov 2002).

From here, Papastephanou (2012) goes into a much needed exploration of the “complaint against rootlessness” (p. 116) which many other cosmopolitan scholars have but alluded to in their own work, particularly when speaking upon the question of “the Jews” who, at least up until the birth of the State of Israel, had been seen by their adversaries as the quintessential cosmopolitan nomads-wanderers (Spector 2013). The key idea regarding rootlessness so central to Papastephanou’s analysis is found in the way that Waldron and others have turned attitudes toward cosmopolitan rootlessness on their head. Rather than exterminate “rootless cosmopolitans” as had been done during the Second World War, cosmopolitans, at least from a culturalist perspective today, are “glorifi[ed]” (Papastephanou 2012, p. 132) for being mobile, “border crossing” (p. 129) agents who are able to adapt to and move freely and comfortably through the world, linguistically and otherwise. The problem of perceiving cosmopolitans in this way is that even “slave traders” (p. 120) could fit such a wide-open definition. Hence, the need for cosmopolitanism to take on an ethico-political dimension in which relationality plays center-stage.

While Papastephanou is critical of the culturalist depiction of a cosmopolitan, what interests me in her analysis of cosmopolitan rootlessness is that it is tied to perceptions of human beings relating or not relating with each other. From an ethical perspective, the subject of cosmopolitanism as an un/rooted phenomenon also lends itself well to an analysis of human manufactured boundary-defying environmental emergencies. Strikingly, when Papastephanou does speak upon environmental concerns in her exploration of who is cosmopolitan, it is most often done as a parenthetical gesture. On one hand, because the thrust of her analysis is rooted in human affairs, it is conceptually coherent to keep focused on her subject, to not wander off across border genres into a discussion of the cosmopolitan moment of the ecological crisis despite the fact that this crisis is an ethico-political one of the first order. When speaking upon private interests and public goods, it is mentioned that “(…environmental damage demands a thinking that goes beyond profit)” (p. 117). Similarly, when referring to those who proclaim themselves to be cosmopolitan, she questions their “provable and visible commitment to justice” (p. 122) which includes “changes in our ways of treating others (or treating the environment).” The point that I wish to make here is not that Papastephanou or other educational cosmopolitanists should have included a full-blown analysis of what commitment to environmental justice might look like. Rather, I am suggesting how frequently environmental issues, and modern man’s predacious relationship to “the environment,” are treated as a passing thought in classic and new educational cosmopolitanism. The environmental afterthought comes in spite of the fact that scholarship on cosmopolitanism in other fields of study such as geography (e.g., Clark 2002, 2008), environmental politics (e.g., Dobson 2003, 2005, 2006), and sociology (e.g., Beck 2009, 2010; Beck et al. 2012) draw comprehensive connections between the two, a point to be elaborated upon later in this paper.

As ecologically-minded educationalists Rebecca Martusewicz and Jeff Edmundson (2005) point out:

educators interested in social justice look primarily at race, class, and gender issues, as these interfere with economic and social opportunities or access, and seldom acknowledge our interdependence with a more than human world as more than an add-on category. (p. 74)

Further to this point, when Hansen (2008, 2010) provides his important overview of the various strands of cosmopolitanism—i.e., political, moral, cultural, and economic—in his move toward naming educational cosmopolitanism, environmental issues are treated largely as an add-on category, as well. “Environmental justice” (Hansen 2008, p. 292) and “environmental degradation” (Hansen 2010, p. 153) are placed under the umbrella of political cosmopolitanism which includes an array of concerns having to do with “formalized methods of hospitality to strangers, equitable economic practices, [and] humane responsiveness to political conflict” (Hansen 2008, p. 292). The environment, moreover, is depicted as a static place that “family, cultures, communities…inhabit” (p. 290), thereby unintentionally reinforcing the erroneous albeit long-established belief in a dynamic human culture and passive physical environment referenced earlier in this paper.

What Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) also call to our attention is the ways that “[w]e set ourselves apart from and above other life forms” (p. 75) whom we are always impacting and being impacted by as interconnected earthly creatures (p. 74). Our impact, moreover, often “ignores how toxins introduced into the environment disrupts” (Bowers as cited in Martusewicz and Edmundson 2005, p. 74) life forms in the present and well into the future. Interestingly, classic cosmopolitanism has been referred to as a form of “toxic universalism” (Papastephanou 2012, p. 1); the term toxic here is being used metaphorically to describe the ways that treating unique human beings in the same manner can have harmful effects not only on identity formations. This is not to say that the philosophical idea of toxic universalism is any less dangerous than the empirical reality of chemical toxins. Rather, these respective kinds of toxicities manifest themselves differently. The former can harm the who that is the human being in largely unmeasurable and unpredictable ways; the latter has dangerous consequences of a scientifically ascertainable nature for the what that is the entire ecosystem as illustrated in Rachel Carson’s classic book on the subject, Silent Spring. In this way, I emphasize the significance of understanding cosmopolitanism in its “normative” and “descriptive” articulations (see Beck 2009, p. 189).

To recount, theorizing rootedness and rootlessness in the way it has been by Papastephanou teaches us a great deal about the problem of the culturalist cosmopolitan standpoint which tends to view human subjects in the abstract and as stereotypes-caricatures in such examples as “the ‘cosmopolitan’ student” (Papastephanou 2012, p. 94) and “the Jew” (Spector 2013, pp. 152–162). Papastephanou’s (2012) analysis of rootlessness, moreover, offers opportunities to expand such thinking outside the purview of cultural cosmopolitanism. As Clark (2002) points out in his study of bioinvasion and environmental cosmopolitanism, “environmental problems are becoming manifest far from their source, or seemingly detaching themselves from specific origins altogether” (p. 2). In other words, we might consider the ways that non-human boundary-transgressing phenomena offer opportunities to expand the conversation on rootless cosmopolitans particularly within the “‘cosmopolitan moment’…of the environmental catastrophe” (Beck 2009, p. 63). Given that this crisis is one that threatens the survival of the planet, it seems important to include in the building of educational cosmopolitanism from an ethico-political perspective and as an eco-ethical responsibility.

Passionate Lives in Public Service

Attuned to an eco-ethical commitment in the key texts shaping educational cosmopolitanism today is Pinar’s (2009) The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education. He gets that cosmopolitanism refers, or should refer, to the entire world. Worldliness is defined as “love of this world—not only the human world” (p. 7). Speaking broadly on loving a radical alterity that includes intimacy with nature, “worldliness might represent a station on the historical path to a sacred humanism centered on the biosphere” which is now “facing extinction.” The urgency of the planetary predicament is made starkly clear in Pinar’s formulation of a cosmopolitan curriculum and cultivation of a cosmopolitan self. But this predicament cannot be amended without respect for planetary consciousness (p. 5). Beyond human planetary consciousness and an eco-ethical consciousness that is human are consciousnesses that can be said to correspond with each other. Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) “define eco-ethical consciousness as the awareness of and ability to respond carefully to the fundamental interdependence among all forms of life on the planet” (p. 73). We might also say that educational cosmopolitanism asks itself to become more aware of and more responsive to the planetary crisis facing not only but largely created by human beings.

Perhaps overstating his point to those inclined to not be terribly alarmed by the need for sustainable living habits, Pinar (2009) contends that “[s]ustainability does not mean the unregulated reproduction of the species. In fact, heterosexual copulation—with its potential for offspring—contributes to the crisis of sustainability, despite disbelief” (p. 6). When speaking on cosmopolitanism and climate change, Beck (2010), too, makes the point that those individuals intent on living a green life “look for ways to defuse the ‘bomb of overpopulation’ (as if newborn babies could ever be a ‘weapon of mass-destruction’)” (p. 259). His argument here nevertheless does not go far beyond stating that individuals and localities cannot solve the human-manufactured global environmental crisis. Pinar (2009) takes Beck’s argument a step further by suggesting that additional steps are necessary including “state regulation of reproduction and the promotion of homosexuality” (p. 6). Perhaps a clue could also be taken from the once itinerant Inuit people who lived sustainably for thousands of years until they came in contact with (and largely lost their culture to) the white man (Freuchen 1961). Ironically, the white man believed that the Inuit and other indigenous nomadic tribes led morally repugnant lives.

That said, regulating bodies in the way Pinar describes is a dangerous affair with totalitarian implications as illustrated in The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood 1998), a piece of speculative fiction that imagines what might happen when nuclear power plant explosions and other environmental toxins wreak havoc on the ability for human beings to procreate. Those few women who can still conceive—yet are always in danger of giving birth to “unbabies” (p. 113)—are enslaved by the state as reproductive handmaid-vessels. Given that aspects of this work of fiction have become fact in Japan due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster where women from the surrounding area are getting abortions for fear of what they might give birth to (Johannessen 2012; see also DeLeo 2003), perhaps we ought to take just as seriously its academic counterpart, which turns the ecological dangers involved with human procreation on its head. Certainly with “1 billion human beings hungry” (Pinar 2009, p. 7), Pinar’s not exactly outlandish plea begs one to think about the long term ramifications of unregulated anthropogenic impact on the environment. The key question compelling Pinar’s conception of a cosmopolitan education, which is also the key question at the center of curriculum studies, is: What knowledge is of most worth? Blogger on the topic of sustainability and Inuit society, Reese (2011) offers a compelling response to Pinar’s question: “Is there anything more precious than a sustainable way of life?”

But the problem of unsustainable living habits is overshadowed, if unintentionally, by Pinar’s provocative biographical narratives that rest at the heart of his montage. For his study reads more like a juxtaposition of various worldly concerns and a cornucopia of quoted material linked together through a performance of the curricular concept “complicated conversation” (p. 4). This conversation evokes an impression of educational cosmopolitanism in contrast to presenting a point-by-point theoretical analysis on its subject. Indeed, the content of the three “passionate lives in public service”—the subtitle of his book—occupies half of its pages. These pages are devoted to public philosopher Jane Addams whose concept of “education was experience” (p. 71), to museum educator Laura Bragg “and her remarkable Boxes” (p. 97), and to poet-playwright-filmmaker Pier Paulo Pasolini whose life was characterized by “the cosmopolitan curriculum Pasolini taught” (p. 104) as concrete illustrations of a cosmopolitan education which “invites an ongoing self-reflection associated with solitude while engaged with others” (p. ix). Pinar himself states that he was so captivated by Pasolini’s life accomplishments that he feared the man would take over his book (p. 13). While the eco-ethical is significant, particularly as expressed in the book’s introduction, the public pedagogy of these three figures—particularly that of Pasolini who resisted fascism and “late capitalist-cannibalism” (Pasolini as cited in Pinar 2009, p. 105) through his “scandalous art” (p. 141)—would appear to position cosmopolitan subjectivities as ones invested in a kind of ethico-political commitment that Papastephanou (2012) calls for so intently in her recasting of cosmopolitanism. In other words, Bragg and Pasolini could not be called environmental educators, per say. “Jane Addams's education as an urban environmentalist” (Platt 2000), on the other hand, has been extensively researched and documented.

That said, in narrating passionately these passionate lives that lived public service, Pinar implicitly calls on his readers to engage in service, too, and in ways that speak to one’s own distinct sense of being in the world. Pinar does hint that “reverence for life” (p. 5) and not only human life (p. 28) is framed by “[s]pirituality, sexuality, and sustainability” (p. 5). An alliteration of concepts that the “present historical situation fractures” by way of recalcitrant religious dogma and rampant consumer capitalism.Footnote 2 The kind of public service endorsed in Worldliness is open-ended—indeed, educational cosmopolitanism in this incarnation is the antithesis of educational instrumentalism found so frequently in educational theories and practices writ large—and inspires in this reader an eco-ethical commitment to “worlding” through encounters in and with the world. It is also the inspiration for putting into practice the “Marxist dictum to know something is to transform it” (Radhakrishnan as cited in Pinar 2009, p. 146). As Beck (2009) also reminds, “the ‘cosmopolitan moment’ of world risk society” (p. 48) is characterized by “transformation,” or new beginnings, in contrast to modern “denial” (optimism) and postmodern “apathy” (pessimism). If the cosmopolitan moment does not call for public service, then which moment does? The eco-ethical asks anthropocentric classic and new cosmopolitanism to expand its obligations to more than human beings at a critical moment in time in modern history of the Earth.

Cosmopolitan Events

Why speak of environmental degradation in relation to cosmopolitanism? Can certain kinds of environmental and/or ecological crises be categorized as cosmopolitan events? What are the ethical and juridical implications of such events and why do they matter? To respond to these questions, I enter the conversation on cosmopolitan thematics already begun in discourse on climate change, nuclear contamination, and biological invasiveness. These free-floating, free-roaming environmental hazards push discourse on educational cosmopolitanism from its primary focus on human affairs to one also concerned with human impact. For living in the Athropocene—“a geological age of our own [un/]making” (Revkin 1992, p. 55)—human impact on the environment is approaching a planetary tipping point that is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and one which “threatens us all” (Vince 2012). This threat situates it as transnational, or cosmopolitan, in scope and is one in which education is seriously lacking not only in public schooling.

Climate Change, or We are All (Not) in This Together

In writing upon a vision for a green modernity, Beck (2010) asks: “Why is there no storming of the Bastille because of the environmental destruction threatening mankind, why no Red October of ecology?” (p. 254). The answer to his question is found in the fact that environmental affairs, unlike human affairs, have so far been seen as “an expert and elitist discourse” which does not provide a level playing field for the voices of the laypeople to be heard. The way to disrupt this expert/layperson binary is to (finally) recognize that “the environment” is not separate from human beings who are the actors that make action possible. Separating the two is “scientifically mistaken and politically suicidal.” Beck proposes eight theses to help put climate politics into the hands of the people, and it is the sixth thesis where he speaks upon “cosmopolitan events” (p. 260), or the what of cosmopolitanism. “[G]lobal risks can become ‘cosmopolitan events’” when the mass media turns something that was invisible into something visible by way of “staging.” When the global public is able to simultaneously witness and respond to world risks (turned catastrophe), they become cosmopolitan.

The key example that Beck attends to in order to elucidate what is cosmopolitan about world risks is climate change. By way of the “mediapolis,” the global public is now able to behold effects of climate change via “visually arresting images” (p. 261) such as irreversible glacier collapse (NASA 2014), starving polar bears turned cannibalistic (Amos 2011), and flooding brought on by extreme weather patterns in places like Mozambique (Dobson 2006) and the Balkans (Thomson 2014). Indeed, climate change “may yet prove to be the most powerful of forces summoning a civilizational community of fate into existence” (Beck 2010, p. 261). With Beck’s analysis at hand, cosmopolitanism is cast not as a “harmonious image” (Todd 2009, p. 16) or “comforting philosophy…couched in some nice language of ‘care,’ ‘love,’ or ‘empathy’” (p. 20) as it has been in educational cosmopolitanism at the cost of ignoring the “antagonism, violence, and hatred [that are] part and parcel of humanity itself” (p. 19). Rather, it is described as an empirical reality that imposes a shared human existence regardless of how individuals or collectives might feel about that commonality (Beck 2009, p. 56). World risks (turned catastrophe) can spur on action that the “cosmopolitan moment” gives rise to or they can spell out doom. What Beck (2010) does not attend to nearly enough here in his argument that climate change has the capacity to “prompt transnational reflexivity” (p. 260) are the ways that is also divides people across national and political lines.Footnote 3

While it is not the point of this paper to argue that one version of cosmopolitanism is right or wrong or better or worse than the other, I do emphasize that educational cosmopolitanism has by and large focused upon human affairs, notably intended human versus human violence without sufficiently attending to the violence that humans have exercised upon the planet and the violence that the planet has, in turn, exercised upon us. This latter unintended corollary might also be called the “boomerang effect” (Beck 1992, p. 37) of successful modernization. The boomerang effect has adverse consequences not only for the unmodernized and trying-to-modernize weak who suffer first and most severely at the hands of the powerful (former) colonizer (Dobson 2006, pp. 173-175), but it also does for the agents who have created and profited from their own technological feats (Beck 1992, p. 37). In an ironic twist, triumphant modernization refuses to acknowledge the possibility of (not) withstanding a future of its own un/making.

The Boundlessness of Radioactive Contamination

To elucidate Beck’s analysis of the boomerang effect of successful modernization, I turn to the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, a cosmopolitan event with a beginning yet no end in sight (Spector 2012). Certainly the unwitting victims of Fukushima, a “profoundly man-made disaster” (Kurokawa as cited in The National Diet of Japan 2012), have experienced, are experiencing, and will continue to experience for generations unmeasurable ramifications from the three reactor explosions. These consequences are both immediate and local—e.g., many nuclear refugees from the Fukushima prefecture are living in make-shift government housing, having been forced to leave their homes where generations of families lived and died (Kageyama 2014)—and gradual and global—e.g., trans-Pacific migrating Bluefin tuna caught off the coast of San Diego have been found to contain traces of cancer-causing cesium linked directly to Fukushima (Fessenden 2013).

While Beck (2010) argues that invisible world risks become visible through media re-presentation thereby creating the capacity to incite transnational action, it should also be pointed out that manufactured globally dispersed radiation contamination is an invisible enemy which, in the case of Fukushima, has been called both “negligible” and “beyond authority” by the juridical branch despite lawsuits claiming otherwise (Hofilena 2013; see also Iwata 2011). Fukushima can be seen to function as an exemplar of the juridical failure to act justly toward a situation “completely beyond comprehension” (Nakayama 2013). This inability to comprehend also troubles academia which has by and large avoided confronting the un/confrontable problem of modern man’s destructive relationship with our own habitat, epitomized by the mind-numbing, soul-terrorizing threat of nuclear annihilation. If thinking about bio-politics faces great “difficulties and resistances” as Giorgio Agamben (1998, p. 4) understands in his penetrating analysis on the subject, then what, too, are the difficulties and resistances to thinking about earth-politics? This is a subject that has yet to be carefully mined in cosmopolitan studies.

Additionally, while Japan is not a United States colony in the strict sense of the term, it was the United States that brought atoms for peace to Japan after first experiencing its atoms for war. Since Tokyo Electric Power Company signed a pact with the “atomic devil,” Japan was able to quickly modernize (see Bloomberg News 2011). The unintended side effects of modernization are catching up with its intended successes. Not only Japan’s nuclear power village has been coming undone since Fukushima began; the nuclear industry in other parts of the world has been faring poorly, too (Harvey 2012), with Germany planning to shut down all their nuclear reactors by 2022 (Pidd 2011). On one hand, Fukushima reveals how both the weak (and largely innocent) and powerful (and largely guilty) cannot escape the side effects of modernization. Even if the bow of the ship begins to sink before the stern, the entire boat will eventually descend into oblivion. On the other hand, Fukushima also shows how a (mis)fortunate event of global horror opens up the possibility of new (green) beginnings (see Beck 2009, p. 49) not only on a governmental level but also by way of grassroots activism as seen in mothers across Japan engaging in unprecedented anti-nuclear protests (Tremonti 2012) in a society historically understood as hierarchical and patriarchal. In short, it is true that Fukushima poses unprecedented ethical and juridical challenges that have resulted in both failures and prospects for world renewal. What these failures and prospects mean for education and the future not only of our species will be considered after attending to a (not so) different kind of environmental issue of global concern: bioinvasion. A “deterritorializing” (Clark 2002, p. 103) ecological problem, biological invasion opens up Papastephanou’s (2012) ethico-political critique of cultural cosmopolitanism in new and important ways.

Bioinvasion and Its Intolerances

What do exotic species have to do with nuclear issues?Footnote 4 In a creative opening to his study on bioinvasion and environmental cosmopolitanism, Nigel Clark (2002) juxtaposes late 19th century European farming techniques in New Zealand to a proposal made 100 years later for transporting recycled nuclear fuel used for fast breeder reactors from Europe to Japan via the Tasman Sea. The proposed shipment was said to include a cargo of concentrated plutonium not sufficiently equipped to tolerate “the maximum credible accident” (Fitzsimons as cited in Clark 2002, p. 101); an industrial risk that could potentially be more disastrous than Chernobyl. An arguably similar disaster did, in fact, take place in New Zealand when a class of “late-Victorian vermin” (Clark 2002, p. 102) introduced to help control the population of rats and rabbits became “another type of ‘fast-breeder’ reaction” that had unintended lethal consequences on other indigenous populations. To this day, the presence of these invasive vermin continues to wreak havoc on the “colonial periphery…[and] is of profound ecological significance, no less an expression of global interconnectivity than the nuclear issue.” It has been argued by some scientists that as a consequence of increased global interconnectivity, the greatest danger to ecological disintegration is, along with habitat loss, invasive species (Clark 2002).

Framing much of Clark’s (2002) analysis of invasive biology is scholarship on “environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities” (p. 105), with particular attention placed on Beck’s (1995) “undelimitable hazard situations” (p. 156) that characterize world risk society. While Beck’s undelimitable event focuses primarily upon the dangers of (post)industrial technologies, Clark takes aim at the natural habitat; he pushes the boundaries of cosmopolitanism “from below” as a human practice to that geared toward practices and mobilities occurring in the plant and non-human animal world (p. 105), namely that of the “weedy, opportunist organisms” (p. 113) referred to in the title of his paper, “The Demon-Seed.” Clark also takes exception with the ways that cosmopolitanism, particularly its postmodern influenced refashioning, assigns “guard-rail[s]” (p. 105) to what “from below” entails. As illustrated not only in educational cosmopolitanism, “practice from below” (Kurasawa 2007, p. xii; see also Todd 2009; Papastephanou 2012) still signifies those practices done by and for those at the top of the food chain. This form of speciesism is bewildering given the alarming reality of the human-manufactured global ecological crisis that threatens just about everyone and everything.

It has also been said that environmental cosmopolitanism is arguably an oxymoron—at least when cosmopolitanism is understood as a cultural concept. Environmentalists and environmental education tend to emphasize the importance of place, placed-based learning, and rootedness to the natural landscape. In juxtaposition, “[f]or cultural cosmopolitans…if the roots begin to feel toxic the plant must cut loose and relocate” (Hansen 2010, p. 154). Similarly, Appiah (2006) says that the impulse for human beings “to migrate is no less ‘natural’ than the urge to settle” (p. xviii). This understanding of cosmopolitanism is, as already hinted at, one that Papastephanou (2012) rightfully finds troubling given its tendency to slip into discussions about the ways cosmopolitans like to live; i.e., they prefer inhabiting such places as wealthy Western urbane metropolises—the higher up in the skyscraper, the better—versus living in that of rural areas and the “‘unspoilt’ charms of the countryside or wilderness” (Clark 2002, p. 105). Related this line of thought but taking it a step further, Orr (1994) makes the judgment that “New York City” (p. 131) centric filmmaker Woody Allen’s “biophobia” (see pp. 131–132, 135, 137) “is not OK” (p. 135). Fear of the natural world like that of Allen’s, he maintains, is a “result of deformed childhoods.”Footnote 5

It is impressive that Clark (2002) has the intrepidity to reference the “comparison between the oppression of Jews and the control of weeds” (p. 121) in a paper on translocated biotic invaders. This comparison nevertheless could use more unpacking if cosmopolitanism is to be understood as an ethical stance a la Papastephanou (2012). As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, a weed is a herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation. Clark (2002) points out that “ecologically undesirable elements are viewed with blatant repulsion” (p. 106) and, I would add, without taking into consideration that it is human beings who are the primary agents for introducing new species to environments. But rather than seriously attend to the meaning behind this and other unintended ironies of world risk society and its profit-driven outcomes (Beck 2009, p. 9, 37), which might actually help humanity move toward inner-enlightenment—the only kind of enlightenment that has a chance of remedying an outer world of our un/making—the kind of research that gets funded big dollars prefers to focus on destroying undesirable otherness with, for example, systemic herbicides such as Roundup weed killer. In research done on Roundup, it has been discovered, ironically, that one of the herbicide’s side effects is that it also destroys human DNA (Gammon 2009). Pushing Beck’s (2009) analysis of the unintended ironies of world risk society further, can it be definitively said that it is modern man who is the undelimitable hazard that threatens all walks of life of earth? If so, can education do anything about this hazard?

Eco-Ethical Commitment: What Will It Take and Will It Have Impact?

It has been argued that to “rescue the earth,” and the “human prospect on the earth” (Orr 1994, p. 122), education needs to be radically reimagined and reconstituted. There are barriers to this work, of course. Orr argues that, first, is the problem of remedying the risks turned catastrophe that humankind has created. While disasters often happen quickly, cleaning them up takes a great deal more time (pp. 122–123). Indeed, one of the largest engineering projects in history is underway at Chernobyl where a giant arch is being built to help cut back on the possibility of new radioactive releases into the environment (Meo 2013). Half way across the planet and 25 years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the world is experiencing Fukushima’s explosions and will be for generations. The “biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of humankind” (Gundersen as cited in Welch 2013), Fukushima is a “story of human disaster that may never end” (Kelts 2014). Second, there is the “widespread tendency to deny the seriousness of our situation” (Orr 1994, p. 124). This form of denial is rooted in the modern mentality that new and improved technologies will solve humanity’s problems even when it was certain kinds of technologies that created them in the first place. The tendency to deny is alive and well in Japan as spoken by the country’s pro-nuclear Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, (as cited in Tabuchi 2012) who asserts that the new nuclear reactors Japan plans to build “will be completely different from those at Fukushima.” Third, is the fact of “cheap citizenship” (Orr 1994, p. 124), i.e., citizenship only entails caring about oneself. Such carelessness and thoughtlessness for others leads to the creation of global catastrophes. To this point, the philosophy of Japan’s nuclear power village is “economy comes first” (Naka as cited in Hano 2012). In the words of Sayomi (as cited in BBC News 2012), a mother of one of the children who died in the Tohoko tsunami: “For people in authority as long as it’s not their own child who’s dead, as long as they are not the ones living in radioactive areas, they don’t care.”

Fourth and last, the way that the public receives critical information about the world is through watered down news reports which are more interested in ratings than they are about the serious implications of the information itself (p. 125). This fourth barrier to rescuing the earth—and related to the third—is an example of the “organized irresponsibility” (Beck 2009, p. 59) of the neoliberal state (p. 62). To this point, the bioinvasion of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades—“an International Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site, and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance” (National Park Service 2014)—comes largely to the awareness of the global public via the Nat Geo Wild internationally broadcasted television program Python Hunters. Rather than engaging in serious discussion on the ways that global commerce has created the problem in the Everglades to begin with—as side effects from trade in exotic species in the exotic pets trade hub of Miami—the viewing public can instead be “entertained right into oblivion” (Orr 1994, p. 125) by watching manly men hunt, wrestle, and trap the alien invaders thereby perpetuating the erroneous Enlightenment narrative that man has the power to dominate nature. Python Hunters is also an example of the ways in which world risks have become a profitable business (see Beck 2009, p. 9). Turning world risks into a business is arguably the most dangerous, short-sighted business plan the world has ever come to know.

It is nonetheless argued that these barriers to putting the earth back in balance (p. 122) can be overcome with the proper “reeducation of teachers, administrators, and board of trustees” (p. 127). These are the people who “shape the minds that will shape the future.” Orr’s wary optimism about the power of education to build ecologically sustainable communities might strike one as naïve. Yet, his perspective gets reinforced 25 years later in Beck’s (2009) description of the ways that (mis)fortunate events (p. 49) “set free a ‘cosmopolitan moment’” (p. 48) characterized by new beginnings. While Beck does not relate his analysis of world risks to the power of formal (re)education, it can be said that the global public has begun to receive an informal education on world risks, which are today propelling transnational bottom-up action. Certainly, the “anthropological shock” (p. 70) experienced as a result of the 2004 Asian tsunami “forbids apathy” (p. 69) as illustrated by the “unprecedented willingness to donate to the relief efforts” (p. 58). This sense of cautious optimism regarding bottom-up practices for “political and cultural renewal” (see also Clark 2002, p. 102) is being interpreted in a less optimistic, though not totally grim, fashion by Giroux (2014) who sees “new waves of resistance…especially among young people” in retaliation to the neoliberal attack on democracy which includes exploitation of the planet. Yet these youth movements across various countries have yet to develop a sense of cosmopolitan solidarity needed to make a real impact. If the movements stay fragmented, “no significant change will take place” and the “destruction of human life and the planet itself” will be imminent.

What can education do in the face of a United Nations’ (UN) report considered by scientists to be “the most comprehensive assessment to date on the impacts of climate change on the world” (McGrath 2014)? How also might educators engage students in discussion on the following excerpt from the report?

Global climate change risks are high to very high…and include severe and widespread impacts on unique and threatened systems, substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security, and the combination of high temperature and humidity compromising normal human activities, including growing food or working outdoors in some areas for parts of the year (high confidence). The precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points…remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the earth system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature (medium confidence). (IPCC 2014, p. 14)

Generally speaking, the answer to these questions has been: turn a blind eye. A book that might help educators think through these questions when imagining a radical revision of the modern curriculum in and for the ecological crisis is Requiem for a Species (Hamilton 2010). The preface of the requiem is foretelling:

Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. When the facts are distressing it is easier to reframe or ignore them. Around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming…It’s the same with our own deaths; we all “accept” that we will die, but it is only when our death is imminent that we confront the true meaning of our mortality. (p. x)

While writing this paper, I engaged in extensive conversation with a friend who is an entomologist specializing in invasive species. The subject of education naturally came up given my own field of research. From your perspective, I asked him, can education help fix the global ecological crisis? To solve something of this magnitude, he said, people will have to die on a mass scale first. But when this begins to happen, I thought, will humankind still have the capacity to create new beginnings?