- Before introducing
our distinguished guest
I'd like to thank the sponsors
of our Speaker Series.
They include Cravath, Swaine & Moore,
Davis Polk, DLA Piper, Fried Frank,
Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins,
Paul, Weiss, Sullivan & Cromwell,
Wachtell, Lipton, Weil, and White & Case.
I'd now like to introduce our guest.
I'm thrilled to welcome my
dear friend and colleague
Professor Anthony Appiah.
Professor Appiah is one of our own.
He teaches law and philosophy at NYU.
Before NYU he taught at Yale, Cornell,
Duke, Harvard, and Princeton.
He has written widely in
ethics, political philosophy,
and African and African American studies.
He's the author of really
too many books to mention
at this point.
But they include The Ethics
of Identity, Cosmopolitanism,
The Honor Code, and most
recently, The Lies That Bind.
The Lies That Bind is the
subject of today's discussion.
And we have purchased a copy of that book
for everyone in this room.
It will be available on the
tables outside as you depart.
And Professor Appiah has been kind enough
to sign each and every one of them.
(Professor Appiah chuckling)
- My hand is a bit sore.
(Kenji laughing)
- In addition to Professor
Appiah's scholarly writing
he's written the weekly Ethicist column
in the New York Times since October 2015.
And among his numerous honors,
he has received a
National Humanities Medal
from President Obama in 2012.
Before we kick off the conversation
I'll just mention the
process for audience Q&A
which we'll do at the end of the program.
Instead of taking audience
questions by microphone
we're gonna do it by index card.
So, you should have an
index card on your seat.
Please write your questions on your cards
as they come to mind
during the discussion.
Helpers will walk through the
room to collect the cards,
and I will read out a
selection from the pile we get
when we get to that
portion of the program.
With that, please welcome
Professor Anthony Appiah.
(audience applauding)
So, Anthony, let's begin with the title
and what this book is about.
So, The Lies That Bind.
What are we to make of this title
and where does it come from?
- Well, titles are always
a struggle for books
because you want to
do something that's both likely
to catch people's attention
and also communicate
what the book's about.
So, it's called The Lies That Bind.
Rethinking Identity is the subtitle.
I batted a bunch of titles around
but this one seemed to be the right one
because it's about the various ways
in which social identities
are both always involve
misunderstanding, error,
and intellectual confusion,
but are nevertheless also central
to holding people together
and generating forms of solidarity,
as well as all the bad things
that no doubt we'll talk
about, that identity does.
I think,
there's a sort of simpleminded thought
you might have which is,
well, if they're lies, how can they bind?
You might have that thought.
Well, the answer is, that's
what the book's about.
You might have another thought,
which is if they're lies
shouldn't we replace
them just with the truth.
For various reasons I think that while
moving towards the truth
is a good idea in general,
it's not gonna be possible to, as it were,
purify them before we go on with them.
We can't abandon them until
they've been cleaned up.
We have to go on with them as they are.
So, it was sort of
stressing the ways in which
these forms of identity involve
philosophical confusions, and
other kinds of confusions,
but nevertheless do important work.
- Great.
And you talk about this book
as being a book about mistaken identities,
but it's about mistakes
we make about identities,
not the idea that identity
itself is a mistake.
- No.
No, identity,
again, it's not an unnatural thought
that if you see the damage
done by patriarchy and sexism,
or by racism and white supremacy,
or by homophobia and heteronormativity,
to think, oh, well,
maybe we should just try
and do without these things.
Maybe the alternative to bad identities
is no identities at all.
That's not my view.
My view is, the alternative
to bad identities
is better identities.
- So, amend it, don't end it, approach.
- Yes, exactly.
- And you take up, I mean this is,
you had me with, as those
who know me will appreciate,
with a kind of fierce commitment
to alliteration throughout this book.
The five identities you take up
are creed, color, country,
class, and culture.
So I think we can actually
knock this out best by example.
So let's begin with creed.
You argue that religion is not
primarily a matter of belief.
This goes against how a lot of people
are accustomed to thinking about religion.
How do you think religion is
organized if not by belief?
- By...
As an identity.
It's a form of identity.
That's the main reason
religion matters to everybody.
Of course, each religion
matters to its adherents
for reasons specific to the
way that religion is organized.
But if you're thinking
about religion in general,
what matters about them is
that they're forms of identity,
and they're organized around...
Which means they're organized around
ideas about how you should behave
if you're a member of a
certain religious group,
how you should treat other people,
maybe ideas in the society
about how people of that
religious group should be treated.
So, centrally, in other words, ideas about
how you should behave,
and feel, and so on.
And in that, in some religious traditions
doctrinal questions may play a role.
But if you actually look at the...
And I should say, and
perhaps this is not something
I say in the book as clearly as one might,
it seems to me that a lot of the ways
in which people talk about
religion in the world today
are based on
the way in which the study of religion
in the academy developed.
And I think you can understand
it best by saying that
what happened was,
in the sort of social
sciences of religion,
was that people asked about
societies outside Europe,
what do they have instead of Christianity.
That was the question.
So they don't have Christianity.
What do they have instead?
Well, the trouble is that means
that you'll sort of
project out into the world
a way of thinking about religious life
that's actually specific
to one of the world's great traditions.
And in the history of Christianity,
questions of creed in
doctrine have been central.
That's true.
But that isn't true for large...
It's not true for...
It's not true for what we call Hinduism,
it's not true for the
traditional religions of Africa,
and so on.
It's not really true of Buddhism either.
And if Confucianism is a religion
and I don't really care
whether Confucianism
should be called a religion or not,
but if it is a religion, again,
it's not something in
which theological doctrine
plays almost any important role.
So, I don't think we need to
deny that there are religious traditions
in which belief is one of the
things people argue about.
Though, and this is the thought that I...
That was a parenthesis.
But actually the thought
that I started with,
which is that even if you look
at the history of Christianity
it's striking how widely divergent
interpretations have been
of what Christianity,
as doctrine, requires.
And while Christians
have fought each other
and killed each other over the millennia
over doctrinal questions,
even within a tradition people have often
interpreted doctrine in different ways.
So it can't be best to understand
what's at the heart of the
religious life of most people,
I think, in terms of their commitments
to sort of theological doctrine.
- Great.
So, if that's the lie about creed,
what is the lie that
we have about country?
- I think the easiest way to think about
what the lie about country is to say that
what happened with the rise of nationalism
in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries,
and then in the rest of the world
partly prompted by European empires,
was the spreading of a picture
of what a country was, what a nation was,
which was this body of people
who shared language,
traditions, religion, culture,
and because of that, needed a shared state
to express the commonality
that they already had.
The opposite is closer to the truth.
So far as there are bodies of people
who have shared culture, religion,
a language, above a certain size,
that's the result of
the existence of states,
not, as it were,
the precondition of the
existence of states.
So, in the late 19th century in France,
a third of the population
didn't speak French.
It was the product of the French state
to make everybody in France speak French.
In the 19th century, I
mean, we think of England,
and in fact, we think
of the British Isles,
as a domain in which
everybody speaks English.
Well, again, not a story in the book,
but when I went to university in England
at the age of 18,
across the hall from me was another person
who had also grown up in
England much of the time,
and I couldn't understand a word he said
because he spoke Geordie.
He was from Newcastle.
Or Newcastle as I said,
but he said Newcastle.
So, the idea that, as it were,
everybody in England could
understand each other
from the time of Shakespeare
on, that's just false.
So, again, what happened
in the 19th century?
The development of a national dialect
which was then strengthened
by the growth of radio
in the 20th century
when a normative form of the
British language was developed,
which was BBC English.
So, I think...
And of course, it's sort of
obvious to someone like me
who grew up in a place like Ghana.
I'm older than Ghana.
I was born before independence,
but I grew up there.
Where there were 80...
The government recognizes 80 languages.
We have all these different
political traditions.
I grew up in the capital of
a highly centralized state
that had been the head part of an empire
from the 18th century on
and was the heir to earlier
empires in the region.
But in the north of the country
there are people speaking
their own language,
10,000 of them,
in so-called acephalous societies,
societies without much
political organization,
hunter-gatherers and so
on, farmers, small farmers.
Very, very diverse in terms of
culture, traditions, language.
A lot of Muslims in the north.
A lot of Christians in the south.
A lot of not either Christians
or Muslims everywhere.
And so on.
Matrilineal family systems,
patrilineal family systems,
if you wanna go ethnographic.
So, very, very diverse.
And yet Ghana is a place.
And all these diverse people
have been brought together.
And their language, their
political language, English.
That's the product of
processes of state formation.
There wasn't an Asante.
There wasn't a Ghanaian nation there
waiting to express itself
through the Ghanaian state.
And this idea, it's of Hegel's idea.
Hegel's idea was that there
were these things called...
Each person was a member of a folk,
and history was about these folks
getting organized as states.
It's just empirically a
misunderstanding of how
the things we now call nations came to be.
- Yeah, so, you said acephalous,
so speaking of heads,
you talk about the head of
Medusa and the Medusa syndrome.
My ears sort of perked
up when I read about this
because Anthony talks about how,
when the state looks at you,
it freezes your identity.
So, it takes things that
are not fixed or rigid
and imposes its own fixity
and rigidity onto it.
Very similar to the vein
with which we started
this conversation, though,
you also say this may be faute de mieux,
something that we have to do.
And you use example of Singapore.
So could you talk a little bit about that,
of how Singapore looked out at its polity
and essentially engaged in
this form of nation building,
but at the end, Singapore
starts to look pretty good,
in your account,
as something that said,
we are gonna fix you
into certain identities,
but we're gonna do it
in a kind of intelligent
and thoughtful way.
- Just to say about the
thing I said before,
I'm in favor of Ghana.
So, I'm not against this process,
this process of, to some
extent, creation of identities.
I think it's necessary.
I mean, the simplest reason it's necessary
is because states have to
be communities of strangers,
and they have to do things together.
And you need some kind
of state-based identities
in order for me to care
about people in Alabama
that I'll never know, I'll never see.
I may even never go to Alabama,
though I'm happy to accept invitations.
(Professor Appiah laughing)
I haven't been yet.
But, Singapore.
Again, Singapore is a very young thing.
It's the product of its political
processes in the mid-60s.
It was supposed originally
to be part of Malaysia,
and for various reasons that didn't happen
so it ended up separate.
It had populations who were identified
by the colonial authorities
as Chinese, Malay, Indian,
and of course, other.
So, C, M, I, and O were the
sort of colonial categories.
And what the sort of political genius
who invented Singapore,
the first prime minister,
Lee Kuan Yew, realized
was that he couldn't create
a Singaporean identity
by suppressing all of those.
But he couldn't create
a Singaporean identity
that was based on any one of them
because if the majority were Chinese,
you couldn't make the Chinese
identity the official identity
because the Malays, and the Indians,
and the others, would be upset.
So what they did was they said
everybody gets one of these labels.
And we will oblige you--
And we will use English as
our government language.
But we will oblige every Chinese person,
every person who has a C
on their identity card,
we will raise them speaking
and writing Mandarin.
We will raise the Indians
writing and speaking Tamil
which was the majority language
of the Indians of Singapore
who mostly came from South India,
not from Hindu speaking North India.
And we'll take...
And we'll have Malay for the Malays.
And they will all learn
their own languages
and the national language,
English, in schools.
Now, you think it's obvious
that you should pick
Mandarin for the Chinese.
1% of the Chinese population of Singapore
spoke Mandarin in 1965.
Why did they pick
Chinese, Mandarin Chinese?
Well, because it was
the language of China,
not because it was the language
of the Chinese of Singapore.
This turned out to be a very
good idea because of course,
the second great trading language
of the world today is Chinese,
and they were a small port
in a major trading center.
But the prime minister of
Singapore himself, Lee Kuan Yew,
didn't speak Chinese until he was 30.
He learned it in order to go along
with this nation building project.
So Chineseness within Singapore
was created by the Singaporean state.
Lots of young...
It's not so true now
because time has passed,
but 20 years ago, a lot
of Chinese Singaporeans
couldn't speak to their grandparents
because their grandparents spoke Hokkien
or some other Chinese,
some other of the languages of China.
Same with Tamil now.
There's been lots of migration
in from South Asia into Singapore
and many of the people
who come in from elsewhere
are not from Tamil speaking areas,
but Tamil is the official
language of Indians in Singapore.
So, again, there are Indians in Singapore
who can't speak to their grandparents
because their grandparents
don't speak Tamil,
they speak some other Indian language.
The Malays are more fortunate
because they've been speaking...
Actually, the Malays
are not more fortunate
because though many of them
were speaking Malay all along,
they've also been speaking
another language's name
I'm blocking, which is not Malay.
So, again.
In other words, the official languages
of these ethnic groups of Singapore
were chosen and then enforced, as it were,
in a gentle way, I mean,
just by making them the
language of schools,
not by beating anybody.
And the result is they have a society
in which everybody sort of
has one of these things.
They also worked very hard
to be multicultural so they didn't...
For example, most of
the housing in Singapore
is government created.
And by law, the ratios
between C, M, and I,
in these big housing developments
have to correspond roughly
to their ratios in the population.
So in other words there's
forced residential integration.
Again, most people don't mind it.
It's not as if...
It doesn't feel oppressive,
I think, to most people.
They thought a lot about
what they were doing.
So, their way of handling diversity
was to create some official
forms of diversity,
tidy them up a lot,
and then also officially
insist upon mutual respect
and integration between the ethnicities.
And you do not want...
It's a serious criminal offense
to engage in attempts to
produce intergroup hostility in Singapore,
either on the basis of ethnicity or race,
or on the basis of religion.
And remember, just to
complicate the picture more
the Chinese Malays-- or Singaporeans,
are of course Protestant,
Buddhist, Confucian.
A significant proportion
of the Malays are Muslim.
Some of the Indians are Muslim.
Many of the Muslims are Hindu.
Catholicism, Anglicanism,
and Protestantism
are well represented.
And one of the national monuments
of Singapore is a synagogue.
So they have great religious diversity.
Again, you're allowed
to be whatever you want
in the domain of religion,
but you're not allowed to criticize
people of other religions.
So Protestant missionaries
from the United States
who say bad things about Muslims and so on
can get arrested and sent home.
- And there's avid citizen,
one thing that I didn't know
and learned from your book
is that there's avid citizen
reporting of intolerance.
- If you do one of those things,
the people will call the police and say,
I just heard this Protestant missionary
stigmatizing Muslims,
or I just heard this Muslim person
suggesting that all Christians should be,
you know, whatever.
So they do police themselves.
It's not exactly a liberal society,
but what it is is a society in
which, as far as I can tell,
most people think that
these arrangements are okay.
However, they've been so successful
that there's lots of interracial marriage
between these groups.
And the result of course is
that if it says C on your mother's ID card
and I on your father's,
you have to decide which.
You can't have both,
so you have to decide whether your child
will be raised speaking Mandarin or Tamil,
as well as English, and so on.
I mean, probably sensible
people these days
would pick Chinese just for trade reasons.
Anyway, so, I think
there's some, generally...
I didn't get the feeling...
I've only been there a little bit,
but I didn't get the feeling
that lots of people were
objecting to any of this.
And yet it is a perfect
instance of this Medusa syndrome
because the form ethnicity
now takes in Singapore
is essentially the product of
50 years of government work.
- I always get mixed up
about whether the Medusa...
I guess the basilisk
kills us when it looks us,
and Medusa kills us when we look at it.
Because they brought out
the head at the right time
maybe is the right way to frame it.
So, moving on to race.
In some ways, the lies about race are,
I think, most well understood
in conventional wisdom.
I don't know if you would agree with that.
But it seems like this notion
that there is a biological
racial essence is something that,
at least in progressive circles,
we understand and we've debunked.
So, I wanna use this topic
in order to jump off a little bit
to the idea of the 19th century
because this recurs like a through line
as kind of a drumbeat
throughout your book of
prior to the 19th century
we just didn't think about
racial identity in this way, you argue.
And this chapter, you earlier said
France didn't think of
itself as a nation state.
National identities
didn't exist in the way
we think of them today,
prior to the 19th century.
The first line of your book is,
"Until the middle of the 20th century,
"no one who was asked
about a person's identity
"would have mentioned race, class,
"nationality, religion, or region."
So, first of all, what's
going on temporally here
in the 19th century?
And then, prior to that time
what would they have mentioned instead?
How would prior
generations of human beings
have conceived of themselves
in relationship to others?
- So, the new thought...
Of course, you just have to
read the Torah or The Iliad
to see that people had lots
of names for kinds of people
from the very beginnings
of historical times.
That's not surprising.
And of course people distinguished
between men and women, very notably.
Again in these classical texts
the big issue is the difference
between men and women.
And people have been
aware of the distinction
between Christians, and Muslims, and Jews,
ever since there have been Muslims
and ever since there have
been Christians, and so on.
But the new thought is that
the state you belong to,
the religion you adhere to,
and your gender, are
things of the same kind.
That they're all these
things called identities.
So people knew that...
People had all sorts of
ways of categorizing people.
And they behaved similarly
to the ways they do behave.
But the thought that all of these
are things of the same kind
so that you can have a
general theory of identity,
you can say these are all alike,
that's actually a thought
that you do not find.
I looked.
You don't find it in social theory
before the Second World War, basically.
And in particular,
you do not find it
using the word identity.
There are ancestor ideas,
but the word identity is
first used for this thought
that all these things are
things of the same kind,
which is now so routine
that it doesn't even,
as it were, count as a thought.
It's just, of course.
But that's because we all
have acquired this concept.
- And how do you think that happened?
Because in some ways, Anthony,
as I'm just listening to you now
I think 1870 is a date that Foucault
assigns to the creation of the gay person.
Before that, same sex sexual
activity is just activity,
and then the sodomite becomes
a species, as he says,
in this famously precise date of 1870.
So, is that a generalizable claim?
Can we say that identities in general
became implanted in us
as kind of parallel tracks?
- I think it's...
As I say, I think the new thought is
the thought that these are
things of the same kind.
There are also new identities created,
new kinds of identity as well.
That's a separate topic.
So I don't mean to deny that people had
what we call identities in the past,
but they didn't think of
them in the way we do,
as it were, a bunch of,
a list of properties
of the central social properties
which were then going to be important
both for you, and for how
others responded to you.
Of course everybody in Elizabethan England
thought of themselves as men and women.
Well, almost everybody.
There's interesting kinds of
people in Elizabethan England
who are ancestors of some
of our trans people today.
But most people thought of
themselves as men and women.
It might not have occurred to them
that because I was a man
I should do something.
They might just have taken, as it were,
what the masculine
script was as just given.
And similarly, of course there were people
in Elizabethan England who
saw themselves as English.
But the idea of the British nation
as a thing you belonged
to and cared about,
that's essentially the product
of the early 19th century.
Linda Colley has argued it's essentially
a product of the Napoleonic Wars,
when Rule, Britannia! is written,
and for the first time, people think,
it's a really important fact about me.
And I think that...
Famously, Benedict Anderson
argued in his book on the nation
that one thing that's
happening in the 19th century,
to the nation,
and maybe this is connected with the rise
of these other forms of identification,
is one thing that's going on
is that more people are literate.
And what are they reading?
Well, the thing that everybody's reading
is kind of broadsheets and newspapers.
And what's in those?
Stories about what we are
doing, we Britons are doing.
We are discovering Lake
Victoria, we Britons.
We are beating the
Chinese in the Opium Wars.
We are spreading Christianity
in India and Africa.
That sense of identification
with a project
which you're not actually
participating in.
These people weren't missionaries,
they weren't discoverers,
they weren't explorers.
But they were relating to
the stories of those things
as us doing those things.
And I think a lot of
19th century nationalism
is the coalescence of that thought
that we are doing something.
And by the late 19th century,
in France and Germany,
in Italy and England,
the we is about the same
shape as it is today.
It's Italy, or Germany,
or France, or England.
But one has to remember
that Germany and Italy
are late 19th century
products, and before that...
And so, one of the interesting things
that happens in the early 19th century
in relation to the German speaking peoples
is that they do have a German we,
but it's not yet a state we
because there isn't a German state.
There's kind of memories of the empire,
the German Empire, but the First Reich.
So, I think in the 19th
century these things are...
I think it is connected
with the rise of distributed literacy,
the rise of large numbers
of literate people.
The people are sort of thinking,
they're reading stories about us.
Walter Scott, who's the most widely read
British writer of the early 19th century,
a lot of his stories are connected
with ideas about nationhood,
both Scotland, which
was where he was from...
So, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
is a collection of Scottish poems
which is important to Scottish identity.
But of course also a story like Ivanhoe
is about the creation of Englishness
out of Saxonness and
Normanness in the past.
So I think more people are reading.
They're reading stories
in which they identify
with other people as fellow nationals
in a way that I think
people didn't very much
in the 18th century in most places.
- Moving on to class.
When people talk about
correcting inequalities
in wealth, power, opportunity,
they often call for a meritocracy.
Yet the point you make in the
book in this chapter on class
is that the man who invented
the term meritocracy,
Michael Young, did so satirically,
and considered meritocracy to be dystopic.
- Yes.
- So, what did Young consider
to be the dangers of meritocracy?
And what should we put in its place?
- So, what he...
He's writing in the '50s
when he invents the word meritocracy
and a book with the word
meritocracy in the title.
He anticipated...
It's actually, if you read
it, it's rather brilliant.
It's set in the future
looking back over changes in
the class system in England,
which are actually more
or less the changes
that actually happened
after he wrote about them,
so it's kind of interesting
how prophetic it was.
And the worry is this.
That if you...
So, what's the idea of meritocracy?
He uses the slogan IQ plus effort.
You take, as it were, talent plus effort
and that's what your reward.
And the result is you get a society
in which everybody's
entitled to what they've got,
as opposed to the old
form of class society
in which people get what their class gets.
And so, upper class people
get an upper class life
independently of IQ and effort,
and very talented and
hardworking working class people
still have a thing to bump up against.
So, all right.
So, instead, you say we do
this with IQ and effort.
What happens?
Well, exactly what did happen.
There was more social mobility.
A new class develops.
The character of the class develops.
But two things happen,
and he anticipated both of them.
One is that
with the rise of gender equality,
men and women who rise to the top
end up getting together with each other.
And so, that increases the inequality
because in the old days
men who'd gotten up to the top by merit
didn't insist on...
Roughly speaking, successful
lawyers married secretaries.
They didn't marry lawyers.
Now they marry each other.
So that was one thing.
But the other thing that he
pointed out was inevitably said,
look, even if you're doing this,
you're creating forms of inequality
that will mean that people
have differential amounts
of social and cultural capital.
And what will they do with that?
Well, of course they'll use that
to guarantee that their children
enter into the privileges
of the upper class.
Even if they got there
themselves by merit,
they'll be working hard
to turn their children
into the kind of people
who have the properties
that will guarantee them success.
So, paradoxically the result of all this
is that you get to a situation where
intergenerational transfers of social,
social, financial, and cultural capital,
become to look just like they did
in the old Ancien Regime
that you thought you'd gotten rid of
when you got rid of the class society.
So, his thought was what's wrong
is not really how people
get into the different castes or classes.
It's the very idea of organizing people
in groups with these
structures of social status
where people at the top get all the honor
and the social rewards.
Not just the money, but
they get all the honor.
And people at the bottom
are told, and he does this
very well in the book,
they're told, look, you
have had every chance.
We are a meritocracy,
you're still at the bottom.
That must be where you're supposed to be.
And he thought that
once you saw that the
social rewards of money
reflect only one dimension
of people's capacities,
they reflect their capacity
to make an economic contribution,
which is fine.
But once you saw that people should be
properly assessed in many, many dimensions
you wouldn't want a society
which hoards all the respect
for the people who are also
hoarding all the money.
So he favored...
He didn't really say how we could do it,
and I don't think it's
clear how we can do it,
but we should be trying.
He favors a social system which
recognized many different...
It was pluralistic in its forms of honor.
It recognized many different
kinds of excellence,
including the kind of excellence
that produces economic success
in our kind of society.
But he thought that we were...
And that's exactly
what's happened, I think.
I mean, it's not exactly what's happened.
But a lot of what's happened is
we've gotten to this system where
all the social rewards, not just money,
are kind of piled into a
small group at the top.
And that group is able to
use its very significant
advantages in money, and
social, and cultural capital
to secure for its children
succession into that status.
And so, you've got a lot of these things
that look like castes.
That's a bit stronger than
the data actually suggests.
I mean, there is more...
There is still interlevel
mobility in our system.
But much less than I think
you would have predicted
if you cared about the thing
that the meritocrats cared about.
- Yeah, I mean, there are actually
at least two things that
you're saying there, I think.
I mean, one is a moral licensing point
where if we say, like, oh, we,
this is a pure meritocracy,
so devil take the hindmost.
If you find yourself at the bottom
you've only yourself to blame.
There's a great study about organizations
that say the organizations that believe
they're the most meritocratic
in fact are the most riven with bias
because they've become complacent about
all the forms of inequity that can arise.
The other thing that you're saying--
- Sorry, just to say.
So, I don't want to,
and Young didn't want to suggest
that the forms of merit
that our system recognizes
are actually the ones that
are announced as being.
He understood that there
was lots of prejudice,
and bias, and so on in the system
and that it wasn't true that
this so-called meritocracy
was in fact operating by
the advertised standards.
That's also a problem.
But his point was, even if it
had, there'd be this problem
that you'd be generating
forms of hierarchy of status
that are inessential, you
don't have to have them,
and they damage the people at the bottom,
and they presuppose that
there's only, as it were,
one way of making a contribution.
- Would this be cured if we
level set every generation?
So if we barred intergenerational
transfers of wealth and honor?
Or is it probably gonna be--
- Well,
I think you don't want...
I mean...
I know what Young would say.
Young would say the solution
is not to have single hierarchies.
It's not to abandon the idea
that some people are better
at things than others.
It's to recognize that
there are many things
that people are good at,
and that the people who
are good at some of them
are also bad at others,
and the people who are bad at those
might be good at something else.
I do think that on the financial side,
meritocracy,
the official meritocratic
theory doesn't explain
why it is that we're allowed
to transfer money, at least,
to the next generation.
Because the official meritocratic theory
is that we have these forms
of differential rewards
in order to incentivize things,
and it's hard to see...
So, it's fine to incentivize you,
but it's not clear why we should be
allowing you to give
your children bump ups
since that doesn't incentivize them.
Of course, somebody could
say it incentivizes you,
and that is one of the main reasons
people start accumulating
money beyond a certain point.
So I think it's not
clear why we should allow
intergenerational transfers of wealth
on the meritocratic theory.
On the honor front, though,
the problem is we don't know
how to control transfers of that sort.
Status and honor are very, very hard to
interfere with through...
I mean, we do it through social movements.
One of the things about, say, LGBTQ
social movements over
the course of my lifetime
is that they have,
they've succeeded in removing dishonor
from the status of homosexuals,
to a significant degree.
So, we can do it.
But it's very hard, as
we know in that case.
And I think that
the key thing is that you can stop
the kind of hereditary transfers of honor
that happen in an aristocracy.
You can stop it being the case
that just because I came
out of the uterus of
a duchess, I get high.
But you can't stop the
duchess getting me a tutor
who gives me cultural capital
that people who don't have tutors...
I mean, you can stop that,
but imagine what that would involve
in terms of interference in family life.
So, it's not just that...
You can do something to stop
hereditary status transfers,
but you can't stop people using
the mechanisms of cultural
and social capital.
We have these things...
I think,
what's his name, the French...
Bourdieu exaggerates the
extent to which this is true,
but it is true that there are things
that people in the upper
echelons of societies
teach their children to do
which are just marks of distinction.
They have no function
except to mark distinction.
It used to be if you
were up for consideration
for a fellowship at All Souls College
you had to demonstrate that you knew
how to eat peas with a fork.
This is not a mark of
intellectual distinction.
It's not even very challenging.
(audience chuckling)
It's just a question of
whether you happen to know
how you're supposed to do it.
And that sort of distinction
can be used by people
to do the in-out thing for their children,
to keep their children
in and other people out.
So I think
that the key insight in the Young book
is that...
Is that people love their children,
and they'll do lots of things.
If you give them any social mechanism
for advancing their children
over other people's children,
they'll use it.
As I say in the book,
nothing wrong with loving your children.
I don't mean to elide that.
But we do need to organize
society in such a way
that people's love for their children
doesn't allow them to
gain for their children
advantages over others to
which they're not entitled.
- Yeah, such as photoshopping
them into water polo photos.
- Exactly.
(audience chuckling)
I'm glad to say that that's illegal.
(Anthony laughing)
- I know, but I can't resist saying it.
So, a couple of things on this.
I mean, one is he mentioned Michael Young.
And one of the wonderful kind of
expository gifts of this book
is that each chapter has
a particular avatar figure
who represents the identity in question.
We don't have time to sort
of multiply examples here,
but it's one of the things
that makes the book so readable
because you're following
along a person's story.
And Michael Young's has
a particularly ironic end
which I'll leave you to read.
Okay, you, at the end, and
this is my last question
so please hand your questions in
to our helpers who are wandering around,
and we'll start taking them after this.
The end of the book is
really with culture,
the last substantive chapter, I'll say.
There's a coda afterwards.
And you're quite stern there.
I mean, you take a turn
towards being much more
kind of prescriptive.
And you say you wanna
give up the very idea
of western civilization all together.
So, with all these other identities
you have a kind of mend
it don't end it attitude.
Here it's really just
shut this thing down.
So can you say a little bit more
about why western civilization is a lie
and what we should replace it with?
(audience laughing)
- You could think it was a lie
for the reason that Gandhi
is supposed to have...
He didn't actually say this.
But is supposed to have
thought it was a lie.
He was asked, what do you
think of western civilization,
and he said, it would be a very good idea
if the west could get civilized.
(audience chuckling)
But no, the problem is this.
The idea of western
civilization, which, again,
it's actually not even a
19th century invention.
Our modern idea of western civilization
is essentially a post-First
World War construction.
And it was created for a
perfectly honorable purpose,
which was to unite, reunite Europe
after the astonishingly fierce
and unpleasant divisions
of the First World War.
And the idea was to point
back to these things
that everybody had in common.
So, first,
the things that are supposed to be
the monuments of this tradition
are all things which
were substantially shaped
by things that are
officially outside the west.
We get the so-called
western classical heritage
back to us, in part,
in part from the Arabs
who were the best Aristotelians
during the European Dark Ages.
So that's one problem.
One problem is
the things that we care about
are not actually things
that were only made by...
Some of the most important
recent discoveries of
classical Greek texts
have come from looking in
the libraries of Timbuktu
which turns out to have been
a place in which some classical texts
which didn't survive in Europe, survived.
And everybody knows the same,
similar things happened with
some of the libraries of Ireland.
Which is a very peripheral
country in Europe, by the way.
Sorry to the Irish descended
people in the room.
So that's one problem.
One problem is that it's not western.
Second problem is that
I think the story of western civilization
suggests that Aristotle, Saint Thomas,
and Elizabeth Anscombe,
are, as it were, important
explanatory variables
in explaining the history of Europe.
And this is nonsense.
Most of the history of Europe,
most people in Europe had no
idea about any of these people.
Most of them couldn't
read most of that time.
It is true that classical philosophy,
Platonism and Aristotelianism
were important
for the development of Christian theology.
But Christian theology wasn't
important to most Christians
because most Christians couldn't read,
and couldn't have understood it,
and the debates were going on in Latin,
which is a language that
none of the people knew.
It's taking seriously as a kind
of core of European history
something that just
cannot bear the weight,
the explanatory weight.
It's ascribing to Europe an essence
that's this high grade intellectual stuff.
And that's just not...
That's bad anthropology, it's bad history,
and it gets things wrong.
Finally, the idea of western civilization
was put together in part
to celebrate good things,
democracy, science, and so on.
- Matthew Arnold.
- Matthew Arnold.
And the trouble is that
there are no democracies
in Europe, essentially,
before the 19th century.
And arguably there were
none in the 19th century
because women didn't get
the vote anywhere in...
Well, they didn't...
In England, and France,
and Germany, and Italy,
women didn't get the vote.
The suffrage was anyway limited among men,
to people with property
qualifications in many places.
So, if a democracy is a society
in which you have adult...
Shared responsibility among adults
for the life of the
society, there were no...
So, if democracy is part of
the inheritance of the west
it's a funny kind of inheritance
because it didn't exist in the west
throughout the whole of this long history.
It's true that the word democracy
was coined in classical Athens.
But it wasn't coined to describe
what we mean by democracy,
because it excluded women
and it omitted the existence of slaves.
And again, science.
Science as the core of the west, well,
God, I mean,
how many...
Just think about global warming
and ask whether you think that
there's something about being western
that makes you naturally inclined
to believe the best science
of your day about that.
So again, I think...
And the problem with that thought is that
instead of seeing science and democracy
as achievements which
have to be struggled for,
they're seen as inheritances
that you're just guaranteed
by stamping yourself
with the western stamp.
That gets in the way of
science and democracy
rather than advancing them.
And if you claim science
and democracy for the west,
what are the people of Africa, and Asia,
and everywhere else
supposed to say about them?
I mean, are they supposed
to say, okay, good,
democracy's western, we don't
have to bother with that?
Science is western, we don't
have to bother with that.
We'll do our own thing,
thank you very much.
What's good about science...
It's not true that science
was exclusively developed
in the west, in Western Europe.
But even if it had been,
if there's anything good about it
it isn't because it was
developed in the west.
It's because it's full of good ideas.
And the good ideas should be
shared widely around the world,
if they're good ideas.
And if they're bad ideas they
shouldn't be used in Europe.
- There's a funny resonance
with the class chapter too
because Michael Young would have
probably disapproved
of western civilization
if only on the grounds
that you're inheriting it
rather than working.
- Yes.
The idea that you've gotta...
The idea is...
The things that people talk about
under the rubric of western civilization
are, many of them, things that I love.
That my Ghanaian father loved them too.
My Ghanaian father had the Bible
and Marcus Aurelius on his bedside table.
Those were his two books.
And if you wanted to
talk to him about things
you ended up having to discuss
what Cicero said about them
because he was raised
with a normal high class
imperial British education,
and so he thought about things...
One of the things he used to say
about the city I grew up in, his city,
the city where he was born, Kumasi, was,
like Rome, he used to say,
we are built on seven hills.
(Professor Appiah chuckling)
I mean, he imagined his own society
through the Romans and the Greeks
in exactly the way that lots
of people around the world did,
but not because he was western.
And he didn't admire Marcus Aurelius
because Marcus Aurelius
belonged to him as a westerner.
He admired Marcus Aurelius
because Marcus Aurelius
had some awfully good ideas, he thought.
And I agree with him.
Marcus Aurelius is one of
the great cosmopolitans,
for one thing.
- We've got some great questions.
I'm gonna bundle two of these together
because they both have to do
with gender and gender identity.
I think it's an interesting
decision in your book
not to discuss gender,
so if you could speak to that
as well, that would be great.
But here's one.
Significant percentages of people today
are rejecting binary gender categories.
Since gender is such a powerful identity,
what are the implications
within your frame of thinking?
Is this good, bad, or neutral?
And then the other is in a similar vein.
Do you think our understanding of identity
is becoming more fluid these days
as our understanding of
gender or gender identity is?
Or are we just becoming
more aware as a society
of the lies of identity?
- Just in defense of
what I did in the book,
the book started out as some lectures.
In the lectures I discussed
a lot about gender
in the religion chapter.
I didn't talk about that here,
but a lot of it was about showing
that once you understood religion
correctly, not in terms of doctrine,
you could see the claims
made about what religions,
particular religious traditions
had to do about gender
were just essentialist nonsense.
The argument that because it
says somewhere in the Qur'an
that women get a lesser share than men,
of the estates than men,
that somehow Islam was eternally committed
to gender inequality.
That's just a way of thinking
about the role of these texts
in religious traditions
that is not founded in
what actually goes in.
In 1900 you would not have guessed
that there would be women rabbis
in Jewish tradition by the 1930s,
and there were by 1930, by 1935.
You would not have guessed that
the Anglican Communion
in the United States
would have had its top bishop be a woman,
because you wouldn't have thought
that there would have been
any Anglican priests, let alone bishops.
So, anyway.
And the other thing is that
in the first chapter,
which is the sort of
theory laying chapter,
I used gender as my main example
because feminist philosophy
has just done so much
to give us the tools for
thinking about identity.
And it seemed to me that gender
was the right paradigm topic.
So, now, to answer the questions.
I think that...
One of the arguments of the book
is that it's not up to me to decide
what's going to happen in these domains,
or you, or the questioner.
We are going to have to
figure it all out together.
And we, together, are going to have to--
And what we're going to figure
out in the domain of gender
is going to have to depend
on trying to reshape it
in ways that fit for everybody.
It has to work for everybody.
Gender did not work for everybody
as it was configured when I was a child.
We've done a lot of work,
and it's been reconfigured in ways
that mean that it sits more
lightly on more people,
and that's great.
But non-binary people and
trans people are making us see
that it isn't configured
adequately yet for everybody.
But it has to work for everybody.
We can't, as it were,
just make it work
perfectly for trans people
but leave everybody else uncertain
about how to think about their gender
or what to do with their gender.
It has to work for all of us.
I'm mostly in favor of the
changes that are going on
because they're in response
to claims made by people
who say it's not working for
me and I'd like these changes.
And since the changes they're
asking for don't do me...
Don't make my gender not work for me,
I don't see how I could possibly
reasonably object to that.
People make up things,
and maybe people genuinely feel threatened
by mixed bathrooms
where different classes of people
from the past are allowed to enter.
I think that's just a matter
of getting used to things,
and it won't take most people very long.
And if it does take somebody a long time
it will be because
they're rigidly holding
out for the old ways.
But another sort of set
of arguments in the book,
or suggestions in the book,
is in relation to the second question,
that it is important, I think,
that one of the things that's going on,
now that we see that these identities
are things we make together,
we can also see that
they don't need to be so
heavily policed and
imposed upon everybody,
though, as I said,
I don't think that means we
need to give them up altogether.
We don't need to have...
So that means you can't have no policing
because it's only the fact that
there are things you
can't do with an identity
that gives it a content.
The constraints, it's a
familiar thought for lawyers,
that constraints are what
liberate us in the end.
That we need to have structures
within which to make our lives.
But they need to be structures
that work for everybody.
And they will never work
for absolutely everybody
so a little bit of
flexibility in all of them
increases the probability
that for the people who,
for one reason or another,
something isn't working
will be able at least to find
a decent place in the system.
If you make the system
rigid and inflexible,
and police it heavily,
then the people who
don't fit into it will be
oppressed.
- What about, and this goes to
a question about human nature
that I wanna make part
of this conversation.
So, it says, in discussing meritocracies
and possible alternatives
a a major problem is that
humans naturally fall into hierarchies,
and they seem to organize their societies
based on the passing
of capital to children.
So are you not fighting
basic human nature?
So, you've talked about sort
of enabling constraints.
But we might also think
about the constraints of,
say, wanting to favor my own children.
I actually think there's a
lot of social science about
that human desire to
classify and to essentialize.
So you are really against essentialism,
but isn't it just human
nature to essentialize?
How do we deal with
these sort of brute facts
of what we might call human nature?
Even if we don't, if we evacuate that
of any kind of biological content,
what do we do with these tendencies
that we see repeatedly
expressing themselves?
- And in the first chapter,
on the classification chapter,
I do talk about some
of that social science
and about the ways in which children,
pretty much unprompted,
will generate essentializing
categories of people.
They need some input,
but whatever input you give them
they're going to essentialize something.
So, one thing is to know that
and to think about how,
since the essentialization
usually involves error,
we can, as we grow,
come to recognize the errors
that we spontaneously fall into
and try to avoid them.
In terms of hierarchy, yes.
Again, as the author of a book on honor
which defended the idea of honor,
I'm not against hierarchies.
But I think that hierarchies
have to meet two conditions
if they're not to be very bad for society.
One is that they have to be diverse.
That is to say there
have to be hierarchies
organized around different values.
If you organize all the hierarchies
together into one system
it just means that there are people
who every day are going to be thinking
I'm at the bottom of this,
and I'm at the bottom of that,
and I'm at the bottom of...
And other people who are going
to be wandering around saying
I'm at the top of this,
and I'm at the top of that,
(mumbling)
That might be okay for the people
who are saying they're at the top
but it's horrible for most people
who are not gonna be at the
top or anywhere near it.
So I think we need a
diversity of hierarchies.
Also I think we should
wear them with a lightness,
more lightly,
just as we should perhaps wear
our identities more lightly.
It's great to be a
terrific basketball player,
but it's not, you know...
There are other things that are great,
and basketball isn't the most
important human activity,
and so on.
The same is true of novels.
Novels are wonderful, it's
great to be a great novelist,
but novels aren't the most
important thing humans do
so, you know, calm down.
(audience chuckling)
So I think we...
Oh, and the second point of that,
the sort of conceptual point is
hierarchies need to be organized
around values we can endorse.
And the question whether
having the good fortune
to be someone who happens
to have, and have developed,
skills that are highly financially
rewarded in your society
is the sort of thing that we should
organize hierarchies of respect around
is a question we ought to discuss.
You're already getting lots
more money than everybody else
in that system.
It's not clear to me that
we owe you honor as well.
So I think we need to think about...
I think we over honor wealth,
I think we over honor
celebrity in the movies,
we over honor sports celebrity, I think.
But these are topics we can talk about,
I mean, we should have
conversations about.
So we've gotta be
organizing hierarchies
around the right things,
and we've gotta have lots of hierarchies.
And none of the hierarchies
should be organized in such a way
as to impose upon the
people at the bottom of them
conditions under which they can't
maintain their self-respect.
We need to maintain the
Rawlsian ideal of a society
that guarantees the social basis
of self-respect to everybody.
And any forms of hierarchy
that don't allow for that
need to be combated.
- We're almost out of time,
so I'm gonna close after saying this.
We have several questions
which I encourage you to...
I'll give to Anthony and you should
feel free to speak to him afterwards
about how to solve particular
practical problems in our polity
in an age of huge nationalism.
I got a question about
what would you advise we do about Brexit,
you know, how does this
book help solve Brexit.
I actually steered
clear of those questions
in preparing my own remarks
because I think in some ways this,
it diminishes, in my mind,
the real accomplishment of the book.
But I do think that the book goes,
which is timeless and not bound
to any particular controversy.
But I'd like to end by reading the quote
at the end of the book
because I think, Anthony,
if I were to sum up your oeuvre,
I don't think it can be summed up,
but if I were put to that task I would say
just kind of relax about your identities.
Lower the temperature on these
different identities that you hold
and try to raise the salience
of our common humanity,
I take to be one of the
throughlines from Cosmopolitan,
really from The Ethics of
Identity, to this book.
And so the last line, really
penultimate line, rather,
of the book is from the dramatist Terence
where he says, "I am human.
"I think nothing human alien to me."
And the last line of the book is,
"Now there's an identity
that should bind us all."
I'd like you to join me in
thanking Professor Appiah.
(audience applauding)
