More on Appiah, community, and cosmos

Cheryl Rofer of Whirled View kindly responded in the comments to my post below on Kwame Appiah's essay. I in turn responded to her comments. I think the exchange is fruitful, so I'm posting it on the main page below:

Cheryl:
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

Helmut:

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.