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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And I was recently reading over the Patreon page for Mindscape and I noticed that the very first sentence in the description says, “I’m a scientist, author and now a podcaster.” So think about that move, the very first way that I’m introducing potential Patreons, patrons, to the Mindscape podcast is to talk about myself by giving myself labels, right? Scientist, author, podcaster. This is the move of identity, of labeling ourselves as part of a larger group. And this idea of identity has become contentious in the modern world. It probably was always contentious, right? What identities matter, what is the role of identity? In particular, we have the idea of identity politics which arranges people on kind of a spectrum. There’s one spectrum that says, “Look, if I am female or African-American or poor, these are incredibly important aspects about myself and politically, it makes all the sense in the world to organize along those lines that I can share my interests with other people who share that identity.”

0:01:10 SC: On the other side of the spectrum, there is a move that says, “We should all be citizens of the world, we should all be common human people, we should take our identities and try to put them aside for the greater good.” And I know I’m trying to say this in a very unobjectionable way, many, many people rush to one of the ends of this spectrum and then caricature people on the other end. Today’s conversation is an attempt to move beyond these caricatures and take the idea of identity seriously, in the context of politics, but also just in the context of how we live our lives, how we think about ourselves. My guest is Kwame Anthony Appiah, who is a very distinguished philosopher and also someone who has a lot of identities that play important roles in the modern world. He was born and raised in Ghana, he was educated in the UK, in prestigious places like Cambridge University, he now lives in New York City, he is gay and bi-racial and, most of all, he’s a philosopher. These are all identities that are very, very important. He’s written a wonderful book on cosmopolitanism, which is sort of the idea that we should in some sense, try to look beyond our identities and be part of this bigger picture.

0:02:24 SC: But he argues that that doesn’t mean erasing our identities, we have to learn to live with our identities while acknowledging that to a large extent they’re made up. If you are black or Asian or white in the modern world, this is a crucially important part of your identity. If you’re black-haired or brown-haired or red-haired, that is a less important part, for basically arbitrary reasons. So what are the aspects of identity that matter? How can we use them to live together? How do we construct them, what are the stories we tell? These are the topics we’re going to be talking about in today’s podcast. Remember, you can get complete transcripts for everything that we say here at the Mindscape podcast, just go to the webpage preposterousuniverse.com/podcast and at the end of the episode blog post they’ll be a little link that says “Click here for the transcript,” the whole transcript will be there. So you can actually search the entire webpage to find anything that has ever been talked about on the Mindscape podcast. And with that, let’s go.

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0:03:43 SC: Kwame Anthony Appiah, welcome to The Mindscape podcast.

0:03:45 Kwame Anthony Appiah: I’m delighted to be talking to you.

0:03:47 SC: I’m going to start with an anecdote which will seem a little bit out of left field, but hopefully will connect back into what we’re talking about. My wife and I were watching Castle Rock, which is a TV show based on Stephen King’s stories and there’s a mother and daughter characters this season, who share this story about the laughing place. And that seemed vaguely familiar to me, but I didn’t know it. So, I went of course online, and I Googled it. So the laughing place comes from the Brer Rabbit stories. The Brer Rabbit stories is familiar to many Americans through Uncle Remus and things like that. So, of course, I’m on Wikipedia, and I click on Brer Rabbit to jog my memory about those stories. It turns out, I had never known this, Brer Rabbit sort of as a trickster figure, his stories were translated from West Africa, where they were stories of Anansi the spider. And so I clicked on Anansi the spider, who is also on a different TV show these days on American Gods, a Neil Gaiman TV show, and I’m reading about Anansi the spider and his exploits when I see that one of the major academic works about Anansi the spider, or one of the major collections, was compiled by Peggy Appiah, who I believe is your mother, is that right?

0:05:05 KA: She was my mother, yes, yes, yeah. So she collected, actually she also published Anansi stories, believe it or not.

0:05:12 SC: Okay, yeah. You mean that she had written?

0:05:15 KA: Well, she got… The first volume was called Tales of an Ashanti Father, and my father being Ashanti grew up with Anansi stories, which are still very much known. And he told some of them to us, and she was listening and she thought they were kind of cool, so she started writing them down and adapting them in the way you do when you write things, and so she… So her first books were children’s stories based on Anansi stories. And one of them, I don’t think any… Did one of them have the word Anansi in the title? I can’t remember, but as I say, the first was called Tales of an Ashanti Father, and then… So that was one kind of tradition that she collected. But the other things she collected were these things that are called gold weights, which are not made of gold, but they’re used for weighing gold. And they are made of brass, and some of them are figurative, and some of them have abstract designs on them.

0:06:04 KA: And actually, you can tell roughly when they were made by what kinds of designs they have because depending on whether they were trading with Europeans or with Arabs, they have different weighting systems, and so on. There’s a… They’re full of interesting information about culture. But she started collecting those. She was trained as an artist. She went to art school and became one of the world’s experts on them. And she would, of course, what she did was she took them to people, often in villages, and asked them to talk about them. And they way they talked about them often was by telling proverbs, many of which are in fact the taglines of Anansi stories. So she started collecting proverbs and we published translations of 7,500 proverbs that she collected in my father’s language. It’s a bilingual edition of the proverbs with glosses, which of course took a very long time to do.

0:06:56 SC: I can imagine, yeah, but it struck me as so appropriate because we wanted to talk today about identity and cosmopolitanism. And one of the things I’ve heard you say is how stories help feed into the identity of a people. And also there’s questions of appropriation and translation. And for that matter, the fact that the Anansi stories to the extent that they were converted into Brer Rabbit stories were then appropriated by Walt Disney for that movie The Song of the South, which gave you the impression that being a slave was a wonderful, happy thing. And so there’s a lot of issues that really just flow right out of that single anecdote, I think.

0:07:31 KA: Yes, yes. No, I think the Anansi stories are… They’re part of a wider genre of trickster stories which include things like the Loki in the Norse sagas and to some extent some of the characters in the Greek mythology. But there are very important ones in West Africa, the other large sort of tradition is Yoruba tradition and Eshu, who’s the trickster god there, is a very important figure in their mythology and theology, and what’s interesting about them in all these traditional cultures is… I mean, in a way you could say that Ulysses is the kind of trickster figure. The role of…

0:08:29 SC: He annoyed everybody, right? Everyone was annoyed at Ulysses.

0:08:32 KA: Yes, he’s a hero, sort of, but he’s annoying in various ways. The idea that the trickster is very powerful and important is a very widespread cross-cultural notion, and Anansi stories are not all about Anansi. Anansesem, which is the word just mean… Which just mean Anansi or it means Anansi things or Anansi words, is the generic term for all folk tales. There are folk… There are Anansi stories in which Anansi isn’t… Doesn’t occur. But a lot of them are about him and he’s a spider trickster. And so the idea that you respect, maybe a little bit fear, but also admire the trickster figure is a central thing that you’re brought up with, if you’re brought up with these stories.

0:09:25 SC: Well, is it too much to think that the kinds of story… Let me ask it as a question. How much do the kinds of stories that different communities and groups of people lean on either reflect who they are or shape who they become? Is that an even an answerable question?

0:09:44 KA: Well, I think those kinds of questions of causality are rather hard to tease out, but reflect, sure, I mean, I think… And I think it must be the case that if you’re brought up to, with these stories in which Anansi is a focus and admired, it must suggest something to you about what in my father’s, in English, in Ghana it’s called trickishness. He was very trickish, people say. I think it must do and I think… And certainly you know when we think about the role of the novel in shaping the moral climate of societies, as it surely must have, as also reflected them. You know, it provides… These stories provide a way of thinking about questions that arise for you. The questions about, I mean, in the 19th century, questions about marriage and property are… They are real questions for the kind of people that read Trollope novels.

0:10:52 KA: People were making decisions all the time about that sort of thing. And to have stories in which it works out or it doesn’t work out, stories that essentially teach the idea that love is tremendously important and that all the marriage stuff, that is also important, but for property-related reasons can get in the way of this other important thing. I mean, that’s… I think that’s part of a long history that changes the character of marriage eventually. And John Stuart Mill, who’s on the wall there. [chuckle]

0:11:24 SC: There he is. Looking rather stern, right?

0:11:27 KA: He is looking very stern.

0:11:27 SC: Oh, but there’s David Hume behind him. I see, okay.

0:11:28 KA: Yes, yes, yes. Mill’s discussions of the connection between marriage and equality in On The Subjection of Women, part of that depends upon the longer history of the growth of ideas about romantic love, and the importance of romantic love, and the idea of companionship in marriage as opposed to, as it were, co-parenting as being the main thing you do, and the bringing together of individuals rather than of families being the main thing they’re doing. All of that surely must have been affected by people reading the novels of romance and anti-romance. I think the stories that people read and the stories that they hear as they’re growing up, the stories that they’re told, must have a big impact. And I think, yeah, that’s why it’s important to read to children. And to tell them stories, if you don’t read.

0:12:00 SC: Well, I think that’s actually… This is reflecting bigger issues, right? I mean, you need get some of the bigger issues on the table. Words like identity are very charged these days. And there’s different senses of identity, right, or racial identity or national identity, and so forth. Do you have a simple way of just thinking about what the word identity means or how it’s used these days?

0:12:55 KA: That depends on what you mean by simple.

0:12:58 SC: You don’t need be too simple. This is… We like to get a little bitty.

0:13:00 KA: I think, first of all, it’s very important that this way of using the word identity is an entirely post-Second World War phenomenon. It’s a modern phenomenon. People did not use the word identity. And it’s very hard to find a word that does the same job before. The idea that race and gender and nationality and religion are all things of the same kind, which I mean, we’re so used to that idea that you need to step back from everything. “Wow, Is that really true?” One of the…

0:13:26 SC: Well, actually, that’s… I don’t want to go over that too quickly because that’s really worth pointing out. Identity before Second World War would have just been more individual, like who you specifically are.

0:13:37 KA: Yes, I mean, they wouldn’t have used the word identity. They would have used words like self or individual or… I mean, there’s lots of language for talking about some of it… A group member, groups and so on. Also, words like… Though ethnicity is a relatively modern word too. Words like that.

0:13:54 SC: So not only our identity is constructed, but identity as an idea was very constructed.

0:13:58 KA: Identity was constructed. What’s constructed is the idea that all of these are the same. And here’s… Now, here’s my answer to the question why are they all the same. Well, they’re all the same in these because they all have the following three properties. One, they… The involve labeling and without the labeling, it can’t work. Two, they mean something to the bearers of the label, so that they say to themselves, they get up in the morning and they do things because they are men or because they’re black or because they’re white or because they’re Catholic. And three, other people do things to them because of the labels. That’s the basic structure of identity labeling and there’s one other thing that should be said, as it were, as part of the basic theory as well, I think, which is that all of these things tend to be contested.

0:14:52 KA: Exactly who are the men and who are the women as we’ve now noticed is not as obvious as people have taken it to be. And now we have contests about that. What it means to me to be black or gay or whatever is, I may not be entirely clear about that, other people may have views about what it means to me that I don’t share. Other people may tell me that I’m not being black enough or that I’m letting down the gay community or that…

0:15:19 SC: Not being gay in the right way.

0:15:19 KA: Yeah, not being gay in the right way. And, also there’s huge obviously disagreement about sometimes if at all we should take notice of people’s identities when we’re interacting with them. But if we should, how should we? Some people… Here’s a practice, which I noticed when I came to this country, which is that non-white people in small towns who don’t know each other, and I was always one of them, ’cause they didn’t know me, will often just greet you.

0:15:51 SC: You’re already in the club.

0:15:52 KA: They’ll just say hello. And the white people won’t. They’re not hostile. They just don’t think it’s appropriate to talk to a stranger.

0:16:00 SC: Every stranger on the street.

0:16:01 KA: Every stranger on the street. Is that appropriate? People can think, “Well, that’s kinda weird.” After all, as it turns out, I know almost nothing of the culture of the people who were… I mean, I do now, but I didn’t then know very much about the culture of the people who were greeting me. And who knows whether I wanted to be greeted, as it were. They didn’t know anything about how grumpy I might be.

0:16:29 SC: It seems mostly sweet.

0:16:31 KA: It seems sweet, but if… Notice that if white people made a habit of doing this in a mixed race town, people might begin to think that that was a bad thing. Now, that’s something to do with the fact that white people are going to be a majority and if they were a minority in a small town, again, we might think that that’s not so surprising, even given the background of racism and the fact that building cross-racial relations is probably a thing that in this country we ought to care about doing more than we do.

0:17:04 SC: But many cities have expat communities, right?

0:17:07 KA: Yes, yes.

0:17:07 SC: Where foreigners or strangers stick together in some ways.

0:17:10 KA: Yes, and in fact one interesting thing for Americans, I think, is that when Americans go abroad, Americans who are very conscious of the things that divide them from each other when they’re home come to spend time together and also become commonly defensive of things that they might well criticize when they’re back home. You know, this is… An important point about the contextual character of what identities do for us, it depends on what the background is.

0:17:43 SC: Yeah. And I like your definition because it highlights the extent to which the identity is not simply from within ourselves, it’s so shaped by how we interact with the rest of the world and how they interact with us. In fact, sometimes identities are sort of forged by common enemies in some way.

0:18:00 KA: Yes, yes. I mean, Charles Taylor says that they’re dialogical. I like that word because if you’re… Part of what that means is that if you’re going to change them or shift them around, you’ve got to get everybody on board. And it may be that you might have a view that the insider’s views about how things, how a certain identity should work, should be given extra weight, but in general identity is a part of a system of identities. And so, everybody has a stake in it. You can’t change what it means to be a woman and just leave what it is to be a man completely free-floatingly independently intact.

0:18:37 SC: When you draw a boundary, it separates two things.

0:18:39 KA: Yes, it separates two things. And so, the agreements about where the boundary lies are obviously required, as it were, the consent of all parties or at least they’re only going to be settled if you can get the consent of all parties. And certainly the meanings of these things. There are socially available meanings when, you know, if you’re a parent and you have a male child and a female child, the way in which their gender identities are available to them is going to depend on more than just what you think and more than what they come to think, it’s going to depend on how people in the world think about those things and different people in the world may think differently. It’s very much a matter, I think of it is as something that inevitably involves negotiation and perhaps compromise because a change in the system that is very good for some people maybe, may actually take something away from other people.

0:19:35 KA: Now, it may be, as in the case of the changes in the gender system produced by the kind of feminism that goes back to John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft, those changes took away some things, some privileges from men, and a jolly good thing too. I mean, so sometimes what’s taken away from people they weren’t entitled to, but still, they lost something. And so you had to, to make it really work, you had to get them on board. And I think this is something that I feel is a little bit missing in the discussions about trans issues is the recognition that it is an issue for cis people as well as trans people. And that though the system needs to be changed in ways that will allow trans people better lives, they can’t do it without bringing the rest of us along. And that means they have to make arguments, they can’t just declare things, and they have to help us understand what it is they want, not just be annoyed with us for not understanding it, and so on.

0:20:40 KA: Now, I mean, I agree with the main thrust of what they’re up to, but I think sometimes people behave as if the resistance that comes to what they want is… It may be unreasonable, but it’s not… It comes from a place of people genuinely having a stake in the cis-trans system. And therefore, having I think the right to participate in trying to understand what’s going on.

0:21:03 SC: Well, and this is one of the issues that inevitably comes up when one such group, one such identity, has been historically discriminated against. There are things that they want and they’re a little bit impatient. And one can forgive them for being impatient, right?

0:21:19 KA: No, no. They should be in a hurry.

0:21:19 SC: Maybe they don’t want to sit and listen to detailed arguments one way or the other, or even, let me put it even more strongly than that. They can see what one person sees as a dispassionate philosophical argument one way or the other as an attack on who they are.

0:21:34 KA: Yes, and they do, and it may be. But what I was arguing, I suppose, is that you can’t always get what you want.

0:21:47 SC: Yeah, no, I agree, yeah.

0:21:48 KA: And that you have to… Look, it’s a very interesting thing how… I think young people, people in their teens and 20s today may have a hard time understanding why lesbian and gay people in the ’50s and ’60s, and maybe before, were not just mad at their families, and not just angry with them all the time. And kind of saying, “Take it or leave it. This is who I am.” But that is what happened. People negotiated with their families and when their families reacted badly to coming out, they didn’t stomp out of the room and leave. They stuck around and patiently… Well, this is a sort of an average story. There are lots of stories away from the mode. But I think, what works, it turns out, isn’t insisting immediately on getting your rights, even though they are your rights. What works is a little bit of patience and working with people to get them to see what is… What may be difficult for them to see because… And is too easy perhaps for you to see because you are living it. You’re living a trans identity and…

0:23:17 SC: It’s clear to you.

0:23:18 KA: It’s clear to you what’s going on. I think another thing to be said is that the negotiation isn’t just with cis people. It’s not as if all trans people have the same views about everything…

0:23:29 SC: They’re not, right. Or all…

0:23:29 KA: Just any more than gay people or black or white people or anybody, Catholics. People have disagreements within the tribe. And again, you can declare somebody to be doing the wrong thing as far as the tribe goes, but that isn’t the way of persuading anybody, simply stipulating that they’re misbehaving and that black people shouldn’t do that or gay people shouldn’t do that or whatever, or that you’re letting down the tribe. So I think that the… Dialogical is a good word, Charles says. If we see them as a dialogue with other people, and if we see that everybody has a stake in it, even if the stakes are much bigger for some people than others, still everybody has a stake because it’s a system of identities and the meaning of the identities, like all meanings, is a common possession, like the meanings of words. You can’t simply, like Humpty Dumpty…

0:24:24 SC: Unilaterally…

0:24:25 KA: Just declare a word to mean something.

0:24:26 SC: Right.

0:24:27 KA: If you want a word to mean something or if you want to shift the sense of a word, you’re going to have to work with people and they may or may not go along.

0:24:37 SC: Well, that’s an excellent example. It’s very contemporary, but I like in your recent book, The Lies That Bind. Was that your most recent book?

0:24:44 KA: Yeah.

0:24:44 SC: You write a lot of books [laughter] so I have trouble keeping up sometimes, but… And the allusion in the title is to the fact that in some sense, identity is a lie, or at least it’s something we make up, it’s a story. But they do bind us together, and you do a wonderful job sort of going through different modalities of what identity is. So maybe let’s get that on the table as some examples we can draw on. Race is the most obvious one in the world. And it’s very interesting that this idea that the word identity just wasn’t used before in this sense, but certainly the idea of racial identity was used. And you tell this wonderful story of this 18th-century philosopher who was at a time, I guess, before our current versions of racial identity were quite congealed.

0:25:31 KA: Yes, and he was born in what is now Ghana, where I grew up, but ended up as a professor of philosophy in Germany. And it’s a bit unclear under what terms he got there, but he… Because it looks like he was a gift to…

0:25:50 SC: He, literally, was a gift.

0:25:51 KA: He was literally given to this German ducal family.

0:25:55 SC: But is that the kind of thing that would have happened to white children also]

0:26:00 KA: No, no, so there’s some unclarity about whether he was technically a slave and the extent to which his own family sort of agreed to all this. But we know that his brother was enslaved and sent to Suriname in the Dutch West Indies.

0:26:16 SC: When did the slave trade start? I’m sorry that my ignorance is showing.

0:26:19 KA: Well, it starts in the 17th century, but it really reaches its peak a little bit after the time that Amo was taken from Ghana in the mid-18th century, I suppose. This is the transatlantic slave trade. There were slave trades all over the world, of course. And this is sort of early Enlightenment and these are the people who had Leibniz as their librarian, this ducal family.

0:26:48 SC: Yeah, there were some intellectual heavyweights floating around.

0:26:49 KA: A lot of intellectual stuff going around. And they did an experiment. They raised… He was made the godson of two dukes or two of the children of the Duke. And so he was called Anton Wilhelm after his godparents, Anton and Wilhelm. [chuckle] And he got the education they got. Now, they weren’t going to go become academics. They were going to to become aristocrats, but that meant he ended up with a law degree and a philosophy degree and then teaching and made a living, eventually, as a teacher of philosophy, and was apparently well-respected. And he wrote an unfortunately lost book. Unfortunately lost book because it’s a book about the law of slavery, and you’d love to know…

0:27:33 SC: It would have been [0:27:34] ____.

0:27:35 KA: What an 18th century African who’d become a German thought about the law of slavery. And we know a little bit of the argument of it ’cause a lot of… In the Enlightenment, a lot of books got brief summaries in encyclopedias, and so on, so we know something about what he argued. It would’ve been wonderful to have the whole thing, but we do have a textbook of philosophy, which is actually rather good and contains in particular, some very good arguments, I think against Descartes’ dualism which… Now, some people are using those arguments if they’re teaching historical courses to talk about some of these things. Anyway…

0:28:10 SC: Sorry, I got to pause on that because, also, I am an anti-Cartesian dualist and my favorite arguments against his dualism back in those days come from Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia…

0:28:19 KA: Oh, good, yes.

0:28:20 SC: Another sort of member of an identity which was not given. She could not have become a philosophy professor, I suppose, at that time.

0:28:26 KA: No, no. Yes.

0:28:28 SC: And I wonder if there’s any connection between slightly othered identities and rejecting Cartesian dualism. I just made that up, but…

0:28:37 KA: No, it’s a good idea. And I will pass it on to colleagues who work in that area because as I say, both Elisabeth and Amo are now taught in this… In a way that they weren’t even when I was in college. People knew about her, but you didn’t think, in an introductory course or even in an advanced course, you wouldn’t think it was important to address her arguments. Anyway, part of the… What’s the experiment? What’s the experiment they’re doing? Presumably, part of the experiment is can someone like this achieve intellectual eminence. Okay, hypothesis proved. He can.

0:29:23 SC: And sorry, the idea that he was a member of a certain kind of person that was not us, that was…

0:29:28 KA: That’s it, that’s it. What is the kind of person that he was, and the only thing I think I want to say about that is, because it’s a complicated issue, is that that issue was being settled about then, that the idea of how race was going to work, at least in the context of relations between Europeans and Africans was being settled about then. It was unsettled. And in a way, people who quoted Amo as an example later on. Including the Abbé Grégoire at that time of the French Revolution, really part of their… What he was used to argue was, you know, they’re pretty much like us. And so this idea that this is a great cleavage in the human species probably isn’t so important, but by the end of the 18th century…

0:30:27 SC: By David Hume’s time, sadly. You’re looking at the picture of David Hume there, not his finest moment.

0:30:32 KA: Hume says about, I think, Francis Williams, who was a Jamaican poet, that he can’t have been any good because he’s black. And Kant says similar things, though he reversed himself eventually because despite his rationalism, Kant was actually quite responsive to actual evidence. When people like Herder pointed out to him that he was wrong about these things, he thought about it and changed his mind, but… The idea that there were these… I mean, again, the new idea is that the natural history of man, which is not yet biology, but it’s something a bit before biology, answers the question of the kinds of man, that there are kinds of man is obviously an ancient idea. You just have to read the beginning of the Iliad to see lots of different kinds of Greeks, and also Greeks and Trojans. These are different kinds of people. And in the background, the Persians, who were another kind of people, and the Ethiopians who were another kind of people. The gods are off feasting with the blameless Ethiopians at the beginning of the Iliad.

0:31:45 KA: What’s new is the idea that there’s what we can think of as a kind of proto-scientific account of these things, because the standard account in Christian Europe until then of the kinds of man was a Biblical account. The descendants of Noah, Ham, Shem, Japheth. Shem for the Semites, Ham for the Hamites and Japheth for the Japhetites, that is Europeans, essentially, that was the idea. Now, it’s taken… And of course, the Biblical scheme has a problem, which is that it doesn’t know about India or China.

0:32:08 SC: It has a bunch of problems, sure, yeah.

0:32:08 KA: And so it lacks full completeness. And so the idea that, well, we should go looking and this is a matter of a study, and remember this is the century of Linnaeus… When it was Linnaeus who called us homo sapiens and gave us a genus and a species, and that idea, again, is part of the proto-scientific stuff. In the 19th century, the science of biology really grows up. The word biology was actually coined in 1800 in German. And by the end of the century, actually by the beginning of the 20th century, the account in terms of genetics is beginning. We think of Mendel as having invented the basic ideas of genetics. And he did. Well, he’s, I mean… He’s the earliest person we know that had, did experiments, testing hypotheses about genetic stuff. But his work was published but ignored.

0:33:28 SC: Did not make it big, yeah.

0:33:29 KA: Did not make it big. And so, it was really Morgan, the Drosophila guy in the early 20th century, the first Nobel laureate in Medicine, I think, who really got genetics out there. And the word genetics gets coined, and so on. Once you have a picture of how biological inheritance works, however, you can immediately see that because it’s particular to the idea that there’s just one thing being transmitted, the race, doesn’t look so easy to maintain. And already by 1911, just after the invention of genetics, WE Du Bois, who has degrees from the University of Berlin, he has qualifications from the University of Berlin and Harvard and so on, a highly educated sociologist and historian and philosopher, is saying this shows that this old way of thinking is not biological. We’ve got a biology of inheritance, but it doesn’t map into the biology that we thought we had for race.

0:34:34 SC: I mean, it’s very interesting because we see the concept of the different races growing up, and science is coming on the scene contemporaneously, and immediately put to work.

0:34:42 KA: Yes, yes.

0:34:43 SC: But it’s never a perfect fit. It never necessarily does what you want it to do. And it’s hard to objectively follow what the science is trying to tell you when you have these preconceived ideas.

0:34:52 KA: Right. I think the… In natural history, it was a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that there were distinct varieties of human beings, as there are distinct varieties of crows and…

0:35:10 SC: There’s certainly demographical differences between people.

0:35:12 KA: Right, and that these were inherited was a reasonable hypothesis, though interestingly enough, the distinction between biological and non-biological inheritance really depends upon having a genetic theory. Until you have a genetic theory, the very idea of a distinction between different ways of transmitting things between the generations is not really very well theoretically articulated. And you see that in the characterization of the races in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. Often, things that we would think of as obviously cultural, like beards, get treated…

0:35:54 SC: Oh, really? Okay.

0:35:55 KA: As part of the story. And so the typical Laplander, thought of as one of the minor races, as it were, is either going to be bearded or not. I don’t actually know what the answer is to that, but… You need the new science of biology, which is developed in the 19th century and which develops genetics in the early 20th century to get a clear grip on what the question is. Until then it’s not entirely clear what the question is. As I said, there have been kinds of people all along. There were Hellenes and Ethiopians and Persians, but… And Hebrews and Philistines and so on. What’s new is the idea that, first, that this is a scientific question, and then that the right science is a science that’s now called biology, which is a very important thing, because it puts the question into the hands of the scientists, who are also supposed to be classifying all the other organisms.

0:36:54 KA: It takes it away from, as it were, the distinctively human sciences, anthropology, say. Though anthropology was very preoccupied with non-human animals too in the beginning, especially the other primates. But it’s a question that gets reshaped as the science is going along. And as often happens in the sciences, there are people who are just trying to get it right, and then there are people who, having an eye to what the concept is doing in the world, are trying to bring those things together…

0:37:39 SC: That has not gone away, that tension within science, right.

0:37:41 KA: And I think that one of the… This is a sort of philosophy of science point, I suppose, but one of the reasons why it’s really important to have people of different identities doing science or any intellectual activity is because the stakes for people are different. And unfortunately or fortunately or unfortunately, our biases, which we do not have strong conscious control of, are affected by what the stakes are for us. If you think about how many silly things were said by women… About women by a 19th century male scientist who was studying women in various ways including, for example, the invention of hysteria as a psychiatric condition, it would have been much better if there’d been some women around who just said, “Wait a minute. I’m going to test. I’m going to push that hypothesis. I’m going to test that hypothesis ’cause it doesn’t seem very flattering to people like me.” And they wouldn’t even had to say that explicitly then, but that would have gone on explicitly or not.

0:38:46 KA: I think… I mentioned Du Bois. One of the important things, of course, that happens in the 20th century in the scientific discussion of these questions is that more none… People who are not European… Of European Christian ancestry get involved more. There are more African-Americans in sociology. And through the 20th century, obviously more women as well. Also importantly, because of the way race gets taken up by the Nazis and by European anti-Semitism because remember, hostility to the Jews pre-exists the idea that they’re a race, in the modern sense, it goes back to medieval anti-Judaism, because of that, the presence of significant numbers of Jewish scientists, I think, in the life and social sciences as well as, of course, in the natural sciences generally, was an important brake on some of the ways this was going and produced, so that some of the big statements on race that were organized by people like UNESCO, some of the leading scientists involved were [0:39:58] ____ real scientists, and I don’t think that’s contingent because, again, the stakes are different, for different people.

0:40:07 SC: It’s very hard, certainly, both race and gender in science when people try to talk about who has abilities, and who doesn’t… People are really bad at separating what they want to be true from what is true on both sides.

0:40:20 KA: Yes.

0:40:21 SC: I’m sure we could talk about race for many hours, and people have, but maybe we could contrast it with national identity, which is certainly another very, very strong kind of identity and which seems a priori a totally different kind of thing, right?

0:40:34 KA: Yes. I think they get conflated. Of course, I just mentioned the Nazis, their form of nationalism was a nationalism about the German race. The German people understood as a race. The Volk as race.

0:40:51 SC: Were they very explicitly genetic about that?

0:40:55 KA: Yeah, that’s why they did those things which they called experiments in the concentration camps, they were looking for biologically-based differences between real Germans and Jews, Gypsies, the few poor black people who got caught up in that system, and so on. So they can get all muddled together and what is certainly true is that modern European nationalism, which is essentially the form of nationalism that went global because of the role of European empires in spreading these ideas, though it’s affected by things in other places, but the core ideas start out in Europe and they start out essentially, I think, from an intellectual point of view, with German intellectuals, people like Herder, Johann Gottfried Herder. And he… So, his form of nationalism is tied to the idea of a people, a Volk.

0:42:00 SC: Herder?

0:42:01 KA: Herder, yeah. And that goes into Hegel. And Hegel is a big wheel in all of this stuff. So the idea that you should sort of map states into folks, states into peoples, that’s sort of one of the great ideas of 19th century nationalism. And what’s odd is that the process begins the idea that people should be brought together into a single state who are all German, or Slav or Italian or French, arises at a time when that’s just so far from the truth that you can’t begin to remember how untrue it is. German-speaking peoples are scattered all over what’s now Germany but other places as well.

0:43:00 SC: So, we’re thinking here about the 19th century?

0:43:02 KA: Yes, in the 19th century. Even in the 1860s and ’70s in France, say, a third of the population, I think, didn’t speak French. So the idea that there was a natural group of… Called the people who had a shared language, culture, and traditions, and were a shared people, which increasingly gets down to the idea of a shared race because of the rise of biology in the 19th century, that idea is sort of crazy faced with the reality of Europe at the time.

0:43:34 SC: Italy is even worse.

0:43:35 KA: Italy is worse.

0:43:36 SC: Languages are very different from coast to coast.

0:43:38 KA: Lots of different languages, very different traditions, even different sort of stereotypical looks. The typical Milanese is sort of descended from the same people as many northern Europeans and the typical Sardinian isn’t. But anyway, so, nevertheless, this idea grabs hold and the idea that peoples should map into states, and that we should create a nation state, where the nation is both a political thing and the natural people, develops through the 19th century, and takes hold, and the idea that it’s some natural unity, but maybe not a natural unity of blood, perhaps a natural unity created by shared history and common traditions doesn’t have to be, doesn’t have to be a race-based thing. But anyway, some shared thing. And the point is, any candidate that you give for the shared thing, I’m going to be able to tell you a 19th century story about how that really wasn’t shared.

0:44:49 SC: Big exceptions.

0:44:50 KA: Lots and lots of exceptions.

0:44:51 SC: But it speaks to the lure of the idea that it was such a powerful force to create this.

0:44:56 KA: And it meets an important need because what’s going on from another point of view in the 19th century is the growth of powerful state capacities, and those state capacities depend upon state-istics. They depend upon gathering the numbers that states need in order to do the things they do. So censuses grow up in… Our Constitution has a census built into it in the late 18th century, but censuses get developed increasingly everywhere and states are counting trees, they’re counting people, they’re counting rivers they’re…

0:45:37 SC: It does seem, it always seems strange me, the precious space in the original Constitution gave so much importance to the census, that’s such as the thing. [0:45:48] ____.

0:45:48 KA: Right. Right.

0:45:48 SC: But I guess if you’re making a people, counting them really matters.

0:45:52 KA: Well, and if you’re going, especially, if you’re going to be a democratic people and you’re going to be counting them later in elections, you gotta know who’s there.

0:46:01 SC: Who’s there, yeah.

0:46:01 KA: Because otherwise you can’t have responsible elections, you can’t decide who’s in or out for electoral purposes. And also if you want to have roughly equal sized constituencies, voting districts, you have to know how many people are where. And all of that, but there are many, many other reasons why states want to count people. They need to know, if you want to know how much money will be raised by a tax, you have to know how many people earn what, so you start collecting income statistics. If you want to educate people, you have know how many kids there are so you have to, and so on. So there lots of reasons. So the states are developing these capacities.

0:46:41 KA: And in the course of developing the capacities they have to count things and they have to count people, and so, kinds of people become important, they’re not, so they count men and women. They don’t just count people, they count nationals and foreigners and stuff like that. Also they start increasing the count of different kinds of sick people, people who are permanently disabled, for example. They want to know how many of them there are and so on. And that creates categories as well, some of which become essentialized. So what they’re doing is in the rise of the nation state, one of the important things is defining the nation and it’s very tempting to have an essentialist, a story that says what makes Germans German is some German-ness that’s in each German, something that’s the same in all of them, right? And the trouble is that’s… That there isn’t going to be any such thing that distinguishes Germans from…

0:47:45 SC: Danes…

0:47:46 KA: Danes or Serbians or the French, French men and women. So I think, nevertheless it’s a very tempting thought. Notice, and one of the fascinating things about this idea is, so it’s the nation state is this idea of a people with a common something, sometimes race, but often just culture and traditions, who naturally should be brought together into a state. Now, two things. First, what was actually going on was therefore exactly the opposite of that. It was the rise of the state that was creating the nation, it wasn’t the nation that was creating the states as a response. And two, that means that when this idea spreads around the world, you can actually take a place like the Gold Coast colony which became Ghana, which is 80 languages, 100 ethnic groups, the counting of these things is a bit arbitrary. You can take it and turn them into Ghanaians on a certain day in 1957, and you can do what has been going on everywhere else. You can make Ghanaians…

0:48:55 SC: You can tell stories about what it means to be Ghanaian.

0:48:56 KA: You can tell stories that make Ghanaians, Ghanaians. And even Ghanaians have to be reminded that, in doing that, the British put together two of their colonies, Togo and Ghana. The thing that’s now called Togo is only part of what was German Togoland. The British part, the part that was given to the British under the League of Nations mandate at the end of the First World War, when the German colonies were taken away from the Germans, voted to join to the new country of Ghana. So it was as clear as anything in the world, in some sense that what was going on was the creation of a state.

0:49:41 SC: Nothing more constructive than that.

0:49:42 KA: In plain view, I’m older than Ghana, so I was there as it happened. And my father, who was a Ghanaian patriot, was perfectly aware of all this, he would have said, “Yes, what’s the point.” Yes, of course we have to work together, as it were, to become Ghanaians. And that’s why he thought, that what he called tribalism was a very dangerous thing, even though he was a loyal member of his ethnic group, he thought that in the state, it was really important not to discriminate among the peoples of Ghana. So, what Ghana has done, and it’s this project that has significantly succeeded, is to create a sense of Ghanaian identity, but it’s very hard, as it is with all national identities, to give a simple story about what that means. And as I said about all identities, there’s lots of contest about what it means. And there’s a contest about who’s in and who’s out, the boundaries.

0:50:41 SC: Which sort of will never end.

0:50:41 KA: Will never end. And so, precisely because it’s never going to end it is not a solution every time you find such a fight, to say, “Okay, well, we’ll put these lot in one side and these lot in the other side.” There’ll be no totally agreeable way of making the sides. And as soon as you’ve done that within each of the sides, they’ll start to be developing processes of differentiation. So, the Organization of African Unity, which became the African Union, has insisted all along, with mostly success, the main exception being Eritrea, that we were not to shift the colonial boundaries. That the idea of making more and more groups because more and more people wanted it was not a good idea, and it isn’t a good idea.

0:51:32 SC: So don’t go back to the original tribal…

0:51:34 KA: No, it’s not going to work. There are 800-900 languages in Africa. If a nation is something with a common language, that’s 900 countries, right? And that’s not going to work.

0:51:50 SC: Yeah. And the United States is a little bit different than that story…

0:51:55 KA: Yes.

0:51:55 SC: Right? But not completely different. So there’s on the one hand to this idea that the United States is not based on ethnicity, but based on ideas values, ideals, and ideas. On the other hand, there’s plenty of people around today who think that it kind of is really based on ethnicity.

0:52:10 KA: Right. And that we’re at the beginning, I think Crèvecœur and the Letters of an American Farmer, or whatever it’s called, says a new race of Americans is being created, using race in this 18th century rather vague sense. But he says, it’s being created out of people of all parts of Europe. So he doesn’t think that Native Americans are being made into this new race and he doesn’t think that the slaves are going to be and their free descendants…

0:52:39 SC: But he also doesn’t think it’s just British people?

0:52:39 KA: Absolutely not, no, no, given his name is Crèvecœur, that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. But no, no, but they didn’t generally. Of course, we have to remember that in the 19th century, people shaped, as the intellectuals of North America were, by European ideas thought of the Irish as a profoundly distinct and in fact inferior race to the Anglo-Saxon and Norman descended peoples in other parts of the British Isles. That notion of racial thinking, shaping how nations develop is not just an American thing, it happens in Europe. In France, we have this, as anybody who’s read Asterix knows, we have the idea of the Gauls and the Franks, as it were. These two races put together, the aristocratic Franks and the peasanty Gauls together make the great French nation.

0:53:52 KA: Anglo-Saxon peasants, Norman lords make Britain. It’s all nonsense. In the details, you can show that that’s not what happened. But these stories… We started with stories. These sorts of stories play a huge role in shaping these things, and novels like Ivanhoe in England or all the Walter Scott novels, play a role in shaping ideas about what England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales are. And in those things, racial ideas play a central role. People forget, perhaps, partly because Ivanhoe’s a very long novel so not many people read it anymore. But one of the central issues in the novel is about a relationship between a Christian and a Jewish girl, a Jewish woman. And again, the issue of their race is sort of central to thinking about that, as is the relationship between Normans and Saxons, which is also a big racial thing.

0:54:44 SC: But how much do our current debates over, let’s say, identity politics, just to use the buzz word, right? I mean, how much of these are ways of framing other kinds of issues and how much of them really grow organically out of these actual contours of identity as they grow through time?

0:55:07 KA: I mean, there are many ways in which ethnic and religious identities and national identities intersect with issues that are just about resources. If you look at the collapse of the Yugoslav state, one thing that’s going on is that ancient and pretty low key ethnic identities become high key. And because they get used to compete for as a rapidly diminishing cake, the state’s collapsing, resources are disappearing, you can’t fight for them for your family on your own and so you need some… And so you grab for whatever is available. And it is a grab bag because Muslim turns out to be one of the categories that you grab bag and that’s very different from Serb and Croat. But nevertheless, those are the ones that are there, Albanian. There’s the ones that are there and they get used.

0:56:03 KA: That’s one thing, is that they can get used in what are essentially competitions for resources. And it’s not that there’s a natural tension between Serbs and Croats. It’s that if you organize the Serbs and Croats to compete for resources, there will be a competition between Serbs and Croats. But if you’d organize in some other way, Catholics versus Orthodox, which they also did to some extent, you get different boundaries in different groups. So that’s one way. I think one question is how much ethnic and racial categories are always to some extent covers for competition for resources. I think there’s always that. Even if what matters most to you about your identity as an African-American is culture and traditions, the black church, music, whatever, it cannot but figure somewhat in your thinking that poverty in the United States and the distribution of material resources is very strongly correlated with racial identities.

0:57:21 SC: One of the things that has come out in your discussion is the idea that these categories have implications for boots on the ground, broadly speaking, where the money goes, who gets to vote, who gets thrown in jail, and things like that. For example, there’s the contemporary debate on reparations for slavery. And if someone is African-American, in the sense that they were born in Africa and moved to America, they shouldn’t get reparations for slavery, maybe. But does it too much reify the idea of… Do you think another discussion…

0:57:55 KA: Well, I think what happens… So there is this group now called… I’m forgetting what it’s called. American Descendants of Slaves, I think, they call themselves, who are making the point that they’re in favor of reparations, but they didn’t want the reparations to go to Haitians or Nigerian-Americans. They want it to go to people who are descended from…

0:58:12 SC: Even though the extent to which blacks are discriminated against, probably is not very much affected by the amount that they have…

0:58:17 KA: It’s not very sensitive, it’s not very sensitive.

0:58:19 SC: [0:58:19] ____.

0:58:20 KA: No, it isn’t. I mean, I think the whole business of how to think… I, myself, don’t think there’s a coherent way of giving individualized reparations. I just think that doesn’t make sense. A significant number of the descendants of American slaves have passed now. And so they’re now white. And also a very large proportion of American descendants of slaves are the descendants of slave owners too, so they should presumably be transferring money to themselves. I think the idea that we can… It’s one thing to say that at the moment you can broadly agree on a rough boundary between African-Americans and other Americans. But already the question of how you should think about people whose ances… Who came here, black people who came here in their own lifetimes or people whose recent, recent descendants of recent immigrant families who come from places where there are black people. How should we fit those into that so that, there’s no sense, it’s not a sensible question, so it doesn’t have a sensible answer.

0:59:40 SC: Yeah.

0:59:41 KA: I worry that the focus on reparations, which is also necessarily backward-looking, distracts us from forward-looking concerns about making sure that everybody has an equal and decent shot.

0:59:57 SC: Well, that’s good. Let me just dramatically simplify the world here by sketching out three different positions.

1:00:02 KA: Okay.

1:00:03 SC: And then we can talk about them. One position is the social justice warrior position, which says that there are certain identities, certain groups of people who are just not treated fairly and we should go to great efforts to fix that one way or the other. There is a sort of a countervailing position among… This is going to… I’m going to sound unfair. It’s hard to me to say this, but white male, straight people who feel like they’re the ones who are actually being picked upon today because they didn’t have anything to do with slavery or anything like that and their economic situation isn’t very good and why should they be portrayed as the aggressors here?

1:00:43 SC: And then there’s another category of people who think that the entire discussion is wrong-headed in the sense that we should just be people, right, we should pretend that we don’t see race and gender and things like that, and isn’t the constant harping on these identities making things worse for everybody. That’s way too simplistic, but does the kind of academic understanding of where identity comes from and the role it plays help us adjudicate these battles?

1:01:16 KA: I think it’s important to distinguish… Well, first of all, whether someone is disadvantaged in our society correlates with some of these identities, but it’s by no means determined by them, and there are some very, very badly off straight white men in this country. And similarly, there are some… I’m, I suppose, black by American standards, and I’m gay, so there you are. But I can’t pretend to think that I am not rolling in all kinds of privilege.

1:01:53 SC: It’s a nice office.

[laughter]

1:01:53 KA: It’s a nice office. I have a nice job, I have a lovely husband. I have no reasonable complaints. So…

1:02:07 SC: Sorry, but you probably have had some complaints over the course of your career.

1:02:10 KA: Well, people have said racist and homophobic things around me, but I didn’t… They weren’t in a position to do anything to me, those people. So even though… So mostly what I…

1:02:21 SC: Right. But that’s key, right? ‘Cause you could let them bounce off in a way that…

1:02:24 KA: Yes, absolutely.

1:02:24 SC: If you were less privileged, you couldn’t.

1:02:26 KA: No, no, I’m very conscious of the ways in which…

1:02:29 SC: Exactly.

1:02:29 KA: Just to be explicit about this, there’s obviously a dimension of class here and the class privilege that I have, is… I’m in Debrett’s, which is the book of the British aristocracy.

1:02:43 SC: Oh, congratulations.

[chuckle]

1:02:43 KA: ‘Cause of my ancestors, because of my ancestry. And my uncle and great-uncle were kings in the town that I grew up in, so I grew up with enormous social privilege and that makes it very easy to just kind of, water off a duck’s back about some of these things, so I don’t… And I’m extremely conscious that without that privilege, I couldn’t say that the racial dimension of my identity was not a source of problems for me. And that’s a point about what in the technical language would be called intersectionality. It’s a point about the fact that these identities come together in different ways. And the total package of your situation depends on all of them.

1:03:25 SC: That’s right. It’s not… And not only does it depend on all of them, it depends on all of them, as a physicist would say, non-linearly.

1:03:32 KA: Yes.

1:03:32 SC: It’s not just the sum of all of them.

1:03:33 KA: No.

1:03:33 SC: It also how they’re interacting strongly with each other.

1:03:36 KA: Right, right, it’s not just a vector sum. It’s something way more complicated than that. So I have some sympathy if you are a poor white man struggling to make a living in a post-industrial context.

1:03:53 SC: The world is changing around you.

1:03:54 KA: And the world is changing around you and the world doesn’t seem terribly interested in helping you. I’m sympathetic with the view that our society is not doing what it should for you. And I was sympathetic with that view before some of those people voted for Donald Trump, and was already saying this.

1:04:10 SC: And we still are afterward, even though we wish they hadn’t voted for Donald Trump.

1:04:13 KA: Yes, yes, yes. And it’s still the case that that’s a genuine…

1:04:17 SC: There’s a real argument. A real problem.

1:04:17 KA: Problem in our society. On the other hand, understanding that there are real needs there, that these are our fellow citizens with real needs, doesn’t mean that I can’t say that if they’re racist, that’s wrong. Or that if they think that because we don’t have legal segregation anymore, there’s no problem for black people to complain about. That just seems to me, you know, there’s very good reason to doubt that. There’s lots of evidence in labor economics, for example, that that’s just not true. And I can’t pretend to agree with them about that, ’cause I think they’re wrong about it, and I think they may well be wrong about some of the things they think about what’s happened in gender as well, which they may not be happy about.

1:05:06 KA: So I think we have to… So that’s one set of issues. We gotta be… Yes, we should disaggregate, we should be careful and we should pay attention to all the problems. It’s not impossible to keep track of more than one problem. And the problems of class in our society are very, very serious. And they are, of course, they interact with racial questions, but they’re… But the problems of the people at the bottom of the money, social capital and cultural capital hierarchies are real problems, and the majority of those people are white because black people are a minority in this country. And even if you include Hispanics, who are a significant minority now, more than blacks, larger in numbers, it’s still the case that some of the most serious… Most of the serious problems at the bottom are significantly faced by white people as well.

1:06:05 KA: So when people complain about identity politics having distracted us from class politics I’m inclined to agree, though I should point out that class politics is a kind of identity politics too.

1:06:15 SC: It’s a different identity. Sure, yeah.

1:06:16 KA: It’s a different identity. And the point is we should be keeping track of all of the ways in which all of the identities intersect with questions of justice and fairness. So we’ve done a bad job of that, I think, in keeping… As I say, I feel deeply that we’ve let down a significant part of the population that’s white because… Well, for many reasons, part of it is to do with the general, I’m afraid, corruption of our political system. And because a significant part of the problem these people face is the result of decisions that are good for business. Decisions to offshore jobs or to use robots which increase productivity and shareholder value and all the things that you care about if you are running a company.

1:07:10 KA: And because those people want to be allowed to do those things, which I think is fine, provided some of the wealth created by doing those things is spent on making lives okay for the people whose lives are disrupted by these things. It’s true that we don’t have a problem of unemployment at the moment in this country since the return of jobs after 2008, but we do have a problem of satisfying, significant, well-paid jobs.

1:07:39 SC: Mm-hmm, yeah.

1:07:40 KA: And we are a very rich country and we could do something about that. And we haven’t. And I really do think that part of the reason is that it’s easier to make gestures around race and gender. Gestures because we have still got huge inequalities around both of them than it is to make the gestures around… Or make real significant change around these economic inequality issues.

1:08:08 SC: Well, I think this is a key point because I’m sort of personally sympathetic to those who want to highlight the ways in which people are treated unfairly because of their identity, whether it’s gender or race or whatever.

1:08:20 KA: Or class.

1:08:21 SC: Or class. But as you just pointed out, I think it’s very worth emphasizing, that can be a cheap and easy route to take when the reality is more complicated, right?

1:08:31 KA: Yes, and I think you’ve got to be careful of tokenism. It’s an important fact that a significant part of the integration of the elite universities in this country in respect to race has been done by bringing in very, very elite black people. It’s still a real problem, and by the way, we haven’t done a terrifically good job of bringing in non-elite white people to the universities either. Our universities are a significant part of the problem in the inter-generational transfer of class privilege in the United States.

1:09:13 SC: Yeah. If I understand it correctly, I’ve been told that affirmative action, which has all sorts of problems, but it’s one of the cheapest and most efficient ways of creating a black middle class.

1:09:26 KA: Yeah.

1:09:26 SC: You just take a bunch of black people who wouldn’t have gone to college otherwise, you send them to really good colleges, they go back and everything improves. But it’s much easier to sort of do that along racial categories than along class categories, I would say.

1:09:40 KA: Yes, because… I mean, I think many of the African-Americans who were integrated into, say, the elite universities starting in the late ’60s would say that the universities could have done a better job… And by the way, at that point there was a little bit more class variety among the first generation… For some reason, among the generations. But I think they might say that these places could have done a better job of changing to meet them. Not making them feel unwelcome.

1:10:14 SC: Right.

1:10:15 KA: By just going on the way they were…

1:10:17 SC: Welcome to our WASP enclave.

1:10:18 KA: Oh, yes, exactly. And just taking, making… What’s interesting is that it’s only in the ’60s, remember, that systematic discrimination against Jews really stops in these institutions. So it’s not like…

1:10:33 SC: Oh, absolutely.

1:10:34 KA: There’s been no problems for people other than black people.

1:10:38 SC: Caltech tried to hire Albert Einstein, but it was just such an anti-semitic place, he wouldn’t go.

1:10:42 KA: Yes, right. He did fine at the Institute for Advanced Study. So that’s okay.

1:10:50 SC: He did call it a concentration camp at one point, but then he backed off.

1:10:52 KA: Okay.

1:10:52 SC: Yeah, there’s more than enough anti-semitism there also, but not as bad as California.

1:10:57 KA: So I think the… I think the… But what’s interesting… Sorry, what I was going to say about that is that the way in which the first generations of Jewish intellectuals who were admitted to places like Columbia and Harvard and so on responded was to some extent to just enter the WASP cultural thing. So if you were not an an American, it would not have occurred to you that Lionel Trilling, I think, was Jewish. And what’s interesting is that there’s a later generation among whom I think we can include someone like Harold Bloom who did the thing of saying, “I’m coming as a Jew and I’m not going to… “

1:11:32 SC: Well, this is always a tricky thing with identity, the extent to which you assimilate versus assert your identity at the individual level.

1:11:32 KA: Yes. And both of these things are… And in the end you want to create a world in which people can do what they want to do.

1:11:32 SC: That’s right, and they are allowed to assimilate if that’s what they want.

1:11:32 KA: So they are allowed to assimilate if that’s what they want. And so, you don’t criticize, you don’t say, “Oh, you’re an Oreo or a banana,” whatever the insults are for people who are you know…

1:11:32 SC: White on the inside, yeah.

1:11:32 KA: Black on the… White on the inside. But you also… The institution benefits if it adapts. If it says, “Okay, we’ve got different kinds of people who are coming. What do we need to do”? And I think we’ve done some of that for race in some places. And African-American studies, which is a field that I’ve worked in a lot, has been part of that and I’m proud of that. I think that’s a useful contribution, but we’ve done a terrible job of dealing with the class problem in terms of making the place more welcoming. If you, it’s just a simple set of questions. I mean, if you are… If you build a university around the assumption that everybody has enough money that they don’t need to work while they’re in college, you’ll get one kind of institution.

1:13:10 KA: If you recognize, as we do here at NYU, that many, most of our students are working and have to work because they wouldn’t be, they wouldn’t have enough money to eat otherwise, or to buy their books, then you have to change the place and you have to think about what hours you teach at, how many credits it’s reasonable to expect people to get in a… And so on. You have to change or you have to have enough money to say, “You don’t have to work if you don’t want to,” which is what Princeton does. Princeton’s a very rich institution so nobody has to work, basically. I mean, if your parents can afford it, they expect you o contribute, but if they can’t, they don’t. And you’re not required to… You’re supposed to…

1:13:54 SC: You need to be pretty rich as an institution to pull that off.

1:13:56 KA: Yes, well, it’s the richest per student institution in the world so it jolly well ought to be doing it.

[chuckle]

1:14:04 KA: But it’s… But we know we can’t do that. We’re the largest private university in the United States, and we have a tiny endowment. We’re tuition-driven, and we have to be very attentive to the fact that our tuition is a huge part of the investment that the families of our students will be making in them in the whole of their lives. It’s the most, it’s the largest, and we should keep it as small as we can while consistently being a great university. I think, I’m with the people who criticize our failure to think about those questions, but I think the thought that we are not thinking about them because we’re thinking about something else, and so that we should stop thinking about other forms of injustice just seems a non sequitur to me.

1:14:48 SC: It’s a deflection strategy.

1:14:52 KA: Yes, we should do, we should do as many things as we reasonably can to make our institutions… And this is a point about universities, but of course it’s a general point about the social institutions of our society, that they should be open to people of all the kinds that there are in our society, and on roughly equal terms.

1:15:17 SC: Well, there’s certainly this attitude, a possible stance one can take. You wrote a wonderful book that I really enjoyed called Cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism in certain circles is now used as a quasi anti-semitic slur, but I think we want to reclaim this as a positive thing to be, but it’s not an unproblematically positive thing to be. What is your sales pitch for cosmopolitanism?

1:15:41 KA: I think of cosmopolitanism as combining two thoughts. The expression kosmopolitēs in Greek means citizen of the world. One thought is just that there’s some important sense in which each of us should think of all the other people in the world as our fellow citizens of something. This is a metaphor because there isn’t a world state so we’re not literally fellow citizens of anything. But we should treat each other in ways that are somewhat like the ways we treat fellow citizens, which means I assume that we should care for what happens to them and try to shape the world so that they can do well, just as we can do well.

1:16:16 KA: And that maybe not everybody in every group of citizens shares this, but we should be sort of interested in them. Not just in sort of making their lives better, but in what they’re like, wanting to get to know them. That’s one thing. And the second thing is that that’s wanting to get to know them is important because they’re different, some of them from us and that’s fine. We don’t need them to become like us, whatever, like anybody else.

1:16:50 SC: It can be good.

1:16:51 KA: It can be in fact more interesting to live in a world where not everybody is the same, a point that John Stuart Mill makes beautifully in On Liberty that we profit from other people’s what he called experiments of living. In this country, we have the Swedish healthcare model to think about in deciding how we’re, what we’re going to do. If they hadn’t done that experiment, we wouldn’t know anything about it. It would all be theoretical and it would be done by economists and it would probably be pretty, pretty bad.

1:17:19 SC: We’d know less.

1:17:20 KA: We’d know a great deal less, than by constructing a priori theories of these matters. That’s the two things is the… Now, the universality… The slogan is universality plus difference. The universality thing has elements that I think are compulsory. Morally compulsory. You have moral obligations to every human being, also to animals, but that’s a complication that I will avoid from now on. You have obligations to other human beings and, in particular, you have obligations not to harm them, not to create, not to do things in the world that cause serious harm to people elsewhere. But I don’t think the second thing, the thing of taking pleasure in difference is morally compulsory. I think if you want to hive yourself off. If you want to go, if you want to be an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania and you don’t want to interact with what they call the Americana, the Americans around them, I think you have to be free to do that. And if you want to live in the off…

1:18:18 SC: If you’re letting the others live their lives and you don’t want to interact with them, then that’s fine.

1:18:18 KA: And you want to be ultra Orthodox in Jerusalem, as long as you’re not throwing stones at people who are driving on the Sabbath, which some of them do, unfortunately, that’s fine. The total package I don’t think can be argued to be morally compulsory. The first part of the package is compulsory. That’s just morality, and it includes respect for human rights and all these other things. The pitch for taking the whole package, it’s just that life’s… Well, there are two pitches, one is an instrumental pitch. We need some cosmopolitans ’cause we have to interact, we’ve got global warming, we’ve got a whole bunch of problems, we’ve got pandemics.

1:19:06 SC: One planet, yeah.

1:19:07 KA: One planet and we’re interconnected ecologically, health-wise. I like to remind my students that every year somebody collects influenza viruses in rural China so that we have a flu vaccine by the time they get here, right?

1:19:25 SC: Yeah.

1:19:26 KA: That’s a very complicated international thing and it’s done by people… It’d be much less likely to happen if nobody was interested… Nobody here was interested in there and nobody there was interested in here. So there’s an instrumental reason, but I think there’s also just a sort of jouissance, a pleasure reason. Namely that if you think about… One way to get at this is to think about what are the great aesthetic objects that we care about, if we care about aesthetic objects. There are things like music which is fantastically transnational in its sources and effects. And I mean, popular music, but I also mean at Beethoven. Handel is… The royal fireworks that Handel wrote for, a German, is the British royal family. ‘Cause he was a composer in Britain. He was employed in Britain.

1:20:31 KA: Favorite global example, probably the most famous Japanese poet is Basho. Basho writes in a script invented by the Chinese and belongs to a religion invented by the Indians ’cause he’s a Zen Buddhist. No China, no India, no Basho.

1:20:49 SC: Right, and no cross-cultural stuff.

1:20:51 KA: And no cross-cultural stuff. No, my mother writing haiku as I was growing up because she had discovered Basho and thought he was a wonderful poet. So Shakespeare’s most famous play is about a Danish prince, not an English Prince. So that… The things we care about in the cultural domain spontaneously cross boundaries. Steal, borrow, appropriate, whatever you want to call it.

1:21:22 SC: Well, I was going to at some point mention there are… There’s the darker side of cultural appropriation, which is more about sort of caricaturing or even disrespecting other cultures.

1:21:34 KA: Yes.

1:21:35 SC: I kind of, I want to say that I love cultural appropriation. I love it when cultures mix and interact and inspire each other, but again in the sense of absolutely understanding those who are blatantly against it because it can be so badly used.

1:21:51 KA: Right, this is one of those places where I think the sort of boring distinctions that philosophers make are really useful and helpful and get people to see things more clearly. So the word appropriation is not terribly useful to talk about somebody… Of Justin Trudeau in black face. That’s really… Whose culture was he borrowing?

1:22:11 SC: He wasn’t appropriating.

1:22:11 KA: He wasn’t taking anything from anybody.

1:22:13 SC: He was just being inconsiderate.

1:22:14 KA: He was just representing people in a disrespectful way. That’s not appropriation. And if he had done it for the purpose of… Suppose he had been dressing up for that purpose in order to play a role in a performance that was meant to make a point about racism, we would not have a problem with it. So…

1:22:35 SC: Sorry, some people would.

1:22:36 KA: Well, some people would, but that’s because they’re confused about the distinction between… Or that they’re not keeping track of the fact that some ways of taking things that either are made by or represent other people are disrespectful and others aren’t. And if you want… And one kind of disrespect is exploitation. So if, I don’t know whether Paul Simon’s use of Mbaqanga music from South Africa was good or bad for the people that sang in the choirs and worked with him economically. But if it wasn’t, it should have been.

1:23:19 SC: Yeah, [1:23:19] ____.

1:23:21 KA: Yes, but that’s… But if it wasn’t, that isn’t an argument that the resulting music is a bad thing, that’s an argument about the badness of how it was made. And there’s no reason not to listen to it even once you’ve discovered that, because its existence as music is different from its status as a sort of product of a moral process.

1:23:43 SC: So in some sense there can be perfectly acceptable things that might be labeled cultural appropriation, but there’s a sensitivity that needs to come into it.

1:23:51 KA: Yes, right. And then… And when people wear… I’m old enough that when I was a kid with my grandmother in England, I watched a television program called the Black and White Minstrel Show in which… In which English people, white English people perform in Sambo black face with big red lips. And the music was great, as it happens. At least I thought, I enjoyed it, but… And I was innocent enough that it didn’t occur to me how ridiculous it was that they had to put those faces on in order to do it. So that tradition of sort of Sambo black face is obviously horrible and to continue it is to be insensitive to the badness of that history. But not all sharing and borrowing and taking and even stealing is like that. And what’s wrong with theft is that it’s theft.

[laughter]

1:24:50 SC: There’s no sharing, there’s no…

1:24:51 KA: It’s not sharing.

1:24:52 SC: Mutual agreement, yeah.

1:24:53 KA: Right. So I think we don’t want to stop the flow. Well, sorry, I don’t want to stop the flow. I know people do want to stop the flow and I’m sad about that, because as I say I think if I think about the things… My mother appropriated Ashanti Anansi stories in order to give American and British children something wonderful to read. And I know a lot of African-Americans of my generation who remember reading them my mother’s version of these African stories, my white mother’s version, when they were kids. So I just can’t see anything wrong with that, because it was done with love and respect and with acknowledgement. She didn’t pretend that she made them up.

1:25:39 SC: Well, this idea, I mean, you just said, we shouldn’t, then you changed it to I shouldn’t. And I think that brings up probably the last big point I want to get on the table which is, you talk in the book about the role of positivism. Logical positivism or just positivism?

1:25:53 KA: I think I call it positivism because…

1:25:55 SC: Yeah, anyway, the important part of it for you was the fact value distinction and how values are not quite fixed by the facts. And when you are trying to be a good cosmopolitan, one of the questions that arises is how judgy we can be about what goes on in other cultures. There’s an argument made by various dictatorships around the world that you Westerners shouldn’t judge us ’cause we’re a different culture. And I’m very much in favor of judging them. In fact, Sharon Street, one of your colleagues here at NYU, was very influential for my way of thinking about how you cannot think that morality is fixed by the universe or objectively out there. You can construct it, but it still exists and you can use it to judge other people.

1:26:38 KA: Yeah, good. So I believe this too, that’s why I can’t get a visa to go to China because I’ll criticize them.

1:26:47 SC: You believe it out loud, yes.

1:26:48 KA: I believe it out loud. Though I’m hoping that they’ll change their minds ’cause I would love to go to China ’cause I’m interested in what’s going on in China and I’m not particularly interested in destroying the political system, though I wish it were more generous to its critics. So I think the way to think about it is, the way I think about it, anyway, is what the cosmopolitan recommends is a kind of cross-cultural conversation which means that you’re more likely to get your criticisms right. If you haven’t been listening to people, if you’re not paying attention to what they’re really doing, if you don’t really care about them, you will criticize them, but mostly your criticisms will miss the mark.

1:27:26 KA: So for example, to take a case that everybody wants to bring up, things to do with female genital cutting. There’s no point in criticizing that practice in a society unless you know what they do. And unless you know what the women who’ve been through it think about it, even if you think they’re in a state of false consciousness, you need to know what they’re thinking. And the fact is that what we call… What people call female circumcision as a practice ranges enormously in what it is. And some of it involves just a nick to the labia, and I am against any kind of unnecessary physical mutilation of children, but… But it’s not very serious. Pharaonic incision, removal of the clitoris and sewing up the labia, that’s a very serious…

1:28:23 SC: Very serious.

1:28:24 KA: Bad idea. And it’s bad for reasons… But here again, this is something… To get across the badness of it, one of the things you have to notice is that it’s bad for fertility, and most of the societies which practice it care about fertility. So there’s a thing about it that they should care about, but you won’t know that if you haven’t been paying attention. So… And I think that respectful interventions from outside have made… This is true with female genital cutting in Senegambia in West Africa. The successful interventions have been by people who came in and didn’t wag their fingers, but they just talked to people. They talked about the medical stuff, they talked about human rights and the rights of children.

1:29:04 KA: They didn’t even directly talk… And they waited until the moment when somebody said, “I think maybe that means that we shouldn’t be… ” And then they said, “Okay, if that’s what you think, let’s figure out how to make it happen. Let’s try and persuade everybody in this village, but let’s not do it on our own because we marry the kids in the next village. Our daughters marry their sons, their sons marry our daughters. We need to persuade them as well, otherwise we won’t be able to marry.” Right? I mean, simple point. But again, to know that you have to know something about the lives of these people.

1:29:36 SC: Well, that’s a very good point. It’s okay to be judgy, it’s okay to think that the practices of other cultures are wrong, but it requires a certain amount of work. It requires a certain amount of sensitivity and education.

1:29:48 KA: Yes, and both in order to make sure that your criticism is correct, and to be in a position to do anything at all effective to try and persuade them to do it the other way. In a book that I wrote about honor, I pointed out that the end of the practice of foot-binding in China was significantly brought about by the presence in China of evangelical Christian missionaries who were enormously respectful of Chinese civilization, but thought this practice, which isn’t particularly unchristian, it’s just a bad practice, was a bad practice. And they persuaded… They got Chinese intelligentsia, members of the Chinese intelligentsia, very famous people like Kang Youwei to see this. And the Chinese then organized anti-foot binding societies as they had organized anti-opium societies and… And.

1:30:38 SC: They overcame foot-binding.

1:30:39 KA: Over a generation it went away. Over 20 years, it went from 90% in many places to sort of basically zero in lots of places. At different times in different places, but very, very swift. So cosmopolitans are going to be better at doing the… The being judgy because they’re more likely to be interested in what’s actually going on.

1:31:00 SC: Yeah, you might learn something along the way.

1:31:00 KA: Yeah, and also, you’re listening, you’re not just talking. And the fact is, I want the Chinese to be able to criticize our prison system, which is way more incarcerating than theirs, percentage-wise. And at least in Hong Kong, though not in much of China, the prisons are pretty good in terms of conditions. They’re not Sweden, but they’re definitely better than many prisons in Louisiana. So I think we need… The cosmopolitan wants to listen as well as talk. And in that conversation, we will be judged, and that’s fine. That’s part of the point.

1:31:36 SC: Oh, yeah, that’s part of the bargain, right?

1:31:38 KA: Yes. And also it’s part of what we get because, because maybe, we’re doing something wrong. Maybe, maybe, you know…

1:31:43 SC: Almost certainly we’re doing something wrong.

[chuckle]

1:31:45 KA: Yes, for sure we are, and it won’t be evident to us or it won’t be as evident to us as it might be to someone looking outside. Though the outsider has to be attentive to what we’re actually up to too, the outsider who just waves a hand then says, “Oh, Americans do something, something. They lock their parents up in… They lock their grandparents up in old people’s homes”. So that’s not really a very… I mean, that’s not a very good description of what’s going on.

1:32:08 SC: Do you think this kind of strategy will be helpful in spreading democracy around the world, is that too much to ask?

1:32:13 KA: I think it’s the only strategy that might help in spreading… Though one of the things about democracy and by the way, the language of human rights, is that on the whole, once you get them into the hands of ordinary people, they think they’re a good idea. It’s the government that may not be so keen on democracy. But the people usually think it would be a good idea to be consulted and a good idea to play a role and a good idea to have their rights protected by their own state, and if their own state doesn’t know, knowing that their state will be criticized by other states if it doesn’t. And just as their state should criticize other states when they don’t do things right for their own citizens. So I think… But that means, of course, that it’s going to have to be, whatever…

1:33:04 KA: The forms of democracy are going to be different, they’re going to work… They’re going to have different backgrounds, different traditions, different challenges. The kind of issues that arise in a multi-ethnic society like Ghana where there’s no majority ethnicity are different from the kinds that arise in a society which are multi-racial and there’s a dominant ethnic racial group, right? Those are just different. And what you have to do in designing your democracy to deal with the problems is different in those two cases, but also it depends upon the history. The Germans, I think, not unreasonably, violate a principle that is embedded in our law about freedom of expression by not allowing people to publish copies of Mein Kampf. Given the history of Germany, I don’t think that’s a crazy decision.

1:33:57 SC: Yeah. That’s right.

1:34:00 KA: But it would be, I think it would be wrong to stop Americans having access to Mein Kampf, even though some of them are going to use it to form alt-right groups that will draw swastikas on synagogues and do idiotic things like that. So I think… But that again, that conversation across societies about what free expression is and recognizing that it’s different in different place, we can’t expect Abu Dhabi to immediately go to the regime of regulation of pornography that we have in the United States. It’s just not going to work for them.

1:34:35 SC: The history is different, the culture is different.

1:34:37 KA: The culture’s different.

1:34:37 SC: The expectations are different.

1:34:41 KA: But we should try and persuade them, as they should try to persuade us, that on the whole, their society will work better and will be fairer to its people if they allow them pretty broad freedom to say what they want.

1:34:54 SC: I like it, it all seems very reasonable. Everyone’s talking to each other, enjoying food from different places.

[chuckle]

1:35:00 KA: Yes.

1:35:00 SC: It gives me some optimism that the world can become a more cosmopolitan place.

1:35:03 KA: Yes, and just remember, the BBC, I’m not going to remember the exact numbers, but the BBC did a poll a couple years ago around the world asking people if they thought they were citizens of the world. In fact, they asked them, in my view, a ridiculous question, which was, “Are you more of a citizen of the world than you are of your country”? Which is the wrong question because the whole point about cosmopolitanism is it requires you to be loyal to some local things as well, because that’s what you’re bringing to the cosmopolitan conversation. But anyway, they found that in many countries, including the United States, a significant number of people were willing to say, “Yes,” even to that bizarre question.

1:35:41 KA: So I don’t know how many would have said yes if they’d ask the right question which is “Are you a citizen of the world as well as a citizen of your country”? But in many countries, it was a majority of the population that said they felt more like citizens of the world than they did of their own country, right? Now, some of them, in places like Nigeria, where you can understand that because the Nigerian state is a mess. But some of them… I can’t remember, I wish I could remember the details, but it’s worth looking up. So I think there is a… As I say, we can’t require everybody to do this. We can’t expect everybody to do this.

1:36:10 SC: And it’s okay.

1:36:11 KA: But that’s fine. That’s part of the cosmopolitan thing is that we’re cool with difference. I would be happy if an Amish family were willing to let me come and spend time and see what their life was like, but they’re not, they don’t like, and I can see why. I don’t particularly want… You know, do I want some well-intentioned French straight person to say, “Can I come and spend time with your gay family in order to see what gay family’s life”? I’d say…

1:36:39 SC: Well…

[chuckle]

1:36:40 KA: Well, I don’t know.

1:36:41 SC: Don’t be the subject of that experiment, yeah.

1:36:43 KA: That seems like a weird thing. So the thing is that the, it’s the… It has to be a conversation among equals for it to be really productive and the world is full of inequalities and that makes it really hard.

1:36:49 SC: Yeah, well, Kwame Anthony Appiah, conversations among equals are always great things. And maybe this is not equals but anyway, we’re on the same page. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:36:49 KA: It was great, very nice to talk to you.

[music]