Joined: 02 Feb 2007 {Posts: 255 } Location: California
Posted: Thu 08 Feb 2007 04:57 Post subject: Cosmopolitanism -- Kwame Anthony Appiah
Anyone out there interested in reading Appiah's book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, and discussing it?
I haven't read it yet but plan to. I've read his "In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture" and had the distinct honor of sitting in on a seminar style discussion he led at Haverford College some years ago.
The following is a Publisher's Weekly review taken from Amazon's site:
Quote:
In a world more interconnected than ever, the responsibilities and obligations we share remain matters of volatile debate. Weighing in on a discourse that includes both visions of "clashing civilizations" and often equally misguided cultural relativism, Ghana-born Princeton philosopher Appiah (In My Father's House) reclaims a tradition of creative exchange and imaginative engagement across lines of difference. This cosmopolitan ethic, which he traces from the Greek Cynics and through to the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, must inevitably balance universals with respect for particulars. This balance comes through "conversation," a term Appiah uses literally and metaphorically to signal the depth of encounters across national, religious and other forms of identity. At the same time, Appiah stresses conversation needn't involve consensus, since living together mostly entails just getting used to one another. Amid the good and bad of globalization, the author parses some basic cultural-philosophical beliefs—drawing frequent examples from his own far-flung multicultural family as well as from impersonal relationships of exchange and power—to focus due attention on widespread and unexamined assumptions about identity, difference and morality. A stimulating read, leavened by cheerful, fluid prose, the book will challenge fashionable theories of irreconcilable divides with a practical and pragmatic worldview that revels in difference and the adventure of a shared humanity.
Joined: 02 Feb 2007 {Posts: 255 } Location: California
Posted: Fri 09 Feb 2007 06:25 Post subject: Cosmopolitanism -- Kwame Anthony Appiah
Excerpt from the NYRB:
Quote:
Anthony Appiah was born into two upper classes, British and Ghanaian. His father was Joe Appiah—an Asante aristocrat, and a campaigner for independence from Britain in the 1950s; to the surprise of both their families and most of their friends, he married Peggy Cripps, a daughter of the formidable British Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps. Peggy went to Ghana and became a distinguished folklorist; when Joe Appiah fell out with President Nkrumah, Anthony endured English boarding schools, then studied philosophy at Cambridge on his way to a career in the Ivy League. Peggy showed her loyalty to her new home by purchasing a grave plot in Kumasi; as Appiah tells the reader in Cosmopolitanism, she placed a slab of concrete on top so that nobody could be buried there in her place. Two months ago, she died in Kumasi at the age of eighty-six.
Appiah's exploration of cosmopolitanism begins with an elegant demolition of two common ideas: the first is that different cultures live to all intents and purposes in different universes; the second is that if we all live in the same universe, one story about that universe must be right and the rest just wrong. Consider illness. As Appiah observes, Asante people will seek to explain illness through their belief in witchcraft:
People do get sick for unaccountable reasons all the time, do they not? Many of them have reason to think that there are people who dislike them. So that once you have an idea of witchcraft, there will be plenty of occasions when the general theory will seem to be confirmed.
On the other hand,
When people get sick for unaccountable reasons in Manhattan, there is much talk of viruses and bacteria. Since doctors do not claim to be able to do much about most viruses, they do not put much effort into identifying them. Nor will the course of a viral infection be much changed by a visit to the doctor. In short, most appeals in everyday life to viruses are like most everyday appeals to witch-craft. They are supported only by a general conviction that sickness can be explained, and the conviction that viruses can make you sick.
Do we have to choose between these interpretations? There is no simple answer. Anthony Appiah's sister is a deaconess of the Anglican Church. When her son was ill, she consulted the local remover of spells—who happened to be a Muslim imam. Between his skills and up-to-date medical treatment the child recovered.
We smile, but when a friend goes into the hospital we wish him or her luck, even though we may not strictly believe in luck. Faced with a skeptic who doubted that there were such things as germs and stuck to the familiar story about evil spells, how many of us could convince him or her? Germs are less visible than envious neighbors; and who knows whom we might have offended? We live in one world, but have many different ways of interpreting it; some are effective for particular purposes—space travel comes more easily to those who know Newtonian physics—but the world allows plenty of leeway for interpretation. To understand what we do and do not have in common, we can only engage in conversation with each other, and since both the human species and each of its members deals with the world with a variety of interpretative techniques, there is much to talk about.
Cosmopolitanism is far from artless. Appiah balances an affectionate understanding of the sheer variousness of different cultures with an insistence that "my people" means, in the last resort, nothing less than "human beings." We do not construct our interpretations of the world out of nothing; we pick them up in the societies in which we grow up. On the other hand, we are much less the children of one society than we imagine. A trading people such as the Asante not only engaged in commerce with Arab merchants whose Islamic faith was—on the face of it—at odds with their Asante animism; they also married them. We are more naturally cosmopolitan than many recent commentators, who grumble about the diluting effects of globalization on "culture," suppose. Evoking his own Asante village, Appiah writes:
We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogeneous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron. The odds are that, culturally speaking, you already live a cosmopolitan life, enriched by literature, art, and film that come from many places, and that contains influences from many more. And the marks of cosmopolitanism in that Asante village—soccer, Muhammad Ali, hip-hop—entered their lives, as they entered yours, not as work, but as pleasure.
This thought leads Appiah into the contentious territory of cultural property, on which he has recently written in these pages.[*] The provocation he discusses is not the Metropolitan Museum's recent travails with the Euphronios krater but the looting and destruction of the King of Asante's palace by Sir Garnet Wolseley in the late nineteenth century. Appiah argues not that the British were anything other than wicked but rather that their wickedness does not mean they should now send everything back. Some of the loot should be returned; but it would be of more use to Ghana if Britain would lend antiquities from other parts of the world and allow Ghanaians to see what they otherwise would have to travel to the British Museum to see.
Appiah is very critical of those who talk too easily of the "cultural patrimony" of contemporary nations. A peculiarity of the recent demands from countries throughout the world for the repatriation of objects declared to be their own cultural patrimony is that the present inhabitants of the countries in question often bear a very indirect relationship to the people who created the artifacts in question—the Italian government has claimed title to the Euphronios krater, a Greek pot that was exported in antiquity to Etruria. In some cases, moreover, the values of today's national and religious leaders are violently opposed to everything that informed the lives of the original artists and artisans. Who thinks it was a good thing that the Taliban could smash the contents of "their" museums?
The route by which many of the treasures that are the glory of the Metropolitan Museum or the British Museum got to those museums is often dubious. That does not settle the question of what to do about them now. The glory of Venice rests on the looted treasures of Constantinople, but nobody so far has proposed that the horses of St. Mark's basilica—which are nowadays in its museum—should be sent back to Istanbul. If such things really are the patrimony of the entire world, as UNESCO keeps on saying, any particular state or people should see itself as the custodian pro tem. It is, as Appiah says, a curious thing that people who think of themselves as combatting the greed of dealers and rich collectors have themselves such a narrowly possessive notion of cultural property.
2.
It is cultural cosmopolitanism that most interests Appiah; but he also raises some nagging political questions that readers will have in their minds from the first page. The most obvious is this: If the remedy for cultural narrowness is to listen to anyone who is prepared to talk about his view of the world and its implications, what are we to do with those who believe that they possess a unique, saving truth, and have no intention of discussing anyone else's? Appiah does not provide an answer; but then he does not set out to do so. He tries to make clear the difference between openness to the views of others and offers of friendship such as that made by Osama bin Laden in 2002 when he presented the United States with the choice between conversion and continued terrorism. As he writes,
Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values.
On the other hand,
Counter-cosmopolitans [such as Osama bin Laden], once more like many Christian fundamentalists, do think that there is one right way for all human beings to live; that all differences must be in the details.
Appiah finds this view epitomized in the scathing German couplet:
Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein,
So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein.
Which is to say, "If you won't my brother be, then thy skull I'll smash for thee."
A second large question takes Appiah to the heart of the philosopher's ambition to found morality on something other than familial and local affection. What can get us to take seriously the needs of distant strangers? Here Appiah differs with Amartya Sen, who rightly reminds us of the swiftness with which people in rich countries can sometimes rush to contribute to disaster relief when presented, as in the case of the tsunami, with vivid evidence of the suffering of faraway people. Appiah does not rely on fellow-feeling to sustain a cosmopolitan ethics. Nor does he suggest, as the philosopher Peter Singer once did, that the only rational guide to conduct is a form of utilitarianism that tells us that since our resources would satisfy more urgent needs if they were given to the very poor than they satisfy for us, we should give away everything we have until we can provide only the bare necessities for ourselves.
Instead, and perhaps surprisingly after all that has gone before, he reaches back to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's invocation of the "internal spectator" who judges our actions from a moral point of view. This is the voice of moral reasonableness:
To say that we have obligations to strangers isn't to demand that they have the same grip on our sympathies as our nearest and dearest. We'd better start with the recognition that they don't.
Appiah argues that the utilitarian calculus is a travesty of moral reasoning, but also that doing something useful to help those in need wherever they might be is a moral obligation. Since it appears that a bare forty-five cents a day from each inhabitant of the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Japan would lift the very poorest out of acute misery, it would be a reasonable contribution; and little though it is, it is much more than is now spent in nonmilitary aid. The only difficulty one might raise with this line of thought is that generosity requires institutions to make it effective; most people will contribute their fair share when efficient arrangements for using their contribution are in place, but their willingness rapidly diminishes if they think their contribution will not be used efficiently. Until we have an effective international welfare system, it will be hard to persuade even generous people to take fairness seriously.
[cut]
Quote:
Reading Sen and Appiah together raises large questions about the ways identity, culture, and community are invoked in contemporary politics. All have been made too much of—especially the concept of identity. Even as individuals, many of us manage our lives in the way a not very competent chairman might manage a fractious committee. We can take for granted identity in the form of the physical continuity of our bodies, but consistency of taste, belief, affection, and allegiance is another matter entirely. Not only do different people achieve different degrees of consistency in these matters, they may have very different feelings about the importance of such consistency. How much more so with groups. Appropriately enough, Sen and Appiah each has his own emphasis when it comes to questions of group identity. Sen emphasizes the way that some groups are created by exclusionary social pressures:
Sometimes a classification that is hard to justify intellectually may nevertheless be made important through social arrangements.... That is what competitive examinations do (the 300th candidate is still something, the 301st is nothing). In other words, the social world constitutes differences by the mere fact of designing them.
People who are divided in this way are genuinely members of a different group, and their fates will depend on that membership; but this is not an identity they would choose and it is not one that enhances their lives.
Both Sen and Appiah take two things for granted. The first is that identity matters—that people need roots in some cultural soil or other, even if they should not be so rooted that they cannot migrate physically, linguistically, socially, and culturally. The second is that we all possess multiple identities—that a man will not just be gay, but gay and Catholic and Croatian. What neither writer does is provide a wholly satisfactory account of the ways in which, and the conditions under which, one of those identities swallows up the rest. Sen points out over and over again that we may attach importance to all our identities without slighting one or other of them, although he acknowledges that some forms of affiliation or group identification are likely to be much stronger than others. But on the subject of why people so easily forget this and attack those who seem different, he says little more than that trouble breaks out when someone with an interest in fomenting violence persuades people—poor Hindu laborers in Gujarat, perhaps—that the only thing that matters is that they are Hindu, and that all their misfortunes are to be laid at the door of their Muslim enemies.
The puzzle remains: Why do we succumb so readily to appeals based on the irrational forms of identity—ethnic, racial, religious—rather than to appeals based on the rational forms— economic above all? Or, to put it in dramatic terms: Why do identity politics so often rest on hatreds that do as much damage to the aggressors as to their victims? Until we have a deeper understanding of the answers to that question, both Professor Sen and Professor Appiah are somewhat in the position of explaining what it would be like to behave better to an audience that often seems, unhappily, incapable of following their advice.
I know this discussion is a bit old, but I read this book and enjoyed it very much. High School Teacher, did you finish it? Anybody else read it and have thoughts on the topic?
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