The neurocosmopolitan seeks to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation.

Nick Walker, Neurocosmopolitan Website

Cosmopolitanism has been defined in different ways by different thinkers. As I use the term, cosmopolitanism refers to a particular attitude or approach to cultural diversity. In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes: “People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences. Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.”

The cosmopolitan individual not only accepts cultural diversity, but treasures it as an infinite source of potential learning, beauty, innovation, and creative synergy. In Homeland Earth (1999), Edgar Morin, one of the great cosmopolitan thinkers, writes that cosmopolitanism involves “a double imperative” to “safeguard, propagate, cultivate, or develop” both unity and diversity. “We must simultaneously protect cultural specificities and promote cross-fertilizations and cross-breedings,” Morin writes, because the creativity and vitality of cultures and societies (and, I would add, of individuals) “feeds on influences and confluences,” whereas “homogeneity lacks genius.”

Neurocosmopolitanism consists of approaching neurodiversity in the same spirit in which the true cosmopolitan approaches cultural diversity.

To embrace the neurodiversity paradigm is to refuse to pathologize neurocognitive styles and experiences that differ from our own, and to accept neurodiversity as a natural, healthy, and important form of human biodiversity – a fundamental and vital characteristic of the human species, a crucial source of evolutionary and creative potential.

Neurocosmopolitanism goes beyond this baseline of acceptance, as cosmopolitanism goes beyond mere tolerance of cultural differences. The neurocosmopolitan seeks to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation.

Neuro-what?

Another term you use a lot is “neurocosmopolitan” or “neurocosmopolitanism.” Where does Neuroqueer Theory fit into a neurocosmopolitan world? 

Just as a cosmopolitan perspective recognizes that there’s no “normal,” “superior,” or “default” culture or ethnicity, a neurocosmopolitan perspective––or a neurocosmopolitan society––is one in which no sort of mind is privileged as “normal,” or as superior to others, or as the natural default way for a mind to be.

The path toward a neurocosmopolitan perspective––on either an individual or collective scale––necessarily involves learning to recognize our internalized standards of neuronormativity as culturally constructed and culturally instilled, and then freeing our minds from the limits of those standards.

Neuroqueering is the act or process of challenging, subverting, defying, and/or creatively fucking with neuronormativity. As such, I consider neuroqueering an essential part of our individual and collective paths toward more neurocosmopolitan perspectives and more neurocosmopolitan futures.

Besides neuroqueering, what are the first steps towards a neurocosmopolitan world?

In order to build any kind of better future, it’s essential to have some sort of positive vision to work toward. In order to create something positive and good, one must first be able to imagine it.

So one crucial first step is for all of us to engage our creativity and awaken our sense of the possible, and start generating individual and collective visions of neurocosmopolitan futures that inspire us.

Another crucial step is to produce more and more literature, art, educational material, and entertainment that decenters the neurotypical perspective and the neurotypical gaze––in other words, work which not only is grounded in non-neuronormative perspectives, but also refuses to assume that the default reader or viewer is neurotypical.

INTERVIEW: NEUROQUEERING THE FUTURE • NEUROQUEER

Practicing neurocosmopolitanism is one way that open and relational (process) thinkers can practice what they preach.  The practice is, in the words of Nick Walker, “to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation.”

Open and relational (process) thinkers believe that the entire universe is embraced by an inclusive Love whose very life is enriched, not depleted, by diversity: diverse kinds of entities and creatures throughout the universe, diverse forms of life on planet earth, diverse ways of being human beings among humans.  Differences make the whole richer. 

The inclusive Love (God) is cut off from the diversity by the boundaries of a simple unity.  The Love is the living whole of the universe, understood as living subject in whose life the multiplicities are gathered into a complex unity filled with contrasts.  Nick Walker’s website, Neurocosmopolitanism, shows how a practice of neurocosmopolitanism is good for society.  Open and relational thinkers propose that it is good for God, too.  Without neurodiversity God could not be as fully God.

To practice neurocosmopolitanism is not to pretend that you understand autistic people; it is to honor the mystery of their lives and, for that matter, the mystery of all lives.  No one is enframeable.  All are unique and often, in the uniqueness, quite beautiful.  If the Love in whose heart the universe emerges delights in the uniqueness, we can do the same.

Jay McDaniel, The Practice of Neurocosmopolitanism as a Spiritual Virtue – Open Horizons

Further Reading