I earlier said I'd try to say something about Appiah's essay last weekend in the NY Times on cosmopolitanism and "the case for contamination." I'm late on this, as usual. But it's worth mentioning a few things since, although a bit muddled I think, Appiah's essay gets at two things: 1. one of the most salient political theory debates, or set of debates, of the past couple of decades; and 2. a very real challenge for policy and simply living in a globalizing world.
Appiah sets out a view that's not new. It's a pragmatic form of cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the fact and importance of value pluralism and philosophical and everyday fallibilism. In other words, we live in a world of plural values and cultures and individual beliefs. Our knowledge and understanding of what we call truth or reason or good and bad is qualified by the reality that we can never know the content of these terms absolutely. The world is one of change, and human individuals, societies, and cultures are not excluded from this change. Knowledge is provisional, imperfect, and at its best ever-revisable (a classically pragmatist claim). I say "at its best" because sometimes our ways of knowing no longer fit the realities of the world and we might attempt to hold onto various defunct beliefs and "truths" in light of evidence to the contrary. Charles S. Peirce called this way of "fixing belief," the "method of tenacity." A contemporary example is found with proponents of intelligent design. A world without a master creator has no meaning for such people. But the explanation doesn't explain anything but their own tenacity in holding on to a set of religious beliefs that evidence cannot prove. One simply posits the existence of the master designer a priori, then looks around for ways to justify this belief and to convince others.
The present state of things could have been otherwise. Historical, cultural, and physical contingencies bring us to where we are at present. Absolutist accounts of human being and culture are therefore attempts to deny the evolutionary reality of the world. What we are thus better off trying to get at are not universal truths, absolute certainty, and pure reason, but better ways of dealing with the world and with each other where "better" cannot be fully defined in advance of actual lived - and contingency-laden - experience.
Appiah's claim is a cultural one. He suggests that rather than try to preserve cultures as somehow static entities, as fundamentalists of all stripes are wont to do, we ought to praise the cross-breeding "contamination" of cultures as both a historical reality and an ideal. That's the gist of his essay. It's pretty well-known that cross-cultural exchanges have historically bred new cultures and further exchanges. But what of the normative claim? That we ought to take up the cause of contamination? For Appiah, this would help us get in a better relation with those others we deal with in increasingly intimate ways in a globalizing world of value pluralism.
Now, there's nothing extraordinary about this claim. Appiah traces the general cosmopolitan view to Diogenes in the 4th Century, and admires Rushdie's recent work (see my earlier essay on Rushdie here). But it goes further back, arguably to Socrates, and is taken up by various thinkers throughout the history of philosophy in various ways - Cicero, Epictetus, Plutarch, Zeno of Citium, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Franklin, Mill, Royce, Dewey, and others. At various periods in history the world has seemed as encroaching as it does to us in the age of globalization. The Stoics made precisely this observation. We do so today through the very use of the term "globalization," which usually means more than simply economic liberalization. In other words, I find Appiah's essay not terribly ground-breaking.
16 comments:
This is an endlessly interesting theoretical question, whether there is some kind of identity that transcends local barriers, and to what degree it might be thought of as "authentic," as opposed to being a luxury with overtones of exploitation. At the same time, it is interesting that the same level of energy rarely goes into interrogating the authoritarian versions of identity that are imposed in localities, at least outside of those localities.
At one point I consulted the Great Soviet Encyclopedia on the question of "cosmopolitanism," which advised me that it should not be confused with proletarian internationalism. The terminology is a bit limiting, but I have never been able to avoid the sense that they were onto something all the same.
Right on, Eric. And I agree that the language doesn't suffice. We're grappling around for a new language that fits our variegated situation. The classic problem is that cosmopolitanism tends to be a position of the privileged. In fact, Appiah starts off his essay talking about his family's royal ancestry in Ghana. That cuts two ways: his own position and that of those he deals with when he provides examples of cultural "contamination." Then he talks to some folks who go off to the World Bank, etc. I think he's right that shoring up identities seems the wrong way to go. But it seems the only way one can make that claim is from the perspective of a diluted identity. Appiah himself does precisely this in his examples of cultural adaptation and inversion.
But, personally, I think of this -- as I suppose you do too -- as someone who doesn't have a firm local background, but one of multiple "homes."
I recently reread The Razors Edge which dances all around this theme in a more literary, accessable form.The journey inward is perhaps the aspect that differentiates the intrepip traveler from the cosmopolitan. I was at a retreat yesterday where participants talked about what motivated them to take up social justice work and for nearly every one it was some experience travelling which focused their energy.great post.
Thanks, Troutsky. Yeah, inward but outward. It's not just subjective experience, though. I think travel can be the most genuine confrontation of the objective. What is subjective is that one has to be prepared to be "lost." That's very difficult. As with Appiah, then, there's not much one can do for reasoning with those who don't understand the merits of one's cosmopolitan ways.
Umph. Reminds me of why I didn't follow an early impulse to major in philosophy. Which is not to say that what you're saying isn't important, just that I lack staying power...or something.
I thought that Appiah was saying a number of important things that, new or not, need to be said now. Let me take a bit more concrete note.
I live in a community that values at least a traditional look. The Sears store has been displaced to a mall by Talbots, J. Crew, and an upscale restaurant, but the building is true to our building codes.
We're also currently struggling with bones in the location in which we want to build a new set of city government buildings. One of our local Indian tribes claims them as theirs, although that's not a slam-dunk. Various compromises are being worked out.
There's a reason the Indians (if that's who the bones belong to) wanted to live where the later European settlers wanted to live: water, protection from the elements, decent farming land, a defensive position against enemies.
Lots of people, in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, everywhere, have lived in those places for long times. Archaeological digs show cities on top of cities on top of cities. People filled in the old and built on it. Higher meant better defenses.
We now recognize that there are things we can learn from the old, and we may emotionally relate to it and want to preserve its remains. But we need new city centers. If we preserve everything, there is no room for the new.
Appiah attempts to cut through this dilemma: let the local people choose. We can decry commercialism and the destruction of what we have defined as beautiful or worthy, but life must go on, and it includes the commercial and the necessary as well.
It's not an easy choice, and sometimes it is made with less thought than other times. The choice must be for life, which sometimes will be the glow of tradition and other times the shine of the new.
As for travel, it seems to me that much of what you've written is from a relatively Americentric, vaguely xenophobic point of view. It's not just travel Appiah is talking about, but intercourse between people. I guess you can take that word in all its meanings.
People keep moving around and genuinely encountering each other and their cultures. Magpie-like, they find bits and pieces of languages and customs they like and take them home with them.
It's not abstractions, but living people. And sometimes something quite remarkable and inexplicable happens: one falls in love with a place or people. I realize you are trying to explain this, but there is a mystery that transcends any explanation.
She finds that this love has translated into some semblance of understanding and loyalty that at least sets her apart from who she used to think she was.
And this love leads to a set of actions that she might never have been able to conceive before that transforming experience.
And even if “love,” there is sometimes no greater than that of leaving its object to be what it will be
Very difficult, of course. Much easier to bottle "traditional culture" and expect a place to stay as it was when you fell in love with it. Two sides to love, no?
Perhaps we're saying the same things and I've chosen a more political road rather than the philosophical one.
CKR
Cheryl - I think we are saying similar things. But there's nothing xenophobic or even "Americentric" about what I'm saying. I don't have the lived background for that, having grown up and lived all over the planet and being a changing collection of "bits and pieces." That's the basic idea behind the "traveling self." It's also the idea behind Appiah's "contamination." But I think we -- he and I at least -- have to acknowledge to ourselves that this is a kind of luxury, and that it yields philosophical perspectives that grow out of that luxury. This is simply to say that philosophical criticism is also often self-criticism. There's a lot to say here, but I'll mention a couple things.
On the philosophical side, there are two different problems here among others that cosmopolitans deal with. One is the overemphasis on identity, as if identity is a static thing. There are two sides to the identity coin - one is that "identity" can serve to justify the mistreatment of others who don't share that identity. Identity can approach mythical status as if there's some special ingredient for one group that makes it superior over other groups. The other side of the coin is that identity is thus often bound up with how we think about community. Community, also, has a long history of wretched abuses of human beings conducted in its name, especially that form of community that was known to Tonnies as Gemeinschaft, the belonging of blood, soil, and nation. But community is also something we often long for, and often do not wish to see destroyed when we have it. You mention the simulated version of community in your housing example - that seems to me a tenacious attempt to hold onto an image of community. Cosmopolitanism says, rather, that there are a bunch of different communities and what we ought to be after are ways in which they can all get along, some set of rules or laws to which they would all agree. Nice sentiment and I'm personally an idealist about this. But it's a whole lot easier said than done. Even Martha Nussbaum, in attempt to set out a basic list of goods we all share runs quickly into trouble. Either they're culturally specific (and thus not the universals cosmopolitans are after) or they're so general (e.g., a right to life) as to be nearly contentless in terms of what we do with the information. Yes, we all generally agree that we ought to live decent lives, but that agreement hasn't stopped us from defining "decent lives" in radically different ways that often lead to aggression between different groups. There's something awry in the whole discourse on community, identity, and cosmopolis. This set of issues has had a huge role in philosophy in recent years. I'm trying to find ways to move past it since the debates seem to be spinning their wheels at a philosophical level. I really do like Appiah's work and generally agree with him. But I've heard this said before and have worked on the same kind of problem for years.
On the political side, there's a strong conservative impulse in the communitarian view. It starts with a position I think is correct: that we always begin inquiry and experience from a position that is a collection of learned values, language, beliefs, traditions, etc. And we value them because those beliefs, traditions, etc. imply that they are themselves valuable. If we don't know anything else, that just is the world of value for us. But when we move to exalt community to some kind of special eternal status of fundamental goodness we run into serious political, social, and ethical problems. That's what fundamentalists do, wherever they're from. The idea that we could or ought to have some kind of global outlook that enters the realm of global governance seems equally problematic to me, however. Appiah has harsh words for UNESCO because of its cultural preservationist slant. I'd agree with that. It reifies presently existing cultures. But, on the other hand, I teach a grad seminar on international agreements and see how many of such agreements end up watered down generic guidelines. The central reason is because different states and cultures have differing ideas of what ought to be done, how, why, and differing sets of interests. Given this climate, the points of agreement can only move towards the increasingly general and away from the specific and particular. Once they do that, they often lose potential effectiveness of the agreement and they certainly move away from those elements that legitimize broad-based governance agreements in the eyes of the people who are affected. Cosmopolitans are after that kind of general agreement at both a philosophical and political level. It's a nice dream, and the idealist in me subscribes to it. The pragmatist in me questions it because I want to see some real work done on problems that transcend state and cultural boundaries (e.g., environmental). All this is not even to mention who gets to make the political rules by which everyone would live....
About the xenophobia comment that I think is mistaken.... Maybe it's because I view travel as a way of getting lost. That the being lost is what forces you to genuinely think your way out of situations in which the rules you're used to in your own culture may or may not work. That's what I find exhilarating. I'm saying something like the opposite of xenophobia -- I'm saying that genuinely encountering loss and fear and disorientation can be a great teaqcher of what it means to think about what humans share, what they don't share, what works in different places and situations and what doesn't, who one is and who one is in the process of becoming, etc. Yes, I think we ought to communicate better with others, remain open to others' beliefs and ideas and so on. I kind of take that as a matter of course. But the only way in which this becomes something other than a nice liberal sentiment, in which it becomes experienced and lived, is if it truly disrupts your own perspective and you have to root around for other perspectives that fit experience better.
I think we live in a culture of fear in the US. Some of it is perhaps reasonable but most of it is not. It's often fear of others who are unlike who we take ourselves to be. An antidote -- since such fear can and does have dire ramifications once acted upon -- is the cosmopolitan ideal. Or the traveling self. But, again, this basic idea goes back at least as far as 300BC Greece. There's a certain point at which you have to then return to an analysis of the staying power of beliefs about community, belonging, etc. even when they are destructive and even self-destructive. The difference is that globalization forces us into a new situation in which we can either react in fear and return to the safety of fundamental beliefs and values or genuinely deal with the shifting nature of the world in such a way that we might have some say in how it takes shape (rather than leaving it to corporations and political and economic elites).
Yes, living people. But individuals are all different. Any point of agreement is already a move towards the more abstract. Politics, then, just is abstract. Take away the philosophical inquiry and you're left with various actors acting on their own self-interest rather than examining just what it is that might be good for all of us.
I'm jumping into the fray late, as usual, but there's a lot to digest here. It's easy for me to be simplistic about this, and so I'll try not to ask too stupid a question, but: is that western traveling self seeking, generally, to be lost like you? And if so, is our (unreflective) Western commitment to, say, UNESCO rooted the belief (or fear, at some level) that our opportunities for being lost are being lost, that we're actually less concerned about the implications of the authentic when Wal-Mart builds a super center overlooking Tenochtitlan than we are rightly concerned that we are the Wal-Mart culture, that this is meaningless if shiny one, that (although, most of the time, most of us do not choose to put ourselves in situations in which we are encouraged or forced to recognize the limitations of our values) we hope at some level to have our values confronted at some point.
OK, so that's just another way of saying that most of this talk is (of necessity?) more about the cosmopolitan self than the traditional Other, which is an idea emerging clearly enough from Appiah, I think.
Did anyone read--or manage not to avoid--any of the post-Sago-mine disaster stories about life in West Virginia mining towns? There were lots of references to "ways of life," lots (it seemed to me, anyway) of narratives about parents--coming from generations of miners--wanting their children to find other ways of supporting themselves. These stories have been accompanied by pictures of melancholy older miners and their families, sitting in kitchens, ostensibly fretting about the loss of a long tradition. Why do we love telling this story? At some level--it's deep for most of us--we know we need that coal, we know we need that suffering, or its ever-present potential; we are comforted by the idea that people in West Virginia are clinging, in mining our coal, to a cultural tradition. The story affirms both our literal and figurative energy needs: Appalachia, we tell ourselves, is lousy with the kind of backwardness that would--were we to choose to travel there--challenge our values. And: bonus, cheap energy, as long as we can keep believing such things about Appalachians. We can mine them hills for more than just coal, and we do so all the time.
I digress, I fear. Anyway: thanks, Helmut, Cheryl, Troutsky, and Eric for a really thoughtful and engaging discussion.
The crux of this seems to be the fact that the collective WE (cosmopolitans)can travel to West Virginia ,somewhat voyueristicaly and analyze their situation but THEY cannot do the same. (except in the Beverly Hillbillies)We can love bluegrass music but you are right,barba de chiva, they are dying underground and I am not.Perhaps this explains the "spiritual" base of my political socialism.
Bertolucci's adaptation of Bowles' "The Sheltering Sky" evoked something very similar for me. The book seemed to portray the wife's journey as self-abnegating more than as positively transforming. Bertolucci lionizes her suppleness as positive and indicative of strength.
I adored the book, but didn't get much from the movie. It has been a long time since I read it, but my impression was not the self-abnegation point. Rather self-realization, but in the context of habitual markers of orientation being broken down. To me, that struggle between inherited and habitual "identity" and the ever-present risk of its dissolution is the point. I wonder why we place such a premium on the inherited and habitual elements and less on the disruption. It's in the moments of disruption, after all, that we do some of our most transcendent work.
I think you might have just identified a litmus test for "conservatism." Also maybe the fashion for LSD, "tripping" and a lot of other '60's stuff.
("It's in those moments" that we piss off parents and all other squares too, is where I'm coming from, daddy-o.)
OK, maybe that sounded too paisley. Let me put it the good old pragmatic way. Peirce had it that beliefs are settled habits of action, and that inquiry only kicks in once a problem situation arises in which habitual beliefs are disrupted. The disruption may be some kind of lived contradiction. It can be small or large ("I'm hungry for a burger, where are my car keys? They were in my pocket; now they're not" or "should I tell on my friend for stealing?" or "can a liberal democracy commit torture and still be a liberal democracy?"). There are then better and worse ways to go about inquiry, figuring out what to do when your habitual beliefs are in contradiction or simply don't help resolve the problem. One particularly bad way is to hold onto a belief through the "method of tenacity," come hell or high water. This is basically to say that one is going to ignore actual concrete experience in order to maintain that comfortable belief. Peirce's idea of the best going version of inquiry was scientific method, given that sci method necessarily relies on concrete reality for both the generation of problems and their resolution. For Peirce, this was a matter of getting at the truth of things. Once inquiry had successfully found a solution to the problem such that one could call it a truth, belief could settle in again like a kind of blackbox, a habit of action.
Notice that this suggests that this also suggests that broader experience, observation, etc. is likely more disruptive of settled beliefs than lying low in some innocuous place. The scientists observes, notices anomalies, attempts to explain the anomaly through hypothesis, designs experiments to test the hypothesis, adjusts, maybe finds new anomalies or accidental discoveries, maybe finds a good explanation for the anomaly, publishes the results, other scientists attempt to disprove or verify the results of the experiment, etc. After a long process, we might come upon something we're willing to call "true" because it has been sufficiently tested and verified. We don't believe things and think they're false at the same time. We believe things we think our true. Thus the "truth" becomes a new or readjusted belief, something we can rely upon as we go through other experiences, experiments, etc.
The artist functions in a similar way. So does the philosopher, the cook, etc. So does the "traveling self." The TS is simply a way of saying that social experience is empirically-speaking more diverse and complex today, and thus we're more likely to encounter problematic situations in the Peircean/Deweyan sense - let's say, encounters with different religious beliefs, cultural practices, ideas. One way to deal with this is to recoil and hold onto our habitual beliefs, practices, ideas. That's fine - nothing says that the encounter with the new requires giving up on the old. I don't think that's possible anyway. Using the science analogy again, would it be possible to do science if there weren't a cumulative history of the establishment of scientific truths, theories, theorems, principles? So, we never totally give up on previous beliefs. But we might find some of them to be really problematic, even wrong.
The conservative impulse is to say screw it, I like what I already believe. The TS impulse is to rejoice in the confrontations and say that this is perhaps the most important locus of lived experience.
I'm not saying everyone ought to make a certain kind of choice. I'm saying that the TS attitude is a healthier one in an empirical situation in which we encounter constant difference than the attitude of recoiling, tenacity, conservatism.
Must the happy and/or well adapted traveler be a traveling self and not be traveling selves (i.e. multiple)? An individual can play diverse sports, have both a professional life and a private life, and choose to do as the Romans while in Rome. Instead of a single worldview or a metaphysics that's robust against all social challenges, easy going travelers might just have become comfortable dissociating and/or compartmentalizing. Only a whirling sufi could believe there's a way to reconcile all of his or her beliefs simultaneously. Even the sciences have paradoxically stupid terms and speech conventions (not to mention the occasional profoundly stupid, traditional practice of experimentation or analysis). I'd say human brains are ever-ready to wall things off, and that a wide variety of deep psychologies and conscious philosophies enable people to happily and systematically overlook specific conflicts--throughout a relationship, throughout a career, throughout an addiction, throughout a life. This is where "depth of experience" crops up regarding who has "really traveled" to a place and who hasn't, or regarding who is a traveler versus who is "just a tourist." Is there within every human being a localizable hard core that has to be exposed to travel truly, and is there a universal shape into which the hard cores of the truly traveled are inevitably hammered? If not, then I think the "traveling self," if I've read it right, is a problematic concept.
Not to suggest that a traveling self's core has to be exactly functionally homologous to a non-traveling self's core. Either a "universal shape" or a "universally pared-down, core functionality" would do--as if travelers were to run on a smaller kernel, which farm out to the peripheries some of the operations that non-traveling selves do with their kernels.
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