The truth and lie on Cosmopolitanism

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“Cosmopolitanism” literally means the “”citizen of the world” which can be derived from the ancient Greek, ranging from Cynic and Stoic philosophers. Nowadays, cosmopolitanism has become more and more prevalence as the politics is becoming more and more global and international. Basically, all of the cosmopolitans share the idea that all the people in the world are equal regardless of their political affiliations. Cosmopolitanism is a view that its starting point is drawn from the individual rather than groups or communities. There are different issues that different cosmopolitans focused on, but I would like to argue about the cosmopolitanism on the political and moral level that is more representative and typical.

Political cosmopolitans give their strong arguments on building a global institution that could benefit all the human beings around the world and replace the old and ineffective one (the state). They argue that all human beings should aid fellow human. Nowadays, the global institution has already play their significant role of helping solve the world issues, such as the International Red Cross, Famine relief organization and the United Nation. It seems that the assumption of global institution is beneficial to all of the members.

However, in my point of view, the international communities build on the way of voluntarily and external will turn out to be a kind of straw. I think it is hardly to change the current state system. Firstly, there are so many different communities in the world that these communities s are sharing their own culture so they are holding heterogeneous backgrounds. Thus, building that kind of global political institutions may cause conflicts among different cultural groups. Secondly, the existing state is built from the contract of all the citizen’s decisions. Just as the realists’ debate that the nature of state is based on the Hobbes’s theory of contract, which means all of the citizens make a social contract and everyone go through a kind of cooperative obedience. This violation is caused by the higher level of integrity of a global institution, which will leave the countries with less power to make their decisions also the contract will be more difficult to agreed between individuals when the scale become global since more differences and conflicts are now need to be considered. Therefore, according to the Hobbes’s theory, I believe it is unrealistic to build a global institution.

Besides, from the view of post modernism and post colonialism, even though the global community is not going to have the strong political power, nor the military strength, the world is controlled by the groups, which are more developed rather than those developing groups. So the problem is that the global institution may lead to the despotism. For instance, the permanent members of the UN is consisted of 4 developed countries and only one developing country that the developed countries are on their dominant position on making the decision upon the international affairs. For example: when talk about the issues like environmental pollution, developed countries often blame developing countries but ignore the problems of their own. This is contrary to the justice and equality principle of cosmopolitanism and their ideal thought about the global institutions.

Nevertheless, this kind of realistic theory of building a real global institution may come true when the cultural and economical equality is realized around the world. Of course, there is also a modest version of cosmopolitanism that when asking for building global political institutions, they also admit the existing states.

When comes to the moral dimension of cosmopolitism, they defend the moral equality of all the people no matter where they live and human beings share the fundamental value of the human right.

In my point of view, cosmopolitans are not simply having hostility towards to cultural pluralism. They focus on how can individuals get into good life based on the virtue and the ethic principles, which can be refined from history that all community shared. We are more and more caught into the global issues even though we have no input in, such as the environmental problem, terrorism and some social problem such as the children and gender problem and the decisions made by other side of the world influences us a lot because of the globalization So, I do think the common bonds of the human beings need to be built to protect the most basic human rights and it is a really good point the cosmopolitans have made.

However, firstly, since every community has their own value standards, and we could not basically draw a clear line on which can be used to separate the absolutely good or wrong. From the communitarianism view of point, people identify themselves in the community because of the same memory of history, culture and society. So it is really difficult to realize the common value among human beings. For example, it is meaningless to talk about gender discrimination in an extreme poverty country.

Secondly, it is hard to definite the meaning and the standards of fundamental value. For example, how can we estimate the United States interference of other countries’ domestic affairs for the name of human right? They boost that they love everyone but they trigger a war to kill some one who is not regarded well-behaved from the view point of American value. It is so ironical that it makes me to think about the true meaning of the so-called “common value”. When the common value is built by more developed countries, it is skeptical that the common value is reasonable.

So, the moral way of analyzing cosmopolitanism may also end of its infeasible and unreliable. However, there is also a moderate version that considers people are supposed to finish their duty to help human beings around the world, but also need to care about their compatriots.

In conclusion, cosmopolitanism is a kind of idealistic way of thinking and when talks about building global political institutions and common humanities now, there are many limitations obstacle the way of its realization from the short-term of human history. However, in this more and more globalized world, cosmopolitanism do play its irreplaceable influence on the every issues of the international relationships and I believe cosmopolitanism can go further in influencing the long-term political decision-making.

focus on gender polarization

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Gender polarization aims to construct and to naturalize a gender-polarizing link between sex as well as psyche of one’s body and one’s sexuality. This chapter focuses on what scientists have done about providing legitimacy to both requirement of body sex matching with psyche gender and exclusive value of heterosexuality, which is a scientific tradition of gender polarization.

Sexual inversion refers to any individual with cross-gender desires. The study of sexual inversion firstly focuses on gender identity rather than sex-of-partner preference. At that time, sexual inversion is regarded as a less evolved form of human development because it may be one of the factors that threaten the order of sex and gender of society. However, with the development of society, people come to view inversion as more a pathology of sexual desire than pathology of gender. The effects from Ellis anticipate two branches of twentieth century of sexology, homosexuality of sexual orientation and masculinity-femininity of individual psyche.

The study of homosexuality starts from the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. Freud de-privileges heterosexuality by arguing that it is just one possible outcome of child’s psychosexual development, same as homosexuality. Two specific details have to be concerned that children are born without any objects for sexual instinct and sexual objects can be found only after a lengthy process of psychosexual development, which indicates that “the sexual instinct and sexual object are merely soldered together”. However, the successors of Freud change his notions to privilege the reproductive sexuality as the normal pattern though Freud has made clear at least three statements that homosexuality is not an illness or pathology. While the study of Freud is mainly on the basis of male, which indicates the condition of that time makes him unable to clear state that homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality. After 1930s, at least three basic changes are made to the psychoanalytic theory by Freud successors. First, they argue that heterosexual choice is natural which may blocked because of psychological or neurotic problems. Second, a homosexual choice presents an arrested development of pre-oedipal. Finally, sexual instinct is based on various social and interpersonal issues. All changes above tend to make homosexuality as a mental illness and able to get psychiatric treatment. Bergler, Kardiner, and Socarides come up with the views in fact abusive to homosexuality but they are not rebuked by the professions at that time. This attitude mainly leads to the consequence of federal witch-hunt starting from 1950s which makes lots of homosexual people lose their jobs. While at the same age, scientific challenges do exist towards pathology of homosexuality like Kinsey and Hooker. The research of other social organization indicates that two different social institutions are involved in the construction of exclusive heterosexuality. In 1973, homophobia is used but the problem of homosexual oppression still exists that the fear is from ideological emphasis on gender polarization.

Masculinity-femininity concerns of individual psyche. There are three traditions theorizes a gender-polarization link between the sex of body and gender of psyche. First, M-F assessment, invented by Terman and Miles, is a single dimension measure method, which has disadvantages that it just measures the adherence of individuals towards cultural norms; it has limitations of single dimension and anything other than masculinity or femininity is psychopathology. Second, treatment and prevention of gender identity disorders which regards transsexuality as discrete psychopathology is developed in 1952. Transsexualism can be diagnosed by three criteria but a great deal of controversy towards treatment exists. Then, theory of gender identity disorder of childhood is developed but it also has strong disadvantages to recognize features of transsexual inclination accurately at an early age. It is agreed that transsexualism should better to be conceptualized as a social pathology rather than individual pathology. Third, children are rigidly conforming because of masculinity- femininity gender polarization. According to Kohlberg, children seem to be active participants in the process of gender acquisition and the notion that rigid gender traditionalism is natural is not convincing because the preparational stage of cognitive development can be compelling to children at the first place and also children are not mature enough to understand the differences between male and female biologically. The stream of deconstructing of M-F also exists which represent by BSRI measure method which has three fundamental differences from the Terman-Miles one. The work on androgyny also develops but it also evokes a lot of critiques because the concept of it is utopian without abundant evidences. Also it in fact do not undercut the gender polarization but emphasize on contrary. The author turns her research on androgyny to gender schematic.

Q1: nowadays people may not regard homosexuality as illness but moral principles still have strong oppression on homosexuality. If the society believes in science in the past to treat homosexuality as illness, why today some people still treat homosexuality as monsters?

Q2: there is an inclination of gender neutralization in Asian countries that women are more manly than man and man are softer than women. The school is worried so they want to keep the boys more boy and girls more girl. Is this treatment appropriate?