Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World

Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World by Julian Brookes in Mother Jones, an interview with Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in February 2006.

What’s distinctive about the cosmopolitan attitude is that it comes with a recognition that encounters with other people aren’t about making them like us. Cosmopolitans accept and indeed like the fact that people live in different ways; that free human beings will choose to live in different ways and will choose to express themselves in different ways. And that openness to difference comes, I think, from a kind of toleration combined with a recognition of human fallibility. One of the reasons why we’re glad there are people out there who aren’t like us is that we’re pretty certain that there are a lot of things we’re wrong about.