This week First Principles will feature a special four-part symposium from the current edition of Modern Age: A Debate on Localism & Cosmopolitanism

In the early years of the new century, an ideological fault line cuts across the globe. It does not divide some regions of the world from others, as those who talk of a “clash of civilizations” would have us believe. Instead, it recurs within each society and cleaves humanity in two.

On one side stand those at home in liberal modernity. We can think of liberal modernity as a package that has gained ground over the last century or two: secularism, relativism, an ease with self-interest and self-invention, an urge to dismantle supposedly suffocating traditions, and so on. Political groups as different as neo-conservatives, libertarians, and social democrats subscribe to parts of this package, if not all of it. We have to go to the margins of the modern Western political spectrum to find any people without these habits of mind.

On the other side of the fault line, we find a menagerie of critics. They range from religious fundamentalists, to communitarians, to those who denounce mass consumer culture. Of course, to group them together might exaggerate their common ground. In the United States, “right-wing” populists and “left-wing” communitarians hardly see themselves as bedfellows. And corresponding groups from different parts of the world usually overlook their common enemy, liberal modernity, and spend much of their time bashing one another instead. Christian conservatives and Islamists put forth parallel complaints at home about secularism and moral decay. When they speak of one another, however, they show little but mutual rancor fueled by recent geopolitical events. Still, whether or not they acknowledge it, critics of liberal modernity do occupy much of the same intellectual space, wherever we find them. They all take issue with liberalism’s emphasis on rights over duties, with the uprooted self-indulgence of the global upper-middle class, with the erosion of communities that once anchored human affairs.

This global clash between liberal modernity and its opponents plays out on another level too: that of scale. Seemingly, to be a liberal (in the broad sense of the word) means to be a cosmopolitan, and vice versa. Conversely, to be an antiliberal of any flavor means to be a provincial. The very terms of debate make cosmopolitan antiliberalism a contradiction in terms.

This assumption oddly has the consent of both camps in the global culture war. Liberals take it for granted because it confirms their supposed triumph. They alone can lay claim to the widest horizons. In this spirit, a decade ago Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, confidently observed that “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.” And the novelist and social critic V. S. Naipaul has proclaimed liberal modernity “our universal civilization.” The story such people tell is quite simple. Technology forces once insulated civilizations into contact. Those civilizations—or, rather, individuals formed within them—can meet peacefully only on the terrain of markets, personal choice, and self-negating irony. Their encounter has an inherently liberal coloring, we hear. Exposure to the world’s diversity sets individuals free from the claims of tradition. It turns them into self-fashioning consumers and relativists. They become, as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts it, “nomads” in the “transit-zone” deserts of a globalized world ever more distant from the “agrarian patriotism” of centuries past.

So too do critics of liberal modernity assume that to challenge it means invoking the name of a place. To restore harmony to the self, to enrich public life, supposedly means falling back on one or another self-contained tradition or community. For communitarians and civic republicans in the West, it is a polity small and engaging enough to demand much of its citizens. For Islamic fundamentalists, it is the pious orthodoxy of the ummah. And for revivalists in China, India, and elsewhere, it is the fellow-feeling that binds together a country or a civilization. Whatever the language they use, such reactions against the present order have much in common. They take for granted that the narrower a community, the denser its ethical content. They all mark off a community, flatten diversity within it, and then give it full purchase on how its citizens or faithful must live. Only in this way, allegedly, can they keep at bay the corrosive influence of liberal modernity. This mentality ends up erecting high walls around such identities. Insularity is the price of depth.