Chapter Nine Cosmopolitanism, Political Conscience and Higher Consciousness A human being is a part of a whole—called by us “Universe”—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Albert Einstein, New York Post: 1972.) The world is slowly waking up to the proposition that, as Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in “Liberalism, Individuality and Identity”: “A free self is a human self” (2001: 326). Yet the concept of exactly what constitutes freedom is contingent and variable, as are the means of how to attain it; it can be based upon religious zeal and fought for by hunger strikers or suicide bombers, by the saint and the fanatic. This is nothing new, yet the extent to which so-called “religious” extremists or neo-fundamentalists (who in fact follow a political jihad) claim their status of freedom implicates increasing violence to populations around the globe. A recent novel such as V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds dramatises the historical uncertainties of winners and losers, oppressed and oppressors, and problematises concepts behind notions of revolution and violence against imperialism. By avoiding questioning realities and choices, the protagonist is trapped within his jaded ethical stance and ambivalent involvement with freedom fighters/terrorists, until he realises: “‘one man’s quest or self- fulfilment, can be noble. But what I am seeing is awful’” (2004: 200). Postcolonialism revolves around the concept and positioning of the “other”, yet now the “other” is increasingly non-locatable within geographical space. The postcolonial has negotiated and expressed the voice of the oppressed, problematising agency and freedom, but the current status of neo-colonialism demands a new level and mode of understanding issues of self and other. The world is in need of a cross- cultural vision, one that offers alternatives to conflict and violence based on racial and national identities, the small “i” of identity. 214 Relocating Consciousness 1. Cosmopolitan concepts In this global era, cultures can no longer be defined as separate entities; the world is being re-mapped and re-visioned, necessitating a holistic understanding based on a more profound level than mere concern or intellectual reasoning. Women and men of goodwill have, after all, since the dawn of civilisation struggled to ameliorate the suffering of their fellow humans on this planet. More recently, some academics have striven to keep up with the fast moving trends in world events and the world’s mood, the international moves for peace, for example, represented and endorsed by Nelson Mandela, who was able to move beyond concepts of retribution and reparation.i In a review of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie eloquently explores how the notion of migration can also contain within it that of rebirth. He locates the urgency and sentiment inherent within the sense of a writer feeling obliged to bring his new world into being by an act of pure will, the sense that if the world is not described into existence in the most minute detail, then it won’t be there. The migrant must invent the earth beneath his feet. (1991: 149) In another essay, Rushdie has claimed that the effect of mass migration “has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places […] people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur” (1981: 124). If, as we have seen, we are all to certain degrees definable as migrants, so hopefully such strange fusions of imagination, memory, and being- ness are possible on ever-widening spheres of “imaginative relationship with the world” (ibid: 125). The growing interest in concepts such as cosmopolitanism confirm the awareness amongst academics and writers that alternative realities can and must be envisioned. The notion of cosmopolitanism is one that has long been projected as an alternative to the nation-state and as a basis for a boundary-free ethic of life, with the aim of creating the redefinition of social hierarchies and an alternative approach to existence to one based on wars and conflict. It also now presents an important method of analysing literature and film, as well as a mode of cultural production based on new interactions and alliances. (New areas in art and performance, such as international and transnational cinema and theatre, reflect this trend.) .