John Schwenkler and Clark Stooksbury point to this Bill Kauffman column on the importance of identification with and loyalty to place, and he makes many of the points that need to be made, especially with respect to the policy implications of a rootless and boundless internationalism. The connection between a lack of local horizons that define a person and the lack of any sense of limits on what constitutes national interest is an important one. Unable to mind their own business, because they do not really have their own business, rootless people seem to find meaning in supporting projects everywhere and anywhere.
His position makes me uncomfortable because it reminds me that cosmopolitanism and conservatism do not make ready company. What conservative will speak poorly of 'identification with and loyalty to place?'* I am made doubly uncomfortable because I understand my cosmopolitanism to be more properly basic to my beliefs than my conservatism. The lure of cosmopolitanism is, for me, in part a reflection of my ecumenicist Christianity, which relies heavily on the dissolution of difference in Christ as found in Galatians 3**, the imperatives for other-regard in, say, Proverbs 24:10-12, and finds one apotheosis in Grotius' insistence that all distinctions among people, though serving valuable and important functions, are effaced by the clear and simple demands made by common humanity.
To return to the question at hand: surely we owe our first loyalty to those who are closest to us? Certainly we do, and in some circumstances giving proper regard to the needs of those closest will exclude (for reasons of time or energy) those further afield, but I don't know that we can ever have, on that basis, a reason to exclude those concerns. It is simply the case that in the world, there are a number of people who just are rootless, lacking a place to which they can be loyal, or a place that (in any meaningful sense) would deserve loyalty. Dedication to place is all well and good, but conservatism needs something to say to those people, yes?
*Not me; my desires for home, family, and a community of which I can be a part are, I think, perfectly typical
**I have a difficult time accepting Rorty or Connolly's belief that formation of identity necessarily implies exclusion, for precisely this reason.
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