World Citizenship

3 Pages 643 Words

When I think of the word “citizen” the first thoughts that enter my mind are state, nation, and government. Webster’s Dictionary defines the word: “a : a member of a state b : a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it”. The phrase “World Citizen” is almost an oxymoron in my opinion. This oxymoron, however, may suit the meaning.
In Martha Nussbaum’s article, The Idea of World Citizenship, she speaks of the severance of a single human nation, the separation of a unified society. That’s how we started out; unified. Man is born with the natural gift of thought, superior to that of any other species, and then uses it to think up ideas and rules that enforce lifestyles unnatural and irregular to human instinct.
Martha brings up Diogenes, an ancient Greek philosopher. She sets him as the main example of an ideal World Citizen. Not only was he a believer in world citizenship, but, as she explains, Diogenes was a teacher. He taught whether you wanted a lesson or not.
In ancient Greece, there were unspoken guidelines and standards, not so different from American society today, which everyone held to without thought on the topic. Diogenes was there to invoke thought on this topic, and you were invoked either voluntarily or by force. His lessons were more obscure than most teachers lessons we would know today however. For example, in Ancient Greece, eating was something only done in private; so Diogenes would eat in public, trying to explain to his neighbors that this was a ridiculous rule. As a more extreme approach, he would masturbate in the marketplace, I would assume for the same reason but I don’t think I can accurately justify that.
As the article goes on, Nussbaum continues to explain the separation of humans from instinct and humans as a group into subgroups, but a more interesting topic is what she portrays as the root of the probl...