Something that increasingly troubles me is the common supposition that urbanites are cosmopolitan by virtue of being urbanites. Not only does that bias attribute what in modern eyes is a morally desirable quality to the mere experience of living in densely populated areas, it also assigns the negative quality of parochialism to non-urbanites.
The thing is, the line between urban and rural is no longer as clear as before, and therefore the association between urbanity and cosmopolitanism—a tie that has been shaky from the start in any case—becomes ever more tenuous.
This overstaying of associative logic is a common enough error.
The connection between urban living and a cosmopolitan mindset was certainly stronger in the old days when city living was clearly separate from rural living. But then again, that may only be so because the meaning of “cosmopolitan” has changed radically.
To start from basics, the term combines the Greek words, cosmos and polis. The first signifies the universe, considered as a harmonious and orderly system, while the second denotes the Greek city-state. The Order of Nature and the Order of Man are necessarily coined at the same time in dialectic relation to each other. And so, the Cosmopolis is born.
