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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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- [00:34]
Anthony Appiah
This is the great point of Mills on Liberty. He's talking about a liberal society, not just a liberal government. He wants people who are persuaded by him to think of their fellow citizens as people who are making their own lives and entitled to do so, but not as people. You can't say I think you're making a mess. What you can't do is stop them. But you can argue with them. He's not against arguing with them.
- [00:56]
Jascha Monk
And now the good fight with Jascha Monk. A few days ago we finally had the long awaited elections in Germany. The first elections in which Angela Merkel has not been a candidate for the chancellorship in about 16 years. Surprisingly, the Social Democrats ended up coming top, beating Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats by about 1.5 percentage points. After that quite distant third though is the Green Party, followed by the center right Liberal Party and finally the far right AfD. Now, there are three really interesting things to pay attention to in this election. I think the first is a very good piece of news for the state of liberal democracy around the world, or at least in Germany. And that is that the far right AFD for the first time in its history, lost their chair in a national election, got about 2 percentage points less than they did four years ago, and that in general, the center of gravity in the German electoral system still seems to be very much with moderate parties. I'm often a critic of Germany, but it is quite clear that German democracy is in a much better state of health than that of the United States, of France, of Italy, of Brazil, of most democracies and most developed democracies around the world. The second big thing to note, I think is the gradual death of what Germans call Volksbartein, of what American political scientists call catch all parties. It used to be the German parties was really dominated by the Christian Democrats on the right and the Social Democrats on the left. People have remarked on the decline of the Social Democrats for a good number of decades. Social Democratic parties in many countries were declining from the former glories. And that seemed to be a specific story about social democracy, which succeeded so much in establishing welfare state that it no longer appeared to be needed in quite the Same ways people thought that it might be a victim of its own success. Well, at this point, Christian Democratic parties are also declining very rapidly. They too no longer have a status of casual party. So this just seems to be a general phenomenon. And what lies in its wake is a much more fragmented politics with many parties jostling to form coalitions. And the third big story is the dog that did not bark, and that's a green dog. That is the story that many people told about the rise of the Green Party, which was going to win the chancellorship and dominate this election, showing us what the future holds for developed democracy. Not populism, some said, but cosmopolitan environmentalist Green Party. Well, the Green Party, after leading polls for a little while, declined very strongly. And that was partially to do with a leading candidate who did not turn out to be very convincing. But it was also, I think, because many voters did not give as much priority to climate change as the Green Party does, because they want to reconcile economic growth with battling climate change and because the number of people who are on the very strongly left wing side on cultural issues who define themselves by that is simply smaller than many observers seem to have assumed. One of the striking findings from this election is that even among the youngest cohorts, the left barely has a majority over more conservative party. And among those who voted for the first time, it was the center right fdp, not the environmentalist Greens who got the highest share of the vote. So you take all of these things together, you're going to have a few months of complicated, complex coalition negotiations, most likely in the end. Olaf Scholz, a center left social Democrat with politics of Bill Clinton and the charisma of, let's say Mitch McConnell is going to be Chancellor of Germany. As I've discussed before on the podcast, I think Germany will continue to be moderate. It will not trumpify. It'll have a perfectly decent government. But this is not a great transformation. And especially on foreign policy, especially on actually defending democracy and human rights, not just talking about it. I unfortunately don't have high expectations of the next German government. My guest today is one of my favorite philosophers, Anthony Appiah. He is a, I suppose, Ghanaian, British, American philosopher. He's a writer for the New York Times where he tends to be ethicist. He is a professor at NYU and he is one of our times deepest thinkers about questions of identity, of race and religion, gender and class, and the ways in which we can take those seriously and yet try to create a society in which we emphasize what we have in common at the national level and even at the global level. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Anthony Appiah, welcome to the podcast.
- [06:44]
Anthony Appiah
I'm delighted to be with you.
- [06:46]
Jascha Monk
So a lot of your deepest thinking in the last years and decades has been on various questions of identity, and you actually have also a very helpful way of thinking about what identity even is. So what is this weird concept that we didn't really talk very much about 100 or so years ago and that now seems to stand at the core of so much culture, of so much political thought, philosophical thought, and so much electoral politics?
- [07:09]
Anthony Appiah
Yes. I mean, I do think that it's just one of the most interesting and important facts about this concept of identity, which we now all bandy about and take for granted that nobody talked this way basically before the Second World War. I mean, I've looked and you just don't find this way of thinking now. Of course, the things we call identities all existed and people talked about them. But the new thought is that they're all things of the same kind, that gender and race and sexual orientation and nationality and religion, class are all in some sense, things of the same kind. And that's, in a way, I think, a surprising thought. But then you think as a philosopher, okay, so what do they have in common, if anything? And I think there are three things. All of them involve labeling kinds of people. So I'm a nominalist about identities. I think that they come with names. They're not just responses to some real thing out there. The process of naming plays a role in their genesis, I think. And that's true even of the ones that people think are in some sense, natural, like gender. That's first thing is the labeling. Second thing is that once the labels are in operation, some people to whom the labels are applied think of themselves as men, Catholics, you know, liberals. And they think of that as giving them reasons to think and to feel and to do things. So they. They think as a liberal and they respond as a Catholic. And, you know, teasing out what that means is complicated. But let's just call that identification. Let's say that people identify under these things, and again, they need the label to do that. This was a point that Foucault made in a slightly exaggerated way by saying that, you know, he could tell you the date when homosexuality came into being as a possibility and in some date in 1863 or something. But until you can call yourself this thing, you're just someone who wants to have sex with people of your own gender. And you don't have to think of People of that sort as a kind of person. This is just a fact about me. And indeed, for many people, not knowing about the existence of other people with that property. I think many people have genuinely been puzzled by the discovery of such desires, and it hasn't occurred to them until you have the concept that they belong to a kind of person. And then the third thing is that they're social. And that means that it's not just that you think of yourself as something or other, but other people think of you as that. And again, they think that gives them reasons to treat you in various ways. They do things to you, they think about you, they respond to you in ways that depend upon them thinking of you as a man or as a liberal or as a Catholic. So those three things, I think, labels, identification and treatment are significantly present in each of the cases of the sorts of identities that I just mentioned. And then there's this sort of extra thought, which is why they've come to be so central to our thinking about ethics and politics, which is that these are important tools in the management of one's life, that one lives as a man, as a Catholic, as a liberal, and that the availability of that idea sort of shapes what you do and how you think about yourself and where you think you ought to be and whose side you're on and all of that. Now, you could imagine someone who just wanted to reject that idea. They would want to say, look, you have lots of properties. You don't have to shape your life around a small bunch of shared properties created by labeling. Why do that? Why not, just as it were, be you?
- [10:45]
Jascha Monk
And it does seem to be a kind of cultural shift, doesn't it? I mean, it seems to me that even when I was growing up in Germany, I was born in 1982, in the 80s and 90s, certainly the left, and certainly what seemed like a progressive political space, had the way to put it in your language, perhaps would be a sort of meta preference about the way in which, ideally, a lot of people in society would treat identification, which is that any sane person 20 or 30 years ago would have realized, of course, whether people who have particular identities that were treated on the basis of them. But they might have said something like, we want to create a society in which, by and large, people don't go around saying, I'm going to act this way as a. Whatever the identity category is, and hopefully I'm not going to be treated better or worse on the basis of belonging to a kind of label. And so you could think of the project of the left, or at least of the dominant part of the left for much of post war history, as the project of creating a society in which sort of those forms of identification and treatment would be reduced in salience. And it seems to me that now one of the salient features of the left is that that has flipped, that they're saying, look, this is so fundamental to people, which is, I think, a point that analytically I share. But any attempt to try and reduce treatment and identification in those ways is a fool's errand. Or perhaps it's actually morally bad. And so we should create societies in which people are encouraged in their education from primary school through to college to identify as a. In a very strong sense, and in which perhaps even the treatment you receive more and more explicitly depends on the label that society applies to, except hopefully in a way that redresses various historical injustices. Does that seem like a fair characterization of a cultural shift that's happening and how do you feel about that?
- [12:39]
Anthony Appiah
That's a fair account, though I might put the date a little bit earlier because I'm considerably older than you are. So my story is this. There's a hugely successful project of the left that starts in the early 20th century with sort of German social democracy and the Fabians and the Labour Party in England and social democracy in Scandinavia and kind of liberal left in France and so on. And that project is to reduce the role of class in determining life chances. So class is a kind of identity, though they didn't put it that way. Though, of course, Marx and Hegel talk about the for itself. And that really is a way of talking about identification in relation to class. You know, one of Marx's ideas is that in sometime in the 19th century, with the rise of industrial society, working class identities become for itself. It's not just that you have the property of being a worker, but you think of yourself as a worker. And I think that's true in that wonderful book about the making of the English working class by E.P. thompson, shows how people became self consciously working class and came to take pride in something that other people of course, look down on them for. So the big successful project, it seems to me in much of Europe in the 20th century, was to reduce the salience of class in determining life chances. And so much has happened that we've sort of lost track of how amazing an achievement that was in 1950 in the East End of London, which was the largest, as Marx said, in the 19th century, was the largest working class area in the world at that point, I don't know if it still was in 1950, but nobody had indoor toilets. They had to go outside to go to the bathroom. They didn't have telephones, they didn't have fridges, and they didn't have until basically the beginning of the 1950s, they didn't have guaranteed access to any kind of health care. The national health system was created by the post war labor government by literally 10, 20 years later. All of these things are false and they have huge consequences. If you don't have fridges, you can't have cold beer, so you go out to the pub. One thing that happens as a result of fridges and things like that is that men start spending more time at home with their wives. And it changes the character of working class marriage, for example. I mean, so there are all these really interesting things that happen. And as I say, this is an enormously successful project because it really is true. Even though we have a precariat, and even though we have much poverty in the North Atlantic, the typical member of the American working class has a cell phone. Actually, increasingly, the typical member of the sort of lower middle classes in Kenya has a cell phone. So the sort of material conditions of the worst off were radically, successfully improved. Now, of course, that made class in a way less salient, at least for a while, because the thing that you said, reducing the significance of identification and treatment by class occurred in the ideology of meritocracy, which has many problems with it. But the ideology of meritocracy meant that you could say we are trying to make it true that if a member of the working class works hard, someone born into the working class works hard, and they have talents, they will become richer. That's one thing. But the other thing is we're raising the baseline for everybody. You don't have to have talent to have access to the National Health Service. Right? You just have to be a human being living in our society. So two things are going on. One is we're trying to make access to positions of advantage more equal, more a matter of what you do than of what you are. And we're also raising the baseline anyway, so I think that's a hugely successful project. It's kind of sad to lose track of how successful that was.
- [16:16]
Commercial Narrator
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- [16:36]
Jascha Monk
This is about class, right? And class is one form of identity, and it's important to remember that. But if there is a coherent concept of identity, class has presumably got to be one of them, alongside gender and sex and race and ethnicity and so on. But how does that then relate to those other identity categories that at this particular moment in our political history, we're often thinking of as sort of rivals to class in a certain way?
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Anthony Appiah
Part of what happened in all these different places is that as that project succeeded, other sources of inequality related to social treatment of identities became more visible in the United States. Race, obviously, and everywhere. Gender.
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Jascha Monk
I think, in a way, actually the rise of focus on questions like gender and race is in part a function of the success of the fight against class as a salient category.
- [17:27]
Anthony Appiah
Once you're beginning to conceive things in this new way, an analogy will suggest itself to you between class and gender, which is that they are sources of inequality, that they are sources of your sense of who you are, but also sources of sense of. Of other people's sense of who you are. And that would be fine if they didn't also come with forms of inequality that just don't seem to be defensible. Why should women earn 70 cents on the dollar of what men earn? Maybe there's an explanation, so we should look into it. We should try and figure out why it is. But if it's just because they're women, then that seems unfair in the way that just because they're working class seemed unfair. And the same, obviously, is true about race. There are big differences in all kinds of social statistics between blacks and whites and browns in the United States. And again, there might be an explanation that's consistent with thinking that this is fair, but that would have been very hard to believe in the United States when you had legal discrimination. So there was this sort of pressure to do something about that. And then on the tail of feminism, becomes gay rights, because that's also about gender and then trans rights. These are all kind of in succession, things that naturally, once you had one thought, you had the next. So I don't think it's too surprising. However, one of the bad effects, and this is why some people on the left don't like what they call identity politics. One bad effect of this is that we, I think, have stepped backwards on the class thing. The Precariat, the modern Precariat in the modern North Atlantic societies is in the kind of very bad position that the Working class was in England before the Second World War. I mean, if you're a member of the bottom 15% in the United Kingdom, your children have about a 2% chance of going to college. Well, if you have this thought that equality is important, then maybe there's an explanation for this. I suppose it's theoretically possible that in the bottom 15% of the income distribution everybody is incredibly stupid. But that doesn't seem very likely given lots of things we know about genetics and so on. And so the likely thing is that there's some feature of our social arrangements that's generating these inequalities. And if that's what's happening, we ought to change the social arrangements. So one reason why there is hostility to identity polls is because people are thinking about class and race and gender and they're worried that in pursuing those, we've lost the gains we made about class. And I think that's true. And so I'm all in favor of reminding us that we are still living in class societies, that social and financial and cultural capital are very unequally distributed. They make a huge difference in life chances and we could do something about that if we wanted
- [20:10]
Jascha Monk
some.
- [20:10]
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- [20:38]
Jascha Monk
so I think there's two main criticisms at least of identity politics. One of them is that if we at least exclusively focus on things like race and gender, we're going to lose class out of you. And that's going to have at least two bad effects. One of them is that we become insensitive to the injustices that people who are of a dominant ethnic group or of a dominant gender group but at the very bottom of a class hierarchy suffer. And the other may be that we misunderstand the nature of some of the suffering of people who are disfavored across groups. That if you look at the question, for example, of whites and African Americans in the United States without any kind of class lens, you misunderstand what produces some of those inequalities and you may not be able to remedy. That's one category. There's another category of concerns, but perhaps a little less common. But that's at the heart of what I've been thinking about for my next book, for example, and that is, before that. There's a real question when you go back to class about how do we deal with this? And I think there was a split even at the time where some people said, well, actually, this oppositional working class identity is an incredibly good and valuable thing, and we should try and double down on it. We should refuse to take part in the institutions of a bourgeoisie. Perhaps we should build political systems like say, in the Soviet Union, in which your membership in the working class, which got to be defined in kind of pretty weird ways, really was the prerequisite for you having any kind of standing in that society. On the other hand, there's a thought. We're saying, no, actually what we want is a set of institutions that will allow things like class to matter less over time. Not because we're ignoring the injustices of class, but because we've actually managed to remedy them. Now, as you're saying, those look reasonably successful for a while, looks significantly less successful now. But that as an ambition, seems to me to have been the correct one. And there is the worry, isn't there, that there may be something powerful going on here with other identity categories. But there's a real fight about, well, what would a just society look like? Is it one in which we're hyper conscious of the category people belong to, and everybody needs a form of identification to have any kind of real role in that society? And we actually structure more and more things around that in the hope that that might somehow overcome the injustices? Or do we want a society in which those categories will become less salient because they impose fewer disadvantages on people, and people therefore don't have as much of a reason or as much of a need to identify with them. And that's kind of as a way, which doesn't mean they'll completely disappear. Things like religion will clearly stay around, and most likely things like ethnicity will too, but we may get less salient rather than more. And so I guess I wonder how you feel about that. Do you share that concern about where some countries in north and Western Europe are going and what should we do about that?
- [23:33]
Anthony Appiah
So I agree with you. I mean, I think class is different in the way you described what German intellectuals called the Zozialefrage in the late 19th century. Was the question of how essentially to make sure that the working classes acquired the marks of the bourgeoisie, acquired education, familiarity with great music and art, and the capacity to talk about novels and all those things that were of the Bildungsburger to the educated bourgeoisie. And I think that's the solution. I get into trouble. My husband tells me I shouldn't tell this story. But Keynes famously said, if it comes to class warfare, I will side with the educated bourgeoisie. Now, it wasn't because he didn't care about the working class. He just thought that there were features of working class identity that were the result of disadvantage and that if you took the disadvantage away, at the very least, working class identity would be something very, very different. And maybe it would just wouldn't matter. After a working class identity, something was created in the early 19th century in a country like England. So it's not a necessary deep feature of the long history of humanity. Of course there were hierarchies, but they were different. In the 18th century. You have the distinction between the middling orders and the upper orders and the lower orders. That's a different distinction. So unless you're a money egalitarian, you think that it'll continue to be the case that there'll be differences in wealth and income, but they won't be associated with differences in standing of the sort that were bad about the old class system. So with race, that really is a case where I guess I've changed my mind. I mean, I used to be more of an abolitionist, a sort of short run abolitionist about race. I just thought, let's stop thinking this way.
- [25:21]
Jascha Monk
Could you make the case for that? I know that you change your mind, but I think it's interesting to hear that case defended in a rigorous way before criticism. So what was the reason that attracted you to the race abolitionist view?
- [25:33]
Anthony Appiah
Well, first of all, because the sort of strong belief in race is associated with false beliefs about the proper biological classification of human beings. Most of the genetic variance in the human population is within the continent of Africa or Asia or Europe or North America. So that these forms of racial differentiation don't correlate very much with lots of the things that matter about people. And my point is that that's something that it's very hard to keep track of if you keep the race concept central to your ways of thinking about the people around you. My students in the United States correctly see the point when I say to them, can you imagine me sitting on a plane having a conversation with a stranger in the United States, going home to my family and saying, I just had a great conversation. And my husband saying to me, well, was it a man or a woman? Was it a black person or a white person? And my saying, oh, I don't remember that. Why would that matter? That's not socially imaginable in the United States today, and I don't think it's going to be socially imaginable about gender, given how little race tells you about biology, which is what people start thinking about when you think about race. It might be better if we didn't store information about people under the label black, white, yellow, brown, because the information will be enormously misleading. If you start generalizing, you have five experiences with white people and you start generalizing on the basis of that, you're likely to go wrong. And the same for all the other categories. So I think that a lot of race thinking is grounded in the thought that these are biological categories, informative biological categories, and I think they aren't chronic
- [27:19]
Jascha Monk
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- [27:21]
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- [27:23]
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- [27:29]
Jascha Monk
It's not for those with 14 or
- [27:30]
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- [27:36]
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- [28:13]
Jascha Monk
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- [28:14]
Anthony Appiah
Ask your doctor.
- [28:14]
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- [28:20]
Jascha Monk
The basic case is that is that race historically in other ways, was informed by a set of biological assumptions about how that is actually indicative of some deep differences between groups of humans. Of course, most of the time this has been used not exactly to progressive purposes. Most of the time it's been used in order to say that various groups are inferior and therefore can be treated in horrifying ways. And so the natural thought is to say, well look, this picks up categories that don't actually tell us very much about the members of those categories. And it's been used in so many ways in order to mistreat people. Isn't the Natural response just to get rid of a category. So I think there's a strong case there, but there's also a counter case that is pretty strong. So you've changed your mind about this. Why, despite the pull of that position, as you've just put it, do you think that race abolitionism is in fact the wrong response?
- [29:14]
Anthony Appiah
So I think it's the wrong response, as it were, short run. I have no idea what I think about 2121, but for the rest of my life, I think it's got to be true that in the countries where race has played this central role in the shaping of the societies, one of the things that's happened is that around racial identities, including the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy, which is intrinsic to a lot of race thinking, lots of very valuable and interesting culture has been built. African American culture is rich, musically rich. The religious traditions of the black churches. I'm not a Christian, but if you are, you ought to be interested in them because they are powerful instantiations of Christian traditions and of Islam. The Black Muslims in the United States are very interesting and distinctive group. And lots of other things, traditions of political resistance, which are inevitable in a group that is politically persecuted, but which allow you, if you use them well, to generate sympathy with other persecuted people. Not just black people, but people of religious minorities, gender minorities and so on. There's no guarantee in any of this, but I think it does help. So my friend Skip Gates and I made really the first encyclopedia of the black world called Encarta Africana. And it was the first encyclopedia that looked at the descendants of African peoples everywhere, Asia, Latin America and the North Atlantic, as well as Africa. Well, the response when we went with this thing into black communities, the sense of excitement and engagement and the sense of basically pride when they saw how much they didn't know about was there, was very rewarding to me. You know, I grew up in Africa, so I didn't really have the experience of thinking of the culture around me as unvaluable or something because of the color of the people. But if you did grow up like that, as people in Europe and North America often did if they were not white, this is enormously exciting. And so they're interested in it. And you can use this to engage children in school and all sorts of things. So, as you say, there are good things that come from it. And of course, good things came from working class culture too. The sense of solidarity, social solidarity that was generated in union movement, for example, enormously important model of human solidarity. And again, it was usable not just to deal with class injustice, but with other kinds of injustice. There's a wonderful movie about a group of gay activists going to help the miners in the miners strike and coming to form a kind of solidarity with them. And it's based on something that actually happened. So even in the case of class, where I'm sort of more confident that if we do the right thing, it'll be less clear, we shouldn't ignore the fact that fascinating and important forms of cultural production were associated with these identities, mattered to people, guided people in their production. And that's true about race as well.
- [32:12]
Jascha Monk
There's also a more sort of political element of this, right? So I think one part of it which I agree with is that actually, you know, at this point, African Americans, for example, are a group with very strange and tragic history. They're a group that really has been forged through the imposition of extreme injustices that were not in any meaningful sense a coherent cultural ethnic group in Africa before coming here, because they belong to different from each other cultural and ethnic groups. And they were sort of forced together in this way. But I can see how it is now in a meaningful sense in American subculture, and that losing it would be a cultural loss and a loss to the identity of the members of the group and so on. There's also political element of this, which is a position which in the academic literature is called something strategic essentialism, where you're saying, well, look, I mean, we should recognize the artificiality of all these groups. We should recognize the artificiality of race, for example. But then we should recognize also that because people suffer in your chance treatment, because they suffer particular disadvantages on the basis of a membership in that group. The natural locus of resistance is to emphasize to people the extent to which they belong to these groups. And then they can, as members of a group, fight back in order to demand equal rights or whatever else they may be after. Now that again is, I think, very plausible. And I can see the pull of it there too. For I wonder when the strategic essentialism stops being strategic and becomes essentialist full out. And that's a question I ask myself, for example, when I see elite private schools starting to take children at the age of 9 or 10 and separating them into different groups on the basis of their ethnicity. It's one thing for people to self select into groups. That's something that the freedom of association and liberal society should allow, probably including in high school. Once people are a certain kind of age, it's a different thing for teachers to take 9 year olds and 10 year olds, they were most important thing about you is that you are Hispanic or that you are Asian or that you are black. And here's the group you got to go to. That to me seems like despite all the reasons why strategic essentialism has a certain plausibility, like you're really risking creating a society where the essentialism has won over the strategic element in a way that actually is counterproductive. So how do you think about political elements? How do you balance the legitimate reasons why groups might want to organized, especially with suffer at historical disadvantage, and why they might even want to encourage a form of self identification and the ways in which Tibetan actually can come to then perpetuate thinking in terms of categories that are ultimately artificial and fragment societies in ways that actually will make it harder to reach justice?
- [34:57]
Anthony Appiah
Yes, I think in the case of schooling that there is an important political argument to be had and it's based on the recognition of an important piece of social psychology. And this is an argument against segregating children at the age of 8 or 9 by anything including of course, class. I was sent at the age of 8 to an English boarding school and you had to be pretty well off to go there. And so I was class formed from a very early age, not just by the experiences of class at home, but by the very strong class formation processes that go on in English prep and public schools. And I was deprived of the experience of growing up and interacting daily with people of my own generation who had different class experiences from mine. And the same objection I think arises with respect to race and I think religion. I mean, our school had, of course it was an Anglican school, but we had a rabbi because they were Jewish students. I think it was good that we had a rabbi, that the Jewish students had their Friday ceremonies and so on, but also good that they were in school with the rest of us. And I worry about Muslim schools in England and Anglican schools in England, frankly, where if an Anglican school is a school that doesn't take anybody who isn't an Anglican, which as I say, wasn't the case with my school, it was an Anglican school, but it took people of any faith and took care that their religious lives were taken account of. So yes, I worry very much for this reason that there's a kind of cross cutting social capital across identity that is absolutely crucial in political life. Because here's an identity we have, we have identities as citizens of places and we need to be able to mobilize those in a way that Transcends not all the time, but sometimes that transcends sometimes whatever the identities are that we are divided into. And public schools in the American sense of public schools, schools that are run for everybody and by the government are very important site of that. And one of the bad things about the history of public education in the United States is that because of residential segregation by geography they didn't turn out to be doing that function. And in fact after Brown D Board of Education, the public education in many places, especially in the south, but not only in the south, place like Boston was reorganized in order to avoid the creation of this very valuable kind of cross cutting social capital. So I share that worry for that reason not because I think that as it were, the Jewish kids should have been told, you know, in England you have to be Anglican. And so as I say that means that if there's something culturally important to the black students and distinctive, there should be space for that. But it should be I think in a common education system and not in a set of segregated education systems.
- [38:01]
Jascha Monk
England is particularly egregious on that. I think it's the new Labour government introduced state funded fake schools. So it's not just that. Again, I think liberal societies need to permit parents to self fund and organize schools along religious lines. I would be happier to live in a society where that's rare rather than frequent. But I think we should allow it. But what's specific about these state schools in England is that they're actually taxpayer funded.
- [38:26]
Anthony Appiah
I'd like to make a point about what I think the proper liberal attitude is. Of course they should be permitted, but I think we should also say that we disfavor it. There are lots of things that should be permitted that one doesn't need to be enthusiastic about as a liberal. I mean this is the great point of Mills on Liberty. He's talking about a liberal society, not just a liberal government. He wants people who are persuaded by him to think of their fellow citizens as people who are making their own lives and entitled to do so, but not as people. You can't say I think you're making a mess. What you can't do is stop them. But you can argue with them. He's not against arguing with them. And so I think states have to be very careful. And here there are many different models, you know, the Canadians official multiculturalism thing is another thing where I worry a little bit that it's one thing to say you're an immigrant minority, you care about certain, say mentions of certain language will help you that's fine. But in the context of a public education system, I think, and in the context of non segregated public people are entitled to have private things. I don't have to have racially balanced dinner parties. But I think we should try and make it public. And when I say try and make, I mean not just by law. I mean if we're liberal in that sort of million way, we should defend this. We should say there's a reason why we think you should be permitted to have religious schools, but we also think that your kids would be better off in a liberal society. We allow parents to make very big decisions about the lives of their children. I think that's good. But that doesn't mean we can't say to people who are making these decisions, you know, we think your kids will be better off, they'd be better citizens if you didn't do that, or at least if you do do that, that you made some effort to find other spaces where they were creating these cross cutting links.
- [40:15]
Jascha Monk
So I think this speaks to an important misunderstanding that people often have about the nature of liberalism. Now there is a kind of neutrality that is important to liberalism, right? We think that the state can't, for example, say in an authoritative way, this one religion is true and you should follow it. And those who don't follow this religion either are bad or even in some flagrant way disfavored. So there is a kind of part of the idea of liberalism is that the freedoms that the individual enjoys in a liberal regime should give the state a certain kind of respect for the moral autonomy, for their attempt to understand how they want to lead their lives. But then as you're indicating, there's a way of taking that too far towards saying, actually in a liberal society, I don't get to have any kind of opinion about how you lead your life. Or I don't get to argue if you say, hey, you know what, send your children to a common school. Because I think that's better for society, it's better for them. There are some liberals who would say that's inappropriate somehow. And I think you're right in pointing out that that's not the case. Where does that line lie? I mean, how do we balance the respect to our fellow citizens and the neutrality which they should have with? That doesn't mean we should abdicate a real debate about what kind of society we should live in. And it doesn't necessarily mean, for example, that the state in some authoritative terms can't say if you hold genuinely racist beliefs this is something that we as a state dispose. How do you, in your way of thinking about liberalism, balance between these two competing desires?
- [41:42]
Anthony Appiah
I think of the form of neutrality that I'm inclined to endorse operating like this. If a group comes to us and says, we think the state is disfavoring us in virtue of our being Sikhs, gay women, whatever, the state has a responsibility to make sure that that isn't true. It has to think about, shall we exempt Sikhs from requirements for wearing motorbike helmets? Because it's really hard to wear a motorbicycle helmet and also wear the turban, which is a deep element of Sikh identity for men.
- [42:15]
Jascha Monk
This, by the way, is a question in which there's probably approximately 2,748 philosophy papers.
- [42:20]
Anthony Appiah
Yes, right. But it seems to me that, as that example shows, this is a matter of a kind of respectful negotiation. And if you push people into a certain kind of identity politics, they're going to claim that. That it's a terrible imposition on them if you ask them to do something or other, whether it is or not, because they feel, you know, that's what it is to be engaged in politics. It's to be claiming things on the basis of my identity. And the way I win the argument is by saying, this is super important to me. And who is the government to say it isn't super important to you? Well, we do have models for dealing with this. One model is the model that developed in societies that had conscription for conscientious objection. We didn't just allow people to declare that they had a conscientious objection. We asked them to show that they belong to a serious tradition in which they and other people together were committed, seriously, say, as Quakers. And they had to show that they were willing to take on the sort of risk that conscription imposes on people without being willing to fight. So that's why Quakers spilled the ambulance brigades in the First World War. They were, as it were, conscripted like everybody else. But they were allowed to say, my form of conscription isn't going to be one which involves me killing people. It's going to be about me saving people to the extent that I can. And this is because you have evidence that my claim that this is a serious conscientious matter is supported. You can't. Just as we declare it out of the blue.
- [43:50]
Jascha Monk
This is an interesting point, by the way, which is to say that, as you're describing it, it is really important for a liberal state to be very mindful of not Discriminating in groups of listening very attentively to claims about injustices or disfavored treatment that groups suffer. And sometimes I think it's plausible that civil servants of a state, even if well intentioned, may generally be unaware, for example of this new motorcycle helmet law is actually going to really disfavor members of the Sikh group. Because if Sikhs unveiling society may generally not afford of it. Right. But at the same time, and I think this is something where we sometimes perhaps go wrong at the moment, you need to actually bring evidence of this to the table. It needs to be evidence that can be rationally assessed. It can't just be a claim without evidence or claim in which the assertion of a lived experience is in itself proof enough, right?
- [44:41]
Anthony Appiah
No. And I think that's why I'm a little bit leery of all this talk of lived experience, because I think, of course there is such a thing as lived experience, but often it's just an excuse for saying, you don't get to question me about this, I declare, and you have to accept. And that just seems to me not how citizens in a liberal society ought to address one another. If something's important to you, you should be able to explain to other people why it's important and show that it's important. And they should be responsive to good reasons. I mean, of course they should. But the idea that you can just sort of trump a consideration by just saying, as an X, I declare why to be important and therefore you must do something about it, that seems to me just not how citizens should treat one another. And I say that aware that of course what I just said might lead some comfortable people in majorities not to take the demand I just enunciated very seriously. And that's true. But the fact that people will abuse a claim doesn't mean it's not correct. Take religious neutrality. What it means in a society is just going to depend on what the religious traditions happen to be in that society, the variety of them, and what matters to them. And very generally, what happens, at least in the United States as people of different religions migrate in, is that their form of religious life actually gets Americanized. I mean, they may not recognize it, but roughly speaking, American Catholics are a good deal more Protestant than Irish and Italian Catholics. They've sort of adopted some of the assumptions about Christianity, which are basically, historically speaking, Protestant assumptions. And this has happened to Judaism. I remember going once on the High Holy Days to one of the big synagogues on Fifth Avenue and couldn't have felt more comfortable because it felt exactly like an Anglican cathedral. Pews, stained glass organs. I knew where the preaching was going to come from because there was a place for a preacher to stand and it was above the rest of the U.S. so that's good, I think, because it means that it's easier to fit Jewish religious life into the United States because it's adapted itself a little bit. And the hard Jewish Americans to assimilate are the ultra Orthodox who have made fewer compromises with America. And now I'm not saying we shouldn't practice religious toleration. To us, of course we should, but they've made it harder for us. I remember hearing on the train from Washington back to New York, once a group of prosperous, looking, besooted South Asian Muslims talking men. And they were clearly heterosexual. At least in the conversation, they identified each other as heterosexual. And they were talking about how if in the United States, Muslims were to be tolerated, then Muslims maybe had to accept that in the United States, homosexuals would be tolerated. Now, if you said that in Abu Dhabi, which is the most liberal of the Gulf states, people would say, you're crazy. That's not obviously true. But in American Islam, this is a developing thing, this kind of toleration. And it's not just in Americans. There are things like this in Turkey and all sorts of places where Islam is important. So I think we should push back sometimes a little bit, because I think people can, as it were, think of things as important which turn out to be, if it's required for accommodation, a little bit less important than they were inclined originally to think. So this is a very delicate process. In other words, so there's lots of established religion in Europe, right? The Queen is the head of Church of England. The Scandinavian monarchs are all Lutherans. So constitutionally. And the church, Lutheran Church in those very liberal countries is a state church in some sense. But there are also places where I think it's fair to say that a good deal of progress has been made in respect of toleration of Muslims and Catholics and Jews. And so I don't know that this constitutional formality is the important thing. The important thing is that Muslims in Norway shouldn't find themselves saying, you know, you've organized this society in such a way that it's really hard for me to do something that's really important to me. And I'm sure that in the airport in Oslo, there's somewhere where Muslims can pray. It may be a Christian chapel, but they're not excluded. And I think that that's the thing. So I used to be a bit more of a hardliner about establishment, but as long as it's consistent with this form of neutrality, I don't even care about establishment. What I care about is that nobody feels as a citizen of a certain identity that when they complain that they're being burdened as a citizen of that identity, they don't feel that the state doesn't take an interest or doesn't care. Sometimes the state can take an interest and care and respond. We can't do anything about that. Right. That has to be true as well. I mean, we can't make an accommodation. I think it's reasonable to listen to complaints about animal welfare laws that may limit some religious practices in relation to the slaughtering of animals. Say. Now it turns out that the ways in which Jews and Muslims slaughter animals are not crueler than the ways that anybody else does. So we don't have to deal with this as a practical problem. But in theory, it could turn out that we had to say, look, we're a democratic society. We've thought about this. We, we just think that the suffering of animals is something we have to criminalize. You're just going to have to adapt. I think that can be a perfectly reasonable liberal response. So I don't mean that disparate impact is a trump. Sometimes you just have to say, we can't do that. If your religion requires you to steal something every Friday, we're still going to lock you up if we find you stealing. Fortunately, as I say, most religions don't require things like that because they adapt to the ecology of religions in their society. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
- [50:23]
Jascha Monk
So there's a different strand of a conversation that I want to make sure we untangle before we close this conversation. And it's, you know, one question you have to ask when you're trying to figure out how to deal with all these different identities in a democracy is, you know, what kind of level of identification should we encourage, especially in the ways we discussed in which we as individuals and to some extent the institutions run by the state don't have to be entirely neutral. So one answer to this is to say, well, it's something like a multicultural model, as you mentioned about Canada, is to say, look, the thing that really is the basis of our society, all these different religious and ethnic communities, and we think that's wonderful, and we celebrate them. And insofar as possible, our citizens are going to feel that they are Sikh Canadians or that they are black Canadians or that they are, whatever may have to be the case. And we're going to live in a society in which that really is the primary kind of identity that people have, right? A second kind of answer is to say, well, look, yes, people will have these identities, and there will be Sikh Canadians and there will be black Canadians, and that's perfectly fine. And we are glad for the kind of diversity that gives our society and the cultural richness it gives us. But we also want our institutions to ensure that the members of these different groups have a feeling of connection to each other, that they also feel Canadian, and that they think, hey, I have duties and responsibilities and goodwill towards Canadians who are from outside of my own ethnic religious group. That's a position I'm tempted by for various reasons. I think you are true in certain ways. But there's also a third answer which is often called cosmopolitan. Say, well, no, actually what we should really ideally do, and you're going to disagree, perhaps, with a characterization of his position, is to get people to care about all humans equal, is to go beyond not just their particular sort of religious or ethnic identity, but also their nationality in order to say, you know, I care equally about somebody suffering today in North Korea and Venezuela or in Appalachia. How do you think, sort of we should act as private actors, as institutions? Which of these three levels of identity should we encourage? And what's the case for cosmopolitanism being at least part of that answer?
- [52:39]
Anthony Appiah
I think it's a very good thing if people have a sense of a human identity, a global identity, a sense that they are connected with all members of the species and combined with a recognition that that isn't because we're all the same, that we're living different lives both as individuals and as communities. And that's fine within broad limits set by some moral constraints. So I think that's an attractive thing, and you can encourage that by the things that we think of as cosmopolitan in many domains. You can encourage it by making sure that you raise children who've read some Chinese novels as well as some German novels, and have seen movies from all over the place and listen to music that isn't all from, you know, Bavaria and so on. And I think you should encourage people to meet people who come from other places, and that will create these kinds of links that are human links, not because there won't be specific elements in them, any two humans have much more in common than their humanity, but because the project of making links with people who are unlike yourself is something that you value Now, I don't know that I can argue that this is morally compulsory. So that what I want to do is to say it's extremely attractive and important. And in particular, in our world today, we'd better have a lot of people doing this, because there are lots of things we are going to be able to manage together better if there are people with this attitude engaged with one another in the project of solving these problems. We're not going to solve global warming unless we have a significant number of people who know how to care about what happens to people in China who aren't Chinese. Maybe not everybody has to do that in order for this to work, but we need people like that. But I'm, in the technical sense, a partial cosmopolitan. That is, I think that that level of identification is perfectly consistent with having a strong sense of having special responsibilities to my fellow citizens, the people with whom I share a nationality. And of course, just as that sense of having a special responsibility to people with whom I share the republic and the responsibility for running the state is consistent with my having special concern for my children and my family. I mean, I sometimes think that people sort of forget this very elementary thing. When you start talking about global identity. I say, how can you combine global identity with national identity? Well, how can you combine New York identity with American identity? People do that all the time. I vote for a mayor of New York, the governor of New York State, and a president of the United States, and I vote for a member of the United States Congress, and I vote for a member of the United States Senate. And they're doing different things. So I think about different things when I'm voting for them. And I care about New York City more than I care about Albany, which is the capital of New York State, because it's my home. So this is rooted cosmopolitanism. There have been people who were principled opponents of this rootedness because they made a mistake, I think, a philosophical mistake. They thought that because everybody matters is a deep moral truth. It follows that everybody matters equally to everybody. Those are separate questions, of course. Everybody matters, but my family matters to me, and it doesn't matter to you, except as another human family. And so partiality is a deep part of the structure of the moral world. And that's why I can say sometimes to myself, I think my country's doing the wrong thing for the world. And the world matters enough to me that I'm going to vote against my country here. I'm going to say, my country shouldn't be doing this thing. And I'm going to be proud of my country when it makes a useful contribution to the world's well being in a way that I'm not proud of Sweden when it makes a useful contribution to the world's well being. So I'm in favor of Sweden making useful contributions to the world's well being. And I'm in favor of Swedes thinking that it's especially important for them to care about that. So I think that partiality, it's so easy to think that, as it were, equality is inconsistent with partiality. That's not true. Equality and impartiality are different ideals. I'm against impartiality. But there are obligations of morality that we have to everybody, and we must meet those obligations. And we must meet them in a way that is consistent with partiality. And sometimes it will mean that we can't be partial to our own kin, right? Sometimes we have to say, I have to be against nepotism, even though it would be very nice to be able to give the job to my nephew.
- [57:12]
Jascha Monk
There's two very helpful contrasts here that really influence how I think about this question, actually. So one is, as you're saying, well, it can be true morally, but everybody matters equally. But that doesn't mean that I have to be impartial. I have reason to go out of a way to help my friends in a way that goes beyond the general duties that I have towards human beings. And then actually that's true in a way that's, I think, a little less obvious at the level of what kind of identity we want to aim for. Because people do really tend to put patriotism and something like cosmopolitanism in conflict with each other, either with cosmopolitans who are supposed to, in the way I formulated it, care equally, but everybody, or we can have a healthy affection for our nation and a healthy set of special duties and responsibilities for making sure that our nation thrives and behaves responsibly and so on. But actually those two things aren't true. And one reason why they're not true, and this is something that I have from your writing, is that actually when you think of where most people's sense of identity and political agency and solidarity starts, it's really quite narrow. And so if you want to go towards people caring more about people far away from them, the nation is actually a very helpful stepping stone towards that. So, you know, in my personal journey on this, I think I've shifted position twice now. So I grew up, I think, as a kind of naive cosmopolitan, as somebody who thought, you know, everybody should just abandon their identities in some kind of way and care equally about everybody in the world, and wouldn't that be a lovely society? And then I think I started to take seriously the social science as being groupish of us having these very natural tendencies to favor the in group over the out group, and recognizing that any vision of society that thinks it can overcome that human tendency is simply doomed for failure. And so that pushed me in a direction in which I became an advocate of things like an inclusive understanding of patriotism. To say, actually, the best we can do is to build these nations and which are diverse internally, and in which we are hoping to instill a sense of solidarity with people who are not obviously similar to women, precisely to keep in check the potentially negative aspects of the way in which groupishness can lead me to say, I'm going to fight for people of my tribe, of my religion, and screw everybody else. But I think the point you make is an important one, which is that that doesn't have to at all be in conflict with, at the same time saying, nobody's going to be a pure cosmopolitan. Everybody is going to recognize the special duties and allegiances they have at multiple levels. But of course, it is a wonderful thing, an important thing, if people watch Netflix shows or read novels, but give them an understanding of the suffering that people have in different parts of the world, the richness of the culture they have, and allows them to have a little bit more fellow feeling with people who are not just beyond their particular tribe of ethnicity, but also beyond the nation. And I never lost a belief in that in practice, but I think you helped me reconcile that as a theoretical position with that insight.
- [60:13]
Anthony Appiah
I think it's really crucial, whatever people think about this question, for them to grasp the theoretical point that this is a possibility, because I think there are really people who think it's impossible.
- [60:26]
Jascha Monk
Just a brief final question. When we zoom out and think about the ways in which we now think about identity, I think have made pros as a society and what we know about it, how we think about it. But I think that also real pitfalls. How optimistic or pessimistic are you that societies like the United States or like the United Kingdom will work this out in a constructive way? And what might that look like?
- [60:48]
Anthony Appiah
The reason I'm moderately pessimistic at the moment, and it isn't a temperamental thing, I'm not temperamentally pessimistic, is that a form of identity has arisen, namely a kind of partisan political identity that is enormously destructive of the possibilities of democracy in my society and I suspect in some others in India, for example. And I don't know what to do about it because I can't pretend to take seriously the view that the pandemic is a conspiracy of liberals to take over the lives of people. And yet I have fellow citizens who think something like that, and I don't know what mechanisms are available to persuade them that we can't run the thing together if that's how we think about each other.
- [61:39]
Jascha Monk
Anthony Appiah thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [61:42]
Anthony Appiah
It's a great pleasure. Very good to talk to you.
- [61:55]
Jascha Monk
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about this show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [62:21]
Anthony Appiah
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [62:26]
Jascha Monk
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [62:37]
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