In Defense of Parochialism

You meet them most, surprisingly enough, when traveling. The conversation starts off stimulating enough: where you've been, where you're going, impressions, observations... sometimes insightful, often not, but you know you're talking with good folk none the less.

And then you start to get a feeling. Talk shifts to 'the problems of the world'... soon the conversation is being peppered with the word 'cosmopolitan,' being used here as an approximate synonym to the word 'virtuous.' And after they begin lamenting the 93% of Americans who don't own a passport (or something like that), and just before they draw a correlation between this and the specter of 'ignorance' (being used here as an approximate antonym to 'virtue'), you think to yourself: "Oh no... It's one of them."

You're dealing with a Travel Snob.

There are, as I see it, a few problems with cosmopolitanism, but the biggest of them all are the cosmopolitans themselves. Humanity, you see, has been floundering for far too long in the chaotic waters of tribalism and provincialism. ''We are all equal, and whoever doesn't experience for themselves the rich cultural differences this world offers is a bigoted nincompoop" they say with no apparent hint of irony.
The logic of cosmopolitanism --at least as I see it frequently expressed -- goes something like this:
1) Knowledge is good. By corollary, therefore, ignorance is BAD.
2) Travel produces knowledge in the traveller. (But not just any knowledge. That's boring. You can just FEEL that the knowledge gained by travelling is better than other kinds of knowledge.)
3) Therefore, the traveller is, necessarily, wiser than provincial folk.

The problems, of course, are 1) the assumption that travel necessarily produces some kind of non-trivial knowledge and 2) the idea that, assuming one does obtain some kind of new cultural understanding, this kind of knowledge is somehow superior than other kinds of knowledge (from the understanding of cellular respiration to knowing how to fix a broken toilet.)

1) should be self evidently foolish. But if it is not, can someone please explain to me how getting ripped on Mykonos among a cadre of anglophones makes one a wiser person?
2) seems more natural to believe, but is it true? I'm not sure.

One could make the argument, I suppose, that transcultural knowledge is, though not necessarily superior, contingently superior because of the increasingly globalized world in which we live. This may be true, but it still misses a very important point which is that, in most cases, cultural knowledge, or whatever words we use to express this concept, is so abstracted an idea that it means very little in practice. Ask a cosmopolitan what he has gained from travelling and make him answer in concrete terms and he will blush a little, because much of the time, he either has no answer or the answer, when expressed nakedly, seems so trivial and quotidian.

The explanation of cosmopolitanism is as prosaic as it is natural: a person takes something that is true of me and not of thee, and uses it to beat thee over the head. Classic In-Group Out-Group dynamics. When we were hunter-gatherers, discerning who was in 'our group' was essential to group survival. If we gave a hunk of Zebra thigh to someone who wasn't in our group it would endanger our own group. Of course, nowadays material subsistence isn't the issue, so we do it with ideas.

Now that's progress!