Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism
Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lovely essay on cosmopolitanism in the NYT Magazine is mandatory reading. It was very heartening, even a little exciting, to find that there was almost no point on which I disagreed with Appiah. He has lucidly articulated what I think grown-ups ought think about the complex pluralism of a globalized world.
Some highlights:
When people talk of the homogeneity produced by globalization, what they are talking about is this [small, traditional African village]: Even here, the villagers will have radios (though the language will be local); you will be able to get a discussion going about Ronaldo, Mike Tyson or Tupac; and you will probably be able to find a bottle of Guinness or Coca-Cola (as well as of Star or Club, Ghana’s own fine lagers). But has access to these things made the place more homogeneous or less? And what can you tell about people’s souls from the fact that they drink Coca-Cola?
. . .
Human variety matters, cosmopolitans think, because people are entitled to options . . . [quotes Mill's On Liberty re: the need for a plurality of "moral climates"] . . . If we want to preserve a wide range of human conditions because it allows free people the best chance to make their own lives, we can’t enforce diversity by trapping people within differences they long to escape.
On cultural authenticity:
[T]rying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. The textiles most people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as Java prints; they arrived in the 19th century with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled, by the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women in Namibia derives from the attire of 19th-century German missionaries, though it is still unmistakably Herero, not least because the fabrics used have a distinctly un-Lutheran range of colors. And so with our kente cloth: the silk was always imported, traded by Europeans, produced in Asia. This tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Should we condemn the young men and women of the University of Science and Technology, a few miles outside Kumasi, who wear European-style gowns for graduation, lined with kente strips (as they do now at Howard and Morehouse, too)? Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren’t authentic; they’re just dead.
Earlier, on the same note:
Talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions.
Appiah’s discussion of the interpretive power of cultural consumers could have come straight our of Reason:
Dutch viewers of “Dallas” saw not the pleasures of conspicuous consumption among the superrich - the message that theorists of “cultural imperialism” find in every episode - but a reminder that money and power don’t protect you from tragedy. Israeli Arabs saw a program that confirmed that women abused by their husbands should return to their fathers. Mexican telenovelas remind Ghanaian women that, where sex is at issue, men are not to be trusted. If the telenovelas tried to tell them otherwise, they wouldn’t believe it.
Talk of cultural imperialism “structuring the consciousnesses” of those in the periphery treats people like Sipho as blank slates on which global capitalism’s moving finger writes its message, leaving behind another cultural automaton as it moves on. It is deeply condescending. And it isn’t true.
I can’t quote the whole thing, but it deserves your attention. Appiah’s account of tolerance not as “understanding” but simply as “getting used to” differences is also illuminating.
Appiah’s essay led me to reflect on the relationship between my libertarianism and my cosmopolitan liberalism. I became a cosmopolitan liberal because I was a libertarian first. I believe that if you lay enough weight on the natural human liberty to exchange, the moral significance of national boundaries dissipates, and cultural mixing will be seen as an inevitable consequence of people jointly satsifying their preferences through conversation and trade. But I have since met some puzzlingly anti-cosmopolitan libertarians. If I had to choose between pushing a button that would make the U.S. government 75% smaller, or pushing a button that would end the oppression of women the world over, for example, I’d choose the latter without a millisecond’s hesitation. I was astonished when I first discovered that there are strangely nationalistic “libertarians” who would push the smaller-US-government button instead. That is, I think, a regrettable sign of moral immaturity or brokenness.
In some sense, my cosmolitan liberalism, though initially motivated by my libertarianism, has taken precedence in my own philosophy. However, I stick to my libertarian guns largely because I believe that cosmopolitan liberalism demands it. My “Understanding Political Libertarianism” essay I think makes that case pretty well.
January 6th, 2006 18:44
Will,
Do you think it is at all acceptable to put more importance on the health of one’s country than on the health of other countries? I imagine you do. What general principle do you accept for guidance in such thought experiments? Does the benefit to other countries have to be MUCH greater than the benefit to the country you live in, in order for it to be unacceptable to chose push the button that benefits your country over the rest. Or does it just have to be somewhat greater?
January 6th, 2006 20:43
All the enslaved and oppressed women in the world aren’t a country. My point was that the denial of basic rights to a large portion of the earth’s population is of an entirely different order of moral significance than a large benefit to a society where most basic rights are already well-protected. Free a slave or give an already free person a billion dollars? Same kind of thing.
January 6th, 2006 22:20
Right. All the enslaved and oppressed women in the world aren’t a country. I guess I don’t know why I focused on countries in my question…Maybe it was because your thought experiment partly focuses on a certain kind of nationalist preference. And nationalist preferences have to do with countries…?
Anyway, I’m really just interested where you are nowadays with the whole weighing the interests of others against your own interests, and weighing the interests of your country against those of other countries. (I can remember a time when you might have pressed the other button…) This thought experiment of yours just made me wodner about that.
And, for the record, I would push the same button that you push, without a doubt. It’s more important to me that women aren’t enslaved or oppressed. So I’m not coming from a place of criticism in any way, just a place of curiousity.
January 6th, 2006 22:54
I’m afraid I’d have to push the 75% Smaller Button. The 75% Smaller Button would have substantial benefits for me, every single family member within 3 generations, and almost every friend I’ve ever had (a few are Canadian). Ending the oppression of women is a terrific and valuable thing to strive for, don’t get me wrong, but I support what helps me, my family, and my friends first.
- Josh
January 7th, 2006 22:41
Just curious didn’t Apphia used to be a Post Modernist or something like that?
January 8th, 2006 03:20
Will,
I realize that you might be finished responding to comments about this post. But I feel like giving it one more try here. Here goes…
The more I think about your response, the more curious I am about your current view about what the correct moral theory is. It sounds like you would chose to free a slave over getting a billion dollars AND that you think freeing the slave is the moral thing to do. That is a SERIOUSLY non-egoistic attitude, both in terms of personal and moral values. I’m assuming that you think that it’s appropriate, or at least acceptable, to be somewhat egoistic. But I’m wondering just how non-egoistic you are nowadays…
So how about this one: Say you have another two buttons. Pushing one gives you and all of your loved ones VERY happy and VERY long lives. The other one frees one slave. Which one do you pick? And do you think it’s morally unacceptable to pick either one?
January 8th, 2006 13:24
Luka,
Not that I would presume to speak for anyone else, but I’m not sure that having the preference of freeing the slave would be non-egoistic. One’s life with a million dollars may not be so happy if one knows that its achievement was dependant on keeping someone in slavery.
January 8th, 2006 13:40
In breaking the spirit of the thing, a billion dollars can probably be used to free significantly more than one slave. Ending ‘the oppression’ of women the world over would include unoppressing those women being oppressed by an overlarge US government and might well entail reducing that government by 75%.
January 8th, 2006 14:59
See why thought experiments like this are always less useful than you think they’ll be!
Luka, I’m not sure there is such a thing as the correct moral theory. There is, I believe, correct moral behavior, but it is not well-described by a theory, any more than a “theory of wines” will describe, in advance of experience, which wines will be the best. The more contextualistic one’s moral non-theory becomes, the less useful abstractly specified thought experiments are bound to be, because almost all the relevant information is in the “omitted measurements.” Even if we have identical moral sensibilities, our response to an abstractly characterized situation will differ depending on how our minds (probably subconsciously) have filled in some of the details.
How’s that for not actually answering your question.
OK. . . If I have a theory, it is something like Schmidtz’s moral dualism. There is an egoistic, self-centered component to morality. But then there is also a social, coordinative component, which requires limiting self-interest locally in some ways to enable an overall pattern of cooperative interaction that tends to advance each person’s global self-interest. Some dispositions, practices, and virtues, are more geared toward optimizing the mutually advantageous cooperative pattern. When these become internalized into one’s identity, the tension between “self-interest” and “morality” are reduced, since “altruistic” dispositions will have been brought inside the agent’s conception of the “self” and it’s “interest.”
January 8th, 2006 16:01
Michael,
You’re right that one’s life might not be so happy if they chose to take the billion dollars over freeing the slave. There are a few things to say about this, actually, though.
I think there are plenty of people that would be able to be happier if they pushed the billion dollar button than the free-the-slave one. For them, at least, it would be in their self-interest to take the money.
Also, I actually think that many of us have enough money to free a slave right now. It’s my impression that one can go over to the far east and buy a sex slave and then set them free. I seem to remember reading part of some NYT series on that last year. I don’t know how much that would cost, but it seems that for many people, it wouldn’t hurt them financially very much. And if they are willing to forgo a billion dollars to free the slave, then it seems they should be willing to give up a MUCH smaller chunk of money to free a slave. Especially if giving up the money won’t negatively affect their financial stading in any significant way. BUT I would guess that more people are willing to say that they would forgo the billion dollars than are willing to spend a few thousand (or whatever) to free a sex slave in asia. I think that’s interesting. And I wonder why exactly that is. (I mean, I can think of some explanations. But I have no real idea which is the best one.)
Lastly, I think we can change the thought experiment such that if you press the button that gives you the money you are also given a pill that erases your knowledge of the slave. That way you get all the money and none of the guilt. Now THAT would almost certainly be the egoistic choice. But I imagine that changing the situation in that way would NOT change Will’s choice or his judgment that pressing the billion dollar button is morally unacceptable.
January 8th, 2006 17:17
Thanks Will! That’s interesting. I have some pretty strong intuitions against the first part of your comment, the part about there not being a correct moral theory. But I’ll have to think more about that.
And you’ve mentioned Schmidtz’s theory before, I think. I’ll have to actually read that book where he discusses it. Sounds like a theory I might be interested in accepting.
January 10th, 2006 14:03
Odd how Will’s example of “free a slave or *give* a free man a billion dolalrs” morphed into “free a slave or *get* a billion dollars.” Will was comparing benefits-to-others, in my view quite rightly; it then got flipped into typically Randian stuff about egoism.
[Messy facts about the world: the buy-a-slave-to-free-him-or-her has some unpleaant dynamic effects that should be apparent to libertarians who pride themselves in thinking in economic terms.]
For what it’s worth, I travelled much the same path as Will, and have ended up in mich the same place– and, like him, view the thought experiment as offering a ridiculously easy choice.
Note that the economic benefit to any one person of a 75% reduction in the size of the U.S. government is of the order of magnitude of thousands of dollars per year, not millions. And ending the oppression of women worldwide means, among other things, moving at least hundreds of millions of human beings out of borderline-slavery situations including not only sex slavery but also coerced, child, and violent marriages. This is surely ridiculously easier than the billion-dollars-vs.-one-slave equation. Anyone opting for the U.S. gov’t reduction on self-interested grounds would be morally deficient; but anyone opting for it on nationalistic grounds is morally very strange, since willing to choose lesser-benefit-for-fewer-others over greater-benefit-for-more-others.
January 10th, 2006 17:30
Jacob,
I was the one who morphed things into a free-a-slave-or-get-a-billion-dollars situation, I think. But I don’t think that there is anything especially Randian about my doing so. I’m not a Randian. I used to be. But here I’m just wondering about what Will’s (and others’) views are about how much more weight an agent can give his self-interest. I assume that Will would not give infinite weight to his self-interests, as a Randian would. But I imagine that he thinks it’s okay to give some more weight to one’s self-interest than to others’. (His comment about Schmidtz’s view seems to confirm this.)
I thinkg it is okay to give more weight to one’s self-interest. And I think it’s an interesting project to figure out how much more weight we can, morally speaking, give our interests over those of others. (Separately, I think it’s interesting to see how much weight a person puts on his self-interest, apart from his moral views.) That’s why I changed the course of the discussion a bit. I mean, giving some stranger, who is basically a free person,a billion dollars over freeing some other person, you don’t know, from slavery, IS a no-brainer. I think setting the situation up so that one has to weigh ONE’S self-interest against those of the slave is a bit more interesting.
Finally, good point about the messy facts about the world. But an interesting thing, I think, is that most people who would not take the billion dollars over freeing the slave do not think in economic terms. So, their not going about freeing a slave every once in awhile might still tell us something about their view about morality. And again, I think that could be interesting (and useful).
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