Salman Rushdie The migrant condition is one of uprooting disjuncture and metamorphosis 1 Communitarianism cid 127 Modern liberal theorists place great stress on the autonomous individual leading his own life plan His rights are the liberties and protections needed to protect this ideal The liberal autonomy of Rushdie s vision is choice running rampant and pluralism internalized from the relations between individuals to the chaotic coexistence of projects pursuits ideas images and snatches of culture within an individual which is in part the cosmopolitan view The cosmopolitan is one who does not choose to be defined by his location ancestry citizenship or language Community is a term which is hard to have a sense of the scope and scale of community in the sense of ethinic community is a term worth attention where people have a shared sense of life Johann Gottfried Von Herder asserts that the need to belong to a particular group is among basic human needs cid 127 What if belonging is not the main important need but rather having others respect one s way of life regardless of whether they participate in the same way In modern discussions of human rights there is a claim that particular cultures communities and ethnic traditions have a right to exist and a right to be of life 2 Minority culture as a human right protected form decay assimilation and desuetude cid 127 What it means to protect these cultures is vague cid 127 What does it mean to enjoy one s culture The key is nondiscrimination against minority cultures 3 A thin theory of good Any political theory must be grounded on some assumption as to what human life is like cid 127 What philosophers call thin theories are those which serve as a bare framework for conceptualizing choices but also leaves the individual to fill those choices we need this thin theory to say something about the the shape of individual lives in relation to matters such as society community politics and justice There is an assumed difference between lifestyle and background 4 Opposition and Authenticity A world in which cosmopolitanism that allows for people to feel displaced begins to flourish is one that is not safe for minority culture Experience shows that they wither and die in the reality of modern life and that those who hold these cultures live their lives demoralized and in misery Suppose a freewheeling cosmopolitan life lived with a kaleidoscope of cultures is both possible and fulfilling The argument for protecting minority cultures in this case goes away because it can no longer be said that people need their rootedness in a particular culture but can rather choose to preserve their way of life This argument undercuts Herder s assertion that we need that sense of belonging The sheer existence of the cosmopolitan alternative undercuts the clauses for the protection of minority culture Salman Rushdie puts in a strong argument for the cosmopolitan view of life in that the hybrid lifestyle of the cosmopolitan view is the only appropriate response to the modern world in which we live cid 127 We live in a world formed by technology and trade The world has changed Thus the charge against preserving those aboriginal cultures is that they are inauthentic as to what is actually going on in the world If we accept the other hand that rootedness in a culture is necessary for human well being then the claims made by Rushdie seem to be deviant and eccentric and not relevant to human liberty but rather another way of life From this point of view purported by the defenders of minority culture Rushdie s view are inauthentic They could claim that Rushdie s views show the worst about classic liberalism namely that it supports atomism abstraction and alienation from one s roots vacuity of commitment indeterminacy of character and ambivalence towards the good 7 Our Debt to the Global Community of belonging The advantage of focus on the cosmopolitan ideal is that it forces us to assess the broader basis of friendship and community that contributes to one s sense cid 127 Many of us owe our allegiance to increasing more international communities such as those of international scholars human rights movements feminist movements artistic communities that all transcend borders and nationalities The modern realization of Aristotelean friendship contains those who are good at orienting themselves in common pursuit of virtues cid 127 We are not self made atoms of intense liberalism but neither are we exclusively products of single national or ethnic communities National communities have an obligation to recognize their dependence on the wider social political international and civilizational structures that sustain them There is a reality to our communal life 8 Kymlicka s view of the social world A The importance of cultural membership cid 127 Minority cultures need larger political and international structures to protect and sustain the cultural goods that they pursue The cosmopolitan strategy is not to deny the role of culture in the constitution of human life but to first question the assumption that the social world divides up neatly into particular distinct cultures one to every community and secondly the assumption that one need to pick and choose just one of these cultures Kymlicka s starting point is thus a Rawlsian conviction about the importance of the freedom to form reform and revise individual beliefs about what makes life worth living Kymlicka argues that to achieve this people need to have a wide array of options and a clear understanding of those options and that people cannot choose a conception of good for themselves in isolation The decision for how to lead our lives must be ours alone cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 cid 127 We decide how to lead our lives in the context of a cultural narrative Kymlicka follows that liberals should still be concerned with preserving cultural structure not because they have inherent moral status but rather because through having a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become vividly aware of the options available to them and intelligently examine their value cid 127 Waldren asserts that this need not be the case and that we can take fragments of cultures and still preserve the meaningfulness of