Becoming a Cosmopolitan by Hill Jason D.;

Author:Hill, Jason D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 662187
Publisher: Stackpole Books

4

FORGETTING WHERE WE CAME FROM:

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF EVERY COSMOPOLITAN

Memory of a certain type reinforces a nostalgia for the familiar. It can breed sentimentality that valorizes the traditional because it is comforting and because it is the traditional. Fixation to the inherited and the bequeathed prevents the innovative and the creative from coming into existence. Like the inheritor who spends a lifetime slavishly devoted to preserving her father’s estate as it was, never considering effecting a change by applying her own style of management, the would-be cosmopolitan who fixates on the narratives and seductive myths spawned by the tribe stymies her potential for self-transformation. If the goal is to fight for a new self-interpretation, then one has to learn to forget the old and the familiar: the weight of ancestral values and of outdated tenets is too much for one to resist for oneself.

I recall another conversation with my friend Kevin, who came to the United States from South Africa at the age of fifteen. We met in college. He already had a degree in engineering and was taking classes in philosophy. We bonded immediately and often had long, candid conversations about our lives. He admitted to me that I was his first black friend and that he found the philosophical give-and-take fascinating, since the closest thing to a conversation he had ever had with a black person was to say, “Put the garden hose over there” to his gardener in South Africa. He once said to me that he wished he could forget everything about being South African and retain most things Jewish. We talked about this for a long time, and I came to understand the occasional embarrassment he felt over his socialization as a privileged Caucasian raised under apartheid. He regretted the way racist values had colored his view of people outside his racial category. I remember telling him that he had a right to forget where he came from, to forget the past that would prevent him from really seeing the world differently. In effect he was being held hostage by a set of values and a narrative paradigm that he had not chosen. I came to see that a moral forgetting would be necessary if he was to be successful in depathologizing crucial aspects of his self-image, at least those parts of his moral sensibilities that he came to accept as being morally questionable because they were mired in morally reprehensible beliefs and attitudes. If one were to speak in Freudian terms, one could say that in this case the superego had to be revamped and provided a different set of postulates and value premises. Claudia Card writes that there is such a thing as justifiably disowning a heritage. Forgetting dispenses with the attachment that makes difficult the resocialization of self and values warranted by any attempt at radical self-transformation. The enemy fought by a commitment to self-transformation is overdetermination. Forgetting can vanquish this enemy. It is a self-inflicted type of death to one’s past and the identities and the selves that were shaped to that past.

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