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The Michael Shermer Show

40. Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah — Who Am I? Who Are You? The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4921 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2018

⏱️ 92 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this wide-ranging conversation Dr. Appiah and Dr. Shermer review the 5 “Cs” of identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, and Culture—and what they tell us about who we are, or at least who we think we are. Dr. Appiah’s new book The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity explores the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation—of self-rule—is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities—from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns. Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who—and what—“we” are.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor at NYU in the department of philosophy and the school of law, the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and the author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Experiments in Ethics, and most recently The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.

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This remote Science Salon was recorded on August 21, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science A Lot, a series of conversations

0:10.4

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

0:17.0

Actually, you may have forgotten, but way back in 1994, we published an article that you had written for the Times Literary Supplement on Afrocentrism.

0:32.0

Oh yes, this was an old issue of skeptic when we had first started in 92 and we I bumped into Afrocentrism.

0:39.0

Yes.

0:40.0

And you know and so we had something by Mary Leffkovic, who described it as a pseudo history,

0:47.0

kind of an analog to pseudoscience, which we deal a lot with in skeptic.

0:52.0

But I haven't really seen come across my radar

0:55.3

in must be 10, 15 years.

0:58.0

This whole issue of what race were the Egyptians,

1:01.6

was Cleopatra Black, and those kinds of questions.

1:04.3

That whole thing just seems to have faded, or if I just missed it.

1:07.2

I think it's, like many things in the moment which have disappeared into recesses in the internet.

1:17.0

So I think there's a world of people who are still pursuing those thoughts,

1:21.0

but they don't have the same salience in the world in general that they may

1:26.0

have had for a while.

1:27.9

That's my impression.

1:28.9

Yeah.

1:29.9

Because I don't hear much about it either.

1:30.9

I mean, occasionally people complain to me about what I said all those years ago, but... about it's

1:33.0

I mean occasionally people complain to me about what I said all those years ago but I mean you know in the case of

1:37.4

Cleopatra it's really so clear that she was of Macedonian ancestry that it's a bit odd that anyone thinks anything else.

...

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