Cosmotopia

Fellow came up to me. He was from Sri Lanka. He mentioned how funny it was the Americans started doing something about disaster relief only after the argument was made that failure to do so would be used by Al Qaeda to increase support among the Muslim victims of the disaster. Aside from being patently false the interesting thing is that he did not expect me to be offended. Nor did he have any reason to think I would be. After all, I am an academic and academics aren’t Americans, they are citizens of the world. His years in the U.S. academic world had lead him to expect that a professor would naturally see himself as a citizen of the world, not of America. He was not being provocative in insulting my country since, as a fellow academic, he implicitly assumed that my country was the “cosmopolitos” or “cosmotopia” that imagined community of the enlightened that will one day rule the world as soon as the U.S. can be persuaded to cede sovereignty to the UN and fund enough international bureaucrats.