the riptide: a cosmopolitan perspective

nikola hale

Stepping through the liminality of the lockdown to a reset, a redesign, a re-imagining.

*In my childhood summers on Long Beach Island, we heard the word “riptide” for the dangerous undertow which could suck you out into the ocean. It seemed to be a perfect metaphor for the coronavirus. Now I stand corrected: this is actually called a “rip current.” But the feeling evoked by “riptide” fits better here!

The global pandemic sucked the security out of our daily experience and the certainty about everything we took for granted. Just as a dangerous riptide* lurks invisibly under the waves, the outbreak of the corona virus in Wuhan was observed first here in Europe as something which wouldn’t affect us. We ignored the clues, as our powerholders did, for political or other reasons, until it was too late. Now we see that this riptide has squelched human activities to various degrees in every corner of the earth. We have allowed our governments and industries to accelerate the spread of economic disparity and impact on climatic change. And this has finally become nakedly apparent. A spectrum of reactions to the impact of COVID-19 has become evident, depending on whether someone has an invisible backpack of privileges or belongs to an isolated marginalized group.

The best-selling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari, claimed recently in The Guardian,“…the dominant cultural reaction to COVID-19 isn’t resignation-it is a mixture of outrage and hope.”

What remains is this: what are we now doing with the huge gap this riptide created?                                 We had become human DOINGS, not human BEINGS, and then the pandemic slowed us down. It forced us to reconsider what is essential. And what is not. Will we just return to the accelerated busyness? To running around, blind, to what we really need?

A new cosmopolitan perspective can support us in re-viewing our paradigms, re-thinking our value to society and re-designing our influence. This shift requires a reset of our self-image as builders, not only consumers, in the disrupted world of blended environments, combining the physical and the virtual.

Waiting the lockdown out is a luxury that only a powerful minority can afford. We share confusion and anxiety about the curtailing of many human activities. But at the same time, we see the birth of promising new ways of working and being with each other.

**For the sake of simplicity, the term “intercultural” is used to describe border-crossing work of whatever kind of diversity. This can be your ethnic or national identity, but also any other kind of diversity we need to honor, professional, religious, sexual orientation, organizational, generational, or other collectivities we self-identify with. I am using “interculturalist” for practitioners and researchers actively working with cultural diversities.

Are you still carrying the illusion that we can “get back” to what was previously normal? Or are you rushing ahead as quickly as possible to re-imagine a new normal for some day in the future? The lockdown and social distancing already ARE our “next normal”, at least for now. How will people who care about intercultural communication and collaboration participate in building new ways of working during and after the global pandemic?

How can we do anything right now in early 2020 without reflecting on the pandemic and its impact on our interactions across cultural borders?

I returned to the lockdown in Germany from an extended retreat in India, where I become aware, every time I visit, of my inability to always decode what’s going on. Now walking down the empty streets of my city, social dancing around the people who approach me on the sidewalk, I arrive at a supermarket. Slipping on my mask, I realize that here, too, I don’t know which behaviors are expected in this space, and familiar feelings arise.

The ambiguity reminds me of the mantra I often repeat from one of the main researchers in GLOBE project, at Thunderbird School of Management, Mansour Javidan, “Having a global mindset means being comfortable with being uncomfortable in an uncomfortable environment.” (Javidan, 2013:145).

Is liminality scary or exciting for you? Are you curious or do you want to go home?

Can you find your comfort in being uncomfortable in this lockdown, in the restraints the global pandemic has brought onto us? Or are you still complaining? Can we learn from our thoughts and behaviors in the liminal space which the corona virus has pushed on us? Growing our resilience and agility to thrive in the ambiguity of the unknown are the very competences we need to develop in our interculturally-connected world these days. ………………………………………………….

A spectrum of reactions to the impact of COVID-19 has become evident, depending on whether someone has an invisible backpack of privileges or belongs to an isolated marginalized group. The privileges we on LinkedIn have include the luxury of quarantining, access to health care, and an internet connection. Many whose lives we indirectly affect do not have reliable access to the internet, and possibly, no place to shelter or social distance, no water to wash hands or food to feed kids properly. We all are experiencing a loss of control over our movements and our encounters, but we still have our freedom to decide what we do with these restraints.

The media has exposed us to the many faces: from the migrant workers outside of New Delhi, trying to walk home to Uttar Pradesh, to the impossibility of social distancing in the sprawling refugee camp of Zaatari, to the nightmare of victims’ bodies left on the street in Guayaquil, and to the various reactions to first responders and medical workers worldwide. The bored cocooners who fled New York City to their mansions in the Hamptons remind me of the wealthy Florentines who escaped the Pest in the 14th century to a villa in Fiesole; they binged on their stories each night, the way we binge on Netflix. Comfy in front our laptops, we are fed images of how others around the world are coping, or not ; while sitting in our zoom meetings and heated, medically safe homes in Germany, we are forced to reflect on our membership in a global society that is larger than our own little tribes and cohorts.

A political philosopher at Harvard, Michael J. Sandel, wrote in the New York Times this morning, “the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to reconsider which social and economic roles matter most”. Are we truly all in this together, as “cosmopolites”, world citizens, or do some people seem to matter less? COVID-19 magnifies the divide between the haves and have-nots. If your role in society is not validated in times of social distancing, you risk losing respect, a sense of belonging, mental health and even your life. Those who can quickly pivot in the virtual environment are able to monetize their activities and benefit from the new normal. Some even enjoy this de-accelerated period to focus on what is truly essential for them. Using the wokeness which is beginning to manifest, we see it is time to use this new-found momentum to create radical contributions to the post-lockdown societies.

What comes to your mind when you hear “cosmopolitanism”?

When I asked my friends and colleagues what the term connoted for them, one colleague said, “a middle-aged or millennial couple sipping cocktails in a bar”. Another shared her view with a wink: a cosmopolitan is a person who is “worldly, well-read, widely traveled, at home in capital cities around the globe, connoisseur of the arts, perhaps an expert in dining etiquette abroad”. Writers on cosmopolitanism commonly begin their discussion by tracing the etymology to the Greek Cynics of the fourth century B.C., who coined the term, citizen (polites) of the world (cosmos). What does it mean today to be a citizen of the world? How can taking a new cosmopolitan perspective approach to intercultural work inform reconciliation of the dilemmas which have crept into our field?

Since Diogenes declared himself a cosmopolitan in the 4th century B.C., thinkers have pondered what it means to be a world citizen. Cosmopolitanism proposes that we belong to a global community of people that transcends local attachments and cultural identities. Since the post-modern cultural turn starting at the end of the 1960’s, writers have deliberated on how we view “culture”. Is it a thing or a process or both? Is “identity” based on primary socialization or is it a fuzzy hybrid composite? Is transcultural the same as intercultural? As such, numerous thinkers have also explored the concepts of a new cosmopolitanism, what cosmopolitan communication can mean, and how cosmopolitan perspectives can add value to intercultural communication. This essay touches upon three of these thinkers: Kwame Anthony Appiah, W. Barnett Pearce and Miriam Sobré-Denton, and shares some proposals from my experience in intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Why bother with cosmopolitanism?

The pandemic has woken many of us up and while many people suffer alienation and frustration, others are already experimenting with new paradigms of organizational and learning environments. I propose we plant the seeds for the design of a new non-alienated life. This will require curiosity and the humility to admit we don’t know the answers yet. When Anita Dube, the curator of the Art Biennale held in Kerala in 2018-19, entitled the exhibition “Possibilities for a Non-alienated Life”, she was referring to radical new propositions about modern culture and society.

Catalogue of Kochi-Muzuris Biennale 2018 in Kerala             

A new cosmopolitanism can provoke radical new propositions about intercultural communication on personal, organizational and global levels. Cosmopolitanism has been described by different authors as a concept, a mindset, a perspective and an approach, et al. I offer this definition-in-progress:

A new cosmopolitan perspective offers the intercultural discipline a fluid, dynamic and enabling approach for understanding Self and the cultural Other, for considering alternative views, for communicating with each other in multilogues, and for transcending the tensions of polarities such as same or different, universal or specific, global or local, in order to enable collaboration in a disrupted environment. (Hale, 2020)

***The term “multilogue” is used far too rarely, and it means an intentional “many-to-many” or multiple person conversation.  

However, a radical new proposition cannot be developed by one person alone, since that would negate the entire concept of enabling a cosmopolitan perspective in intercultural communication. We need to ***multilogue with each other to mutually design plausible ways of collaborating in diversity. In what Gerard Delanty calls our “post-western world,” (Delanty, 2009:9), we need to learn from formal scholars outside of Europe to infuse our conversations with global varieties of cosmopolitanism. In no way comprehensive, this is a list of just some thinkers we could explore: Sami Nair, Edward Said, Amin Maalouf, Fujuki Kurasawa, Homi Bhabha, Ken Wilber, et al. (We obviously need more voices from diverse philosophers on cosmopolitanism!) Practitioners are invited to contribute how they would inject insights from these and other non-European thinkers into our development of a new cosmopolitan perspective for intercultural collaboration.

Taking perspectives from a new cosmopolitanism for our intercultural activities can remind us of what we have in common, such as feelings of alienation outside our comfort zones, exhilaration at discovery of new insights we were previously too full of ourselves to notice, and joy in rediscovering what is essential to us. The global pandemic has enabled us to see what we were doing to the environment more clearly, just as the cleaner water in Venice now shows us the fish and swans who have reclaimed the canals. We can now identify subtle sounds on the quiet streets, such as tunes of the songbirds who have returned to the cityscape. Ultimately, a new cosmopolitan investigation of the liminal spaces and border crossings we are now experiencing will empower us. We will be able to comprehend and be enriched by claims of legitimate difference, such as how we “do” freedom, trust, respect, appropriateness, privacy, power, gender, etc. in the multiple collectivities we belong to.

What could a new non-alienated life look like?

Nathan Coley, A PLACE BEYOND BELIEF, part of installation viewed at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 

One of the things our new world needs is more collaboration in enriching each other. It is the nature of our multidisciplinary lifespace these days to have diverse interpretations of how we prefer to work and behave. We would be more convincing to colleagues and other stakeholders if we could explain this diversity in cognitive styles and interpretations. What do YOU mean when you talk about speed, efficiency or quality? Do you know what I mean? How do you differentiate between valuable contribution, active participation, and taking the initiative? How do you measure or development of competences and skills in your context? Which approaches do you use to ensure knowledge transfer and does that really work? And how do you know that the other guy really understood what you said? Only in multilogue with each other can we be enriched by each other’s perspectives. The goal does not need to be agreement upon absolute definitions, but to learn about the multiplicité, and co-create what we want and need in the specific project we are on. 

How can cosmopolitanism(s) inform our self-development?

The competences required in the next normal include dealing with ambiguity, building self-resilience to carry on, and communicating in inclusive ways which share voice and agency among all actors. If we are not only willing to listen, but want to be connected to cultural Others, then cosmopolitanism can provide us with a foundation of values and attitudes to work from. The first contemporary writer on cosmopolitanism I would like to mention is an analytic philosopher at Princeton, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who posits that a person can be a “rooted cosmopolitan” (Appiah, 1996), connected to their local particular attachments and simultaneously at home in other contexts. Appiah’s first strand in his understanding of cosmopolitanism reveals itself in our global pandemic. We have a “universal concern” and a “responsibility to others” who are not members of our family, clan, or citizenship (Appiah, 2006: xiii). In his second strand he insists upon “respect for legitimate difference” (ibid.) As we explore this respect with our partners, we need to ask ourselves: do we also feel and show this respect to those who have different cognitive styles, professional disciplines, academic backgrounds, gender, sexual identity and orientation, generation, and politically-based histories? A sankalpa (Sanskrit for affirmation, intention) I set for myself at age 19 in Mexico and only now can share with anyone is, “claim your difference”. Our unique difference is where we can draw our power and passion to create. Sharing this deep power in our self-work and group work, we can co-create radical new responses. We can learn to reduce our egos, dial up the reticent voices, dial down the dominant ones, and mentor each other. Appiah’s two strands gift us with a worldview of being simultaneously similar and different, and a reminder of our responsibility to each other.

What are indicators of Cosmopolitan Communication?

What can cosmopolitanism contribute to our understanding of intercultural collaboration? There is no one model of cosmopolitan communication, no universal diagnostic tool, no best set of categories or dimensions, and no binary polarities in a cosmopolitan perspective. Merely possessing knowledge about other contexts is insufficient for us to collaborate happily; we also need to remain curious about what the cultural Other wants and needs. Willingness to stay in conversation long enough to achieve mutual understanding is required. And yet, knowledge, curiosity and openness are still not enough; we also need to let go of our illusions of control over the outcome. Most essential of all, we need to grasp ubuntu, the belief in our interdependence on each other for the very appreciation of our existence (Eze, 2017). Through recognizing the essence of you inside me and my essence as a human being in you, we will feel safe and respected and validated in our quest for collaboration.

What are cosmopolitan communicative competences?

They are situational, performatory and multilogic. We develop communicative competences in dialogue or multilogue, in the situation we share with that other, and in the actions we are performing together. The best practices which ensue are not directly transferrable to the next hybrid setting; the process of discovery is iterative for every collaborative project we participate in. Through self-reflection and group reflection, allowing commonalities and diversities to be revealed, we enter the encounter without assuming we know the solution, even if we have immense similar experience. Using the cosmopolitan perspective of respect for difference and distance, together with responsibility for the other, we experience self-transformation.

The late W. Barnett Pearce, a scholar and practitioner at Fielding Graduate University, proposed that cosmopolitan communication transcends barriers to cooperation by acknowledging that everyone is both similar and different. “Cosmopolitan communication results from a commitment to find ways of achieving coordination without denying the existence of humanity of “other” ways of achieving coherence.” (Pearce, 1989:169). His lifework on communication provides us with a sophisticated, yet accessible set of tools, techniques and concepts in CMM, the “coordinated management of meaning” (Pearce, 189: xvii). CMM supports cosmopolitan communication as we move through evolutionary phases in the evolution of communication in multicultural environments from what he called monocultural, ethnocentric, modernistic to, ultimately, cosmopolitan communication.

Pearce elaborates in this way: “monocultural communicators” project their communication preferences onto cultural others through their assumption that everyone should be treated as similar. “Ethnocentric communicators” treat those from their in-group as similar to themselves and those in their outgroup as different. Pearce sees “modernistic communication” as illustrated by actors who treat everyone as different. In contrast, he describes “cosmopolitan communication” as a vision of coordinating meaning management which will enable collaboration between actors, who are both similar to me and simultaneously different from me. Pearce’s connectedness and yet difference dovetails with Appiah’s two strands in proposing a new cosmopolitanism in which we can move beyond the dichotomies of the past decades of essentialism and arrive at a new approach towards working in ambiguity and “next normals.”

Finally, it was a treat to discover the last two researchers to be showcased here: Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan, whose research needs more profound exploration than this short essay can possibly offer. Their invaluable textbook provides a multi-modal approach to a new cosmopolitan pedagogy by “defining, critiquing and operationalizing cosmopolitanism”. (Sobré-Denton, p. 162). They add value to our understanding of cosmopolitanism, tracing how it has been reframed from the formerly elitist Eurocentric orientation towards an approach which offers application to our daily operations. Audre Lorde is cited with words which powerfully resonate for me, “Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund ….. from which our creativity can spark…within the interdependence of mutual non-dominant differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future…” (Lorde in Sobré-Denton, p.42-43).

*VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity; coined by Bennis and Nanus in 1987 at US Army War College. The global pandemic is a fitting example of a VUCA occurrence: an external event which came over us quickly, without advance notice, which was complex and for which we did not have a ready solution.

Let us return to the initial inquiry into how a cosmopolitan perspective can support us as interculturalists in re-imagining our fields of influence in post-lockdown societies. The focus of our intercultural work needs to be on competences necessary for the VUCA* world of unpredictability. With hybrid socio-cultural identities and loyalities to multiple heritages, we provide a path to clarity with diverse perspectives. On a good day, we are aware of the blinders we are wearing, but might have unintentionally allowed the information overload these days to hijack our brains. Have we turned into human DOINGS, as opposed to human BEINGS, who no longer take enough time to be with ourselves and be with each other?

In order to remain relevant, we need to cultivate the practices of witnessing the disruptions of the VUCA* environment and redesigning what the environment needs from us today. There are huge gaps now exposed which need to be re-imagined, not just quickly filled up thoughtlessly. Our challenge is to rethink our society with more participation for marginalized groups, and incorporating voices not heard in the past, and voices never heard in former spheres of power. The concepts of cosmopolitan communication, the cultural commonalities and responsibility for each other and a deep recognition of the value and creative power of our differences, mean shifting our paradigms.

Regardless of how you experience this period of social distancing, closed public spaces and forbidden group gatherings, the riptide of the global pandemic illuminates this reality: every step we take, or do not take, impacts everyone and everything else on our planet.

I wear my mask to protect you; you wear yours to protect me.

I invite you to take a cosmopolitan perspective of “same, same and different” in your intercultural interactions and in your daily practice of what you love to do: climbing, yoga, running, writing, cooking, reading, or others. Our practice doesn’t manifest itself the same way every day. Just as the asanas in yoga are expressed differently every time we get on the mat, our own practice can be light and breezy one day, ambitious and serious the next, jumpy and boisterous the following day, and perhaps on Friday, meditative and introspective. But you have to show up on the mat every day. Just like in life; you have to show up. To be alone, or to multilogue with your cultural Others. The interactions will be different every day. But will also feel similar.

I see you. Do you see me?

Nikola Hale, Professor for Intercultural Management and Communication, HFU Business School at Furtwangen University, Global Collaboration Enabler, icUnlimited consultants, member of Scientific Advisory Board, SIETAR Germany.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, (2006), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Penguin, London

……….(2004) The Ethics of Identity: a Rooted Cosmopolitan, Princeton University Press, Princeton

Delanty, Gerard, (2009),The Cosmopolitan Imagination: the renewal of critical social theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Eze, Michael Onyebuchi (2017) I am because you are: cosmopolitanism in the Age of Xenophobia, Palgrave MacMillan, London

Hale, Nikola, (2012) “The Cultural Intermezzo”, CULTUS Journal, Iconesoft Edizioni, Bologna

Harari, Yuval Noah, “Will Coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite.”The Guardian, 20 April 2020

Mansour, Javidan, et al. (2013) “The Global Mindset of Managers,” Organizational Dynamics, April,42(2):145-155

Pearce, W. Barnett, (1989) Communication and the Human Condition, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale

Sandel, Michael J.,” Are We All in This Together? The pandemic has helpfully scrambled how we value everyone’s economic and social roles.” New York Times, NYC, 13 April, 2020

Sobré-Denton, Miriam & Nilanjana Bardhan (2013), Cultivating Cosmopolitanism for Intercultural Communication, Routledge, London