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Mistaken Identities: Creed, Country, Color, Culture

Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith Lectures 2016

Lecture 1: Creed, London

SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the 2016 Reith Lectures. We begin the series at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was founded in 1895 for the “betterment of society” and boasts President Kennedy and Mick Jagger among its alumni.

The subject of our lectures this year is Identity. What is it that makes us who we are? Our country, our colour, our religion or our culture? Is it none or is it all of these things?

Tackling these questions is a philosopher who’s written extensively on subjects such as ethics, honour and cosmopolitanism. He’s also, by the way, written a handful of highly entertaining detective novels.

His parents made headlines when they married here in 1953. Theirs was said to be the first inter-racial society wedding and an inspiration for the film ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’. His mother was the daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, the post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his father was an independence activist for what was then called the Gold Coast, now Ghana.

His own marriage also made a small piece of social history when four years ago he married his long-term partner within days of same-sex marriage being recognised by the state of New York.

2 So - born in the UK, a childhood spent living in Ghana, back and forth to boarding school here in England, onto Cambridge, a teacher at some of the world’s top universities - Yale, Cornell and Harvard – and now Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

Here, then, is a man who’s successfully crossed so many different boundaries, someone qualified to opine on the nature of identity in all its forms.

Ladies and gentlemen, to deliver the first of four lectures under the title of Mistaken Identities, please welcome the BBC 2016 Reith Lecturer Kwame Anthony Appiah.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you, thank you very much.

Often over the years, London taxi drivers, wondering about the combination of my accent and my appearance, have often asked me where I was born. And I’ve told them: “Here in London.” But that wasn’t what they usually wanted to know. What they meant to ask me was where my family came from “originally.” Some guessed from the way I look that I came from South Asia; that I was merely pretending not to understand them when they addressed me in Hindi! (laughter)

Prodded further, I’d have had to answer that I come from two families in two places pretty far apart. My mother grew up on the edge of the Cotswold Hills, in a tiny village on the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

When she met my father, she was working in London at an organization called Racial Unity, dedicated to promoting racial harmony throughout Britain and her empire. You could say that her principles were put into practice, because my father was a law student from the Gold Coast. He was an anti-colonial activist, the President of the West African Students’ Union, and a representative in Britain in those days of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who was to lead Ghana to independence.

So the other side of my family came from Ghana: more precisely from the region of Ashanti. My father’s lineage, as he taught us, could be traced back to Akroma-Ampim, an eighteenth-century general whose military successes had won him a great tract of land on the edge of the Ashanti kingdom. His name is one of the names my parents gave me; and my father raised us with stories of his family. There’s a wrinkle here: My mother’s people traced family through fathers, my father’s through mothers: So I could have told those taxi drivers,

3 then, that I really had no family at all. Naturally, of course, I’ve been embraced and absorbed by both. Well I begin with family stories because I want, in these lectures, to explore the ways in which stories like these shape who and what we are. Your sense of self is shaped by your family, but also by affiliations that spread out from there, like your nationality, gender, class, race, and religion.

Nowadays, we talk of these affiliations as matters of “identity.” That’s historically a rather recent use of that term, though. When George Eliot writes in Middlemarch that Rosamond “was almost losing the sense of her identity,” it’s because her sense of self has been shaken by the revelation that the man she thinks she loves is hopelessly devoted to somebody else. So identity here is utterly personal. The identities we often think of today, on the other hand, are shared, sometimes with millions or billions of others. So they’re social.

I’m not going to try to explain why identity talk has exploded through my lifetime, though I agree that’s a fascinating question. Instead, I’ve set myself the task in these lectures of trying to challenge some of our settled assumptions about how identity works. Each of my four lectures focuses on one species of the phenomenon: next time, in Glasgow, I’ll be talking about country; after that, in Accra and in New York, I’ll be taking on color and culture. But today, here in London, I’m going to start with creed, because religious identities so often connect us with some of the very oldest stories that we have. When my parents got married in the 1950s, they were warned that their “mixed marriage” was going to be difficult. And my parents agreed—because, you see, my father was a Methodist and my mother an Anglican. (laughter) They made a home together in Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, for the rest of their lives, but, true enough, they were always members of different churches. One reason their marriage worked, I think, was that they were each sustained by these slightly different variants of their faith. What some counted a burden, they counted a blessing.

And religion wasn’t something they practiced only on Sundays: it infused their lives. In that way, it was like many other religious traditions over the millennia. Take Judaism, the oldest of our Abrahamic creeds. For thousands of years, everyday dietary and hygienic practices; rituals, public and private; and forms of dress have played a central role in distinguishing a Jewish community from its neighbors. The Jews of Alexandria in the first century BCE looked different from their neighbors because of their hair and their beards, the clothes they wore; because of the foods they ate, the way they prayed, the scriptures they held holy. But of the things that set them apart, which were matters of custom and which were matters of creed? They would have been hard pressed to say. Pulling religion out of all this to articulate a notion of Judaism as distinct from what we would now call their Jewish identity would not have made much sense to them or to their neighbors.

4 As the Reconstructionist theologian Mordecai Kaplan once put it, Judaism is the folk religion of the Jewish people. And the notion here that identity might precede doctrine is for many people a startling one. There’s a reason why we refer to religious identities with words like “faith,” “confession,” or, indeed, “credo,” from the Latin word for “I believe.” It’s that we’ve been taught to think of religion principally as a matter of beliefs.

Now I want to argue that this simple idea is deeply misleading, in ways that can make understanding between religions seem both harder and easier than it really is. I want to persuade you that religion is not, in the first instance, a matter of belief.

Every religion has three dimensions: there’s what you do—call that practice. There’s who you do it with—call that community, or fellowship. And, yes, there’s a body of beliefs. The trouble is that we tend to emphasize the details of belief over the shared practices and the communities that buttress religious life. We all know the word “orthodoxy”: it comes from a Greek word that means correct belief. But there’s a less familiar word, “orthopraxy” which comes from another Greek word, πρᾶξις (praxis), which means action. So orthopraxy is a matter not of believing right but of acting right.

So consider again our Alexandrian Jews. Philo of Alexandria, an eminent Jewish philosopher of the time, discusses atheism. True, he was against it. But he was plainly contesting a position that was tempting some in his own community. So already, more than two thousand years ago, it was possible to belong to that community without believing in God.

We can approach the matter from the other direction. Maimonides, the greatest of the medieval Torah scholars, decocted the essence of Judaism into Thirteen Principles: tenets such as the “the unity of God,” the existence of prophesy, and the divine origins of the Torah. Suppose you sat by yourself in your study and persuaded yourself of these principles. You would not thereby become Jewish. These abstract beliefs mean very little if you lack a direct relationship to traditions of practice, conventions of interpretation, and communities of worship.

What’s easy to miss is that even an avowal of faith is a performance as much as it is a proposition. I think of Gore Vidal’s wonderful novel about the last of the pagan Roman emperors, Julian the Apostate, and his line in that book about temple priests reciting verses by rote in an ancient language that everyone has long since forgotten, including the priests. Would that have rendered the rites meaningless? I don’t think so. Many of us have witnessed the power of ceremonies in a language we do not understand. The gravity of the Jewish Kaddish, the prayer pronounced at funerals and memorials, may even be heightened by the fact that this prayer is in Aramaic, a language that modern

5 congregants mostly don’t understand. The things we do together, in fellowship, are at the core of religious experience.

If we distort the nature of religious identity by a fixation on faith, this fallacy is entwined with another: that I’ll call scriptural determinism. Often, we’re told that our religious beliefs repose in our sacred texts—so that to be a believer is to believe what’s in the scriptures. As if one could decant from them, like wine from a pitcher, the unchanging nature of a religion and its adherents.

To evaluate claims like these, it helps to recall what scriptures are actually like. So let me take, more or less at random, a passage near the beginning of Isaiah. See if you can understand it. “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.” (Isaiah 1:3.) Much of scripture is written in language like this that is poetical, metaphorical, or simply obscure. Much consists of narratives, some, like the parables told by Jesus, overtly fictional. Scripture, in short, requires interpretation.

Thinking back again to our Alexandrian Jews, let’s turn to something that looks altogether cut and dried: kashrut, the dietary codes that spell out what’s kosher and what’s unclean. This would seem to be the ultimate case of “Read the manual, stupid.” (laughter) The relevant passages from the Torah are either specific rules or even more specific lists of foods. For example, the fish you eat must have scales: okay check. But what about fish that have weird scales, like sturgeon? Rabbinic authorities disagree. The Torah helpfully lists the specific birds it forbids. But they aren’t unfortunately given the names you will find in a Bird Identifier from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. One bird name translates as “vomiting.” (laughter) We think that’s a pelican, but we’re not sure. Another bird’s name means “purple.” A flamingo perhaps? Perhaps a purple swamp hen? Nobody really knows. Then there’s the prohibition on the anaqah which means groaners or moaners. Some think these are geckos. Others ,(אֲנָקָ ה) say ferrets.

This is in a way the most straightforward part of the five books of Moses, and it’s a blizzard of uncertainties. We want the clarity of “Eat This, Not That.” Instead, we could be explicating a symbolist poem.

And frequently the stakes are greater than whether sturgeon will be on the menu. In the New Testament, for example, St. Paul uses the word ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoitai) twice in a list of wrongdoers. Translators have tended recently to treat ἀρσενοκοῖται as a word for homosexuals, and if you are hostile to homosexuality, you’ll take this as proof that St. Paul endorses this modern view. But the scholarly tradition is divided on this, for reasons that most Christians don’t know … beginning with the fact that this word is not known in Greek before St. Paul and these two passages are not cited by the early fathers of the church on the rare occasions when they discuss sexual relations between

6 men. The condemnation of homosexuality, in other words, reflects the power of everyday traditions of sentiment: it helps interpret the text, it isn’t simply derived from it.

The priests and the scholars often want to insist that doctrine, which they are, after all, the masters of, drives practice. So it’s easy to ignore the reverse process, the way doctrine is often driven by practice —by forms of worship, familiar feelings, traditions of social regulation. Practice changes, of course, over time, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly. And changed practice can lead to changed belief. Scriptural passages can get new interpretations. And if they can’t adapt, they’re often abandoned. That passage in the Psalms about how blessed you will be if you dash Babylonian babies on the rocks; the passage in First Peter about how slaves should submit themselves to their masters, however cruel—these we can usefully look away from. St. Paul’s powerful move was to hold on to the Jewish scriptures while instructing the followers of Christ that they could ignore large parts of them because they were only binding on the Jews. In short, if scriptures were not subject to interpretation—and thus to re- interpretation—they wouldn’t continue to guide people over long centuries. When it comes to their survival, their openness is not a bug but a feature. A burden, perhaps, but also a blessing.

This feature cuts in various directions. Because among the most vehement of the scriptural determinists are fundamentalists, consumed with dragging others into a single version of one of the great religious traditions. These movements—whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim, or anything else —all aim to defend and promulgate the One True Way, imagined as the way things were understood in the earliest days when the Truth was first revealed. The movements have something else in common: though they venerate the old, they’re all new, being reactions to the modern world. The great paradox of fundamentalism is that it relies on precisely what it repudiates: interpretive latitude. Today, many Iranian Shi’ites believe that the ulama, the recognized Muslim scholars, should hold ultimate political power; and despite the fact that this tenet is new in Shia tradition, they claim that this has always been true, and that every Muslim should accept it. Others around the world believe that all truth is with the Dalai Lama or the Pope or the pastor of some independent church in Brazil or in Kenya. And yet whether the label you are claiming is Islam or Buddhism or Christianity, sincere committed people who have also claimed that label have believed other things. Fundamentalists insist that those people weren’t really Muslims or really Buddhists or Christians. In their view most of the people who have affirmed these labels were simply mistaken … so they don’t apply to most of the people who have claimed them, though they have claimed them in all sincerity.

Once you recognize these perplexities, some of the things people regularly say about religious identities should appear in a new light. For example: the place of women in Islam. You often hear an argument that goes like this.

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The Qur’an has passages that clearly treat women as inferior to men. Take the Surah (4: 11) that says that men should inherit twice the portion of women, or the Surah (2: 282) that says that the evidence of two women in a dispute over a commercial contract can replace the evidence of one man, or the lines (4:34) that say “men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other.” These passages show that Islamic societies are bound to continue to treat men as superior to women.

Well, that’s how it goes. And scriptural determinism of this kind, you’ll notice, is mobilized both by outsiders to indict Islam and by insiders to defend practices they favor. Now let’s put aside the fact that this argument ignores lots of other relevant evidence, such as the fact that Pakistan and Bangladesh, countries where Islam is the state religion, have had women prime ministers, and have a larger percentage of women in their legislatures than does the United States. Gender inequality certainly remains the norm there, as almost everywhere else in the world. But notice that this scriptural argument could be met with parallel arguments about Judaism or for Christianity. “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord,” St. Paul says in Ephesians. In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, based on a reading of the Bible and a study of religious traditions, I don’t think anybody would have predicted that, by the end of that century, there would be either women rabbis or women Anglican bishops.

And yet the first woman was ordained as a rabbi in Offenbach-am-Main in 1935. Her name was Regina Jonas and she died in Auschwitz. In the United States, where I live, there are women rabbis in each of the major branches of Judaism, including among the Orthodox. The senior bishop of the American branch of the Anglican Church has been a woman: the primate. The fact is that religious communities shift their views about gender over and over again.

Scriptures survive, then, in part precisely because they aren’t just lists of beliefs or instructions on how to live. But even religious documents that are lists of beliefs and instructions require interpretation … as I learned from my Anglican mother. When she was preparing for confirmation, she mentioned to her father that she was having difficulty with some of the Thirty Nine Articles of faith that the Anglican Church has affirmed since the reign of Elizabeth the First. “Well,” grandfather said, “I have a friend who can help you with that.” That friend was William Temple, who was soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury. As my mother went through the articles with him, every time she said that something was difficult to believe, the Archbishop agreed with her. (laughter) “Yes, that is hard to believe,” he would say. So she decided that if you could be an Archbishop with these doubts, you could surely be an ordinary Anglican, so she was confirmed. (2776)

[World Service break here]

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What I am seeking to show is that the story of sacred and ecclesiastical texts is the story of their readers: of shifting and often clashing interpretations. There are many more cases one could mention: the disputes over whether the Qur’an requires women to cover their faces in public places; the attitudes of different Christian denominations to gay sex and marriage and to women’s role as priests; debates within modern Hindu communities about the proper way to think about sex and sexuality. Some Buddhists don’t think female monks ever outrank a male, but Buddhism has traditions of holy women going back to its beginnings. In the Buddhist Vimalakirti Sutra, some two millennia old, a goddess changes Shariputra, one of the Buddha’s original male disciples, into a goddess, into a woman. Then she says to him:

Shariputra, who is not a woman, appears in a woman’s body. And the same is true of all women—though they appear in women’s bodies, they are not women. Therefore the Buddha teaches that all phenomena are neither male nor female.

The same St Paul who says women should cover their heads in church and men shouldn’t told the Galatians: “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” And the Qur’an stresses, in a famous Surah (33:35), that the rewards of submission to Allah are there for both women and men, in a passage that is often cited to stress the fundamental equality of the sexes. So these traditions do not speak with a single voice. To have mastery of the scriptures is to know which passages to read into and which to read past.

When it comes to interpretation, we can always consult context. When St. Paul says women should keep their heads covered in church, it’s reasonable to wonder what the customs of dress were in Corinth in his day, since he was addressing the Corinthians. If it turns out that no respectable woman in that Roman city would have gone around with her head uncovered, you could conclude, as my mother did, that you should dress respectably by local standards when you are in church. And that meant the standards of Kumasi, where she went to church, not of Filkins, the village where she grew up, let alone of first century Corinth.

The same applies even to capital offences. The Torah says adulterers must be stoned to death. Jewish law required that death sentences should go to the Sanhedrin, a rabbinical court of appeal in the Temple in Jerusalem. In the first century, with the destruction of the temple, the Sanhedrin ceased to exist. So some rabbis said: No Sanhedrin, no stoning. For Christians, there’s the story in St. John’s Gospel, in which Jesus, when asked if it was permissible to stone a woman ‘‘taken in adultery,’’ told the Pharisees that one of them who was without sin should ‘‘cast the first stone.’’ When none of them was willing to condemn her, Jesus said he wouldn’t condemn her either.

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An episode like this does not carry its meaning, so to speak, on its face. Nowhere in this account, for example, does Christ actually reject the Mosaic Law. Could have said “I reject the law.” Indeed, in the Sermon on the Mount, he actually says that he has come to “fulfill the Law,” not to destroy it. What does this mean? Well interpreting what Jesus says takes Christians back to the Torah and forward to St. Paul. It’s natural to think that, like some of the other rabbis in first century Palestine, Jesus doesn’t have much sympathy with capital punishment, at least for adultery. And one might venture the same actually about Muhammad, since the Qur’an requires four witnesses to convict a woman of adultery (and penalizes anyone who makes an accusation without producing them). Given the character of the offense, that’s a rather high bar. (laughter)

All of us are conscious today of interpretations of Islam that are wielded in support of violence against Muslims and non-Muslims; that incite terrorism and murder and destruction. And you can, indeed, find sources in Muslim tradition that sustain these ideas, because you can find such sources in all the great religious traditions. The notion that because some Muslim texts speak of warfare, Muslims must be engaged in endless bloodshed is no more sensible than the same claim made for any other religious tradition. You might as well argue that because there is a popular Christian hymn that begins, “Onward Christian soldiers,” Christians must be against peace. When critics of fundamentalism say a religious identity requires a fixed set of beliefs or some fixed reading of its scriptures, they themselves have fallen for the fundamentalists’ fallacy.

These phantom fixities will not help Muslims in this country or their non- Muslim neighbors as they seek together successful forms of cohabitation. In ways largely unknown to the traditional ulama who shaped Islamic ideas about politics, British Muslims are living through a modern experiment. Like the Muslims of much of Europe and North America, they have chosen to settle permanently in non-Muslim lands. Questions of gender, in this new setting, will be only part of the challenge. In meeting it, the recognition that identity endures through change—indeed, that it only endures by change—will be a useful touchstone for everyone involved. Religious identities, like all identities, as we shall see in the next three lectures, are transformed through history: that is how they survive.

Several weeks ago, in a faraway Ghanaian village, far away from here, I found myself in the company of various local chiefs doing as we Ashantis do: pouring libations to our ancestors. One was to the founder of my father’s lineage, the great warrior Akroma-Ampim. Nana Akroma-Ampim, bεgye nsa nom: Grandfather Akroma-Ampim, come take this alcohol to drink, I said. Another was to my own father: Papa Joe, bεgye nsa nom.

Among the Ashanti, your ancestors are spirits who can help or hinder you, and you supply them with food and drink out of prudence as well as out of

10 the fullness of your heart. Doing so is a part of daily life, because daily life is where you interact with spiritual beings. Nobody is warned against faltering in their faith; because nobody is very much tempted by infidelity. And these practices are taken by most people (Ashanti Catholic bishops and imams included!) to be perfectly consistent with having other confessional allegiances, with being Muslim or Christian.

That was certainly true of my own father. He was an elder of the Wesley Methodist Cathedral in Kumasi. But his Methodism had to live with the fact that he was also an Ashanti. And so whenever my father opened a bottle of spirits, which was splendidly often (laughter), he poured out the first drops in a libation to his ancestors, and asked them to watch over the family; as an Italian Catholic might call on Mary, mother of God, or an Indian Muslim might call on a Sufi saint at a shrine. The missionaries who converted my grandfather might have complained that this was a reversion to idolatry, but this complaint would have been regarded by my father and my grandfather as absurd. Philo of Alexandria, expounding Exodus, had some well-judged counsel for them: to be loyal to your god, he said, you need not revile the gods of others. And so there I was, in my father’s ancestral village, pouring those libations—a practice embedded within a spirit of community and fellowship.

So here’s one thing we can agree with the fundamentalists about: Our ancestors are powerful, though not in the ways the fundamentalists imagine. For none of us creates the world we inhabit from scratch; none of us crafts our values and commitments save in dialogue, or debate, with the past.

Dialogue is not determinism, though. Once you think of creedal identities in terms of mutable practices and communities rather than sets of immutable beliefs, religion becomes more verb than noun: the identity is revealed as an activity not a thing. And it’s the nature of activities to bring change. Our ancestors, as I say, are powerful then. They grip us in ways we scarcely realize. But pouring those libations, I found myself reflecting that in the ethical realm— whether civic or religious—we have to recognize that one day we, too, shall be ancestors. That we do not merely follow traditions; we create them. Count that a burden, and a blessing. Thank you.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Many thanks indeed, Professor Appiah. Much meat to get our teeth into there. Let’s see what our audience thinks about it. Actually I’m going to pounce on our first questioner because she’s tweeted before now that she’s ‘always up for a polite chat about the big stuff’. (Appiah laughs) She is Elizabeth Oldfield and she’s just over there. She’s director of a think tank on religion and society. Elizabeth, have you got a question?

11 ELIZABETH OLDFIELD: I have. Thank you very much, Professor Appiah, for your lecture. I have to say I take it as a bit of a given that the vast majority of religious believers don’t think their faith is necessarily one thing and understand that sacred texts are open to, and indeed require, interpretation. I don’t think many people would in fact actually argue with that. My question is doesn’t everyone, every human being, religious or otherwise, crave if not certainty a sense that there’s some basis for the things that they believe, and is that such a problem?

SUE LAWLEY: It’s true, isn’t it? We need something to hang our hats on. It’s what gives us strength?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I draw on a philosophical tradition in which one of the central thoughts is the recognition of human fallibility, and I think that one of the ways in which we’re fallible is that we seek for certainty in places where it’s not to be found and where the correct attitude is one of not of disbelief, not of certainty that it’s in the opposite direction, but of relatively relaxed convictions of one sort and another which we leave open for challenge and revision if new ideas, new stuff comes in. And I think there is a problem when people are so certain of things that in the nature of the case seem to be exactly the sort of things that someone who is committed to them should see are the sorts of things you shouldn’t be certain about. Nothing is clearer, I think, than the difficulty of coming to the truth about theological questions, for example. Everybody in the world agrees that most people in the world have incorrect religious beliefs. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: Elizabeth, come back on that.

ELIZABETH OLDFIELD: Yes I’m always nervous when we try and make conviction itself something to be nervous of. Isn’t the proper test not how strong someone’s belief is, but the fruit of it: does it serve or hinder the common good?

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KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: For me the ultimate test for belief is do you have grounds for thinking that it’s true …believe what you have grounds for thinking is true and you should disbelieve what you have grounds for thinking is false. But in this area, in the area of religious belief, I think it’s very hard to say what’s true. I think that most reasonable believers think it’s really hard to figure out what the truth is about these things that they feel very strongly about.

SUE LAWLEY: But Catholicism, if you like, keeps its believers closer because it has great certainties, doesn’t it – no to abortion, no to women priests, no to contraception?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Except the vast majority, for example, of American Catholics who still identify as Catholic reject the church’s teaching on many of these topics.

SUE LAWLEY: Who wants to come in on this?

GILES FRASER: My name is Giles Fraser. I’m a priest in London. I’m also a canon of a cathedral in Sefwi-Wiawso in Ghana …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Oh great.

GILES FRASER: … so I know a little bit about both of the places you come from. I think you played a trick with us tonight, and one of the tricks that you played is that you wanted us to historicise religious understanding of the scriptures but what you weren’t prepare to acknowledge is that religions themselves have had varying and historically changing understandings of those scriptures from … they’ve not always been fundamentalist from sort of the mid rash of the second century all the way through, and that you presented religion as having a very 20th century fundamentalist approach to scriptures which was actually a dehistoricised understanding of how religions actually understand their scriptures. If you were going to be generous to religions, you would accept the fact that actually they’ve agreed with you over time quite a great deal.

13 KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: The criticisms I was making on that front were criticisms of fundamentalism which identify it as a modern phenomenon, so I don’t think of myself as having committed myself to the view – which I don’t hold – that I think it’s precisely the historical character of interpretation, precisely the fact, as I said, that religious identities have survived in large measure, precisely because texts have been reinterpreted and understood to be reinterpreted by many of the most enduring and flexible traditions, so I don’t want to deny that at all. That’s really what the fundamentalists misunderstand. They misunderstand the fact that the traditions that they’re trying to box in in this way have long, sophisticated bodies of practice in relation to interpretation. Think, just in the case of Islam, think about how much the development of sharia is like the development of something like the English common law because it’s a legal system and it develops in response to the challenges in particular communities of trying to solve particular problems. And that’s why, like the common law, it’s extremely difficult to extract from it some stuff you can take across contexts very easily.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to interrupt you and go to a question I’ve got at the back there. Yes?

ANDREW BROWN: My name’s Andrew Brown. I write about religion, mostly because I don’t understand it. (laughter) There are some things that only work because people believe in them. I mean money’s the best example. Isn’t religion another one of these? If people don’t believe the truths to which religious practices give them access are eternal, unchanging and supremely important, they’re not going to bother? But you’ve shown that religions are contingent, they’re changing, and that they have to be in order to survive, so how do you stick these two understandings together?

SUE LAWLEY: It’s a contradiction.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes, but it’s not my contradiction. (laughter/applause) Well look, I think that let’s say cosmopolitan, fallibilist interpretations of the traditions have been available in all the major traditions pretty much all along. It has rightly been said that the history of faith is the history of doubt. The earliest fathers already deal with the possibility that they’re wrong about things, and they were pretty serious about their Christianity, the early fathers of the church, but that didn’t require them to deny that they had doubts, it didn’t require them to think that they were in touch with the whole truth. Look if the whole truth is available, love to be given it, but the human situation I think is that it’s very hard to figure out what the whole truth is, so a little bit of modesty about what you yourself know I think is natural.

SUE LAWLEY: Somebody aching to pick you up on this here. Yeah?

14 CHRISTINA REES: Yes my name is Christina Rees and I’ve been an activist in the Church of England for women’s equality and women’s ordination. My question is following on some of what you’re saying right now: it’s about truth. You’ve talked about different traditions, the Abrahamic faiths, and you’ve explained to us how everything goes into our actions, our lives, what we do, who we do it with. What I’d really like to ask you is that above and beyond the truths that may be contained in these three major faiths you’ve been discussing, do you think there is one truth, there has to be one truth because if there isn’t one truth in which everything everyone believes in makes sense then nothing is true? So is there a truth beyond the religions you’ve been discussing that either incorporates them or is something other?

SUE LAWLEY: Well there’s a nice, easy question. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: So that’s a nice, easy question. (laughter) I mean the short … I’ll tell you what I think about this, but this is a complicated question in metaphysics and epistemology, which is supposed to be one of my businesses. (laughter) My own view is that once you’ve got a system of representation, once you’ve got a way of talking, then you can say true things and false things in that way of talking and that that can be true about sentences where you have no idea which it is. It can be very hard to figure out what the truth is even if you think you’re clear about what the claim is. So yes, I think there are truths about all the things that I can understand that religious traditions say. I also think that they tend to be the kinds of things that is awfully hard to come across the truth about and that’s why I favour a sense of modesty in the face of that difficulty. Put it this way: I think reasonable people can come to a very wide range of different pictures of the world. I like the formulation of this that Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century traveller, first Christian I think to get into Mecca because he was able to pass for a Pashtun, he said “Truth is the shattered mirror strown in myriad bits, while each believes his little piece the whole to own”.

SUE LAWLEY: A reminder that you’re listening to The Reith Lectures on Radio Four. I’m Sue Lawley. A question at the back there. Yuh?

MICHAEL AMOAH: My name’s Michael Amoah. I’m from SOAS. I’m also from Ghana, by the way.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Excellent.

15 MICHAEL AMOAH: It’s interesting that the title for this talk is Mistaken Identities and you talked about orthodoxy that’s the right doctrine as well as orthopraxy - that’s doing right. It’s also interesting that you did say that you actually talked to your ancestors – you poured libation, you spoke to them – and I mean these are deities and we know that deities when you talk to them, they also talk back to you. I just wondered if you’ve perceived in any of the interactions between you and the deities that you’ve poured libation to, that perhaps they might be suggesting that in terms of orthodoxy and orthopraxy that it’s usually male and female that marry and that perhaps maybe you haven’t perceived that the orthopraxy of your own personal life is not actually the orthodoxy which the deities might be suggesting to you?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well my ancestors mostly didn’t declare themselves on the question that you’re raising (laughter/applause) because they didn’t have a conception of homosexuality. They didn’t think about homosexuality because they didn’t think of sexuality in the way we moderns have come to do and so they couldn’t have had an attitude towards it because to have an attitude towards a thing, you have to have the concept of a thing of that kind. So I think here is a case where there’s perfect freedom to do what you like with the ancestors’ views since they’re empty. (laughter) I will say though that one of the things that strikes me about modern expressions of hostility to homosexuality both from often Wahhabi inspired Islam and from American evangelical inspired Christianity, that these seem to me actually very good examples of things that have come in recently from the outside and that on the whole, though it’s hard to generalise about thousands of cultures and that’s what you’re talking about in Africa, on the whole it looks historically as though there was either very little interest in this kind of orthopraxy in relation to these things, in relation to gender and sex, but also that in some places there were attitudes that were quite relaxed. There isn’t a general answer to the question how traditional Africans regarded sex between men or sex between women because there are lots of different answers depending on the different cases. Sir Richard Burton, whom I mentioned, had a friend called John Hanning Speke who visited one of the kabakas of Buganda who Speke observed - and Speke was shocked by this as a Victorian Englishman - seemed to be having sex with his pages, the young men around the court. Now people around the court didn’t necessarily approve of this, but the fact is there it was – he was the King and that’s what he was doing. So I think there’s a very wide range of practice/praxis in relation to matters of sexuality in the thousands and thousands of traditions of Africa, but among my own ancestors I’d say there’s very little evidence that they had any view at all until Christians came along. And even after Christians came along, they only developed a substantial view – more recently under pressure from evangelical Christianity from … mostly from the country of which I’m now a citizen. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: I see a former Reith Lecturer, Grayson Perry himself, who’s also a bit of an expert on certain kinds of identity. Hello Grayson.

16 GRAYSON PERRY: Yes we’re talking about religious identities and I wondered if atheists and secular people, whether they’ve got a hole, and I wondered what kind of things do you think fill that hole where they haven’t got sort of religious belief and that culture? What kind of things are filling that hole for those people?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well one thought you might have if you believe, with me, that belief isn’t so central at least in all of religious life is that you could take up the community side of religion, you could take up the doings.

GRAYSON PERRY: But I wondered what non-religious things fill the hole for people. It wasn’t that really. What I was interested in is what kind of things do you think atheists and secular people fill that hole somehow that I think we all kind of have in a way for community and identity?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m sceptical about the existence of the hole. (laughter)

GRAYSON PERRY: Okay, that’s a good answer.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: That is to say I know lots of perfectly happy atheists who have lots of complicated views about lots of things and lots of commitments, but I’m not sure they would say that those commitments are filling a hole left by God.

GRAYSON PERRY: Yeah.

SUE LAWLEY: I’ve got a lot of people with their hands up, so I’m going to try and go a bit more quickly if we can. Yes?

SHAHIDHA BARI: I’m Shahidha Bari. I’m a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. If we are to understand religion as a process, going into the future how do we ensure that women are at the vanguard of it rather than the victims of it, as they have been for so long?

17 KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: My guess is that the answer to that is not going to be an across the board answer. We have to figure out within each of the faith traditions, women and men together have to figure out how to move in a direction that makes it possible for everybody in the community to be enthusiastic about the place in the universe given to them in the religious understanding of that community. This has happened in communities where it wasn’t true in the past, as I said. We now have women rabbis. There have been women priests in the Anglican communion for a while and there have been women primates now in the Anglican communion. Identities are … People think of them as kind of trapping us and fixing us, but actually we are always free to move in the light of our best understandings away from the features of our identities that are dangerous. And clearly that’s what needs to be done in the case of gender not just for religious traditions, but in all of our practices we’re still woefully far from having reached proper gender equality.

SUE LAWLEY: But you seemed to be suggesting at one point in your lecture that there was a possibility that in Islam women could one day – we know not when – earn greater respect, earn greater regard. There was a footnote actually to your lecture which the listeners haven’t heard because it’s a footnote …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes.

SUE LAWLEY: … but you talked there about the Prophet and the influence of women and his wives …. And that this could be interpreted by Islam as reasons for giving …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: (over) Yes what I think is that there are the materials in this tradition, as in any tradition, for a person with the right attitudes to take the materials …not to stamp on the scripture, but to take it and to read (in the case of Islam) both the Qur’an and the surrounding materials, which include Hadith and stories of the Prophet’s life, and out of them to build a very different view. The Prophet’s first wife was a businesswoman who was older than he was. That doesn’t sound like the behaviour of a man who thought that women didn’t matter. SUE LAWLEY: Dr Bari just wants to come back on that.

SHAHIDHA BARI: If you have a history of injury, by which I mean if you’ve lived in a faith that has caused you … has been injurious to you, then it’s not enough to say I think that just religion is a process. I think there has to be some sort of compensation… How do we reconcile people to faith as a process if they’ve been injured by their faith in particular ways – women in particular?

18 KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I mean that’s a challenge for the leadership of the traditions that we’re talking about. I’m not a leader of one those traditions and I urge it on them. I mean I urge … that is I urge on them the recognition of this challenge – that however you think about what your tradition requires of you, it is also true, as I mentioned, that we’ve had Muslim women lead countries now. That’s a very important fact and I think that any Muslim who’s thinking about the place of women in public life, for example, has to take into account that we’ve now got this other form of experience. We have this other form of experience. The President of the Supreme Court Bar in Pakistan has been a woman, right, and Pakistan is constitutionally a Muslim country. So I think you need to build on the things that are already there, to move in the right direction. And my only point is there’s always something there to work with. It’s never the case that the tradition rules out an interpretation that can move you in a new direction.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to see if I can go a little bit faster. There, okay.

DEMOLASH OMAKUN. Hi, my name’s Demolash Omakun. Brilliant lecture, thank you very much. I was wondering what role you think choice makes in all of this? One of the scriptures you use is obviously one where St. Paul says you know “Woman, submit your wives … submit yourselves to your husbands” but actually the verse preceding that says “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church that he gave his life for it”, so of course the church chose to focus on one and ignoring the other for a long time. So I wonder how much of choice actually plays in what plays out in religious practices? But also a follow up to that: if you had a choice ontologically, what three values would you actually ask of the world to hold onto, express and expound?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well in a way the main thrust of these lectures will be that we have …we always have choices; that identities are not a fate and that we have to figure out what to do with them. The question is who shall be master, as Lewis Carroll said? So I think we should be masters and mistresses of our identities rather than letting them master us. As for the identities that I think we should hold onto, I hope that that will be clear by the end of these lectures. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: Okay question?

RABBI JANNER-KLAUSNER: I’m Rabbi Janner-Klausner. You talked about fundamentalist fallacy and that lacks a fluidity and robustness of religion as a process. What experiences have you see unlock fundamentalism and open people to doubt and the possibility of change? Can we educate people in a way or open them or heal them or hurt them so that they can move possibly from one truth fallacy, as you call it, to doubt?

19 KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m not an expert on that, but we know that it happens. People who are raised in fundamentalist sects, communities, do escape. And I suspect that one of the reasons is that they find one way at least is that they find themselves injured by the … by the practices or the rhetoric of the faith. I think many gay people have left many religious traditions for this reason. I think many women have either left or revised religious traditions for this reason.

SUE LAWLEY: I thought you wanted to come back on that?

RABBI JANNER-KLAUSNER: Well I wanted to ask if you can bring that about as an educator? What can … what processes can we be involved in?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m a big believer in conversation across difference. I’m a big believer in that. But conversation (as I like to tell my students) is an activity that involves consenting adults, and some people don’t want to talk to you and that means you can’t talk them out of anything. So there are people who are unavailable to us because they don’t want a conversation. But I would like to be open to conversation who’s open to conversation. I would like you to be open to … You know I’d like those of us who are on the side of conversation and toleration and so on to be willing to talk to anybody.

SUE LAWLEY: (over) But how do you deal with people who won’t converse? What do you say to them?

APPIAH: If people won’t converse, you can’t say anything to them. (laughs)

SUE LAWLEY: Yes you can. They may not say anything back, but …

KWAME ANTHONT APPIAH: Well they may not say anything back. I mean I invite them in and I tell them that I’m … Look in this sort of context, you talk a lot, but actually I’m quite a good listener too (laughter) and I would say to someone who had views like this, I really am interested in talking … in understanding where you’re coming from, so I’ll shut up for a while. You tell me some stuff and I’ll think about that.

SUE LAWLEY: Question up there?

ANDREA IZLASS?? My name is Andrea Izlass (ph) and I was your student at New York University last year.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Hello.

20 ANDREA IZLASS?? So I want to ask: religion is such a polarising element in societies around the world today, but if religion is not just a body of beliefs but a matter of daily practice in our community with specific behaviours, can we still speak of religion at all in the 21st century or should we rather speak simply of communities in public and political life? And would this make a difference?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m tempted by your proposal. (laughter) That is to say, I have sometimes felt that the right thing to do was to get people to stop using the word ‘religion’ and to start focusing on the people that they’re interacting with and to not use the concept of religion to understand them. And one reason I think that might be useful is because actually I believe that the way in which we talk about religion is really the result of the fact that theories of religion in the West were basically developed in order to answer the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? That’s basically what, if you look into the early anthropology of Christianity, if you look at the works of the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, Sir Edward Tylor and so on, basically he’s interested in the question ..So he knows what he has and then he goes out and he meets some Amerindians or some Mexicans and he thinks well what do they have? Hello, I know you’re a Mexican, so welcome. So I think … And that’s … that’s the sort of weird question because people, communities put things together in their own way and that’s why it’s so hard, I think, to parse out what’s religious in some lives or others. It’s actually hard to parse out even in the history of the West because we have over the last couple of centuries done a parsing out in which we separated out much of our religious thinking, for example, from our scientific thinking. Isaac Newton didn’t have to separate out his scientific and his religious thinking. Isaac Newton spent more time working on interpreting the Book of Revelations than he did writing the Principia. He didn’t think that there was a big tension between his physics and his Christianity. In the 19th century, for various reasons, there was a kind of big division of intellectual labour that developed in which theologians and people did one sort of thing and philosophers and scientists did something else, and it got harder and harder, I think, to figure out what the relationship was supposed to be between these two ongoing discourses. In many places in the world, that hasn’t happened, there isn’t the same notion that you can sort of separate out religious stuff from non- religious stuff, and if that hasn’t happened our understanding of religion isn’t going to work.

SUE LAWLEY: But you’re defining during the course of these lectures identity on the basis of the four things we’ve talked about, which is creed, colour, country, culture. I wonder if the conclusion that we’ve been coming to here this evening is that in many ways religion is perhaps the least relevant of those four things to identity; it’s almost for many people an also-ran to all the others as to how we define ourselves?

21 KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I think that might be true in this room, though I wouldn’t guarantee it, but in the world I don’t think that’s true. There’ll be people all around the world who would be very sceptical of the claim that their religious identity wasn’t pretty important to who they were.

SUE LAWLEY: Have you got an order for the importance of them in defining identity?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I have a theory according to which what the order is going to be will depend on who you are. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: There we must leave it.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you very much. Thank you.

SUE LAWLEY: My apologies to all of those of you who had your hands up and we couldn’t come to you, but thank you very much for being here. I want to just thank our hosts, the LSE. Do check out the Reith website where you’ll find transcripts, audio and much more in the Reith Archives.

Next time we’re in Glasgow where Anthony will be telling the Scots that nationality isn’t as important as they may think. (laughter) We look forward to seeing how that one goes down. In the meantime our thanks to our Reith Lecturer 2016, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and goodbye.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

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Lecture 2: Country Glasgow

SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the second of this year’s Reith Lectures.

Today we’re guests of the University of Glasgow, the fourth oldest university in the English speaking world. Founded in 1451, it predates by two and a half centuries the union of Scotland with England.

It’s produced seven Nobel laureates, two UK prime ministers, and, more recently, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

In the eighteenth century, Glasgow was a centre for the Scottish Enlightenment. In the nineteenth, trade gave it the title of Second City of the British Empire. Today, it’s a place abuzz with talk of independence and the role of Scotland as a nation on its own. Proud of its history, its learning and its people, it’s a good place to hear a lecture about the nature of identity.

In his series Mistaken Identities, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is arguing that the subjects we rely on in order to try to define ourselves are often wrong or misleading. He began in London talking about religious identity. In forthcoming programmes he’ll be talking about race and about culture. But here, in Scotland, his subject couldn’t be more topical. It’s country.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the BBC’s Reith Lecturer 2016 Professor Anthony Appiah.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Aron Ettore Schmitz was born in the city of Trieste at the end of 1861. His mother and father were Jews, of Italian and German origin, respectively. But Trieste was the main trading port of the Austrian Empire. So young Ettore was a citizen of that Empire. And whatever the words “Italian” and “German” meant when he was born, they didn’t mean you were a citizen of Italy or Germany. Ettore was nine when a unified Germany was cobbled together from a hodgepodge of duchies, kingdoms, principalities and Hanseatic city-states. When he traveled to school in Bavaria, in 1874, he was visiting a Germany that was younger than he was.

As for Italy? Ettore and Italy were practically born twins. The modern Italian state was created in the year of his birth, bringing together the Venetian territories of the Austrian Empire, the Papal States, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the Kingdom of Piedmont- Sardinia. So, like his father’s German-ness, his mother’s Italian-ness was more a matter of language or culture than of citizenship. Only in his late fifties, at the end of the First World War, did Trieste became what it is today, an Italian city. So here was a man, Jewish by upbringing, an atheist who became a Catholic as a courtesy to his wife; someone who had claims to being German and to being Italian, and who never felt other than Triestine, whatever that meant exactly. Born a subject of the Austrian Emperor, he died a subject of the king of Italy. And his life poses sharply the question how you decide what country, if any, is yours.

When Schmitz came of age, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires held sway over a vast array of diverse European peoples. But, starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to the twentieth, many peoples who had never controlled a state were engulfed by political movements that sought an alignment between politics and peoplehood: they wanted nation-states to express their sense that they already had something important in common. So we need a name for these groups that doesn’t imply that they already have a shared political citizenship, and I’m going to continue to call them peoples. A people is a group of human beings united by a common ancestry, real or imagined, whether or not they share a state.

In 1830, the great German philosopher Hegel wrote, “In the existence of a people the substantial purpose is to be a state and to maintain itself as such; a people without state- formation … has no real history.”

Hegel thought, then, that as time went on, all the peoples that mattered would gradually become the masters of their own states: over the next century that thought took hold around the world.

Today, in what we like to think of as a post-imperial age, no political tenet commands more audible assent than that of national sovereignty. “We” aren’t to be ruled by others, captive to a foreign occupation; “we” must be allowed to rule ourselves. This simple is baked into the concept of the nation itself. It helped to propel the collapse of empires and the era of decolonization. Maps were redrawn to advance the cause; even in our own time, borders have given way to it. It remains a vaunted principle of our political order. And yet this ideal has an incoherence at its heart: and that’s what I want to explore today.

To begin to understand this, ask yourself why, if everyone agrees that “we” are entitled to rule ourselves, it is often so hard to agree about who “we” are? The nationalist says, “We are a people, we share an ancestry.” But so does a family, to take the idea at its narrowest; and the whole species, at its widest, shares its ancestry, too. So in seeking nations, where should we draw the line? The people of Ashanti in Ghana, where I grew up, are supposed to share ancestry; but so is the wider world of Akan peoples to which we also belong. There’s not just Ashanti, but Akwapim, Akyem, Baule, Fante, Kwahu and a bunch more – none of which you’ve heard of either. (laughter) So if you were going for a nation state, perhaps Akan would make more sense than Ashanti: bigger may be better in modern nations, and there are twice as many Akan as Ashanti, their homes spread through southern Ghana and Ivory Coast.

But, following that thought, why not go for something even bigger, as Pan- Africanists argued, seeking to create a mega-state of all the people of African descent? Which should it be? There are no natural boundaries. So that is a first quandary, one of scale.

Even once we’ve picked a scale, though, not every such group wants to build a state together. It is said that the Celts of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man share ancestry: but most of them don’t care enough about that fact to want to act together as a people. They’re not a nation. So let’s posit that a nation is a group of people who think of themselves as sharing ancestry and care about it. Well, how do you know when you care enough to qualify as having a “national consciousness”?

Matching peoples to territories faces yet a third quandary. I mentioned the Akans.

But, living side by side with Akan people are people of other ancestries—Guans, for example, whose forebears migrated to Ghana a millennium ago. The logic of shared ancestry offers only three possible answers for such interspersed minorities. Annihilate them, expel them, or assimilate them, inventing a story of common ancestry to cover up the problem. All of these “solutions” have been tried in the past couple of hundred years somewhere. None of them would be necessary if we weren’t trying to match states to peoples.

Deciding which nation is yours is further complicated when political boundaries keep shifting. Ettore Schmitz’s experience—as a citizen of one country who became a citizen of another without leaving home—was shared by millions in the twentieth century.

In 1900, most of Central and Eastern Europe was ruled by one empire or another. After the First World War, independent nation states were delivered blinking into the light. After the Second World War, boundaries shifted again, and an Iron Curtain reshaped the map yet once more.

Meanwhile, with the partition of British India, in 1947, some 14 million people crossed the new borders between India and Pakistan: Hindus and Sikhs into India, Muslims into Pakistan. This was the largest migration in human history, even though between thirty and forty million Muslims remained in India, which, by the way, will soon be the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.

And with the end of Europe’s empires, dozens more independent states in Africa and Asia appeared on the world stage. In Africa in 1945 only Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa were independent.

Today, there are 54 independent states in the African Union. So you peer at this gleaming canvas of countries … and you can see that the paint is still wet.

But if the global success of nationalist movements is a twentieth century phenomenon, the ideology that fueled them is only a century or so older. I think many would find that thought surprising. Human beings have long told stories about clashing tribes. The Old Testament is filled with the names of what I’ve been calling peoples: Assyrians, Canaanites, Chaldeans, Cushites, Philistines, and the rest. These peoples do things together. Their actions are the theme of a thousand epic tales. The Assyrians attack Israel; the Ashanti conquer the Denkyira; the Romans conquer the Greeks. These stories generally celebrate their respective peoples as a pretty terrific lot, an in-group well worth belonging to.

Recall Shakespeare’s Henry V, addressing his soldiers as “you noblest English/Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!” So why isn’t that just nationalism?

The answer is that something new entered European thought toward the end of the eighteenth century. Reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism produced a great upswelling of new feelings and ideas, especially in the expanding middle classes. It brought together a fascination with conquering heroes and an engagement with folk traditions that were thought to express a people’s true spirit—what German speakers took to calling the Volksgeist – the spirit of the folk. The Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder pursued the idea that what made the Germans a people was a spirit embodied, above all else, in their language and literature. He thought this applied to every other people, too.

Here in Scotland, Robert Burns, the Bard of Ayrshire, embodied the same attitudes: collecting and adapting the folk songs of ordinary people, composing in the language of every day. And, as literacy and print spread across great territories, ordinary people increasingly thought of themselves as sharing in the life of a vast community of fellow nationals … united in part by reading people like Burns.

By the late nineteenth century, this romantic ideal was a platitude. Ernest Renan, the conservative French historian and patriot wrote in 1882, “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.” A thousand kilometers southeast of him, the Genoese revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini announced his nationalist mission: “awakening the soul of Italy.”

In Schmitz’s Trieste, though, many people might have favored keeping the Italian soul asleep.

This city was composed, like the empire, of a motley group. Most people spoke either German or triestino, the local dialect of Italian, but in the areas around the city many people spoke Slovenian. Italian and Slavic nationalism had to contest with educated Germans who defended the cosmopolitanism of a multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. At a dinner in honor of Richard Cobden, the English Liberal statesman, in 1847, a Herr von Bruck shouted aloud, “We are Triestines; we are cosmopolites; we … have nothing to do with Italian and German nationalities.”

Yet Ettore Schmitz, despite his German father, Teutonic education, and Austrian citizenship, wasn’t deaf to Mazzini’s call to awaken the soul of Italy.

Lady Isabel Burton, whose husband was the British consul in Trieste in the 1870s and 80s, reported that most of Trieste’s Jews sided with what she called the “Italianissimi” – the most Italian of Italians. Schmitz followed suit. When he began his literary career, he decided to write, with great effort, in standard Italian. Though not precisely as an Italian. For he published under the name Italo Svevo. It means “Italian Swabian.” Since Swabia is a region of southern Germany, this is a not-so-subtle reference to his double heritage.

Now we probably wouldn’t know much about Italo Svevo, if it weren’t for his English tutor, an Irishman who lived in Trieste from 1904 to 1920, and who had his own very complicated relationship with nationalism. His name was James Joyce, and he drew on Svevo as a model for the character of Leopold Bloom, the Jewish wanderer and hero of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses.

Svevo was an early enthusiast for Joyce’s writing, and Joyce returned the favor, helping to arrange the French translation of Svevo’s self-published book La Coscienza di Zeno. No one had noticed the Italian edition very much, even in Italy. The French version, championed now by Joyce, was widely praised and the book justly came to be regarded as one of the great novels of European modernism.

A nice moment in The Confessions of Zeno (which is what the book is usually called in English) reveals the interplay of German, Italian and local Triestino identities. Zeno is in love with Ada, who is herself in love with an attractive young man with the Italian- German name of Guido Speier. When Ada introduces them, Zeno forces a smile.

Then, as he recounts it,

My smile became more spontaneous because I was immediately offered the opportunity of saying something disagreeable to him: “You are German?”

He replied politely, admitting that because of his name, one might believe he was. But family documents proved that they had been Italian for several centuries. He spoke Tuscan fluently, while Ada and I were condemned to our horrid dialect.

So our Italian Swabian expresses a certain sympathy for the Italianissimi, but he also conveys the allure of Trieste itself, in all its multiplicity. Zeno is, above all, a walker in the city, a boulevardier and rambler: a man always struggling with his own irresolution, always smoking his “last cigarette,” always betraying his ideals, and forever scrutinizing his own prejudices and preferences like a quizzical ethnographer.

He wants to confront uncomfortable truths—to side with reality, however much it stings.

And the reality of linguistic and cultural variation within a community, Svevo reminds us, can be in tension with the romantic nationalist vision of a community united by language and culture. Indeed, this tension is the rule, rather than the exception.

Take Scotland, where we meet today. For hundreds of years this has been a country of multiple tongues (Gaelic, Lallans or Broad Scots, and English) with regional differences between the cultures of the Highlands and the Lowlands, the Islands and the mainland, the country and the city, even, dare I say it, that place 45 miles away: Edinburgh and Glasgow. Sir Walter Scott’s border minstrelsy and Burns’ “braid lallans” verse have little in common with Gaelic folk song.

Many of the things that are identified with Scots culture aren’t widely shared. Fewer than 60,000 Scots speak Gaelic today; it hasn’t been the mother tongue of a majority of the people of Scotland in five hundred years. We think of Scotland as the land of the Kirk, but Catholics outnumber adherents of the Kirk here in Glasgow, the country’s largest city. And, like most of Europe, Scotland has a long-established Jewish presence and a growing Muslim one.

Internal complexities of this sort are common throughout the world. As late as 1893, the historian Eugen Weber taught us, roughly a quarter of the 30 million citizens of metropolitan France hadn’t mastered the French language. Roughly a quarter. Italy, on unification, was filled with mutually unintelligible dialects, and even now it recognizes twenty regional dialects, to say nothing of Amharic or of the Arabic of a growing number of refugees.

India and China and Indonesia are wildly diverse in their ethnicities, whether or not they acknowledge it. And, as you know, the countries of the Americas, including the United States, all do acknowledge to some degree their origins in a multiplicity of peoples.

Given these realities, how have we dealt with the fact that self-determination— which could disrupt any imaginable political order—remains a sacrosanct ideal? Well, with caution and inconsistency. Consider Europe’s newest country. The UN recognizes the “territorial integrity” of existing states while also endorsing the principle of self- determination. Weighing the two, in 2008, the International Court of Justice declared that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence was consistent with international law. Britain’s UN representative agreed: here he said self-determination outweighed territorial integrity.

In that spirit, more than a hundred countries recognized Kosovo as a sovereign nation. The Serbs, naturally, objected, maintaining that Kosovo was the “cradle” of their national identity. And nobody spoke louder in defense of their “territorial integrity” than Vladimir Putin. Several years later came the matter of Crimea and a certain referendum. Like cricket teams switching sides at the end of an innings, the advocates of self-determination became defenders of territorial integrity, while the great defender of territorial integrity became an advocate for self-determination.

Notice, however, that nobody directly quarreled with the premise that a people is entitled to withdraw from a polity and form its own state. Instead, Western diplomats questioned the legality and the empirical validity of the Crimean referendum. But they could also invoke self-rule against self-rule.

The Ukrainian people, you might argue, including those who lived in the Crimea, should all have been consulted. Indeed, was there really a Crimean people to consult? It’s a time-honored strategy, since what a “people” wants always depends on where you draw the lines. One of Abraham Lincoln’s arguments against Southern secession is one with China’s argument against Tibetan independence and Spain’s against Catalan independence: namely, that the people, that is, the majority of the citizens of the whole country, do not favor it.

My point is not that all of these cases are the same. It is rather that the ideal of national sovereignty remains a profound source of legitimacy, however obscure and unstable our definition of a people. We face here the incoherence I promised to identify at the start: Yes, “we” have the right to self-determination, but that thought can only guide us once we’ve decided who “we” are.

Earlier I described nation states emerging from an age of empire. In recent decades, many theorists of globalization predicted that the process would reverse itself: the nation state, we were told, would be demoted to middle management, a mere node in a vast transnational flux of capital and labor, of banking treaties and trade pacts, of the supranational security arrangements required for transnational adversaries, from drug cartels to terrorists. The national age was to be edged aside by the “network age.”

What’s everywhere in evidence today, instead, are the forces of resistance to this sort of globalization. Boris Johnson tapped into them when he said that Brexit was “about the right of the people of this country to settle their own destiny.” But was it the British people he was talking about? Well, then they denied that right to the Scottish people. Who are “we”?

There was certainly a chauvinist strain in Brexit nationalism. And you’ll find more overt hard nationalism elsewhere. In India, the ruling party built a following by claiming that only Hindutva, a putative unity of language, religion and culture, can bring the nation together; in Austria, the Freedom Party announces that the Austrian homeland—the Heimat— is held together by a German heritage. In Hungary, Poland and elsewhere, ruling parties have made similar avowals; they defend “Christian values” against Middle Eastern migrants, denounce the “eurocrats,” and extol the purity of national heritage. In their political imagination, the network is definitely down. And in asserting these nationalisms, they deny religious and ethnic minorities like the Roma an equal place within the nation.

These vectors of reaction have their precursors.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Ettore Schmitz, given his penetrating realism, was little moved by such preachments of purity. Late in his life, the Italian state started to pressure new nationals like him to adopt Italian surnames. Schmitz volunteered to change his name to his pen name, Italo Svevo. They said no: the new Italian name had to be a dictionary translation of the old name. Schmitz walked away. “I’ve got two names already; why do I need a third?” he grumbled. His enthusiasm for Italian-ness had its limits. But once we reject the notion that some natural unity gives countries their shape, we’re left with a puzzle. How do we hold countries together?

Well my father, an anti-colonial firebrand, a leader in Ghana’s independence struggle, once published a newspaper article headed, “Is Ghana Worth Dying For?” His answer, of course, was yes. And it wasn’t an abstract issue for him. As an occasional political prisoner, he once narrowly averted an appointment with a firing squad. Yet what, exactly, would my patriotic father have been dying for?

Ghanaians speak eighty or so languages; our religious diversity is all over the map—Accra, our capital, has one of the largest Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist Temples outside of Japan, along with a spanking new, huge Mormon Temple. And Ghanaians live all over the map too: hundreds of thousands in Nigeria, close to a hundred thousand in the United States and the United Kingdom, and thousands in the Netherlands, South Africa and a host of other countries.

Because of this diversity and diffusion, Ghanaians are well aware that they are not a Herderian people, with one history and culture, and a single unifying Volksgeist. But that doesn’t stop anyone from thinking of themselves as Ghanaian at elections, or when they travel abroad with their Ghanaian passports, or when they are following the Olympics or the World Cup. You do not have to come from Ashanti, as I do, to be proud of Kofi Annan, or Fante to take pride in the novels of Ama Ata Aidoo. And kente, the fabulous silk fabric, woven in Bonwire, near Kumasi, is now worn proudly by Ghanaians around the world. And so Ghanaians are slowly becoming a people, drawn together over a few decades, as the Scots have been over centuries, by living together under a single government. It’s the process that matters.

For my father, then, national consciousness wasn’t a mineral to be excavated, like bauxite; it was a fabric to be woven, like kente.

He would have agreed with Svevo’s observation that “inventing is a creation, not a lie.” National identity doesn’t require that we are all already the same. Still, for the purposes of government, citizens need to have languages in common. In developing national education, a state has to decide which dialects of which languages should be taught. It would be nice if the history taught explained why this people was gathered in this state; and a government, concerned to get citizens acting and feeling together, would like a story that connects them. With a diverse population, filigreed with potentially divisive local histories and traditions, it might be necessary to glide over conflictual claims on the truth. As Ernest Renan said more than a century ago, “Forgetting and, I would even say, historical error, is an essential element in the creation of a nation.”

Recognize that nations are invented and you’ll see they’re always being reinvented. Once, to be English, you had to imagine your ancestors were recorded a millennium ago in the Doomsday Book. Now a Rohit or a Pavel or a Muhammad or a Kwame can be English. Once the Anglican Church defined Englishness; now an array of creeds can be embodied in the teams who play for England in the Test Match. Today, a brown-skinned Scot, whose grandfather came from Mumbai, can take pride in the Scottish Enlightenment or thrill to the tale of Bannockburn.

But, as Renan also argued, what really matters in making a nation, beyond these shared stories, is, as he said, “the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.” “A nation’s existence (he went on) “is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite.” What makes “us” a people, ultimately, is a commitment to governing a common life together.

The challenge this poses for liberal democracies is formidable. Liberal states depend upon a civic creed that’s both potent and lean—potent enough to give significance to citizenship, lean enough to be shared by people with different religious and ethnic affiliations. The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic state could boldly identify itself with a people’s Will; liberal states must content themselves with a general willingness. The romantic state rallies its citizens with a stirring cry: “One people!” The liberal state’s true anthem is: “We can work it out.”

And often enough, we can. We’ve long known in America—as most people surely know here in Scotland—that we can hang together without a common religion or even delusions of common ancestry.

Nor need we agree about everything: Europe or Brexit, Edinburgh or Glasgow, Labour or Tory or SNP or even about something important: Rangers or Celtic. (laughter)

I have no dog in the fight over Scottish independence. But let the argument not be made in terms of some ancient spirit of the Folk; the truth of every modern nation is that political unity is never underwritten by some pre-existing national commonality. What binds citizens together is a commitment, through Renan’s daily plebiscite, to sharing the life of a modern state, united by its institutions, procedures, and precepts.

My father used to celebrate Burns night. Even after an evening of knocking back the whiskey, though, he wasn’t deluded into thinking he was a Scot. (laughter) He just admired the poet’s principles, alongside his poetry.

Because when Burns had Robert the Bruce ask for his follower’s allegiance he wisely did it not in the name of a Scottish identity but in the name of Freedom. (And you will forgive me if I read it in my own dialect.)

Who, for Scotland’s king and law, Freedom’s sword will strongly draw Freeman stand, or Freeman fall Let him follow me.

As ardently as he felt the romance of the national spirit, Burns realized here that Scotland was not a fate but a project.

Today, as a wave of right-wing nationalism surges across Europe once more, I think about how fragile liberal pluralism can seem.

And I think too, as you might expect, of Italo Svevo, a man who, like Zeno, his greatest creation, was never happier than walking among Trieste’s diverse neighborhoods— an inveterate ironist who thrived on being sort-of Jewish, sort-of German, and, in the end, only sort-of Italian. For Svevo, life was a dance with ambiguities. And when fascism convulsed Europe after his death, his kin were dashed against forces that detested ambiguity and venerated certainty—his Catholic wife Livia was forced to register as a Jew, his grandsons were shot as partisans or starved in camps.

And yet, in the canons of our culture, Italo Svevo is still with us. True, the tolerant, pluralist, unsentimental, liberal modernity he embodied is under attack. But don’t bet against the spirit of Svevo … for I believe Italo Svevo with his clear-eyed vision, has reality on his side.

Thank you.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Professor Appiah, thank you very much indeed.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to open this up to our audience here in Glasgow University Sir Charles Wilson Theatre. So who would like to start with a question for Anthony? I can see a hand up.

PAULINE HOUSTON: I am Pauline Houston from TEDx Glasgow, which is the independent part of Ted Talks. Just listening to everything you said there about the confusion around the definition of nation, why is it do you think that people are still very passionately aligned to that kind of romantic view of what one nation is?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: That’s a great question. I think people are passionately aligned with all the mistaken views that I’m going to challenge over the next lectures (laughter) and I think that part of the answer has to do with a very important feature of our social psychology, a feature of our evolved psychology that developed over probably hundreds of thousands of years, which is that we need “us’es” to ‘thems’, and complicated stories make fixing the us really hard and so we prefer simpler stories. And the story that was invented in the eighteenth century of the nation with the single spirit is a nice, simple story. It’s not true of anywhere, and I think if you wanted to make it true you’d have to engage in the kind of barbarism that we saw in the middle of the twentieth century.

SUE LAWLEY: But people form nations because they need them, don’t they? I mean that’s why you know during the Brexit debate the whole business of take your country back had such appeal.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I would like people to be clear when they say that about what they think they need it for. And I think that, as I said, given the complex enmeshment of everybody nowadays in these transnational structures, some of the things people want it for, you can’t get, you can’t have anymore.

SUE LAWLEY: Well like you can’t shut Mexicans out of the United States.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: (over) You can’t shut Mexicans …

SUE LAWLEY: (over) But it’s a border thing, isn’t it?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well …

SUE LAWLEY: You know the whole business of borders is what fuelled the Brexit debate and it’s to an extent what’s fuelling the American presidential election.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Right. And, as I said, there’s a nasty side to that which has to do with other things, which I’ll also be talking about later, like you know racism in the case of the Mexican border.

SUE LAWLEY: Sure, rightly or wrongly, but all I’m saying is that peoples tend maybe when they’re feeling threatened to want to put up walls and borders and patrol themselves.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes and I would ...That’s what Svevo’s useful for – to remember that you can live in a world without that and have a good time.

SUE LAWLEY: Yeah?

ADAM RAMSAY: My name’s Adam Ramsay and I run the UK section of a website called Open Democracy. My question is for those of us who believe in what you call the spirit of Svevo - in multiculturalism, in open borders, in tolerance - are we better engaging in that process of national myth-making, in trying to follow Nicola Sturgeon’s lead in saying here in Scotland we are Scottish and that means everyone who chooses to live here, or are we better attempting to reject the idea of nation entirely?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I think it would be close to hopeless to reject the idea of nation entirely given the way the world is. But to defend a kind of nationalism that is open in that way, it’s worth remembering that I mentioned the German philosopher, which is the sort of thing philosophers do, but Herder was both a German patriot, nationalist, and a cosmopolitan. He believed both in creating Germany before Germany existed and in the right of the Slavic peoples to develop their own nationalities. And more than that, he believed that German culture, the thing that he was about defending, was essentially required to be open. He once claimed Shakespeare as one of the great German writers. Certainly Shakespeare had a huge influence on German literature, he had fantastic influence on German literature, and he was proud of people like Goethe who .. one of whose most powerful poetic cycles is called the West East Diwan and it’s inspired by a Persian poet, by Hafiz. So I think that you can combine a sense of this shared commitment, forward going commitment as Scots or as Ghanaians with a sort of relaxed sense of what that means, which includes space for people who aren’t Scottish already or Ghanaian already, and includes the notion that Ghana and Scotland are both going to be internally quite diverse – as they have been, in both cases, all along.

SUE LAWLEY: Isn’t that what the SNP attempts to do essentially though if it wants independence for Scotland but it wants to be part of the wider cross-cultural body that’s the EU?

ADAM RAMSAY: I would argue that is what they at least try and do. I think there are some problems with that, but I suppose for me there is an attraction to one government attempting to do nationalism in an open way and using that as a strategy versus another government. I have a quick follow-up question if I may. Does that lead to a position on any future independence referendum if you look at the different nationalisms that we’re currently experiencing here in Scotland right now?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I said I don’t have a dog in the fight over Scottish independence …

SUE LAWLEY: I knew he was going to duck that one..

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: … and I do mean that because I think it’s up to the people who are in this daily plebiscite to decide what they want to do. But I would want to say one thing about this, which is that I believe that when the nation state was first conceived in the eighteenth century people developed theories of sovereignty which are totally irrelevant to the current circumstances of the world. Whether or not you are an independent sovereign state in this modern way, you’re going to have to live with the World Trade Organisation, you’re going to have to live with the UN, you’re going to have to live with FAO and UNESCO and all the transnational structures. You’re going to have to live with the fact that accounting standards are made by accountants, not all of whom live in Scotland. You need to be clear about what the stakes are for you.

SUE LAWLEY: Question here.

PAT KANE: My name is Pat Kane. I’m a writer and musician. This is a statement by Theresa May, the prime minister of the country. I’d like your response to it please. “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” What is your response to that statement?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well.. no, perhaps, would be … (laughter/applause) Again my old friend Herder is a great model here. He was a cosmopolitan, cosmopolitesse citizen of the world, but he was also a German patriot. I’ve defended what’s sometimes called ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ and I think that I’m profoundly loyal to lots of … to more than one state actually, but certainly to one. I’m a citizen of the United States. I’m glad to be a citizen of the United States. I get one vote in that election that’s coming up and you can guess which way it’s going to go. (laughter) So I do think that you can be, as I am - I’m the author of a book called Cosmopolitanism, I’m a defender of cosmopolitanism – but I have … you have to understand cosmopolitanism as combining respect for the local with respect for the global. It can’t be all pushed off to the global and I’m against pushing it all off to the local as well.

AMEER IBRAHIM: Hello there. My name’s Ameer Ibrahim and I’m President of Glasgow University Students’ Representative Council. My question is you know what are your views on the distinctions between nationalism and patriotism? And also, is nationalism something that can be an innate trait of an individual or is it something that is developed purely as a result of external factors?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I think, just to go to the second part first, I think nationalism has to be something developed because, as I was arguing perhaps too quickly and opaquely, there were ages before nationalism. This particular combination I think is a relatively modern thing with the sort of romantic sense of the shared spirit, so I don’t … I think it has to be something that’s socially produced and therefore can be shaped.

SUE LAWLEY: Can you do that? Can you manufacture nationalism? Because it’s such an emotional thing. When you think of the kind of iconic symbols of nationalism – the Statue of Liberty, the Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s speeches – you know it’s emotional; it’s not intellectual at all. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I would resist the inclination to suppose that everything is either emotional or rational. We use reason to organise our feelings and the fact is that nationalism of this sort was the result of a lot of work. It was actually created through the work of people like Herder, through poets yes like Burns and Walter Scott Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, but also by political processes and by educational processes. I mean the great … one of the great sources of nineteenth century nationalism was simply creating national school systems in which everybody was taught the same one dialect of the language. And that happens for example in Italy, so the official language of Italy is called “Lingua Toscana in Bocca Romana” - so the language of Tuscany in a Roman mouth. And in fact you notice that Svevo referred to the Tuscan dialect.

SUE LAWLEY: Yes.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: As you do that, you create the possibility of a national conversation. So it takes work to create the institutions and the habits of thought that produce a national spirit. I don’t think it’s something … Once you’ve got it, managing it can be very difficult.

SUE LAWLEY: Yes, but also I just wonder whether trying to define nationhood is like trying to define love really. You don’t order that, you don’t manufacture it. It kind of happens in your gut.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Right I think that’s … I mean of course people like philosophers think that you can define love and everything else (laughter), but having a definition is not the same thing as being able to manage it, I’ll grant you that, and I think very often we have these powerful sentiments. As I say, I feel powerful sentiments of this sort about a bunch of nations. But I do think that we can nevertheless think about it a bit and try to manage it and I do think that in that process raising young people with sort of sensible attitudes about these things is a really important part of the process.

SUE LAWLEY: Are you ready to have a quick word on - I don’t know how quickly you can do this - on the difference between nationalism and patriotism?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I think that these words are used in ways that they’re sometimes just synonyms, equivalents of each other. I would like to preserve a sense of patriotism as having to do with a sense of investment in the national honour. I think that caring about what your country’s doing in the world and feeling bad when it does bad things and good when it does good things, that’s at the heart of the kind of morally appropriate patriotism that I think is a decent thing.

DENNIS CANAVAN: Dennis Canavan, retired politician. Some people would say thank heavens for that. (laughter) But anyway, does the professor agree that people are far more important than territories and if the nation state, or indeed the nation states throughout the world today are going to survive, they have got to be not ethnic nationalist states but they must be multinational, multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-faith?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I mean broadly speaking yes. Broadly speaking, I think that, given the realities which I was trying to sketch, most modern states contain within them diversity of all the kinds that you talked about and that if you try and force everybody into a single national faith, a single national identification of an ethnic sort, you’re simply going to produce terrible political problems. My father’s Ghanaian, my mother’s English, my brother-in-laws are Norwegian and Nigerian. One of my nephews has already married a Namibian, so we’ve got another bunch of people in the family. I have Jewish cousins and I have Muslim cousins. I was raised a Christian. That’s unusual, that combination, but more and more people in the world are like that and they won’t fit into the mono-ethnic nation. So if you speak that way, they will hate the nation and then they’ll be dangerous to you, so I would recommend against it just on grounds of prudence.

SUE LAWLEY: Gentleman there.

JONTY HAYWOOD: Jonty Haywood. I’m a school pupil at Dollar Academy. Let’s turn the tables. You have quite an interesting, a diverse personal history. How do you identify?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well, as far as citizenship goes, I’m an American. When I arrive at the borders of the United Kingdom sometimes, they look at my passport and it says I was born in London and they say “Why are you travelling on an American passport?” And I say “Because I’m an American.” I used to have a British passport, but I have an American passport now. But you know are my concerns, my political concerns in the world equally distributed over Korea and Australia and Japan and Nigeria? No, they’re more focused on the United Kingdom and on Ghana because those are the two places I grew up. I spent a lot of time in Scotland as a child actually, not just in England. You know I care more about Scotland than I do about Lithuania. Sorry Lithuania. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: But if you had …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: But I’m an American …

SUE LAWLEY: It’s a long answer when people say where are you from? It’s a long answer?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes, yes, yes.

SUE LAWLEY: Gentleman there.

LES FORREST: Thank you. My name is Les Forrest. I run a small business with my wife. My question is we live in an era where communication has never been faster. The world is dominated by social media, the sharing of ideas is immediate and across the whole world. There is massive migration of people across the world. Labour opportunities mean that people change jobs and change countries on a regular basis and have that opportunity like never before. So in the modern era, to what extent is technology driving the way that people feel about themselves? And leading on from that, to what extent is the idea that peoples identify primarily through nationhood is an idea which is approaching its sell-by-date?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I think it is. (applause) But despite what one columnist in the New York Times says, it’s not yet a flat world and so things look very different in different places. I spent some time this summer in a small village where my father’s family … which my father’s family was connected with since the early eighteenth century. Things look very different from there. They don’t have labour opportunities to go zooming around the world. They’re worried about whether they’re going to have electricity most of the day and whether they’re going to have clean water and whether the buildings are going to be … survive the next rainy season. So the world is still very economically uneven, unequal. And the things you’re talking about are realer and realer for a larger and larger number of people – and that’s great – and when they’re real for everybody, I think it will be clear to everybody that while a national and a local identification are fine things and are useful for many purposes, we have complex identities and other things matter too. Which is why Herder was right- you can be a cosmopolitan and a patriot.

SUE LAWLEY: Question at the back there.

SIOBHAN FAIRHURST: Hi. My name’s Siobhan Fairhurst. I’m a nurse. I just wanted to tap into that idea of personhood and where our allegiances really lie. I have a German grandmother, Irish and Welsh grandparents, English father, Scottish mother (laughs), so I know there’s realities of economics, government, how we define ourselves so we can enter into trade deals, etcetera, but what about personhood, what about family? Where does that leave us in terms of our allegiance because I know certainly if somebody started to threaten any one of my heritages, my reality is my family and I belong to any type of nation that preaches tolerance and peace, and I want to know where that personal personhood lies for you?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I mean in a way the point is that national identity is just a small part of who we are for many purposes. It’s not that it isn’t hugely important on some occasions. Sometimes it’s really important; wars happen and then you have to pick sides. But much of the time you don’t get up in morning and shave as an American, you don’t get up in the morning and pick your … you know pick your breakfast cereal on the basis of your nationality. So I think there are lots of things in our lives that have nothing to do with the nation and it’s really important to bear that in mind. Also I think, like you, that you can have kinds of affiliation with man… with more than one nation, as I do, but I think increasingly lots of people do. In your personal life, for example, you can think of yourself as connected with more than one place. This actually wasn’t my father’s view. I said that Ghanaian nationalism you know is clearly the product of new processes because Ghana’s … Ghana is younger than I am, but my father I remember when we were growing him, I asked him once why I couldn’t have a Ghanaian and a British passport. And he was President of the Bar Association and he was on various constitutional commissions and I said couldn’t we … “You know you have some influence here. Why don’t you change … get them to change the law?” And he said, “Citizenship is unitary” to his own son with an English wife. (laughs) So you know not everybody agrees.

SUE LAWLEY: Gentleman here.

MURRAY PITTOCK: I’m Murray Pittock, University of Glasgow. Thank you very much for that lecture, Professor Appiah. You started by categorising nationalism as essentialist. You went on towards the end of the lecture describing more civic open nationalism. Isn’t it just the case that nationalism isn’t one thing but many, and isn’t the problem that the modernist theorists of nationalism over identify romantic nationalism as the default?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I don’t know about the problem. It is a problem because when you’re trying to characterise any complex historical movement that has come to operate in 190 countries around the world - and some aspiring countries as well - you’re not going to be able to say something that’s going to cover all the cases. But I do think that both a) that it’s possible to have a different kind of nationalism that isn’t, as you’re suggesting, the Herderian national spirit nationalism - which is essentialist, though I don’t think I used that word - and b) that, nevertheless, that way of thinking of the nation has been enormously powerful and can be very dangerous. But I agree that if you were … if you were writing a textbook on the idea of the nation, you’d have to mention many possibilities. I do think, nevertheless, that this strand is very important and has been very influential and is in the background, if not very explicitly, of a lot of what I think of as unattractive nationalist movements of the present. And when I mentioned the Austrian Freedom Party and the talk of the Heimat, I think that’s very much in this tradition.

SUE LAWLEY: Thank you.

BEN COLBURN: Hello. I’m Ben Colburn. I’m a philosopher here at the University of Glasgow. In the independence debates a couple of years ago, this notion of civic nationalism emerged and gained great currency. I take it it’s the idea that you start somewhere else from a set of shared political principles and then you construct a national identity around those rather than taking nationality as something sort of prior to politics? As an Englishman living in Scotland, I feel that I can be part of that notion of civic nationalism even at the same time as I’m excluded by this sort of deeper, more romantic, historically based notion that you discussed. I was wondering whether you thought some notion of civic nationalism might evade some of the problems that you picked out with the more maybe pathological or romantic notions that have been around for longer?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes I do have some sympathy with the thought of civic nationalism and, as you must be aware, this is one way in which a sort of liberal strand of American thought has developed over the long haul. I worry that it can be a little bit bloodless, especially if the principles are too abstract, and so my own view is that it’s helpful to have narrative as well as principle that you’re attracted to. And so the narrative of the American founding, as well as the principles of the American founding, construed in such a way as to make it possible to escape from the stain of slavery and racial oppression and construed in such a way as to make it possible to celebrate the fact that eventually we gave women the vote - I mean there are lots of problems with the American founding, but I think there’s a way of telling that story which isn’t just about principles. And I … we’re philosophers. One of the things I’ve learned as a philosopher is that many ideas are better gain a better grip on people if you can invent them in a story, in a narrative, so I would say national … civic nationalism construed in a way that includes space for shared stories – Bannock Burn, right, or the story of the life of Robert Burns - those sorts of things can I think help bring people together. And they’re not really principles, though I think the principles are really important, but among the principles that you have to have in a modern democratic state is one of pretty broad tolerance for differences about political matters.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to take a last question up there. Yeah?

HAIDER KHADAD: I’m a fourth year philosophy student. I’m just wondering where autonomy and individuality fit into your picture of identity? The reason why I ask is because I was adopted. My biological mother was of Sephardic Jewish origin, my father was an Arab Bedouin and I was adopted into a Catholic family, and when people say to me you know “What do you identify yourself as?”, I just say “Human.” So … (applause)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: You’ve got to figure how to relate - all the sorts of identities I’m going to be talking about in these lectures - you’ve got to be able to figure out how to relate them to the lives of individual people, and you want to shape them in such a way that they can be useful generally speaking in the lives of individual people. So exclusivist notions of many of these things are not going to be useful in your life or mine and more and more people are like us. So I think we need to have more relaxed, more open notions of identity. We’re doing this in many domains. Over the last couple of years, we’ve made huge shifts I think in this area in relation to gender because of the rise of, successful rise of a new kind of transgender activism, and what they’re saying is let’s reshape gender identities in a way that allows for more of us to feel at home in them. And that’s what I’m arguing for the nation. I’m not against the nation. As I said, I’m actually an American patriot, but I think it needs to be shaped in such a way that it can be useful in a productive way in the lives of more people. And the sort of chauvinist nationalism, I don’t think is good for the people who do fit actually because it deprives them of that open connection which someone like Herder celebrated in his more cosmopolitan moments.

SUE LAWLEY: And with that, we must end. Thank you very much to our hosts here at Glasgow University. Do check out the Reith website where you can find transcripts, audio and much more information about the series. That’s all via the BBC website.

Next week we’re in Ghana, the land of Anthony’s childhood, to hear the story of how in the early 1700s a little black African boy was whisked away by sea to be brought up among the white nobility in a European palace. The subject is colour.

Until then, our thanks to our Reith Lecturer 2016 Anthony Appiah and from Glasgow goodbye.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

THIS TRANSCRIPT IS ISSUED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IT IS TAKEN FROM A LIVE PROGRAMME AS IT WAS BROADCAST. THE NATURE OF LIVE BROADCASTING MEANS THAT NEITHER THE BBC NOR THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE PROGRAMME CAN GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION HERE

Mistaken Identities: Creed, Country, Color, Culture

Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith Lectures 2016

Lecture 3: Color, Accra

SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the third of this year’s BBC Reith Lectures. We’re in Accra, the capital of Ghana, the country where our lecturer spent much of his childhood. He’s a philosopher and his subject is identity, what are the forces that make us who we are?

In the first two lectures, he explored religion – or creed – and nationhood, country. In his third lecture, he moves onto race or – to keep the alliteration – colour.

As the son of an English mother and Ghanaian father, he knows at firsthand how the colour of your skin can affect the way you look at the world and, possibly more importantly, the way the world looks at you.

Our lecture is taking place at the British Council, an organisation that exists to build bridges between Britain and the outside world, but can building bridges ever close the gap between people who feel themselves to be different or are regarded as different simply because of the colour of their skin?

Even in countries that like to pride themselves on their tolerance, such as America and Britain, race is a constant and often divisive presence. These are tricky waters to navigate. As our lecturer has observed, the currents of identity can sometimes tug us excruciatingly in opposite directions.

To dig deeper into this complex issue, please welcome the BBC Reith Lecturer 2016 Kwame Anthony Appiah.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you very, Sue, and thank you all very much for coming. It’s great to be here with so many familiar faces in the audience. I’m glad that I’ve got my family represented and I’m very honoured by the presence of my friend John Kufuor and so many others of you.

In 1707, a boy about five years old boarded a ship at Axim on the African Gold Coast, a long morning’s drive west from Accra, where we meet today. The ship belonged to the Dutch West India Company, and after many grueling weeks, it arrived in Amsterdam. But that wasn’t the end of the boy’s long journey. For he then had to travel another 500 or so kilometers to Wolfenbüttel, a German town midway between Amsterdam and Berlin. It was the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick- Wolfenbüttel, who was a major patron of the European Enlightenment. The Duke’s library boasted one of the most magnificent book collections in the world, and his librarian was the great philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibnitz, an inventor of the calculus and among the most powerful minds of his century.

This was a glittering, dazzling center of Enlightenment rationalism: what was this boy from Ghana doing there? Well apparently, he had been “given” to the Duke as a present. We don’t know what the boy’s status was exactly: Had he been enslaved? Was he sent by missionaries for a Christian education? What we do know is that Duke Anton Ulrich took a special interest in him, arranging for his education, and conferring on him, at his baptism, both his own Christian name and that of his sons: so the young man came to be known as Anton Wilhelm Rudolph. For the Duke, the gift of an African child was an opportunity to conduct an Enlightenment experiment, exploring what would happen to an African immersed in modern European scholarship.

The young man from Axim received the family’s patronage for three decades.

They were presumably aware of a similar experiment, which began a few years earlier, when Tsar Peter the Great of Russia took an African slave as his godson, naming him Hannibal. Hannibal became a successful Russian general, and was the great grandfather of Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature. They didn’t know that was going to happen. (laughter)

But Anton Wilhelm wasn’t content to be an object of inquiry; he had inquiries of his own to conduct. We’re not sure when Anton Wilhelm started using his Nzema name, Amo: at his confirmation, the church records call him Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Mohre; Mohr, or Moor, being one of the ways Germans then referred to Africans. Later, though, he called himself Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer, using the word for African in Latin, the language of European scholarship. So he wanted to be known, then, as Amo the African.

Nowadays, we might call Amo a person of color, and we know that Enlightenment Europeans could be rather unenlightened when it came to color. Immanuel Kant, the most influential European philosopher of the eighteenth century, once declared that the fact that someone “was completely black from head to foot” provided “distinct proof that what he said was stupid.” And, though it would be nice to report that such hierarchies of hue are merely of antiquarian interest, they have, of course, proved curiously persistent.

Consider the bestselling book on politics by a German author in the past decade, written by a then board member of the Deutsche Bundesbank no less, which suggests that Germany is being made less intelligent—“verdummt,” is the expressive German word—by genetically inferior Muslim immigrants.

In the United States, where I live, the color line is an unhealed wound. In the past year, while the Black Lives Matter movement has sought to draw attention to black victims of state violence, white nativists have found a Presidential candidate to rally behind.

And so questions arise: Why have the divisions of color proved so resistant to evidence and argument? Why did the Enlightenment spirit of rational inquiry fail to consign these hierarchies to the ash heap of history, alongside so many other discarded notions? What has gone wrong in the longstanding global conversation about color?

Let’s retrace our steps. The experiment with our young African, three centuries ago, looks like a success.

Amo, the Duke’s godson, educated with the children of the local aristocracy, clearly flourished at the local university, because he went on to study law at the university of Halle, then (as now) one of Germany’s leading centers of teaching and research. There, he wrote a thesis about the legal status of the “Moor” arguing that the European slave trade violated the principles of Roman law. He soon added knowledge of medicine and astronomy to his training, and a few years later, moved to the University of Wittenberg, in Saxony, where he became the first black African to earn a doctoral degree in philosophy. When the ruler of Saxony came to visit, Amo was chosen to lead the students’ procession in his honor. His Wittenberg thesis, published in 1734, makes important criticisms of Descartes’ views of sensation.

And Amo, who knew Dutch, German, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, went on to teach at two eminent institutions of higher learning, in Halle and in Jena. And in 1738 he published an academic text, which won eminent admirers. The great physicist and philosopher Gotthelf Loescher, who examined his thesis at the University of Wittenberg, spoke of the Gold Coast as “the mother … of the most auspicious minds,” and added:

Among these auspicious minds, your genius stands out especially, most noble and distinguished Sir, seeing that you have excellently proved the felicity and superiority of genius, solidity and refinement in learning and teaching, in countless examples….

So I have said that Amo’s education was an experiment. What hypothesis was it designed to test?

When the Rector of Wittenberg complemented Dr. Amo on his successful defense of his dissertation, he began by talking about his African background. He mentioned some of the most famous African writers from Antiquity, including the Roman playwright Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine among the Christian Fathers, and he discussed the Moors who conquered Spain from Africa. All of these people (as the Rector would have known) were of Berber or Phoenician or Roman ancestry, so none of them would have had dark skin or the tightly-curled black hair that Amo had.

So our dukes were presumably interested in a question not about Africans in general but about black people, about Negroes, about the Moor. But what could you learn from a single experiment with one black man? Did Anton Ulrich and his friends conclude that any black child, taken at random and given Amo’s education, would have ended up as a professor of philosophy?

And if Amo had not passed the exams, would they have concluded that this somehow showed something about every black person?

Three centuries later, we are bound to see Amo’s story through the prism of race. Not so in his day. Then, everyone agreed there are what I called “peoples” in the last lecture, which was about nationalism; that is to say groups of human beings defined by shared ancestry, real or imagined, as there had been since the beginnings of recorded history. But the idea that each people shared an inherited biological nature was not yet the consensus of European thinkers. For one thing, most of them believed in the Biblical story of creation, and that meant that every living person was a descendant of Adam and Eve, and each was also a descendant of Noah. For another, the idea of distinguishing between our biological and our non-biological features was still in the intellectual future.

When Leibniz wrote about – that’s the librarian at the place where Amo was educated – when Leibniz wrote what distinguished one people from another, he thought what mattered was language. And if you read contemporaneous accounts given by European travelers and the thinkers who read them, the great debates at that time were about the role of climate and geography in shaping color and customs, not about inherited characteristics.

Indeed, the very word “biology” wasn’t invented until about 1800. Until then, the discussions took place under the heading of Natural History. And it’s only with the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, who was Amo’s contemporary, that scholars began to think of human beings as part of nature in a way that meant that we could be classified, like other animals and plants, by genus and species. And it was Linnaeus who first called us Homo sapiens, and who placed us alongside monkeys and apes in the natural order.

As he wrote to a colleague, “I seek from you and the whole world what the generic difference is between men and apes that follows from the principles of Natural History. Very certainly, I know of none.”

Beginning in the years that Amo was in Europe, a contest developed between this older Biblical understanding of the nature of humanity and a newer one that grew with the increasing prestige of the scientific study of mankind. In Amo’s day, as I said, almost everyone would have agreed that, since all human beings had to be descended from the sons of Noah, the different kinds of people might be different because they descended from Shem or Ham or Japheth. The basic division of humankind suggested by this typology was threefold:

first, the Semites, descendants of Shem like the Hebrews and the Arabs and the Assyrians; second, the darker-skinned people of Africa, including Egyptians and Ethiopians; and, third, the lighter-skinned people of Europe and Asia, like the Greeks, or the Medes or the Persians. That gives you three races: Semites, Blacks and Whites.

But the travels of European scientists and explorers revealed the diversity of modern human beings, which didn’t fit this framework. To begin with, there was the absence from the Biblical picture of East Asians—like the Chinese and the Japanese— or of Amerindians. Some thinkers even began to wonder if all the people in the world were really descendants of Adam.

Such findings might have encouraged intellectuals to question how deep these divisions of humanity really were.

Instead, for the most part, natural historians just sought to expand the categories and continued to ground hierarchies of color in the natural order of things.

There were, however, notable forces of opposition. The Abbé Grégoire, the great French revolutionary Catholic priest and anti-slavery campaigner, published a survey of the cultural achievements of black people in 1808, less than two decades after the storming of the Bastille. He subtitled it, “researches on their intellectual faculties, their moral qualities and their literature,” and he offered up Amo, among others, as evidence for the unity of the human race and the fundamental equality of black people.

He sent a copy of this book to Thomas Jefferson, who had remarked in his Notes on the State of Virginia that he could never “find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” Grégoire, with Amo in hand, urged him to think again.

Yet what did Amo’s example demonstrate? No one ever thought that because Plato or Descartes was a European, every European was capable of works of philosophical genius. Amo’s relevance in Grégoire’s argument derived largely from the fact that, for black people, the racial essence was thought by many to rule out real intellectual capacity. Hence Kant’s rather foolish remark that a black man could only say stupid things. Amo’s existence did refute that view. Still, skeptics could insist that Amo was just an exception.

So Grégoire not only assembled a dozen such counterexamples in his book, but he reported on visiting a group of black children brought from Sierra Leone to a school founded by William Wilberforce in Clapham, and concluded that, so far as he could tell, “there exists no difference between them and Europeans except that of color.” You couldn’t tell much about what black people were capable of by seeing what most of them achieved in the appalling conditions of New World slavery, Gregoire (needs accent on e) felt. As the freedwoman Harriet Jacobs put it somewhat genteelly later, there was reason to excuse enslaved people some “deficiencies in consideration of circumstances.” Who knew what would happen if all black people were offered the education of Anton Wilhelm Amo?

As Grégoire’s activism suggests, the background to the debate about the capacity of the Negro was the explosion of African slavery in Europe’s New World colonies in the Americas. In Amo’s years in Germany, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was rising to its mid-eighteenth-century peak, when nearly 200,000 people a year were transported in shackles from Africa to the New World. Many historians have concluded that one reason for the increasingly negative view of the Negro through the later eighteenth century was the need to salve the consciences of those who trafficked in and exploited men and women. As Grégoire put it, bleakly but bluntly, “People have slandered Negroes, first in order to get the right to enslave them, and then to justify themselves for having enslaved them …”

It is, perhaps, worth insisting that even if you could show that every single Negro wasn’t much good at philosophy, it would not have justified black slavery. As Thomas Jefferson said, in responding to the Abbé Grégoire, “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore the lord of the person or property of others.” The slanders against the Negro race may have salved some Christian consciences: they could never have justified what had been done in enslaving millions of black people.

But ideology—enlisted by forms of domination from slavery to colonization— does help explain why, at a time when scientists were discarding notions like phlogiston, supposedly the substance of fire, they made extraordinary efforts to assert the continuing reality of race.

There were the physical anthropologists, with their craniometric devices measuring skulls; there were the ethnologists and physiologists and the evolutionary theorists, who, discounting Darwin, propagated notions of race degeneration and separate, “polygenic” origins for the various races. One illustrious discipline after another was recruited to give content to color. And so, in the course of the nineteenth century, out of noisy debate, the modern race concept took hold.

Its first premise was that all of us carry within us something that comes from the race to which we belong, something that explains our mental and physical potential. That something, that racial essence, was inherited biologically. If your parents were of the same race, you shared their common essence.

Its second premise was that this common essence had profound intrinsic importance—and that many of the characteristics of individual human beings were a product of their race. People might be assigned to the Negro race on the basis of their skin color and hair, or their thicker lips and broader noses. But these visible differences, though important for classification, were only the beginning of a catalogue of deeper differences. The great African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, theorist of the “color line,” insisted that the deeper unities of a race are “spiritual, psychical …— undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.” In speaking in this way, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Du Bois was reflecting a scientific consensus that he had learned as a student, first at Harvard and then at the University of Berlin, each of them the greatest university in its country in that day.

We might call this idea—that almost everything important about people is shaped by their race, conceived as a heritable, biological property—the racial fixation. By the late nineteenth century in the world of the North Atlantic, the racial fixation was everywhere: scientists leading the way, humanists rushing to keep up.

In the 1860’s, for example, the English critic Matthew Arnold wrote, “Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race …” Physiologists, Arnold says, can contribute to understanding the nature of races by cataloging the physical differences between them, but the literary critic must consider the “data … afforded by our literature, genius, and spiritual production generally.” Because each race has a specific genius, a spirit which shows up in its literature. Here is what he thinks the “data” show, for example, about the Celtic race, with apologies to anybody Welsh, Scots or Irish in the room:

The Celtic genius [has] sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self-will for its defect.

Hippolyte Taine, the French literary historian, writing about English literature a decade later, says,

A race, like the Old Aryans, scattered from the Ganges as far as the Hebrides, settled in every clime, and every stage of civilization, transformed by thirty centuries of revolutions, nevertheless manifests in its languages, religions, literatures, philosophies, the community of blood and of intellect which to this day binds its offshoots together.

Taine was one of the most influential historians of his era; Matthew Arnold was perhaps the most distinguished English literary critic of the nineteenth century. For both of them, literary history was part of the scientific study of race.

By their day, then, race was a central preoccupation not only of Europe’s social and natural scientists but, as I said, of its humanists, as well. And their thinking was guided by what you might call the typological assumption. Everyone was a representative of a racial type; each of us provided a window into our race. And the typology of race explained not only our physical but also our cultural type.

The racial assumptions of the nineteenth century had a moral dimension, too. People properly had a preference for—indeed they had special obligations to—their own kind.

And while the race concept may have been propelled by imperial dreams of domination, it’s important to note that it was adopted by those who sought to resist domination, as well. Edward W. Blyden, a founder of Pan-Africanism, who was born in the Caribbean but moved to Liberia as a young man, expressed this thought as well as any in a Sierra Leonean newspaper in 1893. Abandoning “the sentiment of race,” he wrote, was like trying to “do away with gravitation.”

In reality, quite evidently, the history of the world shows that hatred and warfare is as common within the so-called races as it is between them—more common, in fact, since conflict requires contact. There was nothing racial in the fifth century BCE conflicts among China’s warring states, or between Ashanti and Denkyira in West Africa in the early eighteenth century, or among the various Amerindian states of Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish.

Still, this dialectic, where the idea of race becomes the common currency of negation and affirmation, dominance and resistance, would prove dauntingly difficult to withdraw from, even as its intellectual foundations started to crumble.

Over the past century, with the rise of modern genetics, race and science became untethered from each other. Once you grasped the new theories, you could start to see that the idea of a racial essence was a mistake. There was no underlying single something that explained why Negroes were Negroes or Caucasians Caucasian. Their shared appearance was the product of genes for appearance that they had in common. And those genes played no role in fixing your tastes in poetry, as Arnold thought, or your philosophical ideas, as Taine thought. The picture that Arnold and Taine had presented no longer had a foundation in the sciences. There was no longer a theory to support what I called the racial fixation.

It also became clear that the vast majority of our genetic material is shared with all human beings, whatever their race. And much of the variation that does exist doesn’t correspond to the old racial categories.

Almost all of the world’s genetic variation is found within every one of the major purported racial groups.

Every element of the older view was thus put in doubt: the racial fixation and the typological assumption made sense if there was a racial essence. But if there wasn’t, then each human being was a bundle of characteristics and you had to have some other reason for supposing that Amo the African told you anything more about another black person than he told you about a white person with whom he would also share most of his genes.

It’s true that if you look at enough of a person’s genes you can usually figure out whether they have recent ancestry in Africa or Asia or Europe. But that’s because there are patterns of genes in human populations— that is a fact about groups—not because there are particular sets of genes shared by the members of a race, which would be a fact about individuals.

And a great many people in the world live at the boundaries between the races imagined by nineteenth-century science: between African Negroes and European Caucasians there are Ethiopians and Arabs and Berbers; between the yellow races of East Asia and the white Europeans are the peoples of central and South Asia. Where in India is there a sharp boundary between white and brown and black?

There is little doubt that genes make a difference, along with environment, in determining your height or the color of your skin. Some people are cleverer or more musical or better poets than others and perhaps genes play a role there, too. But those genes are not inherited in racial packages. And so, if you want to think about how the limits of individual human capability are set by genetic inheritance, it won’t help you to think about races. Race is something we make; it is not something that makes us.

So why has the racial fixation proven so durable? Think about the lost-wax method by which gold weights are cast here in Ghana. The nineteenth-century race concept is the lost wax: the substance may have melted away, but we’ve carefully filled in the conceptual space it created. In the United States, the so-called “alt-right,” racial conservative groups spawned by the web, aims to define the country in terms of color and creed (namely, white and Christian). On the other side of the color line, the persistence of material inequality gives a mission to racial identities, for how can we discuss inequities based on color without reference to color? If black lives are disproportionately burdened, don’t we have to insist that Black Lives Matter?

Still, shouldn’t we feel at least a fleeting anxiety at the fact that racial authenticity can now be coded in cultural terms that sound pretty much like Taine or Arnold?

In our day, as in theirs, cultural traits are often cast as inalienable racial possessions. Until two years ago, the British government required adoption agencies to take account of a child’s “racial and cultural origins.” In universities in America today, there is much color-coded talk of cultural appropriation, which one law professor defines as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission.” Often enough that “someone else” turns out to be defined by race. We are asked, in short, to look askance at Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks, and to insist that the color line is also a property line. In Cape Coast, when African-Americans arrive at the slave castle to do their heritage tourism, they are claiming a racial inheritance.

I speak of these developments neither to commend nor to condemn them; I speak of them to show how race has become a palimpsest, a parchment written upon by successive generations where nothing is ever entirely erased. Often with the most benevolent of intentions, but sometimes, alas, with the least, we keep tracing the same contours with different pens.

As Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer knew, even benevolence has its limits. Reaching middle age, he decided that it was time to go home, and, in 1747, he made his way back to the Gold Coast, to the Nzema villages of his birth. It was a bold move.

Someone who’d been raised in the heartland of the European Enlightenment and had built a scholarly career in some of the most prestigious seats of European learning, was now turning his back on the grand experiment he embodied and resolving to make a life in a land he’d last glimpsed as a small child. We can only guess why. There is some suggestion that increasing color prejudice in this period in Germany—the early stirrings of Europe’s racial fixation—may have caused him discomfort: a satirical play was performed in Halle in 1747 in which Astrine, a young German woman, refuses the amorous advances of an African philosophy teacher from Jena named Amo. “My soul,” Astrine insists, “certainly cannot ever love a Moor.” This work demonstrates that Amo was a famous figure in Halle.

But the rejection of the Moor is Astrine’s, not the author’s; and some will conjecture that what drove him off was not racial prejudice but a broken heart.

We know a little more of what happened to him. A Dutch ship’s doctor met him in the mid-seventeen fifties at Axim. “His father and a sister were still alive and lived four days’ journey inland,” the doctor reported. He also reported that Amo, whom he described as “a great sage,” had “acquired the reputation of a soothsayer.” Both European sage and African soothsayer: Amo claimed the inheritance of the Enlightenment and an Nzema legacy.

Sometime later, he moved from Axim and went to live in Fort St. Sebastian, near the town of Shama, where he is buried. Today, we are bound to wonder: What did the soothsayer say he had learned from his long sojourn in the north?

And how did he explain his decision to leave behind everything he had built there? It’s impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion. A place where Amo the African could just be plain Amo again. Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a fate. It asks us to contemplate another bold experiment — one in which we gave up our racial fixations and abandoned a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhelm Amo was a well-known German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers.

Thank you.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Thank you very much indeed, Professor Appiah.

Now here at the British Council in Accra, we have an audience of some 250 people here and I know they’re bursting with questions following your lecture. So here’s a question here.

SABNA AMOIS: My name is Sabna Amois. I’m an investment banker. When we look at the tribal issues among people of the same colour, so take Ghana, we have lots of differences and discriminations based on what we call “tribes”. So without the colour question, when you look at – and it’s similar across other African countries and even among white people whenever there’s some discrimination among people of the same colour - is it that humans when they choose to oppress another group just pick the easiest solution or just pick the easiest difference, whether it’s against Jewish people or whether it’s an Ashanti versus another person or whether it’s between a Hutu or a Tutsi, is that … from a philosophical point of view when you try to understand human nature, is it that when we choose to hate or discriminate or treat someone badly, we pick one excuse versus another and it’s not necessarily a matter of the colour of your skin or the shade of skin colour you are?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Right. So there’s a general tendency of human beings to engage in … the word academics use for this is “othering”. It’s not a very attractive word. But …

SUE LAWLEY: Translate it for us.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Creating boundaries between self and other and defining the other in a sort of negative way. And colour is only one of the many ways in which we do it. In fact colour is only one of the ways in which racial othering occurs because the Jews in Germany were conceived of in racial terms and it wasn’t because of the colour of their skin. So the word ‘racism’, by the way, was coined to describe the attitudes associated with national socialist Germany. It wasn’t in fact coined to talk about white/black racism; it was coined to talk about anti-Jewish attitudes. But it’s perfectly natural, as you suggested, to transfer it from between these cases because they have much of the same psychological sub-structure. I would only question maybe a little bit one thing you said, which is that these identitarian conflicts, these conflicts between people of different identity, usually have at their base something other than the identity itself. They have competition for resources. If you look … The paradigm - a wonderful example of this because it’s a horrible thing that happened but it’s an intellectually useful example - is what happened with the collapse of the state of Yugoslavia. All these people had been getting along perfectly well, but when the economy collapses, there’s competition over very, very scarce resources, people use – as you said – whatever forms of alliance they can in order to engage in that competition, and in that case they settled into ancient, ethnic categories which had rather lost their meaning but were easily turned back into something significant, and also to some extent a racial category - so Muslim versus Christian, Orthodox Christian versus Catholic and so on. All these categories, they’d been there all along but they weren’t doing much work in social life. Then there’s a great conflict over resources and people mobilise these things in those difficult conflicts.

MENIPAKAI DUMOE: Thank you. I’m Menipakai Dumoe. I work for a political party in Liberia. Liberian law assumes that it would be wrong for the races to mix. Therefore in our constitution, we barred citizenship to non-Negroes. If you’re of Negro descent, you’ll be just fine, so you could be a Liberian citizen too. So do you think that politics is perhaps the problem with the racial debate? Are we hampered by politics and political necessities?

SUE LAWLEY: Anthony?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well so Liberia, as you know better than I do, was created as a refuge for freed slaves from the New World to return to Africa, and it’s natural that they brought with them ideas about identity that came from the New World where they had suffered so grievously. But what they came back with, I think, was one of the bad ideas from Europe and North America, a bad idea in two ways: first it’s a bad idea because it’s based on mistakes about how things actually work in the world and in the human body; and also I think bad because it creates the wrong kind of thinking about how we should in fact conduct – and now I get to your question – our political lives. If you want to build a nation, want to build Liberia, you want to build it around something that … you don’t want to assume that everybody’s already on the same side. You’ve got to build national solidarity. And one problem with the old racial way of thinking was that it’s assumed that if everybody was a Negro well they’d already be on the same side. Well the history of Liberia shows that that’s not true; the history of the world shows that that’s not true. So I think yes politics is as it were the problem in the sense that, in the case of race, so much of the history of the way people have thought about race was shaped by processes of colonisation, domination, enslavement – a lot of really unpleasant social political forces.

SUE LAWLEY: But there is a problem, isn’t there Anthony, with self- reinforcement? I mean, if you like, take the organisation Black Lives Matter. That is an organisation that pulls together black people, so it forces segregation, and then other people say well all lives matter or American police say blue lives matter.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes.

SUE LAWLEY: This all of the time reinforces segregation, but to that extent it’s unhelpful.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: First of all, it turns out to be a multiracial movement in the United States. That is, it’s joined by people black and white. And its thesis of course, the thesis that black lives matter is the claim not that black lives matter more than anybody else’s, but that in the United States black lives have been treated as if they didn’t matter and so saying black lives matter is a way of … is, in the context, it’s a way of saying that all lives matter. I think many of the reasonable supporters of Black Lives Matter would agree that blue lives matter, would agree that the lives of the police matter. We kill too many police.

SUE LAWLEY: But you take my general point?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. No, no, I think … So here’s the problem - that this is true not just about racial identities, but about all the identities that I’ve been talking about - they’re going to have pluses and minuses. When an identity is used as a source of solidarity in order to help people resist oppression, for example, it also creates boundaries with people outside who might want to be friendly with you because they’re not in favour of your oppression, and so you have to think as time goes on about how to modulate the different roles that identity plays in our lives.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to go to a question here.

SOLOMON HENBATAYTE: My name is Solomon Henbatayte . I’m a poet. Until 1967, it wasn’t legal to marry someone from another race in America, so I want to know if interracial marriage has helped cull racial prejudice? Thank you.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’d have thought that the direction of causality had been mostly the other way round; that is to say it’s the decline in racial prejudice that makes interracial marriage more likely. In fact interracial marriage in racist societies tends to produce enormous anxiety. The family whose case before the United States Supreme Court led to the decision that it’s no longer possible for an American state to ban interracial marriage – and marvellously enough they were called the Lovings, Mr and Mrs Loving – the reason they got into trouble was because people hated the fact – the people in authority in their community in Virginia – hated the fact that they had engaged in what they regarded as a terrible form of ghastly inter-marriage. So it didn’t help at all in that community, their marriage. It led to a decade of tension in that community and so on. But there’s a sort of natural … if you like a sort of – dare I use a philsopher’s word – a sort of dialectic here: as racial prejudice declines, interracial marriage becomes more likely; and as interracial marriage becomes more frequent, it becomes less threatening, and so there’s a kind of positive reinforcement cycle that can occur. But you want to be clear that - I know because my sister and I can both tell you about letters we read written to my parents when they married – that a lot of people were made extremely mad, angry by the marriage of a white woman to a black man in the 1950s in England.

SUE LAWLEY: This was 1953, your father and mother – yuh.

WALE EDUN: Thank you. My name is Wale Edun from Nigeria. I’m an economist and an investment banker. You’ve taken us, Professor Appiah, through the thinking about race in the past right up to the present. What do you think will be the thinking and the evolution of thinking about race in the future?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Part of the reason why I chose this topic is because I do think that the future is sort of open in a certain way. I think things can get better and worse in these dimensions and I’m very much hoping of course that they’ll get better. And I think that part of getting better, it isn’t that one should abandon the idea, these racial categories – they have a social … they have a historical significance – but we should at least remember that there’s the risk of them turning us against each other in ways that are horrendous and I think we should be more as it were relaxed about the boundaries. Some of the most difficult questions of race are arguments within racial groups about who’s really in, right? There can be colourism among black people as well. And I think that trying to think clearly about these things, trying to raise our children with sensitivity to the risks of over identification on the racial ground, raising them with knowledge about the fact that race doesn’t determine everything in the way that some people ….this is all a very important part of trying to build a future that is positive in the domain of race. I don’t think that it’s … You know people sometimes say to me do you think that in the United States the category black will disappear or do you think it should disappear? Well, first of all, on the ‘should’ question, it’s not up to me; it’s to be decided by Americans discussing with one another about what they want to do. But on the ‘will’ question, I think that whether it does or not – and I think it’s going to take a long future, if it does – it’s going to depend in part on whether new meanings can be given to black identity that are positive, as has happened of course. I mentioned Dr Du Bois. He’s one of the heroes of the process of turning black identity from the very negative thing it was in the United States into something very positive, and we Ghanaians can be proud of the fact that Dr Du Bois, who was born an American, chose to die as a Ghanaian. I mean he didn’t choose to die (laughter), but he died having chosen to be a Ghanaian. (laughs)

SUE LAWLEY: But these revolutions take generations. I mean moral revolutions take much longer than political revolutions. And I mean from my own experience in the UK, I think I would say that my parents were intrinsically racist because they were very suspicious in the fifties and sixties when Caribbean people came to the UK. They were suspicious. They might even have been a bit frightened. My children find it deeply uncool to be racist, deeply uncool, and their children – my grandchildren – will presumably be colour blind?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I don’t know if they’ll be colour blind, but the thing about uncool is really important.

SUE LAWLEY: But just answer my point about the progression, the progress actually.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: (over) Yes there’s been enormous progress. So part of the point of the Amo story, right, is that we begin in a time when the racial fixation has not occurred. Europe is not yet obsessed with the racial difference. So it’s possible for a black kid from Axim to come and be a professor of philosophy and get a PhD and teach and be leading processions, student processions, and being turned down by girls who he is attracted to?? Then there’s this very interesting process which occurs with the rise of slavery and so on and the changing ideas in the nineteenth century and then race gets really, really entrenched. And part of the point of insisting that it wasn’t always there is to remind us that if it wasn’t always there, it doesn’t have to be there forever in the future as well …

SUE LAWLEY: (over) Sure.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: … and I think we’ve seen a great deal of progress. Obviously because of the thing … the issue raised about the way identities are mobilised in conditions where you have competition for resources - if things go badly in certain countries at certain times, even if progress has been made, there’s the possibility of the risk of going backwards.

SUE LAWLEY: So progression isn’t a wonderful straight line graph …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: (over) Right, we have been …

SUE LAWLEY: … but it is inexorably upwards – i.e. progress, huh?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. I think Dr King used to say … Dr Martin Luther King used to say “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards progress”. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: Coming to my female questioner at the back there. Yeah?

MJIBA FREHIWOT: My name is Mjiba Frehiwot and I’m a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies here at the University of Ghana. So my question is can you please draw parallels between racial disparities and class based disparities?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: One of the most interesting connections I think between race and class is that racial systems and class systems tend to associate dishonour, the lack of respect, lack of entitlement to respect with the people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and they grant as it were undue respect, excessive respect to people at the top of the hierarchy. So that if you think about the British class system in the eighteenth century when Amo was in Europe, dukes and their families just got treated with massive deference by everybody however stupid they were, however wicked they were, and what they would have called the “lower orders” – ordinary working people – were treated without respect much of the time. And similarly of course in the United States, under Jim Crow, black people were denied respect. Even black people with resources and higher class standing were denied respect. And so I think that one of the most interesting questions about identity is how questions of identity interact with questions of respect because you mentioned class and race, but again one of the most challenging sets of issues about respect and identity has to do with gender, has to do with the fact that we have historically in most societies denied equality of respect to women. And part of the point of modern feminism and also of other modern movements of gender reform is to try and balance out the respect, so that you don’t lose respect simply by being a woman - as you shouldn’t lose respect simply by not being a duke, and you shouldn’t lose respect simply by not being white.

SUE LAWLEY: I’m going to go to a question here.

ATUKWE OKAI: My name is Atukwe Okai, the Secretary General of the Pan African Writers’ Association.

SUE LAWLEY: And, if I may interrupt, one of Africa’s literary giants.

ATUKWE OKAI: Thank you.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes indeed.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

ATUKWE OKAI: It is an honour and a privilege to listen to Professor Appiah, a proud son of Ghana and Africa. Anton Wilhelm Amo. We learnt about some ten years ago or more that Professor …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Willie Abraham.

ATUKWE OKAI: William Abraham …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yeah.

ATUKWE OKAI: … was working on research about him, working on a book. Are you in a position to say how far he got with it?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m not, but I will say that I mean obviously for those of us who do philosophy with a West African or even more specifically a Ghanaian connection, the discovery that there was somebody at the heart of the European Enlightenment – a little boy who played in the library where Leibniz was librarian – has been a source of excitement all along. And Professor Abraham was the first person I think to draw our attention to this, but since then other philosophers, including other Ghanaian philosphers, including Kwasi Wiredu, for example, have written about him and we know more about him than we did when Professor Abraham first started talking about him. SUE LAWLEY: What happened? Why did he suddenly turn??

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well it’s a very good question why he disappeared essentially between the Abbe Grégoire (needs accents on ‘e’) in the early nineteenth century and the late part of the … the second half of the 20th century, and I think that part of it is that that was a period in which the idea of the African intellectual, the African thinker who could sort of spar with Descartes was not comfortable for an awful lot of people because they had the view that that wasn’t … they had the racial fixation; they thought that what you could do in these dimensions and domains had to do with your race and so he was a sort of standing counterexample. I should say another reason is that some of his work has disappeared. The most depressing thing, I think, is that he was the first person, so far as I can tell, of African descent to write about the law of slavery, and unfortunately we don’t have that thesis. We do have some of his other work. We don’t have that. It would be fascinating to see what someone in his circumstances thought in a philosophical way about the basis of enslavement since he came from the Dutch West India Company to Europe. And even if he wasn’t enslaved, for example his brother was. His brother ended up as a slave in Suriname.

SUE LAWLEY: Coming to the question here.

KAJSA HALLBERG ADU: My name is Kajsa Hallberg Adu.. I’m a lecturer at Ashesi University here in Ghana. I’m also a blogger and the co-founder of Blogging Ghana. But I want to ask this question as a mother. My daughter, who’s five years old, has a Ghanaian father and me, a Swedish woman, as her mother, and she was discussing this issue of how the racial categories vary with me earlier today. She was saying “My classmates, they think I’m white, but I’m really light brown.” So I wanted with that to ask about your personal experiences and how they informed this lecture.

SUE LAWLEY: How did you answer her before Anthony answers? (laughter)

KAJSA HALLBERG ADU: Yeah, no I actually responded because when we travel to Sweden, there she’s black, so I think this is very interesting.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Good, yes good. Well out of the mouths of babes and sucklings cometh truth. I mean you know she’s making the point, she’s recognising the arbitrariness of the classification and she’s inviting you to explain why the grown-up world can’t see what she can. My experience of colour was profoundly shaped by the fact that I was raised in circumstances of enormous privilege. Both my mother’s family and my father’s family you know were very privileged families and so a lot of the buffeting that we might have experienced, especially as a result of not being white in England, we were protected from that by a very elaborate armature of class privilege. In fact …

SUE LAWLEY: But, nevertheless, at your boarding school you would have been … You went in the 60s??

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes.

SUE LAWLEY: You would have been one of the few non-white faces in that school.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. Well my father was very good at organising things, so actually by the time I got to my secondary school in England, he had arranged for somebody else to send a son there, so there was already a Ghanaian head boy. (laughter) But that’s what I mean by privileged. No I mean I obviously …

SUE LAWLEY: Are you saying you never suffered from racial prejudice?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Oh no, no, no. No of course I’ve been called nasty names and so on, but very, very rarely. But I’m making this point not really to make a point about me, but to reinforce the point I was making about the contextual character of these things and about the interconnections between different kinds of identity and different kinds of honour and dishonour. We were protected. In the archives of my grandmother is a letter, a stern letter that she wrote to the headmaster of my first English school basically saying if anything bad happens to my brown grandchild, I will have you killed. (laughter) I mean she didn’t quite say killed. (laughs) She did not. She was not … The threat was subtler.

SUE LAWLEY: I hope so. (laughter) Anthony, let me ask you one last question. I read that one of your great philosophical heroes is David Hume, the great libertarian genius of the eighteenth century Enlightenment; that you have a picture of him on your study wall in the States.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I do.

SUE LAWLEY: You quote him at the top of your lecture. It’s the sort of quote that people don’t hear because you don’t read it out. He wrote in 1742 “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilised nation of that complexion.” Why is this man your hero?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Because I’m a very forgiving character. (laughter) So I didn’t read that out, but at the top of each of the lectures I’ve got a little quote for my own edification. It’s really important to remember that great philosophers can be extremely foolish and in particular in this period they could be very, very foolish about race. I do not admire this side of David Hume. I don’t think that this is one of his better moments. I say that not just because we don’t think it’s a sensible thing to say, but fortunately he was criticised at the time by other people in the Scottish Enlightenment who said that’s a pretty daft way to think, after all, and then they did what the Abbe Grégoire did to Jefferson: they told him about a Jamaican poet, a black Jamaican poet, and he said you know you make this remark about all black people; we’ll give you, we’ll throw you a counter example. So yes, he’s my hero. If I were not allowed to read philosophers who had said foolish things, I wouldn’t be able to read most philosophers (laughter); and if I weren’t allowed to read philosophers who’d said silly things about race, that would also limit my reading somewhat. The greatest philosophical logician arguably of the nineteenth century, Gottlob Frege, was a fanatical anti-Semite. This is a horrible fact about him, but it doesn’t stop him having been the greatest philosophical logician of the nineteenth century.

SU ELAWLEY: I see there’s a former president, a past president of Ghana sitting on the front row there: John Kofuor. Have you anything you’d like to contribute, sir? (laughter)

JOHN KOFUOR: Well I can’t think of the matter of identity without thinking of evolution. And these days we all talk about globalisation, so I want to know from you whether - you being a very professional philosopher - you foresee times when the prejudices being borne out by various fixations and prejudices might tone down because more and more people are beginning to see that perhaps we are the same?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. So I do think that in many dimensions of identity - which I’ll be talking about this … I’ve been talking about race here, but I’ve talked about religion and nationality and I’ll be talking about other forms of identity in New York in the last lecture - and in all of them I see hope because I think if we understand them properly, we can see that we do not need to be divided by religion, we do not need to be divided by nationality, we do not need to be divided by race and we do not need to be divided by culture, though nor do we need to abandon any of them. That is to say, the way forward in the racial domain isn’t – as I’m afraid I used to think – just to sort of as it were pretend that racial identities aren’t there. It’s to moderate them, it’s to recognise that you can have profound friendships across races and nations and cultures and religions, and it’s to stop the essentialisation where that means taking people of a certain sort and treating them as if they have some immutable, eternal, solid character which you can’t do anything about – and usually by the way it’s got something bad about it if it’s not us: we’re terrific, everything about us is wonderful but usually when we’re othering people, when we’re treating them as other, we’re going to find fixed in their very nature something bad. And this is something that we can escape from and we need (speaking of children) we need to raise our children with the tools for resisting that. And so I’m hopeful. I’m a hopeful guy.

SUE LAWLEY: He’s hopeful. Fascinating. Ladies and gentlemen, we have to stop it there. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you too to our hosts here at the British Council.

Next time, for the fourth and last lecture, we’ll be in Anthony’s adopted home city of New York to hear his critique of culture, identity and Western civilization.

In the meantime, do take a look at the BBC Reith website for transcripts, audio and all the other information that’s on it. But for now, many thanks to our Reith Lecturer 2016 Anthony Appiah. And from Accra in Ghana, goodbye.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

THIS TRANSCRIPT IS ISSUED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IT IS TAKEN FROM A LIVE PROGRAMME AS IT WAS BROADCAST. THE NATURE OF LIVE BROADCASTING MEANS THAT NEITHER THE BBC NOR THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE PROGRAMME CAN GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION HERE

Mistaken Identities: Creed, Country, Color, Culture

Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith Lectures 2016

Lecture 4: Culture New York City

SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to New York for the last in this year’s series of BBC Reith Lectures.

This city is our lecturer’s adopted home and we’re in New York University’s law school where he’s Professor of Philosophy and Law. His subject in these lectures is identity, how do we decide who we are? So far he’s guided us through our attitudes to religion, nationhood and colour. For his last lecture, he’s tackling how we come to terms with something rather less precise: culture.

Here in America and across the Atlantic in Europe, we like to think of ourselves as products of something called “Western civilization”, but are we? And if we are, what does that phrase mean? Big questions. Without more ado, please welcome the man who will try to answer them for us: the BBC Reith Lecturer 2016 Kwame Anthony Appiah.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thanks, thanks very much Sue.

Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the dryer air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early twenties, he left for the New World, and, after befriending Henry Christy, a Quaker archeologist he met in his travels, they ended up riding together through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos.

Christy was already an experienced archeologist and under his tutelage Tylor learned how to work in the field. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted the rest of his life.

In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology. Over the decades, as his beard morphed from a lustrous Garibaldi to a vast, silvery cumulonimbus that would have made Gandalf jealous, Tylor added to his knowledge of the world’s peoples through study in the museum and the library.

Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, the poet and literary critic, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

So Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to make sure that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he became the first Professor of Anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture,” which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Civilization, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.

Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it’s usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic: Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture” and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron; Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. Yet, in ways we’ll explore, these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of Western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern Western people. In this final lecture, I’m going to talk about culture as a source of identity, and to try to untangle some of our confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we’ve come to call the West.

You may have heard this story. Someone asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, and he replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.” (laughter) Like many of the best stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but, also like many of the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavor of truth. I have been arguing, in these lectures, that many of our thoughts about the identities that define us are misleading, and that we would have a better grasp on the real challenges that face us if we thought about them in new ways. In this last lecture I want to make an even more stringent case about a “Western” identity: whether you claim it, as many here in New York City might, or rebuff it, as many in our radio audience around the world do, I think you should give up the very idea of Western civilization. It’s at best the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the great political challenges of our time.

I hesitate to disagree with even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe Western civilization is not at all a good idea, and Western culture is no improvement.

One reason for the confusions “Western culture” spawns comes from confusions about the West. We have used the expression “the West” to do many different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet of Empire, wrote, “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the Cold War, “the West” was one side of the Iron Curtain; “the East” its opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the world. Often, in recent years, “the West” means the North Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America.

The opposite here is a non-Western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America—now often dubbed “the Global South”—though many people in Latin America will claim a Western inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South Africans, so that “Western” here can look simply like a euphemism for white.

And, of course, we often also talk today of the Western world to contrast it not with the South but with the Muslim world. Muslim thinkers, too, sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr, the home of unbelief. This contrast is the one I want to explore today.

European and American debates today about whether Western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit, as we’ll see, a genealogy in which “Christendom” was replaced by “Europe” and then by the idea of “the West.”

For the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, the world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents: he himself traveled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to “why the earth, which is one, has three names, all women’s.”

Still, despite his puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.

But here’s the important point: it wouldn’t have occurred to Herodotus to think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus . . . Bodrum in modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn’t make him an Asian; it made him, or left him, a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an adjective, never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of Europeans as a people, either.

Then the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the Prophet’s death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere thirty years to defeat the Persian empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest provinces from Rome’s residue in Byzantium.

The Umayyad dynasty, which began in 661, pushed on west into North Africa and east into Central Asia. In early 711, their army crossed the straits of Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called Al-Andalus, and attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries.

Within seven years, most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly eight hundred years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.

The Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north. But near Tours, in 732, Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, defeated the forces of Al-Andalus, and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the conquest of Frankish Europe. Edward Gibbon, overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they could have sailed up the Thames.

“Perhaps,” he added, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” What matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses,” Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims.

Now, nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “Western” for that job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches west of all of Ireland.

For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula—part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe—until nearly the sixteenth century. The natural contrast wasn’t between Islam and the West, but between Christendom and Dar al-Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.

Starting in the late fourteenth century, the Turks, who created the Ottoman Empire, gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent’s army at Vienna, did the reconquest of Eastern Europe begin. It was a slow process. It wasn’t until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early nineteenth century, Bulgaria even later.

We have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe—Christendom—defining itself through opposition. And yet the move from “Christendom” to “Western Culture” isn’t straightforward.

For one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of the twelfth century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred kilometers southwest of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: “Greece once had the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning,” he wrote. “Then chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has come to France.” The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into Western Europe gradually became, in the Middle Ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea.

More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg, that

The foundations of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.

So from the late Middle Ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilizational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman Empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally reunited — pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn, in the academies of Europe and the United States. This treasure is no doubt nestled somewhere here in the American Academy today; perhaps indeed in the university library just around the corner. There are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the golden nugget the core of a civilization opposed to Islam. Because the classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid Caliphate, the palace library featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid, translated into Arabic. And of course, as the last of the major Abrahamic faiths, Islam combined this attention to the pagan classics with an engagement with the traditions of Judaism and early Christianity. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works were preserved by Muslim scholars.

Much of our modern understanding of classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the Arabs.

In the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of Tours pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of Al-Andalus, bellicose as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless others.

There were no recognized rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues.

Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was ambassador from Muslim Cordoba to the Christian courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman Empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the tenth century, was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the Caliph’s medical council. He advised the Caliph to translate a Latin medical text into Arabic, marking the start of Cordoba’s history as one of the great centers of medical knowledge in Europe. And where had the text come from? It was a gift from Emperor Constantine, the Christian monarch in Byzantium. The translation into Latin of the works of ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the twelfth century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. Ibn Rushd was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The Commentator,” because of his commentaries on Aristotle.

So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish Western Civ from the inheritors of the Caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.

The golden-nugget story starts to fragment. It imagines Western culture as the expression of an essence—a something—which has been passed from hand to hand on a historic journey. And we’ve seen the pitfalls of this sort of essentialism in these lectures again and again. In the first lecture, we saw how the scriptures of a religion were supposed to determine its unchanging nature. In the second, it was the nation, bound together through time by language and custom. In the last lecture, it was a racial quiddity shared by all blacks or all whites.

In each case, then, people have supposed that an identity that survives through time and space must be propelled by some potent common content. But that is simply a mistake.

What was England like in the days of Chaucer, father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of customs, ideas, and material things made England characteristically English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so, when some of those in one generation move from the territory to which English identity was once tied—move, for example, to a New England—the label can even travel beyond the territory. Identities can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences: you don’t get to be called “English” because there’s an essence that this label follows; you’re English because our rules determine that anyone appropriately connected to the place called England is entitled to that label.

So how did we in New York get connected to the realm we call the West, and gain an identity as participants in something called Western culture?

It will help to recognize that the term “Western culture” is surprisingly modern—more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney. “One,” Tylor wrote, “had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine, whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred ... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and roasting an onion representing him.” Primitive culture, indeed.

So the very idea of the “West,” to name a heritage and object of study, doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the twentieth century.

When, around the time of the First World War, Oswald Spengler wrote the influential book translated as “The Decline of the West”—a book that introduced many readers to the concept—he scoffed at the notion that there were continuities between Western culture and the classical world. During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, Rebecca West recounted a visitor’s sense that “it's uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our Western culture.” The “recent blow” in question was the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. If the notion of Christendom was an artifact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of Western culture largely took its present shape during the Cold War. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican Revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. (laughter)

Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe, something that few stalwarts of Western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called Western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if Western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up. And once Western culture could be used as a term of praise, it was bound to become a term of dispraise, too.

Critics of Western culture, producing a photonegative emphasizing slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they saw a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.

Talk of “Western culture” has had a larger implausibility to overcome. It places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted intellectual and artistic achievements—philosophy, literature, art, music, the things Arnold prized and we humanists study. But if Western culture was there in Troyes in the late twelfth century when Chrétien was alive, it had little to do with the lives of most of his fellow citizens, who didn’t know Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato. Today in our country the classical heritage plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans. Look around you, here in New York City, which must count as a center of Western civilization if anything does.

Are these Arnoldian achievements that hold us together? Of course not. What holds us together, surely, is Tylor’s broad sense of culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behavior that shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and civilians, shop-assistants and consumers. Intellectuals like me have a tendency to suppose that the things we care about are the most important things. I don’t say they don’t matter. But they matter less than the story of the golden nugget suggests.

So how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to persuade ourselves that we’re rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, when the stuff of our existence is more Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian? (laughter) Well, by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something that was already present in Tylor’s work.

Remember the famous definition I quoted: it began with culture as a “complex whole.” What you’re hearing there is something we can call organicism. A vision of culture not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an organic unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully adapted to occupy a particular place, each part essential to the functioning of the whole. The Eurovision Song Contest, the cutouts of Matisse, the dialogues of Plato are all part of a larger whole. As such, each is a holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if you’ve never personally checked it out. Even if it isn’t your cup of tea, it’s still your heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our everyday selves could be dusted with gold.

But look: there just isn’t one great big whole called culture that organically unites all these parts.

Spain—in the heart of the West—resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off in India and Japan in the East, the home of Oriental despotism. Jefferson’s cultural inheritance—Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom—did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily—perhaps even more easily—than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. Something like this is true of cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala; now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s. (laughter)

Once we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan picture in which every element of culture—from philosophy to cuisine to the style of bodily movement—is separable in principle from all the others; you really can walk and talk like an African American and think with Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant as well as with Martin Luther King and Miles Davis. No Muslim essence stops—none has stopped—individual inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from taking up anything from Western Civilization, including Christianity or democracy. No Western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam.

The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine to contemporary American culture have some truth in them, of course. There are self-conscious traditions of scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices that we have access to these values, as if they’re tracks in a Spotify Playlist that we have never quite listened to.

If these thinkers are part of our Arnoldian culture, there’s no guarantee that what is best in them will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in Muslim cultures today.

Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the West, however you define it, being Western, provides no guarantee that you will care about Western Civ. The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. And by that very logic they don’t belong to a European who hasn’t taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same is true, naturally, in the other direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests that we can’t help caring about the traditions of “the West” because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a Western destiny.

In the year of Edward Burnett Tylor’s death, what we’ve been taught to call Western civilization stumbled into a death match with itself: the Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other, marching young men to their deaths in order to “defend civilization.” The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked Tylor’s evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold’s worst fears about what civilization might mean. Arnold and Tylor would have agreed, at least, on this: culture isn’t a box to check on the questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with others.

Creed. Color. Country. Culture. As I hope I’ve shown in the course of this year’s Reith Lectures, all these things can become forms of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. But that’s not to deny that they can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. And our lives must make sense at the largest of scales, as well. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon. We live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I can draw on someone who’s a frequent presence in courses on Western Civ., the dramatist Terence: a slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe, who called himself Terence the African. I don’t think, in other words, that I can make the point better than Publius Terentius Afer, writing more than two millennia ago. “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” Now there’s an identity worth holding on to

Thank you very much.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

SUE LAWLEY: Many thanks. Many thanks indeed, Professor Appiah.

Now we turn to our audience here at New York University to put our lecturer’s thesis to the test. So let me have our first questioner, please.

HENRY COHEN: Hello. My name is Henry Cohen. I’m a student, a film and TV student at NYU. What do you make of the concept of cultural appropriation and complaints by minority groups that their culture can be co-opted by a majority? Thank you.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Good question, which means hard answer. (laughter) Look, I myself, as you have seen, believe in the cross-pollination of culture, believe in borrowing and, if necessary, stealing from other cultures in order to create the things that I think are most precious to all of us. If Basho, the great haiku poet, Japanese haiku poet, had been denied access to Chinese and Indian culture, he wouldn’t have had access either to writing or to Buddhism, both of which were very important to him. If people had said to Basho well you’re appropriating Chinese culture when you write or you’re appropriating Indian culture when you appeal to Zen Buddhism, then that would have left him with nothing of the sort that he was best at to do. So my basic tendency is to think that as long as one respects reasonable intellectual property regimes and so on, you should take what you can wherever you find it useful and work with it. But look, there are ways of using the culture of other people that express disrespect for them and it’s bad to express disrespect. So I think that what people are worried about very often when they’re talking about cultural appropriation isn’t actually an issue of property; it’s an issue of respect. And I have some sympathy with the arguments about respect, though not – as you see – very many positive feelings about the idea of cultural objects belonging to one ethnic group or one nationality or anything else like that.

SUE LAWLEY: (to Henry Cohen) Do you want to come back on that?

HENRY COHEN: I agree. (laughter)

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Excellent. Let’s go on like this. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: No, no … no, no, we don’t want to go on like this. Okay I’m coming to a question here. JOSH GLANCY: Hi there. My name’s Josh Glancy. I’m a journalist in New York. Let’s say we accept your argument about abandoning the concept of Western civilization. But you also point out that the stories and narratives we tell ourselves are incredibly powerful, in fact that’s how we bind our societies together, so what do we replace it with?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I think we need all kinds of identities. I’m not sure that we … as it were the disappearance of the idea of yourself as a Westerner doesn’t leave a hole that has to be filled by something else because you have other things to appeal to?? So I don’t think I need to offer you an alternative. I just need to point out to you that you have your British – or perhaps English, I don’t know which you care for most – national identity. But you have that, you have your profession as a journalist. We have many identities to draw on. When we have identities that we are drawing on that aren’t doing good work, I think it’s better to abandon them and develop others. So I would urge you and everybody else to think about other ways of affiliating ourselves with people across the world. I - as you know, as you saw from what I said - have great interest in many of the things that are associated with Western Civ courses – I’m perfectly happy to talk about Herodotus or Plato or Kant or any of those folk. I just think that we should be more generous in thinking about who they can belong to and perhaps a bit more stinting in granting them to the followers of Donald Trump, for example.

SUE LAWLEY: But what holds us all together are the things that you’ve sought to praise of course - liberalism, human rights, rule of law, all those things. That gives us a right to choose, it gives us control over who we are because we can choose. There are people across the world, most particularly in Islamic countries, who don’t have that kind of choice.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes, I’m not sure most particularly in Islamic countries. I mean the two largest countries in the world are China and India and I’m not sure that I think of China as a home of freedom and that has nothing to do with Islam; and, on the other hand, fragile as it is, Indian democracy is a real thing and that involves several hundred million Muslims. But I agree with you that there are too many places in the world where the things I do care about - not because they’re Western but because they’re immensely valuable …

SUE LAWLEY: But they are Western.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well they’ve become identified with the label Western right now, but ask Herodotus how many democracies he knew, in the West; ask Kant how many democracies he knew; ask the historians who wrote … Ask Gibbon how many. I mean I’m thinking of people that I quoted. So I think these are values worth holding onto. Some of the most stalwart defenders of liberalism and democracy now are not Westerners, thank God.

SUE LAWLEY: Question over here.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Chris Anderson. I run an organisation called TED devoted to sharing ideas across cultures. It’s become shockingly clear in the last year or so just how deeply threatened many people are by other cultures – threatened, angry, fearful. Why has that happened and what would you say to someone to diffuse that anger and fear?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: So if I had a little booklet or a pill or something that would do that, of course I would spread it widely around the planet. Look human beings, we evolved as a social species in a context where competition among groups was important and so we have a psychology that does very easily produce “them” and “us” structures that bonds us strongly to the “us” and makes us antagonistic to the “them”. Social psychology is full of experiments in which this can be done in an afternoon with a classroom full of kids or you know over a weekend. So that’s a deep feature of our psychologies. And because we now know that it’s there, it’s tremendously important not to engage it in dangerous ways, and one of the most dangerous kinds of people in the world today I think are people who go around mobilising “us-es” by stigmatising and demonising “thems”. It’s easy to do, it works, but then you’re stuck with the results and the results are that you can’t turn it off, you can’t turn it off. And so you mobilise Serb identity in the Balkans, you can’t turn it off. It’s a deep feature of our psychologies. It’s one we can escape. We don’t have to feel like this. We can make distinctions in our beliefs and in our religions and in our national affiliations without organising them in a way that leads to hatred.

SUE LAWLEY: (to Chris Anderson) Do you have an answer to your own question, Mr Anderson? I mean you must have heard people … Running TED Talks, you must have heard people pontificating on this many, many times?

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean there’s many theories and you know people talk about trying to get visibility of each other, trying to do things that develop empathy, to tell a story that puts you in someone else’s shoes. And you know for a long time technologists would have said that just the sheer connectedness of the world, the fact that we can all see each other, connect with each other on Facebook or Twitter or whatever is a force for good, basically for fundamentally driving a slow but steady progress towards a sort of global you know identity of sorts or at least of that being one of our identities, but definitely the events of the last year have challenged all those views quite strongly.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: If you raise people in groups of mixed identity where they’re doing useful things together in circumstances of equality and mutual dependence, it’s very hard for bigotry against the groups that are represented in those encounters to develop. And I mean that’s just a piece of social … It has a name, the contact hypothesis in social psychology, but I think it’s a really important point and it explains why, for example, in a multicultural society it’s really important to have public schools that are … in which everybody is represented and so on because that’s a bulwark against the other kind of negativity. It doesn’t guarantee that it won’t happen, but it makes it much less likely.

SUE LAWLEY: Okay.

LUCIA SADA (ph): Hi, I’m Lucia … Over here.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Oh there you are.

LUCIA SADA: I’m Lucia Sada. I’m a graduate student in journalism here at NYU. And I’m wondering, since you talk so much about culture and identity, I’m wondering how you envision these ideas to make their way into the classroom – specifically in the teaching of the humanities?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well I have students of mine in this room who I hope feel that I’m communicating something useful to them about these ideas of ethics and cultural identity. Look one of the things – in terms of the humanities – one of the things we can do is to have an education which points to the truth about many of the objects that I anyway care about most – like haiku poetry – which is that they are the product of hybridisation and so on, and then to study those processes. They’re very, very interesting. It’s very interesting to figure out how the sonnet entered English from Italian in such a way that Shakespeare could write sonnets that I very much enjoy and admire. It’s very interesting to think about how the narratives that Shakespeare chooses to tell come out of Roman history and out of Holinshed and so on. I mean these are interesting processes to study. Once you start studying them, you see how the things we most care about in the arts in the Arnoldian sense of culture, those things, are not the product of people who are hoarding stuff. They’re the product of people who are engaging with one another across all kinds of difference - not just national and religious difference, but all kinds of difference.

SUE LAWLEY: Question there.

ALVIN HALL: I’m Alvin Hall - writer, broadcaster, teacher. How do you define a cultured person today?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well of course in the Tylorian sense everybody’s a cultured person, everybody has a culture. In the Arnoldian sense, it’s anyone who is interested in the best that has been thought and read “in the world” remember Arnold said. So it’s not a matter of hoarding yourself … I mean Arnold’s own tastes were perhaps limited, but that was a mistake on his part. Arnoldian cultural lives are grounded in language and things that … in respect of which human beings differ and so my relationship to Basho is obviously different from the relationship of a Japanese person who understands and can read Japanese. But what I don’t think is that you should only care about the ones that are in some sense assoc… I think you can’t be a civilized person if you only care about the culture of one place, one class, one gender for that matter.

SUE LAWLEY: But the modern contribution that Western civilization is making as we speak surely to the culture of the world is the media, for example – television, cinema? What about football? You know the iconic premier league football clubs are a kind of lingua franca across the world. These are Western contributions …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well except that …

SUE LAWLEY: I’m still batting for the West here.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes, I know. And you know you can think of them that way if you like, but the fact is that soccer … (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: How else do you think of them?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well let’s take soccer, which I’m going to call soccer here because if you call it football you may be misunderstood; and whereas I’m willing to defend soccer, I’m not willing to defend what is called football in the United States. (laughter) But look …

SUE LAWLEY: I’m talking about Manchester United, let’s face it.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I’m talking about Man U. Look soccer is a perfect example of something … No doubt the rules were invented somewhere in England or somewhere or France or Ger… I don’t know where they were invented. I don’t care where they were invented actually. But the most elegant soccer players in the world today, even the ones in Man U, don’t all come from countries in the European Union. Many of them come from …

SUE LAWLEY: Sure.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: … of course from Africa, Latin America. Not so far huge numbers of them from Asia, but that’ll happen. So now the question is it’s diffused in this way. Is the fact that it’s diffused and that people in Brazil now think of football as their game, is that a bad thing because they’re not acknowledging that it’s Western or is it a wonderful, good thing that they have taken it up as Brazilian as well as acknowledging that it came from somewhere?

SUE LAWLEY: Well of course it’s a good thing, but that’s the point, isn’t it – it unites the world? I mean we all want civilization, we all want culture. You just don’t like the fact that we put the Western in front of it.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Well the reason … But that’s because … That’s good, that’s a good way of putting the question. A little bit of the intellectual history here might sort of help clarify this. Civilization as it was used in the time of Arnold and Tylor, that word was a process through which every society was going and everybody was somewhere in the process of becoming civilized and there was then a singular notion of what it was to be civilized.

SUE LAWLEY: Which was Christian and white?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Which was Christian and … No you didn’t have to be white. Christian, scientific - I mean whatever, various things. What’s wrong with that picture is that it’ll still be the case for the foreseeable future, but there will be lots of ways of being civilized. They will be different from one another and we should think of cultures, therefore, not as a thing where everybody’s placed in one ladder of culture, but rather - as my hero Herder did - as a plural thing. There are cultures but they should be in dialogue with one another.

SUE LAWLEY: And as far as football is concerned, they are …

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: They are.

SUE LAWLEY: … as far as television is concerned, they are; as far as cinema is concerned, they are?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. Though again these are all contexts in which the transmissions are often rather unequal and uneven. Hollywood is better known than Nollywood and Nollywood is quite interesting. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: Question here.

DAVID REMNICK: David Remnick from The New Yorker magazine. I would like to hear what you think that the lines of opposition are to what you’re talking about – to cosmopolitanism, to this notion that Western civilization is not a useful term at this point? What political forces are allied against what you’re really not just talking about but fighting for?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Yes. It’s back to these questions about how you imagine Europe or the United States. Do you imagine it as a kind of embattled West claiming the legacy of Plato to Nato, regarding everybody else in the world as stuck with whatever you think of their tradition? You probably don’t know very much about their traditions, but you think they probably have some them and they’re stuck with them, we’re stuck with ours and we should defend ours against them. In practice what this leads to is a politics of exclusion, it leads to a politics in which your immigration policies are like the white Australia policy of the twentieth century or the Chinese Exclusion Act policies of the United States in the early twentieth century and so on, in which you’re trying to bring in people who are as it were already guaranteed to be like you. And I suppose part of my point is nothing guarantees that anyone’s going to be like anyone. We have to make choices in this area and where you come from and who your grandparents were is not going to fix it. If you want to care about Plato, you have to study Plato. And you don’t own Plato. Plato belongs to us all. So that leads at one level to these exclusionist, unpleasant, xenophobic policies, but at the other level it leads to a kind of cultural laziness in which you think that because you’re an inheritor of Western civilization, you don’t have to do any work.

SUE LAWLEY: David Remnick, do you want to come back?

DAVID REMNICK: Maybe the lines of opposition to cosmopolitanism are more obvious on the right, or do you find that there’s opposition to it coming from the left as well?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Sure. Failures of respect are pervasive across the political spectrum and including failures of transcultural respect. I think that there are elements of the international human rights movement, which is very much centred in the North Atlantic world, that are profoundly disrespectful of the cultures that they’re criticizing. And part of the reason why that form of disrespect is bad is because first of all it leads them not to understand the things that they’re trying to criticize and so makes them very ill placed to do anything about them; and, second, it makes them look very unappealing to the people that they’re trying to convert. So yes, I think the sense that oh well we’ve already got it all, which is part of one of the Western Civ narratives, that’s not very helpful either. There are things to be learned. That’s one of the cosmopolitan thoughts. Even if you had the good fortune to be born in Athens in the fifth century, there were things you could have learned by listening to the Persians and the Egyptians and even the Celts. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: Question here.

GALA PRUDENT: Hello, I’m Gala Prudent. I’m a high school student. So there’s been a lot of debate about Colin Kaepernick’s decision to sit during the national anthem and some people say that his decision to protest has been disrespectful to American culture. So I’d like to hear how you interpret the relationship between nationalism and culture.

SUE LAWLEY: (to Professor Appiah) Can you explain that to us before you put the full answer?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: So this has to do with the game that I said I wasn’t going to defend. (laughs) This is about an American football player who as a supporter of essentially Black Lives Matter has been kneeling or sitting during the national anthem rather than standing, which is what you’re supposed to do. Short answer - you’re not going to believe that, are you? - this is a way of showing that he is deeply patriotic. Maybe you don’t like this way of showing patriotism, but it seems to me a perfectly appropriate way because it reflects this fundamental concern for the honour of your country, which as an acquired American, as someone who became American by choice, I profoundly feel both the pride and the shame, which is why I can claim to be patriotic.

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ALEXANDER NEHAMAS: Alexander Nehamas. I teach philosophy at Princeton University. It seems to me that people also have a need not only to feel connected with everybody else; they also have a need to feel different from other people. Not necessarily from everybody else though, from specific groups. And I was wondering whether … For example, friends always define in opposition to somebody who is not their friend and so on. Do you want to account for those relationships in the same way that you did account for the large units of culture or whatever, or is there more of a kind of covert essentialism in those groups?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I know what the answer to it is. But part of the question here is what the relationship is between the “us” and “them-ing” on the small, everyday scale and on the global scale. Here’s one thought I’ve had about that. It’s only be… The evolutionary processes that produce the “us” and “them-ing” have to have been small-scale. Human beings lived in groups of you know a hundred, a hundred and twenty, something like that, for most of our history - well pre-history - and so that’s the context in which we evolved. But what’s happened, I think, is that we’ve taken that piece of psychology which was evolved for doing this job in a small group and we’ve done this completely magical and mysterious thing: we’ve been able to develop sentiments of positive affiliation with groups on the scale of hundreds of millions. Three hundred thirty million Americans can feel something that connects them in this imaginary way using the psychology that developed for groups in which it was less imaginary, in which actually you know Aristotle said that you shouldn’t get too big because then you couldn’t know each other’s character. Well it’s too late for that. (laughs) But still fortunately there’s enough of that psychology that works even on the grand scale that we can hold nations together, we can say – as Richard Rorty liked to say, a philosopher we both knew – that you should be able to persuade Americans that they should care about other Americans. Maybe it’s hard to get Americans or anybody to care about everybody in the world, but you should be able to say to an American about the life of someone whose life is lacking in the elements of dignity, you should be able to say to any American none of us should live like that, right? No American should live like that. And if that can be made to work for three hundred and thirty million people, that’s kind of an amazing thing. So anyway that’s my one thought about this topic.

SUE LAWLEY: Question here.

ALISON HORNE RONA : Hello. I’m Alison Horne Rona. I’m an architectural and interior design consultant. I’m thinking about the future of culture and we’ve only touched briefly on the internet and how it’s like a tsunami breaking down barriers, and I recently read somewhere about the rise of intercultural relationships and interracial relationships just rising at a rapid rate and how that might change the world. I just wanted to hear about your ideas about the future with the internet.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: The great thing about the internet is that it allows people to explore options, especially people who don’t have many resources. A huge number of people in Africa today have access to the web because they have a cell phone. That allows … Here’s an example of something that that allows that’s really valuable. There are, despite what they say in Uganda, there are gay people in Africa. It’s kind of hard to come out in a place where you might likely be beaten up, but you can find out and communicate with other gay people privately through your phone, through the web. You can come to … And that gives a resource, a sense of … and that’s one of the reasons why there are people in Uganda who are resisting the homophobia of the Ugandan regime. I’m not picking on Ugandans particularly; this is a terrible problem all over Africa. One of the reasons why there are people resisting is because they have this resource that the web has given them. They can talk to other people – gay people in India and other parts of Africa and Europe and so on. So that’s great. But look, it’s also producing the tem… The temptation for those very people right is to stop there. It’s just to talk to other gay people. And the temptation of libertarians in the United States or of liberals or of conservatives is … - which the web enables - is to kind of … is a sort of self-ghettoisation. So far from making links across things, it can risk pulling people into tighter and tighter communities, echo chambers of one’s own self and one’s own views. Nevertheless, as I say, there’s good news as well and I think the good news is something that we should encourage. And we should encourage ourselves, all of ourselves. I don’t feel … Maybe I should you know spend more time looking at the Drudge Report. (laughs)

SUE LAWLEY: But what is the practical advice you can offer us? You know you’ve told us over the course of these four lectures how to think about colour, creed, country, culture, but you know that’s just thought. How do we become … Is there any practical hint you can give us as to how we become masters of our own identities, which is what we strive, what you’re telling us we should strive to do?

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: I think I said at some point in discussion, in one of the earlier lectures, that I have a view about what philosophers contribute. My view is you shouldn’t ask philosophers to tell you what to do. You should allow us …

SUE LAWLEY: (over) Yeah but this is the last question of a series of four. (Professor Appiah laughs) I’m going to put you on the spot.

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Okay just to say … But I think it’s very important that I am doing something in giving people tools for thinking about these things well. I can’t live your life for you, I can’t sort out your identity problems for you. There are seven billion and/or more of us and the identity challenges are very different for different people. But look, at the end I was urging on us a general spirit, which is not to lock yourself into any identity; not to take it to be a determinism, a fate, but to think of it as something to use as a resource to build a human life, and a human life among humans – that is a life which we share: our town, our village, our country and the planet. I think that’s a useful … it’s a useful idea to approach the world in that way. If any prime minister or president wants to make me his or her counsellor to solve a particular identity problem, I will work on it. (laughter)

SUE LAWLEY: (laughs) Kwame Anthony Appiah, thank you very much indeed. KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH: Thank you. And thank you all.

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SUE LAWLEY: My thanks too to our audience here and our hosts at New York University. If you want to find out more about his lectures and others, take a look at the BBC Reith website where there are transcripts, audio and so much more.

The Reith Lectures will be back next year with the best-selling author Hilary Mantel at the podium. For now, from New York, goodbye.

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