At an October 11 talk presented by the Friends of Princeton Library, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, discussed cosmopolitanism, tribalism, and his recent book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.
Appiah spoke about the effect of identities both to unite and divide people, beginning with a story about his own family and his father, Joe Appiah, MP, who was born into Ashanti aristocracy and served as a Ghanaian diplomat and politician. Appiah’s father, he said, consistently opposed tribalism and believed that in acting as a member of Parliament, one shouldn’t privilege one’s own regional group.
“The state is not meant to be a tribal identity. That’s the ideal that anti-tribalism stands for,” Appiah said. “Ghana is not meant to be Ashanti, in the sort of way that many of us here think that the United States is not meant to be white.”
Appiah discussed the history of cosmopolitanism, beginning with the Greek philosopher Diogenes, who used the term to describe himself as a citizen of the world, rather than any specific city-state. The first component of cosmopolitanism, Appiah argued, is universality, or awareness of one’s common humanity alongside other people.
“Sometimes people say that being human can’t be an identity,” Appiah said, “because they think that identities have to have outsides as well as insides, and, being totally inclusive, there’s no, as it were, ‘other’ to the human identity, at least until the first extraterrestrials come along. I don’t think that’s right. Of course it’s a particular kind of identity, this human identity, in the sense that it isn’t defined in opposition to other humans. It pulls us all together. But one reason it can work is because groups can be held together not just by the contrast between self and other among humans, but also by a common threat, or by a common positive project.”
In practice, shared identity around a common project is often what causes people to do something together, both within nations and between them, Appiah said, pointing to British abolitionism as an example:
“In the late 18th century in Britain, increasingly people developed identities as abolitionists—English people, middle class and, increasingly, working-class people—and that identity meant that they shared a moral project, which was the abolition of the slave trade. And ordinary people, all over England, signed petitions. There were more petitions in the early 19th century about anti-slavery than anything else. Ordinary people, who’d never seen a slave, and slavery on British soil was abolished by that point… and most of the people who were abolitionists had never met a person of African descent, they got together around this moral project, and being an abolitionist was important to them. They wore labels, and that symbol, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ with the picture of the slave with his hands together kneeling, became a symbol for them. They went to meetings which lasted four or five hours, in which they listened to people making anti-slavery speeches with a patience that perhaps modern political audiences don’t have. That sense that they were engaged in a common project, so that I wasn’t just John or Jane Smith, I was John or Jane Smith, abolitionist, helped create this very powerful movement… for a period, for example, ordinary people in England started learning how to drink tea without sugar because sugar was made by slaves, and they didn’t want to support the plantation economy… you could have just had an abstract commitment to a principle, anti-slavery, but what was actually created was a movement in identity, and that was what really worked.”
Even local civic pride, Appiah argued, contributed to the cause of abolitionism, as cities like Liverpool or Birmingham created local anti-slavery petitions and competed to collect the most signatures. Appiah also argued that Quaker identity, shared between Quakers in Britain and Philadelphia, and national honor,
The second part of cosmopolitanism comes from difference, or finding value in engaging with people unlike oneself. Appiah discussed this in practice:
“You don’t have to build connections to everybody all at once. What you have to do is to get people to exercise their humanity by building links with other humans in particular, or local places, so getting young Americans to read literature by Nigerians, or Ecuadorians, or Chinese or Japanese, Australians and so on, getting them to watch movies from those places, as people in those places watch our movies from the United States, building links which are not links to the abstraction of humanity but links to other humans in all their specificity—that’s another way in which we get to the global.”
Appiah discussed the harm that can result when a focus on differences is not combined with an understanding of shared commonalities across identities, or, alternatively framed, within a broader identity such as that of human, or American. Racism in the United States, for example, is connected not only to economic anxiety but also status anxiety.
“White Americans are used to being, as it were, the normative American. And part of what’s going on in movements like Black Lives Matter, or in broader movements for social change, is saying, ‘No, race doesn’t define the normative American.’ And if you’re used to being the kind of representative citizen, in part because of your race, then you face a kind of status threat with a push for a genuine nonracial society, a society in which America is not identified as a white nation.”
But Appiah seemed skeptical regarding completely rejecting identities such as gender and race that frequently divide people.
“I don’t know how in the United States you could produce a society in which people could sit down next to each other for an hour and depart and not be able to answer the question, ‘What was the race of the person you just had a conversation with?’ Where it’s obvious. Obviously some people have ambiguous racial identities, but if somebody’s clearly white American, or clearly African American, or something, in our society, if you grew up here, you’ll notice that… You can’t ask people to abandon their identities because they’ll notice their identities, and they’ll feel things mediated by their identities… So we’ve got to live with identities, we’ve got to make the best of them. We can put them to good uses, as well as being careful not to allow them to be used for bad things. That’s not easy, and it’s messy, but then that’s what human life is like—it’s not easy, and it’s messy.”
Before moving to New York University in 2014, Appiah was the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.
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