World_Citizenship

World Citizenship 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 world, power, diogenes, citizen, ancient, word, topic, today, thought, think, native, himself, government, after, unified, take, state, started, society, slavery, separation, say, root, realizes, reading, oxymoron, one, nation, man, live, list, lessons, instinct, ignorance, humans