Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying "I am a citizen of the world," and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agrees, however; in the words of former British Prime Minister Theresa May, "If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere." On the other side of the political spectrum, groups who share a feature of identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and others — find it useful to band together to make political progress. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a leading philosopher and cultural theorist who has thought carefully about the tricky issues of cosmopolitanism and identity. We talk about how identities form, why they matter, and how to negotiate the difficult balance between being human and being your particular self. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Kwame Anthony Appiah received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and of Law at New York University. He is the author of numerous academic books as well as several novels. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of a number of major awards, including the National Humanities Medal of the United States. He currently writes the New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist", and frequently writes for The New York Review of Books. (Note that in the podcast intro I mistakenly said he was "born and raised" in Ghana; he was actually born in London, moving to Ghana when he was six months old.) Web site NYU web page Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Talk on "Beyond Identity" Wikipedia Twitter

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With continuous use of Shell v. Power Nitro Plus and gasoline direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. See Shell.us. slash more dash protection for more information. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I was recently reading over the Patreon page for Mindscape. And I noticed that the very first sentence in the description says,

I'm a scientist, author, and now a podcaster. So think about that move. The very first way that I'm introducing potential patrons, patrons, to the Mindscape podcast is to talk about myself by giving myself labels, right? Scientist, author, podcaster. This is the move of identity, of labeling ourselves as part of a larger group. And this idea of identity has become contentious in the modern world. It probably was always contentious, right? What identities matter? What is the role of identity? In particular, we have the idea of identity politics, which arranges people on kind of a spectrum. There's one spectrum that says, look, if I am, you know, female or African American or poor, these are incredibly important aspects about myself, and politically, it makes all the sense in the world

to organize along those lines so that I can share my interests with other people who share that identity. On the other side of the spectrum, there's a move that says, we should all be citizens of the world. We should all be common human people. We should take our identities and try to put them aside for the greater good. And I know, I'm trying to say this in a very unobjectionable way, many, many people rush to one of the ends of this spectrum and then caricature people on the other end. Today's conversation is an attempt to move beyond these caricatures and take the idea of seriously in the context of politics, but also just in the context of how we live our lives, how we think about ourselves. My guest is Kwame Anthony Apia, who is a very distinguished philosopher,

and also someone who has a lot of identities that play important roles in the modern world. He was born and raised in Ghana. He was educated in the UK in prestigious places like Cambridge University. He now lives in New York City. He is gay and biracial, and most of all, he's a philosopher. These are all identities that are very, very important. He's written a wonderful book on cosmopolitanism, which is sort of the idea that we should, in some sense, try to look beyond our identities and be part of this bigger picture. But he argues that that doesn't mean erasing our identities. We have to learn to live with our identities while acknowledging that to a large extent they're made up, right? If you are black or Asian or white,

in the modern world, this is a crucially important part of your identity. If you're black-haired or brown-haired or red-haired, that is a less important part for basically arbitrary reasons. So what are the aspects of identity that matter? How can we use them to live together? How do we construct them? What are the stories we tell? These are the topics we're going to be talking about in today's podcast. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem.

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of experience, reimagined for what's next. The BZ isn't just electric. It's Toyota Electric. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. Remember, you can get complete transcripts for everything. that we say here at the Mindscape Podcast, just go to the web page, preposterous universe.com slash podcast. And at the end of the episode blog post, there'll be a little link that says, click here for the transcript, the whole transcript will be there. So you can actually search the entire web page to find anything that has ever been talked about on the Mindscape Podcast. And with that, let's go. I'm Anthony Appiah. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm delighted to be talking to you. I'm going to start with an anecdote, which will seem a little

bit out of left field, but hopefully we'll connect back into what we're talking about. My wife and I were watching Castle Rock, which is a TV show, based on Stephen King's stories. And there's a mother and daughter characters this season who share this story about the laughing place. And that seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I didn't know it. So I went, of course, online, and I googled it. So the laughing place comes from the Brer Rabbit Stories.

The Brer Rabbit story is familiar to many Americans through Uncle Remus and things like that. So, of course, I'm on Wikipedia and I click on Brer Rabbit to jog my memory about those stories. It turns out, I had never known this. Brer Rabbit, sort of as a trickster figure, his stories were translated from West Africa where they were stories of Anansi the Spider. And so I clicked on Anansi the Spider, who's also on a different TV show these days on American Gods. Neil Gaiman TV show. And I'm reading about Anansi the Spider

and his exploits when I see that, you know, one of the major academic works about Anansi the Spider, one of the major collections, was compiled by Peggy Appiah, who I believe is your mother. Is that right? She was my mother, yes, yes.

Yeah, so she collected, actually she also published Anansi stories, believe we don't know. Okay, yeah. Meaning that she had written. Well, she got the, the first volume was called Tales of an Asante father, and my father being Asante grew up with Nancy's stories, which are still very much known, and he told some of them to us, and she was listening, and she thought they were kind of cool, so she started writing them down and adapting them in the way you do when you write things.

And so her first books were children's stories based on Anansi stories, and one of them, I don't think any of them, did one of them have the word of Nancy in the title? I can't remember, but as I say, the first was called Tales of Nassanti father. And then, so that was one kind of tradition that she collected. But the other thing she collected were these things that are called gold weights, which are not made of gold, but they're used for weighing gold. And they're made of brass. And some of them are figurative and some of them have abstract designs on them.

And actually you can tell roughly when they were made by what kinds of designs they have, because depending on whether they were trading with Europeans or with Arabs, they have different weighting systems and so on. So they're full of interesting information about culture. But she started collecting those. She was trained as an artist. She went to art school and became one of the world's experts on them. And she would, of course, what she did was she took them to people, often in villages,

and asked them to talk about them. And the way they talked about them often was by telling proverbs, many of which are, in fact, the taglines of an Ansi story. So she started collecting proverbs. and we published translations of 7,500 proverbs that she collected in my father's language. So it's a bilingual edition of the proverbs with glosses, which of course took a very long time to do. I can imagine, yeah. But it struck me as so appropriate because we wanted to talk today about identity and cosmopolitanism.

And one of the things I've heard you say is how stories help feed into the identity of a people. And also there's questions of appropriation and translation. And for that matter, the fact that the enunci stories to the extent that they were converted into rare rabbit stories were then appropriated by Walt Disney for that movie The Song of the of the South, which gave you the impression that being a slave was a wonderful, happy thing. And so there's a lot of issues that really just flow right out of that single anecdote. Yes, yes. Now, I think the inancy stories are, they're part of a wider genre of trickster stories,

which include things like the low-key and the... in the Norse sagas and to some extent some of the characters in the Greek mythology. But there are very important ones in West Africa. The other large sort of tradition is Yoruba tradition. And Eshu, who's the trickster god there, is a very important figure in their mythology. and sort of theology. And what's interesting about them in all these traditional cultures is, I mean, in a way, you could say that Ulysses is a kind of trickster figure.

The role of the role of... He annoyed everybody, right? Everyone was annoyed at Elysses, yes. He's a hero, sort of. But he's annoying in various ways. So the idea that the trickster is very powerful and important is a very widespread cross-cultural notion. And Anansi stories are not all about Anansi, Anansi Assam, which is the word just mean, which does mean as Anansi, well, it means enancy things or anancy words, is something.

Is the generic term for all folk tales. So there are Nancy stories in which Nancy isn't, doesn't occur. But a lot of them are about him. And he's a sort of, he's a spider trickster. And so the idea that you. respect, maybe a little bit fear, but also admire the trickster figure is a central thing that you're brought up with if you're brought up with these stories. Well, is it too much to think that the kinds of stories, let me ask us a question. How much do the kinds of stories

that different communities and groups of people lean on either reflect who they are or shape who they become? Is that an even an answerable question? Well, I think Those kinds of questions of causality are rather hard to tease out. But reflect, sure. I mean, I think. And I think it must be the case that if you're brought up with these stories in which an answer is a focus and admired, it must suggest something to you about what in my father's, in English in Ghana is called trickishness. He was very trickish, people say.

So I think it must do. And I think, and certainly, you know, when we think about the role of the novel in shaping the moral climate of societies, as it surely must have, as also it reflected them, you know, these stories provide a way of thinking about questions that arise for you. The questions about, I mean, in the 19th century, questions about marriage and property are, you know, They're real questions for the kind of people that read Trollope novels. People were making decisions all the time about that sort of thing. And to have stories in which it works out or it doesn't work out, stories that essentially teach the idea that love is tremendously important and that all the marriage stuff that is also important,

but for property-related reasons, can get in the way of this other important thing. I mean, that's, you know, I think that's part of a long history that changes the character of marriage eventually. And John Seuit Mill, who's on the wall there, looking rather stern right now. Looking very stern. Oh, but there's David Hume behind it.

Yes, yes, yes. Mill, you know, Mill's discussions of the connection between marriage and equality on the subjection of women, you know, part of that depends upon the longer history of the growth of ideas about romantic love and the importance of romantic love and the idea of companionship in marriage as opposed to, as it were, co-parenting as being the main thing you do and the bringing together of individuals rather than of families being the main thing you do. And so all of that surely must have been affected by people reading the novels of

romance and anti-romance. So I think the stories that people read and the stories that they hear as they're growing up, the stories that they're told must have a big impact. And that's why it's important to read the children and to tell them stories if you don't read. Well, I think, so let's actually, and this is reflecting bigger issues, right? And maybe we need to get some of the bigger issues on the table. Words like identity are very charged these days. And there's different senses of identity, right? Our racial identity, our national identity, and so forth.

Do you have a simple way of just thinking about what the word identity means or how it's used these days? That depends on what you mean by simple. Don't need to be too simple. We like to get a little bit deeper. I think, so first of all, it's very important that this way of using the word identity is an entirely post-second world war phenomenon. It's a modern phenomenon. People did not use the word identity. And it's very hard to find a word that does the same job before.

So the idea that race and gender and nationality and religion are all things of the same kind, which, I mean, we're so used to that idea that you need to step back from over to think, wow, you know, is that really true? Well, actually, that's, that it's, I don't want to go over that too quickly because that's, that's really worth pointing out. So identity before Second World War would have just been more individual, like who you specifically are. Yes, I mean, they wouldn't have used the word identity. They would have used words like self or individual. or, I mean, there's lots of language for talking about some of it, or group, you know, groups and so on. Also, words like, though, ethnicity is a relatively modern word, too. Words like that.

So not only are identities constructed, but identity. Identity was constructed. What's constructed is the idea that all of these are the same. And here's, so now here's my answer to the question, why are they all the same? Well, they're all the same in these, because they all have the following three. properties. One, they

go labeling and without the labeling it can't work. Two, they mean something to the bearers of the label so that they say to themselves, they get up in the morning and they do things because they're men or because they're black or because they're

Catholic. And three, other people do things to them because of the labels. So that's the basic structure of the identity labelling. And there's one other thing that should be said, as it were, as part of the basic theory as well, I think, which is that all of these things tend to be contested. So exactly who are the men and who are the women, as we've now noticed,

is not as obvious as people have taken it to be, and now we have contests about that. What it means to me to be black or gay or whatever is, I mean, I may not be entirely clear about that. other people may have views about what it means to me that I don't share. Other people may tell me that I'm not being black enough or that I'm letting down the gay community. Not being gay in the right way. Not being gay in the right way. And also there's huge, obviously, disagreement about, you know, sometimes if at all we should take notice of people's identities when we're interacting with them. But if we should, how should we?

So here's a practice, which I noticed when I came to this country. which is that non-white people in small towns who don't know each other, and I was always one of them because they didn't know me, will often just greet you. You're already in the club. They'll just say hello. And the white people won't. They're not hostile.

They just don't think it's appropriate to talk to a stranger. Every stranger on the street. And that's, now, is that appropriate? People can think, well, that's kind of weird. after all, as it turns out, I know almost nothing of the culture of the people who were, I mean, I do now, but I didn't then know very much about the culture of the people who were greeting me. And who knows whether I wanted to be greeted, as it were. They didn't know anything about how grumpy I might be. So it seems mostly sweet.

It seems sweet, but if noticed that if white people made a habit of doing this in a mixed-race town, people might begin to think that that was a bad thing. Now, that's something to do with the fact that white people are going to be a majority. And if they were a minority in a small town, again, we might think that's not so surprising. Even given the background of racism and the fact that, you know, building cross-racial relations is probably a thing that in this country we ought to care about doing more than we do. But many cities have expat communities, right, where foreigners or strangers stick together and stuff. Yes. And in fact, one interesting thing for Americans, I think, is that when Americans go abroad, Americans who are very conscious of the things that divide them from each other when they're at home come to spend time together and also become commonly defensive of things that they might well criticize

when they're back home. So, you know, this is an important point about the contextual character of what identities do for us. It depends on what the background is. Let me pause for a second to talk about Blinkist, which is a wonderful app you can download for your phone, your tablet, your web browser, that gives you a quick, convenient way of getting information from thousands of nonfiction books. Blinkist takes the best key takeaways, the need to know information, and condenses it down to about 15 minutes worth of reading that you can either read in the words or you can just listen to it. 12 million people are using Blinkist right now and has a massive and growing library. My very first guest here on Mindscape, Carol Tavriss, her book, Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me, is on Blinkist.

My second guest, Carlo Rovelli, has several different books on Blinkist. You can both use it to get the essence of books you might just want to skim, or even better, use it to sample lots of books that you might figure out these are the ones I want to dig into fully. Right now, for limited time, Blinkist has a special offer just for a very, Mindscape listeners, go to blinkist.com slash Mindscape to try it for free for seven days and also get 25% off a new subscription. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash Mindscape to start your seven-day free trial and get 25% off. And I like your definition because it highlights the extent to which the identity is not simply from within ourselves. It's so shaped by how we interact

with the rest of the world and how they interact with us, right? In fact, sometimes identities are sort of forged by common enemies in some ways. Yes, yes. I mean, Charles Taylor says that they're dialogical, I like that word, because part of what that means is that if you're going to change them or shift them around, you've got to get everybody on board. And it may be that you might have a view that the insider's views about how things, how a certain identity should work should be given.

extra weight. But in general, identities are part of a system of identities. And so everybody has a stake in it. You can't change what it means to be a woman and just leave what it is to be a man completely free-floatingly, independently intact. When you draw a boundary, it separates two things. It separates two things. And so the agreements about where the boundary lies are obviously require, as it were, the consent of all parties, or at least they're only going to be settled if you can get the consent of all parties. And similarly, the meanings of these things, they're socially available meanings. When you, you know, if you're a parent and you have a male child and a female child, the way in which their gender identities are available to them is going

to depend on more than just what you think and more than what they come to think. It's going to depend on how people in the world think about those things and different people in the world may think differently. So it's very much a matter, I think, of a matter, I think, of a very much a matter, I think, it as something that inevitably involves negotiation and perhaps compromise because a change in the system that is very good for some people, maybe may actually take something away from other people. Now, it may be, as in the case of the changes in the gender system, you know, produced by kind of the kind of feminism that goes back to John Stuart Mill and Mary Walsoncroft, those changes took away some things, some privileges from men.

and a jolly good thing too. I mean, so sometimes what's taken away from people they weren't entitled to, but still, they lost something. And so you had to make it really work, you had to get them on board. And I think this is something that I feel is a little bit missing in the discussions about trans issues is the recognition that it is an issue for cis people as well as trans people, and that though the system needs to be changed in ways that will allow trans people better, better lives, they can't do it without bringing the rest of us along.

And that means they have to make arguments. They can't just declare things. And they have to help us understand what it is they want, not just be annoyed with us for not understanding it. And so on. Now, I mean, so I agree with the main thrust of what they're up to, but I think sometimes people behave as if the resistance that comes to what they want is, it may be unreasonable, but it's not,

It comes from a place of people genuinely having a stake in the cis-trans system, and therefore having, I think, the right to participate in trying to understand what's going on. Well, and this is one of the issues that inevitably comes up when one such group, one such identity, has been historically discriminated against. There are things that they want, and they're a little bit impatient, and one can forgive them for being impatient, right? No, no, they should be in hurry. They don't want to sit and listen to detailed arguments one way or the other.

Or even, let me put it even more strongly than that, right? They can see what one person sees as a dispassionate philosophical argument one way or the other as an attack on who they are. Yes, and they do. And it may be. But what I was arguing, I suppose, is that you can't always get what you want. Yeah, no, I agree. and that, you know, you have to. It's a very, look, it's a very interesting thing, how I think young people,

people in their sort of teens and 20s today may have a hard time understanding why lesbian and gay people in the 50s and 60s and maybe before were not just mad at their families and not just angry with them all the time and kind of saying you know take it or leave it this is who I am but that is what happened

people people negotiated with their families and when their families reacted badly to coming out they didn't stomp out of the room and leave they stuck around and patiently this is a sort of average story there are lots of stories away from the mode But so I think what works, it turns out, isn't insisting immediately on getting your rights, even though they are your rights.

What works is a little bit of patience and working with people to get them to see what may be difficult for them to see and is too easy perhaps for you to see because, and is too easy perhaps for you to see because you are living it. you're living a trans identity. And it's clear to you. It's clear to you what's going on. I think another thing to be said is that the negotiation isn't just with cis people. It's not as if all trans people have the same views about everything, just as any more than gay people or black people or white people or anybody. Catholics, you know, people have disagreements within the tribe.

And again, you can declare somebody to be doing the wrong thing as far as the tribe goes. But that isn't a way of persuading anybody, simply stipulating that they're misbehaving and that the black people shouldn't do that or gay people shouldn't do that or whatever. Or that, you know, you're letting down the tribe. So I think the dialogical is a good word. If we see them as a dialogue with other people and if we see that everybody has a stake in it, even if the stakes are much bigger for some people than others, still everybody has a stake because it's a system of identity. and the meaning of the identities, like all meanings, is a common possession, like the meanings of words. You can't simply, you know, like Humpty Dumpty,

just declare a word to mean something. If you want a word to mean something, or if you want to shift the sense of a word, you're going to have to work with people, and they may or may not go along. Yeah. Well, that's an excellent example. It's very contemporary.

But I like, you know, in your recent book, The Lies That Bind. Was that your most recent book? A lot of books. I have trouble keeping up sometimes. And the illusion in the title is to the fact that in some sense, identity is a lie, right? Or at least it's something we make up. It's a story.

But they do bind us together. And you do a wonderful job of sort of going through different modalities of what identity is. So maybe let's get that on the table as some examples we can draw on. Race is the most obvious one in the world, right? And it's very interesting that this idea that the word identity just wasn't used before in this sense, but certainly the idea of racial identity was used. And you tell this wonderful story of this 18th century philosopher who was at a time, I guess, before our current versions of racial identity were quite congealed. Yes. And he was born in what is now Ghana, where I grew up,

but ended up as a professor of philosophy in Germany. And it's a bit unclear under what terms he got there, but he, because it looks like he was a gift to, he literally was given, he was literally given to this German Ducal family. But is that the kind of thing that would have happened to white children also? No, no. I mean, I, so there's some unclarity about whether he was technically a slave and the extent to which his own family sort of agreed to all this. But we know that his brother was enslaved and sent to Surinam, Dutch, in the Dutch West Indies. So when did the slave trade start?

I'm sorry that my ignorance is showing. Well, it starts in the 17th century, but it really reaches its peak a little bit after the time that Amo was taken from Ghana in the mid-18th century, I suppose. This is the transatlantic slave trade. There are slave trades all over the world, of course. So he, and this is sort of early enlightenment, and these are the people who had

Leibniz as the librarian, this Dukal family. So, yeah, there's some intellectual heavyweights floating around. There's a lot of intellectual stuff going around. And they did an experiment. They raised, he was made the godson of two dukes, or two of the children of the duke. And so he was called Anton Wilhelm after his godparents, Anton and Vilhelm. And he got the education they got. Now, they weren't going to become academics. they were going to become aristocrats.

But that meant he ended up with a law degree and a philosophy degree and then teaching and made a living eventually as a teacher of philosophy and was apparently well respected and he wrote an unfortunately lost book because it's a book about the law of slavery and you'd love to know what an 18th century

African who'd become a German thought about the law of slavery. And we know a little bit of the argument of it because in the Enlightenment, a lot of books got brief summaries and encyclopedes and so we know something about what he argued, but it would be wonderful to have the whole thing. But we do have a textbook philosophy, right,

which is actually rather good and contains, in particular, some very good arguments, I think, against Descartes' dualism, which, so now some people are using those arguments if they're teaching historical courses to talk about some of these things. Anyway. Sorry, I got to pause on that

because also I am an anti-Cartesian dualist, and my favorite arguments against his dualism back in those days come from Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Another sort of member of an identity, which was not given, she could not have become a philosophy professor, I suppose, at the time. And I wonder if there's any connection between, you know, slightly othered identities and rejecting Cartesian dualism.

I just made that up, but... No, it's a good idea. And I will pass it on to colleagues who work in that area. Because as I say, both Elizabeth and Almu are now taught in a way that they weren't even when I was in college. So people knew about her, but you didn't think in an introductory course or even in an advanced course, you wouldn't think it was important to address her arguments. So anyway, so part of the – so what's the experiment? What's the experiment they're doing?

Presumably, part of the experiment is, can someone like this achieve intellectual eminence? Okay. Hypothesis proved. Right. He can. Sorry, the idea that he was a member of a certain kind of person that was not us. That's it.

That's it. What is the kind of person that he was? And the only thing I think I want to say about that is, is a complicated issue is that that issue was being settled about then the idea of how race was going to work at least in the context of relations between Europeans and Africans

was being settled about then. It was unsettled. And in a way people who quoted Amu's an example later on including the Abbe Gregor at the time of the French Revolution really part of their

what he was used to argue was, you know, they're pretty much like us. And so this idea that this is a great cleavage in the human species probably isn't so important. But so by the end of the 18th century... By David Hume's time, sadly, looking at the picture of David Hume there. He goes not his finest moment. Hume says about, I think, Francis Williams, who was a Jamaican poet,

that he can't have been any good because he's black. And Kant says similar things, though he reversed himself eventually, because despite his rationalism, Kant was actually quite responsive to actual evidence. So when people like Hader pointed out to him that he was wrong about these things, he thought about it and changed his mind.

But so the idea that there were these, I mean, again, the new idea is that that the natural history of man, which is not yet biology, but it's something a bit before biology, answers the question of the kinds of man. That there are kinds of man is obviously an ancient idea.

You just have to read the beginning of the Iliad to see lots of different kinds of Greeks, and also Greeks and Trojans. These are different kinds of people. And in the background are Persians, who are another kind of people, and Ethiopians who are another kind of people. You know, the gods are off feasting with the blameless Ethiopians

at the beginning of the Iliada. So what's new is the idea that there's what we can think of as a kind of proto-scientific account of these things because the standard account in Christian Europe until then of the kinds of man was a biblical account. So the descendants of Noah, Ham, Shem, Japheth, Shem for the Seamites, Ham for the Hamites, and Japheth for the Japhethites, that is Europeans, essentially. That was the idea.

Now it's taken, and of course the biblical scheme has a problem, which is that it doesn't know about India and China. It has a bunch of problems, sure, yeah. And so it lacks full completeness. And so the idea that, well, we should go looking, and this is a matter for study. And remember, this is the century of Linnaeus, when it was Linnaeus who called us Homo sapiens and gave us a genus and a species. And that idea, again, this is part of the proto-scientific stuff.

In the 19th century, the science of biology really grows up. The word biology was actually coined in 1800 in German. And by the end of the century, actually, by the beginning of the 20th century, The account in terms of genetics is beginning. We think of Mendel as having invented the basic ideas of genetics, and he did. Well, at least, I mean, he's the earliest person we know that did experiments, testing hypotheses about genetic stuff.

But his work was published but ignored. Did not make a bit. And so it was really Morgan, the Dysophila, in the early 20th century, the first Nobel laureate and medicine, I think, who really got genetics out there and the word genetics gets coined and so on. Once you have a picture of how biological inheritance works, however, you can immediately see that because it's particulate, the idea that there's just one thing being transmitted, the race,

doesn't look so easy to maintain. and already by 1911, just after the invention of genetics, W. De Bois, you know, who has degrees from the University of Berlin, well, he has qualifications from the University of Berlin and Harvard and so on, and highly educated sociologist and historian, philosopher, is saying this shows that this old way of thinking is not biological. Right. So we've got a biology of inheritance,

but it doesn't map into the biology that we thought we had for race. I mean, it's very interesting because we see the concept of the different races growing up and science is coming on the scene contemporaneously and immediately put to work. Yes, yes. But it's never a perfect fit, right? It never necessarily does what you wanted to do. And it's hard to objectively follow what the science is trying to tell you when you have these preconcept ideas.

I think in natural history, it was a perfectly reason. reasonable hypothesis that there were distinct varieties of human beings, as there are distinct varieties of crows and... There's certainly geographical differences between people. Right, right. And that these were inherited was a reasonable hypothesis, though, interestingly enough, the distinction between biological and non-biological inheritance really depends upon having a genetic theory. So until you have a genetic theory, the very idea of a distinction between

different ways of transmitting things between the generations is not really very well theoretically articulated. And you see that in the characterization of the races in the late 18th century and into the 19th century, often things that we would think of as obviously cultural, like beards, get sort of treated as part of the story. And so the typical lap lander sort of as one of the minor races, as it were, is either going to be bearded or not. I don't actually know what the answer is to that. But so you need the new sensible, the new sensibility, which has developed in the 19th century and which developed genetics in the early 20th century to get a clear grip on what the question is. Until then, it's not entirely clear what the question is.

So as I said, you know, there have been kinds of people all along. There were Helenes and Ethiopians and Persians and Hebrews and Philistines and so on. What's new is the idea that first that this is a scientific question and then that the right science is a science that's now called biology, which is a very important thing because it puts the question into the hands of the scientists who are also supposed to be classifying all the other organisms. So it takes it away from, as it were, the distinctively human sciences, anthropology say, though anthropology is very preoccupied with non-human animals too in the beginning,

especially the other primates. But it's a question that gets reshaped as the science is going along. And as often happens in the sciences, there are people who are just trying to get it right. And then there are people who, having an eye to what the concept is doing in the world, are trying to bring those things together. That has not gone away, that tension within science.

Right, right. And I think that, you know, one of the, this is a sort of philosophy of science point, I suppose, but one of the reasons why it's really important to have people of different identities doing science or any intellectual activity is because the stakes for people are different. And unfortunately or unfortunately or unfortunately, our biases which we do not have strong conscious control of are affected by what the stakes are for us.

So if you think about how many silly things were said about women about women by 90s century male scientists who were studying women in various ways, including, for example, the invention of hysteria as a psychiatric condition, it would have been much better if there'd been some women around who just said, wait a minute, you know, I'm going to test, I'm going to push that hypothesis, I'm going to test that hypothesis because it doesn't seem very flattering to people like me. And they wouldn't even have to say that explicitly, that would have gone on, you know, explicitly or not. So I think the, I mentioned Dubai, it's one of the important things, of course, that happens in the

20th century in the scientific discussion of these questions is that more non-people who are not European Christian ancestry get involved more, they're more African-Americans in sociology through the 20th century, obviously more women as well. Also, importantly, because of the way race gets taken up by the Nazis and by European anti-Semitism, because remember hostilities of the Jews pre-exists the idea that there are a race in the modern sense. It goes back to Europe, to medieval anti-Judaism. Because of that, the presence of significant numbers of Jewish scientists, I think, in the life and social sciences, as well as, of course, in the natural sciences generally,

was an important break on some of the ways this was going and produced so that some of the big statements on race that were organized by people like UNESCO some of the leading scientists involved with Jewish scientists and I don't think that's contingent because again the stakes are different for different people yeah I mean yeah it's it's it's very hard certainly both race and gender in science when people try to talk about who has abilities and who doesn't people are really bad at separating what they want to be true from what is true on both sides. I'm sure we could talk about race for many hours and people have, but maybe we could contrast it with national identity,

which is certainly another very, very strong kind of identity, and which seems a priori a totally different kind of thing. Yes. I think they get conflated, of course. I just mentioned the Nazis. Their form of nationalism was a nationalism about the, German race, the German people understood as a race, the folk as race. Were they very explicitly genetic about that?

Yeah, I mean that's why they did those things which they called the experiments in the concentration camps. They were looking for biologically based differences between real Germans and Jews, gypsies, the few poor black people who got caught up in that system. system and so on. So they can get all muddled together. And what is certainly true is that modern European nationalism, which is essentially the form of nationalism that went global because of the role of European empires in spreading these ideas, though it's affected by things in other places, but the core ideas start out

in Europe. And they start out essentially, I think, from an intellectual point of view with German intellectuals, people like Halder, Johann Gottfried Haudeah. And he, so his form of nationalism is tied to the idea of a people, a folk. Herder. Yeah. And that goes into Hegel. And Hegel's a big wheel and all of this stuff.

So the idea that you should sort of map. states into folks, states into peoples. That's sort of one of the great ideas of 19th century nationalism. And what's odd is that the process begins, the idea that people should be brought together into a single state who are all German or Slav or Italian or French.

arises at a time when that's just so far from the truth that you can't begin to remember how untrue it is. German-speaking peoples are scattered all over what's now Germany, but other places as well. So we're thinking here about 19th century? Yes, in the 19th century. Even in the 1860s and 70s in France, a third of the population, I think, didn't speak

French. So the idea that there was a natural group called the people who had a shared language, culture, and traditions and were shared people which increasingly gets turned to the idea of a shared race because of the rise of biology in the 19th century, that idea

is sort of crazy faced with the reality of Europe at the time. And Italy is even worse. Italy is worse. Languages are very different from places. Lots of different languages, very different traditions.

even, you know, different sort of stereotypical looks. The typical Milanese, you know, is sort of descended from the same people as many northern Europeans and typical Sardinian isn't. But anyway, so nevertheless, this idea grabs hold. and the idea that peoples should map into states and that we should create a nation state where the nation is both a political thing and a natural people

develops through the 19th century and takes hold and the idea that it's some natural unity but maybe not a natural unity of blood perhaps a natural unity created by shared history and common traditions. It doesn't have to be a race-based thing. But anyway, some shared thing. And the point is, any candidate you give for the shared thing,

I'm going to be able to tell you a 19th century story about how that really wasn't shared. Lots and lots of exceptions. But it speaks to the lure of the idea that it was such a powerful force to create this. And it meets an important need because what's going on from another point of view in the 19th century

is the growth of powerful state capacities. And those state capacities depend upon stateistics. They depend upon gathering the numbers that states need in order to do the things they do. So censuses grow up in our constitution has a census built into it in the late 18th century, but censuses get developed increasingly everywhere. And states are counting treaties.

they're counting people, they're counting rivers. It always seems strange to me that the precious space in the original constitution gave so much importance to the census. That's such a thing. But I guess if you're making a people, counting them really matters. Well, and if you're going, especially if you're going to be a democratic people and you're going to be counting them later in elections, you've got to know who's there.

Because otherwise you can't have, responsible elections. You can't decide who's in and right for electoral purposes. And also, you know, if you want to have roughly equal-sized constituencies, voting districts, you have to know how many people are aware. And all of that,

but there are many, many other reasons why states want to count people. They need to know, if you want to know how much money will be raised by a tax, you have to know how many people are and what. So you start collecting income statistics. If you want to educate people, you have to know how many kids there are.

So you have to, you know, and so on. There are lots of reasons. So states are developing these capacities. And in the course of developing these capacities, they have to count things and they have to count people. And so kinds of people become important. They're not, so they count men and women. They don't just count people. They count legal, they count nationals and foreigners and stuff like that.

Also, they increasingly count, you know, different kinds of sick people. who are permanently disabled, for example, they want to know how many of them there are, and so on. And that creates categories as well, some of which become essentialized. So what they're doing is in the rise of the nation state, one of the important things is defining the nation. And it's very tempting to have an essentialist,

a story that says, what makes Germans German is some Germanness that's in each German, some thing that's the same in all of them. Right. And the trouble is that's, that isn't going to be any such thing that distinguishes Germans from Danes or Serbians or

French men and women. So I think, nevertheless, it's a very tempting thought. Notice, one of the fascinating things about this idea is, so the nation state is this idea of a people with a common something, sometimes race, but often just culture and traditions, who naturally should be brought together into a state. Now, two things.

First, what was actually going on was therefore exactly the opposite of that. It was the rise of the state that was creating the nation. It wasn't the nation that was creating the states as a response. And two, that means that when this idea spreads around the world, you can actually take a place like the Gold Coast colony, which became Ghana, which is 80 languages, 100 ethnic groups. I mean, the counting of these things is a bit arbitrary. You can take it and turn them into Garnan's on a certain day in 1957,

and you can do what has been going on everywhere else. You can make Garnans. You can tell stories that make Garnans. Guarnans. And even Guarnan's have to be reminded that in doing that, the British put together two of their colonies, Togo and Ghana. The thing that's now called Togo is only part of what was German Togo land. The British part, the part that was given to the British under the League of Nations mandate at the end of the First World War, when the German colonies were taken away from the Germans,

voted to join the new country of Ghana. So it was as clear as anything in the world in some sense that what was going on was the creation of a state. Nothing more constructed than that. In plain view, I'm older than Ghana. So I was there as it happened. And my father, who was a Ghanaian patriot,

was perfectly aware of all this. He would have said, yes. what's the point? Yes, of course we have to work together as it were to become Garnan's. And that's why he thought that what he called tribalism was a very dangerous thing, even though he was a loyal member of his ethnic group. He thought that in the state it was really important not to discriminate among the peoples of Ghana. So what Garner has done, and it's this project that has significantly succeeded,

is to create a sense of Garnan identity. but it's very hard, as it is with all national identities, to give a simple story about what that means. And as I said about all identities, there's lots of contest about what it means. And there's a contest about who's in and who's out. I mean, the boundaries. Which sort of will never end.

We'll never end. I mean, and so precisely because it's never going to end, it is not a solution every time you find such a fight to say, okay, well, we'll put these lot in one side and these lot on the other side. there'll be no totally agreeable way of making the sides. And as soon as you've done that, within each of the sides, they'll start to be developing processes of differentiation.

So the organization of African unity, which became the African Union, has insisted all along with mostly success, the main exception being Eritrea, that we were not to shift the colonial boundaries, that the idea of making more and more groups because more and more people wanted it was not a good idea. And it isn't a good idea.

So don't go back to the original tribal. No. I mean, it's not going to work. I mean, there are 8,900 languages in Africa. If a nation is something with a common language, that's 900 countries. Right. Right.

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The BZ isn't just electric. It's Toyota Electric. We make it easy. Toyota, let's go places. And the United States is a little bit different than that story, right? but not completely different. So there's on the one hand of this idea that the United States is not based on ethnicity,

but based on ideas, values, ideals and ideas. On the other hand, there's plenty of people around today who think that it kind of is really based on ethnicity. Right, and we're at the beginning. I mean, I think, you know, Krebker and the Latest of American Farmer or whatever it's called, says that a new race of Americans is being created using race in this 18th century rather vague sense.

But he says it's being created out of people of all parts of Europe. So he doesn't think that Native Americans are being made into this new race. And he doesn't think that the slaves are going to be, and their free descendants. But he also doesn't think it's just British people. Absolutely not. No, no. Given his name is Khevker, that probably wouldn't be a good idea. No, no, but they didn't.

Generally, of course, we have to remember that in the 19th century, people shaped as the intellectuals of North America were by European ideas, thought of the Irish as a profoundly distinct and, in fact, inferior race to the sort of Anglo-Saxon and Norman descendant. peoples in other parts of the British Isles. So that notion of racial thinking sort of shaping how nations develop is not just an American thing. It happens in Europe. In France, we have this, as if anybody who's read Asterix knows, we have the idea of the Gauls and the Franks, as it were. These two races together, the aristocratic Franks and the peasanty Gauls together make

the great French nation. Anglo-Saxon peasants, Norman Lords make Britain. It's all nonsense in the details you can show that that's not what happened. But these stories, we started with stories, these sorts of stories play a huge role in shaping these things. And novels like Ivanhoe in England or all the Walter Scott novels play a role in shaping ideas about what England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales are. And in those things, racial ideas play a central role.

People forget, perhaps, partly because Ivanhoe's a very long novel, so not many people read it anymore. But one of the central issues in the novel is about a relationship between a Christian and a Jewish girl, a Jewish woman. And again, the issue of their race is sort of central to thinking about that, as is the relationship between Normans and Saxons, which is also a big racial thing. But how much do our current debates over, let's say, identity politics, just to use the buzzword, right? I mean, how much of these are ways of framing other kinds of issues and how much of them really grow organically out of these actual contours of identity as they grow through time? I mean, there are many ways in which ethnic and religious identities and national identities intersect with issues that are just about resources. If you look at the collapse of the Yugoslav state, one thing that's going on is that ancient and pretty low-key ethnic identities become high-key. And because they get used to compete for a rapidly diminishing cake, the state's collapsing, resources are disappearing.

You can't fight for them for your... family on your own so you need some and so you you sort of grab for whatever's available and and it is a grab bag because Muslim turns out to be one of the categories that you grab bag and that's very different from serve and grow out but nevertheless those are the ones that are there Albanian those are the ones that are there and they get used so that's one thing is is that they can get used in what are essentially competitions for resources and and it's not that there's a natural um tension between Serbs and Croats.

It's that if you organize the Serbs and Croats to compete for resources, there will be a competition between Serbs and Croats. But if you'd organize in some other way, Catholics versus Orthodox, which they also did to some extent, you get different boundaries and different groups. So that's one way. I think one question is how much ethnic and racial categories

are always to some extent covers for competition for resources. I think there's always that. So even if what matters most to you about your identity as an African American is culture and traditions, the black church, music,

whatever, it cannot but figure somewhat in your thinking that poverty in the United States and the distribution of material resources is very strongly correlated with

racial identities. One of the things that has come out in your discussion is the idea that these categories have implications for, you know, boots on the ground, broadly speaking, where the money goes, who gets to vote, who gets thrown in jail and things like that, right? So, for example, there's the contemporary debate on reparations for slavery. And if someone is African-American in the sense that they were born in Africa and moved to America, they shouldn't get reparations for slavery, maybe, but, Does it too much reify the idea? Well, so I think what happens...

So there is this group now called, I forget them what it's called, the American descendants of slaves, I think they call themselves, who are making the point they're in favor of reparations, but they don't want the reparations to go to Haitians or Nigerian Americans. They want them to go to people who are descended. Even though the extent to which blacks are discriminated against probably is not very much effective.

It's not very sensitive. It's not very sensitive to that. No, no, it isn't. I mean, I think the whole business of how to think, I myself don't think there's a coherent way of giving individualized reparations. I just think that doesn't make sense. A significant number of the descendants

of American slaves have passed now, and so they're now white. And also a very large proportion of American descendants of slaves are the descendants of slave owners do. So they should presumably be transferring money to themselves. So I think the idea that we can... It's one thing to say that at the moment, you can broadly agree on a rough boundary

between African Americans and other Americans. But already the question of how you should think about people who came here, black people who came here in their own lifetimes or people whose recent, descendants of recent immigrant families who come from places where there are black people. I mean, how should we fit those into that? That's a, there's no sense, I mean, it's not a sensible question, so it doesn't have a sensible answer.

So I worry that the focus on reparations, which is also necessarily backward-looking, distracts us from forward-looking concerns about making sure that everybody has an equal and decent shot. Well, that's good. Let me just dramatically simplify the world here by sketching out three different positions. Okay. And then we can talk about them. One position is the social justice warrior position, which says that, you know, there are certain identities, certain groups of people who are just not treated fairly.

and we should go to great efforts to fix that one way or the other. There's then sort of a countervailing position among, this is going to sound unfair, it's hard for me to say this, but, you know, white male straight people who feel like they're the ones who are actually being picked upon today because, you know, they didn't have anything to do with slavery or anything like that, and their economic situation isn't very good, and why should they be portrayed as the aggressors here?

And then there's another category of people who think that the entire discussion is wrongheaded in the sense that we should just be people, right? We should pretend that we don't see race and gender and things like that. And isn't the constant harping on these identities making things worse for everybody? That's way too simplistic, but does the kind of academic understanding of where identity comes from and the role of plays help us adjudicate? these battles? So I think it's important to distinguish, well, first of all, whether someone is disadvantage in our society correlates with some of these identities, but it's by no means determined by them, and there are some very, very badly off straight white men in this country.

And similarly, there's some, I'm, I suppose, black by American standards, and I'm and I'm gay, so there you are. But I can't pretend to think that I'm not rolling in all kinds of privilege. It's a nice office. It's a nice office. I have a nice job. I have a lovely husband. You know, I have no reasonable complaints.

So. Sorry, but you probably have had some complaints over the course of your life. Well, I mean, people have said racist and homophobic things around me, but, but I didn't, they weren't in a position to do anything to me, those people. So, so even though I, so mostly what I. But that's key, right? Because you could let them bounce off in a way that if you were less privileged, right.

No, no, I'm very conscious of the ways in which, I mean, just to sort of be explicit about this, there's obviously a dimension of class here and the class privileges that I have is, you know, I'm in DeBretz, which is the book of the British aristocracy. Congratulations. because my ancestors, because of my ancestry. And my uncle and great uncle were kings in the town that I grew up in. So I grew up with enormous social privilege, and that makes it very easy to kind of water off a duck's back

about some of these things. And I'm extremely conscious that without that privilege, I couldn't say that the racial dimension of my identity was not a sort of. of problems for me. And that's a point about what in the technical language would be called intersectionality. It's a point about the fact that these identities come together in different ways, and the total package of your situation depends on all of them.

That's right. And not only does it depend on all of them, it depends on all of them, as a physicist would say, non-linearly. It's not just the sum of all of them. It's how they are interacting strongly with each other. Right. It's not just a vector sum. It's something way more complicated than that.

So I have some sympathy If you are a poor White man struggling to make a living In a post-industrial context The world is changing around you And the world is changing around you And the world doesn't seem terribly interested

In helping you I'm sympathetic with the view That our society is not doing what it should for you And I was sympathetic with that view Before some of those people vote for Donald Trump And I was already saying this And we still are afterward, even though we wish they hadn't voted for Donald Trump. Yes, yes, yes.

And it's still the case that that's a genuine problem in our society. On the other hand, understanding that there are real needs there, these are our fellow citizens with real needs, doesn't mean that I can't say that if they're racist, that's wrong. Or that if they think that because, we don't have legal segregation anymore. There's no problem for black people to complain about. That just seems to me, you know, there's very good reason to doubt that.

There's lots of evidence in labor economics, for example, that that's just not true. And I can't pretend to agree with them about that because I think they're wrong about it. And I think they may well be wrong about some of the things they think about what's happened in gender as well, which they may not be happy about. So I think we have to So that's one set of issues We've got to be yes, we should Disaggregate, we should be careful And we should pay attention to all the problems

It's not impossible to keep track of one one problem And the problems of class in our society Are very, very serious And they are Of course they interact with racial questions But the problems of the people at the bottom Of the money social capital and cultural capital hierarchies are real problems and the majority of those people

are white because black people are a minority in this country. And even if you include Hispanics who are a significant minority now, more than blacks, larger numbers, it's still the case that some of the most serious, the serious problems at the bottom are. significantly faced by white people as well. So when people complain about identity politics having distracted us from class politics, I'm inclined to agree, though I should point out that class politics is a kind of identity politics do.

It's a different identity issue. And the point is we should be keeping track of all of the ways in which all of the identities intersect with questions of justice and fairness. So we've done a bad job of that, I think, in keeping... As I say, I feel deeply that we've let down a significant part of the population that's white. Because, well, for many reasons, part of it is to do with the general, I'm afraid, corruption of our political system. And because a significant part of the problem these people face is the result of decisions that are good for business,

decisions to offshore jobs or to use robots, which are increased productivity and shareholder value and all the things that you care about if you're running a company. And because those people want to be allowed to do those things, which I think is fine, provided some of the wealth created by doing those things, is spent on making lives okay for the people whose lives are disrupted by these things. It's true that we don't have a problem of unemployment at the moment in this kind of since the return of jobs after 2008. But we do have a problem of satisfying, significant, well-paid jobs.

And we're a very rich country, and we could do something about that, and we haven't. And I really do think that part of the reason is that it's easier to make gestures around race and gender, gender, gestures, because we have still got huge inequalities around both of them, than it is to make the gender gestures around, or make real significant change around these economic inequality issues. Well, I think this is a key point because I'm sort of personally sympathetic to those who want to highlight the ways in which people are treated unfairly because of their identity, whether it's gender or race or whatever. Oh, class. Or class. But as you just point out, I think it's very worth emphasizing, that can be a cheap and easy route to take when reality is more complicated.

And I think you've got to be careful of tokenism. It's an important fact that a significant part of the integration of the elite universities in this country in respect to race has been done by bringing in very, very elite black people. it's still a real problem. And by the way, we haven't done a terrific legal a good job of bringing in non-elite white people to the universities. Either our universities are a significant part of the problem

in the intergenerational transfer of class privilege in the United States. If I understand it correctly, I've been told that affirmative action, which has all sorts of problems, but it's one of the cheapest and most efficient ways of creating black middle class. You just take a bunch of black people who wouldn't have gone to college otherwise. You send in their really good colleges.

They go back and everything improves. But it's much easier to sort of do that along racial categories than along class categories. Yes, because I mean, I think many of the African Americans who were integrated into, say, the elite universities, starting in the late 60s, would say that the universities could have done a better trod. And by the way, at that point, there was a little bit more class variety among the first generation, for some reason, among the first generations. But I think they might say that these places could have done a better job of changing to meet them, not making them feel unwelcome by just going on the way they were.

Welcome to our WASP enclave. Yes, exactly. and just taking, making, I mean, what's interesting is that it's only in the 60s, remember, that systematic discrimination against Jews really stops in these institutions. So it's not like, you know, it's not like there's been no problems for people other than black people. Caltech tried to hire Albert Einstein, but it was just such an anti-Semitic place he wouldn't go. Right. So, and, yeah, he did fine at the Institute for Advanced Study.

So that's okay. He did call it a concentration camp at one point, but then he backed off. There's more than enough anti-Semitism there also. Right. Not as bad at California. So I think the, I think the, but what's interesting, sorry, what I'm going to say about that is that the way in which the first generations of Jewish intellectuals who were admitted to places like Columbia and Harvard and so on, responded was to some extent to just

enter the wasp cultural thing. So if you were not an American, it would not have occurred to you that Lionel Trilling, I think, was Jewish. And what's interesting is that there's a later generation

among whom I think we can include someone like Harold Bloom, who did the thing of saying I'm coming as a Jew. Right. And I'm not going to. Well, this is always a tricky thing with identity, you know, the extent to which you assimilate versus assert your identity.

And both of these things are, you know, and, you know, in the end, you want to create a world in which people can do what they want to do. That's right. And they're allowed to assimilate if that's what they want. And so you don't, you don't criticize. You don't say, oh, you're an Oreo or a banana, whatever the insults are for people who are, you know,

white on the inside. But you also, the institution benefits if it adapts. If it says, okay, we've got different kinds of people here coming. What do we need to do? And I think we've done some of that for race in some places. And African American Studies, which is a field that I've worked in a lot, has been part of that. And I'm proud of that. I think that's a useful contribution.

But we've done. a terrible job of dealing with the class problem in terms of making the place more welcoming. If you, it's just a simple set of questions. I mean, if you are, if you build a university around the assumption that everybody has enough money that they don't need to work while they're in college, you'll get one kind of institution. If you recognize, as we do here at NYU, that many, most of our students are working and have to work. because they wouldn't have enough money to eat otherwise, I would buy that books.

Then you have to change the place and you have to think about what hours you teach at, how many credits it's reasonable to expect people to get in the... And so on, you have to change, or you have to have enough money to say you don't have to work if you don't want to, which is what Princeton does. Princeton's a very rich institution, so nobody has to work, basically. I mean, if your parents can afford it, you will, you... parents can afford it. They expect you to contribute, but if they can't, they don't. And you're

not required to, you're supposed to be pretty rich as an institution to pull that off. Yes. Well, it's the richest per student institution in the world. So jolly well ought to be doing it. But it's, but we know, we can't do that. We're the largest private university in the United States. And we have a tiny endowment. So we're tuition driven. And we have to be very attentive to the fact that our tuition is a huge part of the investment that the families of our students will be making in them in the whole of their lives. It's the most, it's the largest. And we should keep it as small as we can while consistently, you know, being a great university. So I think, so I'm with the people who criticize our failure to think about those questions. But I think the thought that

we're not thinking about them because we're thinking about something else and so that we should stop thinking about other forms of injustice just seems a non-sequitur to me. That seems a deflection strategy. Yes, it's just we should do, we should do, we should, you know, do as many things as we reasonably can to make our institutions, and this is a point about universities, but of course it's a general point about about the social institutions of our society, that they should be open to people of all the kinds that there are in our society. and on roughly equal terms.

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Well, so there's certainly this attitude, a possible stance one can take. You wrote a wonderful book that I really enjoyed called cosmopolitanism. Cosmolitanism in certain circles is now used sort of as a quasi-antysmetic slur, but I think we want to reclaim this as a positive thing to be. But it's not an unproblematically positive thing to be. What is your sales pitch for cosmopolitanism? So I think of cosmopolism is combining two thoughts. The expression, cosmopolitous and Greek means citizen of the world.

So one thought is just that there's some important sense in which each of us should think of all the other people in the world as our fellow citizens of something. This is a metaphor because there isn't a world state, so we're not literally fellow citizens of anything. But we should treat each other in ways that are somewhat like the ways we treat fellow citizens, which means, I assume, that we should care for what happens to them and try to shape the world so that. that they can do well, just as we can do well. And that maybe not everybody in every group of citizens shares this, but we should be sort of interested in them, not just in sort of making their lives better,

but in what they're like, wanting to get to know them. So that's one thing. And the second thing is that that's wanting to get to know them is important because they're different. some of them from us and that's fine. We don't need them to become like us. It can be good. It can be, in fact, more interesting to live in the world

where not everybody is the same. A point that John Stuart Mill makes beautifully in On Liberty that we profit from other people's what he called experiments of living. In this country we have the Swedish healthcare model to think about in deciding what we're going to do. If they hadn't done that experiment,

we wouldn't know anything about it. It would all be theoretical. It would be done by economists, and it'd probably be pretty bad. We'd know a great deal less. We'd know a great deal less than by constructing a priori theories of these matters. So that's the two things.

Now, the universality, so the slogan is universality plus difference. The universality thing has elements that I think are compulsory, morally compulsory. You have moral obligations to every human being, also to animals, but that's a complication that I will avoid from now on. You have obligations to other human beings, and in particular you have obligations not to harm them,

not to do things in the world that cause serious harm to people elsewhere. But I don't think the second thing, the thing of taking pleasure indifference, is morally compulsory. I think if you want to hide yourself off. If you want to go, if you want to be an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania and you don't want to

interact with what they call the Americana, the Americans around them, I think you have to be free to do that. And if you want to live in the... If you're letting the others live their lives and you don't want to interact with them, then that's fine. And you want to be ultra-orthodox in Jerusalem, as long as you're not throwing stones at people who are driving on the Sabbath, which some of them do, unfortunately. That's fine.

So, so the total package, I don't think, can be... argued to be morally compulsory. The first part of the package is compulsory. That's just morality. And it includes respects for human rights and all those other things. The pitch for taking the whole package is just that life's, well, there are two pitches. One is an instrumental pitch. We need some cosmopolitans because we have to interact.

We've got global warming. We've got a whole bunch of problems. We've got pandemics. One planet. Yeah. One planet. And we're interconnected. ecologically, health-wise, I like to remind my students that every year somebody

collects influenza viruses in rural China so that we have a flu vaccine by the time they get here, right? That's a very complicated international thing, and it's done by people. It would be much less likely to happen if nobody here was interested in there, and nobody there was interested in here. So there's an instrumental reason, but I think there's also, just a sort of juicence,

a pleasure reason, namely that if you think about, one way to get at this is to think about what are the great aesthetic objects that we care about, if we care about, aesthetic objects.

There are things like music, which is fantastically transnational in its sources and effects, and I mean popular music, but I also mean Beethoven you know

Handel is the royal fireworks that Handel wrote for the German is the British Royal Fireworks because he was a he was a composer in Britain

he was employed in Britain Favorite global example probably the most famous Japanese poet is Basho Basho writes in a script invented by the Chinese and belongs to a religion invented by the Indians because he's a Zen

Buddhist. No China no India, no Basho. Right. And no cross-cultural. And no cross-cultural stuff. No, my mother writing haiku as I was growing up because she had discovered Basho and thought he was a wonderful poet. So

Shakespeare's most famous plays about a Danish prince, not an English prince. So that the things we care about in the cultural domain spontaneously cross boundaries steel, borrow, appropriate, whatever you want to call it.

Well I was going to at some point mention there are there's the darker side of cultural appropriation which is more about sort of caricaturing or even disrespecting other cultures and I'm I kind of I want to say that I love cultural appropriation

I love it when cultures mix and interact and inspire each other. But again, in the sense of absolutely understanding those who are blatantly against it because it can be so badly used. This is one of those places where I think the sort of boring distinctions that philosophers make are really useful and helpful and get people to see things more clearly. So the word appropriation is not terribly useful to talk about somebody of Justin Trudeau in blackface. That's really... Whose culture was he borrowing?

It wasn't appropriate. He wasn't taking anything from anybody. He was just representing people in a disrespectful way. That's not appropriation. And if he had done it for the purpose of... Suppose he had been dressing up with that purpose in order to play a role in a performance that was meant to make a point about racism.

We would not have a problem with it. Sorry, some people would. Well, some people would, but that's because they're confused about the distinction between or that they're not keeping track of the fact that some ways of taking things that either are made by or represent other people are disrespectful and others aren't. And if you once, and one kind of disrespect is exploitation.

So if I don't know whether, um, whether, um, you know, whether Paul Simon's use of Mbacamba music from South Africa was good or bad for the people that sang in the choirs that worked with him economically. But if it wasn't, it should have been. Yeah. Maybe some benefits quite, yes. But that's, but if it wasn't, that isn't an argument that the resulting music is a bad thing.

That's an argument about the badness of how it was made. And there's no reason not to listen to it, even once you've discovered that, because its existence as music is different from its status as a sort of product of a moral process. So in some sense, there can be perfectly acceptable things that might be labeled cultural appropriation, but there's a sensitivity that needs to... Yes, right.

And when people were... I mean, I'm old enough that when I was a kid with my grandmother in England, I watched a television program called The Black and White Minstrel Show in which English people, white in English people, performed in Sambo black face with big red lips. And the music was great, as it happens. At least I thought I enjoyed it. And I was innocent enough that it didn't occur to me,

how ridiculous it was, that they had to put those faces on in order to do it. So that tradition of, you know, sort of Sambo black face is obviously horrible. And to continue it is to be, insensitive to the badness of that history. But not all sharing and borrowing and taking

and even stealing is like that. And what's wrong with theft is that it's theft. There's no sharing. There's no mutual agreement. So I think we don't want to stop the flow. Well, sorry, I don't want to stop the flow. I know people do want to stop the flow. And I'm sad about that because as I say,

I think if I think about the things. My mother appropriated Asante and Ansi stories in order to give American and British children something wonderful to read. And I know a lot of African Americans of my generation who remember reading them my mother's version of these African stories, my white mother's version, when they were kids.

So I just can't see anything wrong with that. because it was done with love and respect and with acknowledgement. She didn't pretend that she'd made them up. Well, this idea, I mean, you just said, you know, we shouldn't, then you change you to I shouldn't. And I think that brings up probably the last big point I want to get on the table, which is you talk in the book

about the role of positivism, logical positivism or just positivism. I think I call it positivism. Yeah. Anyway, the important part of it for you was the fact-value distinction and, you know, how values are not quite fixed by the facts. And when you're trying to be good cosmopolitan, one of the questions that arises is how judgy we can be about what goes on in other cultures.

There's an argument made by various dictatorships around the world that you Westerners shouldn't judge us because we're a different culture. And I'm very much in favor of judging them. In fact, Sharon Street, one of your colleagues here at NYU was very influential for my way of thinking about how you can not think that morality is fixed by the universe or objectively out there. You can construct it, but it still exists and you can use it to judge other people.

Good. So I believe this too. That's why I can't get a visa to go to China because I criticize them. You believe it out loud. I believe it out loud. Though I'm hoping that they'll change their minds because I would love to go to China because I'm interested in what's going on in China and I'm not particularly interested in destroying the political system,

though I wish it were more generous to its critics. So I think the way to think about it is, the way I think about it anyway, is what the cosmopolitan recommends is a kind of cross-cultural conversation, which means that you're more likely to get your criticisms right. If you haven't been listening to people, if you're not paying attention to what they're really doing, if you don't really care about them, you will criticize them, but mostly your criticisms will miss the mark.

So, for example, to take a case that everybody wants to bring up, things to do with female gentle cutting, there's no point in criticizing that practice in a society unless you know what they do. And unless you know what the women who've been through it, think about it. Even if you think they're in a state of false consciousness, you need to know what they're thinking. and the fact is that what we call, what people call female circumcision as a practice, ranges enormously in what it is. Some of it involves just a nick to the labia. Now I'm against any kind of unnecessary physical mutilation of children, but it's not very serious.

pharonic incision, removal of the creditoris and sewing up the labia. That's a very serious, bad idea. And it's bad for reason. But here again, this is something, to get across the badness of it, one of the things you have to notice is that it's bad for fertility,

and most of the societies which practice it care about fertility. So there's a thing about it that they should care about, but you won't know that if you haven't been paying attention. So, and I think that respectful interventions from outside have made,

this is true with Female General Cutting in Senegambia in West Africa, the successful interventions have been by people who came in and didn't wag their fingers, but they just talked to people. They talked about the medical stuff. They talked about human rights and the rights of children. They didn't even directly talk. And they waited until the moment when somebody said,

I think maybe that means that we shouldn't be and then they said, okay, if that's what you think, let's figure out how to make it happen. Let's try and persuade everybody in this village. But let's not do it on our own because we marry the kids in the next village. Our daughters marry their sons. Their sons marry our daughters.

We need to persuade them as well. Otherwise, we won't be able to marry, right? I mean, simple point. But again, to know that, you have to know something about the lives of these people. Well, that's a very good point. I mean, it's okay to be judgy. It's okay to think that the practices

of other cultures are wrong. But it requires a certain amount of work. It requires a amount of sensitivity and education. Yes. And both in order to make sure that your criticism is correct and to be in a position to do anything at all effective to try and persuade them to do it the other way. In a book that I wrote about honor,

I pointed out that the end of the practice of footbinding in China was significantly brought about by the presence in China of evangelical Christian missionaries who were enormously responsible. of Chinese civilization, but thought this practice, which isn't particularly unchristian, it's just a bad practice, was a bad practice. And they persuaded, they got Chinese intelligentsia, members of the Chinese intelligentsia, very famous people like Kang Yu Wei, to see this. And they, Chinese then organized anti-footbiting societies, as they had organized

anti-upium societies. And over a generation, it went away, over 20 years. It went from, you know, 90% in many places to sort of basically zero and lots of places, different times in different places, but very, very swift. So, cosmopolitans are going to be better at doing the, being judgy, because they're more likely to be interested in what's actually going on. You might learn something along the way. And also, you're listening. You're not just talking.

And the fact is, I want the Chinese to be able to criticize our prison system, which is way more incarcerating than theirs percentage-wise. And at least in Hong Kong, though not in much of China, the prisons are pretty good in terms of conditions. They're not Sweden, but they're definitely better than many prisons in Louisiana. So I think we need, the Cosmoulin wants to listen as well as talk, and in that conversation we will be judged. And that's fine. That's part of the point. Oh, yeah, that's part of the bargain, right? Yes.

And also it's part of what we get because maybe we're doing something wrong. Almost certainly we're doing something wrong. Yes, for sure we are. And it won't be evident to us. It won't be as evident to us as it might be to someone looking outside, though the outsider has to be attentive to what we're actually up to, the outsider who just waves a hand and says, oh, Americans do something, and they lock their parents up in,

they lock their grandparents up in old people's homes. Well, that's not a really, I mean, that's not a very good description of what's going on. Do you think this kind of strategy will be helpful in spreading democracy around the world? Is that too much to add? I think it's the only strategy that might help in spreading. Though one of the things about democracy, and by the way, the language of human rights, is that on the whole, once you get them into the hands of ordinary people, they think they're a good idea.

It's the government that may not be so keen on democracy. But the people usually think it would be a good idea to be consulted and a good idea to play a role and a good idea to have their rights protected by their own state. and if their own state doesn't know, knowing that their state will be criticized by other states if it doesn't. Just as their state should criticize other states when they don't do things right for their own citizens.

So I think, but that means, of course, that it's going to have to be whatever, you know, the forms of democracy are going to be different. They're going to work, they're going to have different backgrounds, different traditions, different challenges, the kind of issues that arise in a multi-ethnic society like Ghana where there's no majority ethnicity are different from the kinds that arise in the society which are multiracial and there's a dominant racial group, right?

Those are just different. And what you have to do in designing your democracy to deal with the problems is different in those two cases. But also it depends upon the history. The Germans, I think, not unreasonably, violate a principle that is embedded in our law about freedom of expression by not allowing people to publish copies of Mein Kampf. Given the history of Germany, I don't think that's a crazy decision. But I think it would be wrong to stop Americans having access to Mein Kampf, even though some of them are going to use it to form alt-right groups that will, you know, draw a citizen. swastikas on synagogues and do idiotic things like that.

So I think, but that again, you know, that conversation across society is about what free expression is and recognizing this different and different places. We can't expect Abu Dhabi to immediately go to the regime of regulation of pornography that we have in the United States. It's just not going to work for that. The history is different, the culture is different,

the expectations are different. but we should try and persuade them as they should try and persuade us that on the whole their society will work better and will be fairer to its people if they allow them pretty broad freedom to say what they want. I like it all seems very reasonable. Everyone's talking to each other, enjoying food from different places.

It gives me some optimism that the world can become a more cosmopolitan place. And just remember, the BBC, I'm not going to remember the exact numbers, but the BBC did a poll a couple of years ago around the world, asking people if they thought they were citizens of the world. In fact, they asked them, in my view, a ridiculous question, which was, are you more of a citizen in the world than you were of your country? Which is the wrong question,

because the whole point about cosmopolism is it requires you to be loyal to some local things as well because that's what you're bringing to the cosmopolitan conversation. But anyway, they found that in many countries, including the United States, a significant number of people were willing to say yes, even to that bizarre question. So I don't know how many would have said yes if they'd asked the right question, which is are you a citizen of the world as well as a citizen of your country?

But in many countries, it was a majority of the population that said they felt more like citizens of the world than they did of their own country, right? Now, some of them are places like Nigeria, where you can understand that because the Nigerian state is a mess. But some of them was, I can't remember, I wish I could remember the details, but it's worth looking up. But so I think there is a, as I say, we can't. require everybody to do this. We can't expect everybody to do this. But it's okay. But that's fine. That's part of the causal problem thing

is that we're cool with difference. I would be happy if an Amish family were willing to let me come and spend time and see what their life was like. But they're not. They don't like. And I can see why. I don't particularly want

do I want some well-intentioned French straight person to say, can I come and spend time with your gay family in order to see what gay family is like. Well, I don't know. Don't get the subject of that experiment. That seems like a weird thing.

So the thing is that it's the, it has to be a conversation among equals for it to be really productive. And the world is full of inequalities and that makes it really hard. Yeah. Well, Kwamey, Antiniapia, conversations among equals are always great things.

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