Cosmopolitanism is Intellectual Nonsense

Or so claims Newt Gingrich.

The blogosphere is abuzz with claims that Gingrich's remarks are aimed directly at statements made by Barack Obama during his visit to Germany in 2008--which they are--and amused by Gingrich's obvious failure to acknowledge that one of his ideological heroes, Ronald Reagan, also laid claim to being a citizen of the world in his UN General Assembly address in 1982.

But Gingrich's comments expose more than just his petty partisanship and recent historical amnesia. His claim that the very idea of being a "citizen of the world" is "intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous" reveals profound depths of ignorance for someone who is popularly regarded as an intellectual heavyweight in the Republican party.

The idea of world citizenship has ancient roots. It stretches back to the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, was embraced by Cicero and Seneca, was a source of deep interest for Christian humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More, and received substantial philosophical treatment by Immanuel Kant and, more recently, Jurgen Habermas (among others). Thus to proclaim the idea "intellectual nonsense" is to proclaim oneself an uneducated fool. In claiming it to be "intellectual nonsense," Gingrich has in effect positioned himself as the intellectual superior to philosophers like Kant, who, following Gingrich's line of argument, clearly wasted his time on a concept that has as much intelligibility as Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky."

I'll leave it to others to decide who has better claim to the mantle "intellectual": Gingrich or Kant.