83 | Kwame Anthony Appiah on Identity, Stories, and Cosmopolitanism

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2020

⏱️ 99 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying “I am a citizen of the world,” and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agrees, however; in the words of former British Prime Minister Theresa May, “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” On the other side of the political spectrum, groups who share a feature of identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and others — find it useful to band together to make political progress. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a leading philosopher and cultural theorist who has thought carefully about the tricky issues of cosmopolitanism and identity. We talk about how identities form, why they matter, and how to negotiate the difficult balance between being human and being your particular self.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and of Law at New York University. He is the author of numerous academic books as well as several novels. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of a number of major awards, including the National Humanities Medal of the United States. He currently writes the New York Times Magazine column “The Ethicist“, and frequently writes for The New York Review of Books. (Note that in the podcast intro I mistakenly said he was “born and raised” in Ghana; he was actually born in London, moving to Ghana when he was six months old.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.7	I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:04.3	I was recently reading over the Patreon page for Mindscape, and I noticed that the very
0:09.6	first sentence in the description says, I'm a scientist, author, and now a podcaster.
0:16.4	So think about that move, the very first way that I'm introducing potential patrons, patrons,
0:22.1	to the Mindscape Podcast is to talk about myself by giving myself labels, right?
0:27.8	The most author, podcaster.
0:30.0	This is the move of identity, of labeling ourselves as part of a larger group.
0:35.6	And this idea of identity has become contentious in the modern world.
0:39.5	It probably was always contentious, right?
0:41.6	What identities matter?
0:42.8	What is the role of identity?
0:44.5	In particular, we have the idea of identity politics, which arranges people on kind of
0:50.0	a spectrum.
0:51.0	There's one spectrum that says, look, if I am female or African-American or poor,
0:57.7	these are incredibly important aspects about myself, and politically it makes all the
1:02.6	sense in the world to organize along those lines that I can share my interests with other
1:08.2	people who share that identity.
1:10.2	On the other side of the spectrum, there's a move that says, we should all be citizens
1:15.0	of the world.
1:16.0	We should all be common human people.
1:17.6	We should take our identities and try to put them aside for the greater good.
	...

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