Cosmopolitanism and Religion

There is now a familiar narrative in the social sciences about how secularization ushered in a world of enlightenment and eventually a regime of individual rights that allowed cosmopolitanism to flourish. Thus it is argued that in the 20th century the majority of intellectuals welcomed secularization as the foundation of an expanding cosmopolitanism which was understood to be the humanistic culture of the city. Religion was seen to be the carrier of values and traditions that were contrary to the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and to the promise of secular modernity. As the narrow world of religious traditionalism was being eroded by the steady march of secular modernity, new opportunities arose for a more universal humanistic culture to replace the sterile world of religion. Modernity was increasingly hitched to globalization that experienced an upturn as a capitalist economic system spread worldwide with the consumer boom of postwar reconstruction. The preeminent cosmopolitan development was the mid-century growth of human rights. In response to civilian casualties, displaced persons, and economic depression, the concept of human dignity became the basis of the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As Samuel Moyn (2015) has shown, the Declaration was not in the first instance a response to the Holocaust, recognition of which came later as international law was increasingly developed within a rights framework. The acceptance of human rights was delayed by the growth of postcolonial nationalism in Asia and Africa, where human rights were often regarded as Western interference in the development of national sovereignty. However, after the 1970s, human rights became a global response to human suffering as recognition of the true enormity of the Holocaust became widely accepted. Although it can be disputed, the legal notion of genocide can no longer be exclusively identified with the destruction of Europe’s Jews. Large-scale genocidal conflicts have taken place in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan, and Myanmar.

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