Stoic Cosmopolitanism
Part 1: Three Approaches
Cosmopolitanism is subject to a lot of platitudes and baseless ethical assumptions. Much discussion of Stoic cosmopolitanism falls into these unintelligent ideas since it falls in line with received liberal-secular values.
That we should respect and value one another is so often repeated to us that we’ve accepted it by rote without really knowing why we ought to do so. Morality was invented for people who cannot think.
With an ethical impulse without sound reasoning, people are left with cognitive dissonance. We’re globalists who put our nations first, or egalitarians who want the best for our children.
But in the Stoic tradition, cosmopolitanism has a function behind its form. To understand cosmopolitanism, we need to understand Stoic theology. In the ancient Stoic system, God is immanent in all things, but human beings have more God within them by virtue of the capacity to reason.
God is the ordering logic of the world — the “divine logos” — and human reason reflects that logic. This is the result of human beings having within them more pneuma — God’s breath that carries the divine logos. In light of this capacitive ability to reason, all human beings are sacred and dignified.
