Kwame Anthony Appiah | RSA Journal
http://www.rsa.org.uk/journal/article.asp?articleID=q9#
*KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor Of
Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton
University and author of the acclaimed book "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a
World of Strangers".
Appiah is a philosopher whose interests include political and moral theory,
the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual
history. Educated at Cambridge University in England , where he took both
B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy. His father was the Ghanaian politician
and barrister Joe Appiah, and his mother was Peggy Cripps, a children's-book
author and a daughter of the Socialist Politician Sir Stafford Cripps
(Cripps Mission to India in 1942). The marriage of his father and mother is
believed to have been the inspiration of the Hollywood film "Guess who is
coming to dinner" starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce -
commonly known as the RSA - was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, a
painter and social activist, on a manifesto "to embolden enterprise, enlarge
science, refine arts, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce".
* I'm seated, with my mother, on a palace veranda, cooled by a breeze from
the royal garden. Before us, on a dais, is an empty throne, its arms and
legs embossed with polished brass, the back and seat covered in
black-and-gold silk. In front of the steps to the dais, there are two
columns of people, mostly men, facing one another, seated on carved wooden
stools, the cloths they wear wrapped around their chests, leaving their
shoulders bare. There is a quiet buzz of conversation. Outside in the
garden, peacocks screech. At last, the lowing of a ram's horn announces the
arrival of the king of Asante, its tones sounding his honorific kotokohene
or 'porcupine chief'. (Each quill of the porcupine, according to custom,
signifies a warrior ready to kill and to die for the kingdom.) Everyone
stands until the king has settled on the throne. Then, when we sit, a chorus
sings songs in praise of him, which are interspersed with the playing of a
flute. It is a Wednesday festival day in Kumasi, the town in Ghana where I
grew up.
Unless you're one of a few million Ghanaians, this will probably seem a
relatively unfamiliar world, perhaps even an exotic one. You might suppose
that this festival belongs quaintly to an African past. But before the king
arrived, people were taking calls on cellphones, and among those passing the
time in quiet conversation were a dozen men in suits, representatives of an
insurance company. And the meetings in the office next to the veranda are
about contemporary issues: HIV/Aids, the educational needs of 21st-century
children, the teaching of science and technology at the local university.
When my turn comes to be presented, the king asks me about Princeton, where
I teach. I ask him when he'll next be in the States. In a few weeks, he
says. He's got a meeting with the head of the World Bank.
Anywhere you travel in the world ? today as always ? you can find ceremonies
like these, many of them rooted in centuries-old traditions. But you will
also find everywhere ? and this is something new ? many intimate connections
with places far away: Washington, Moscow, Mexico City, Beijing. Across the
street from us, when we were growing up, there was a large house occupied by
a number of families, among them a vast family of boys; one, about my age,
was a good friend. He lives in London. His brother lives in Japan, where his
wife is from. They have another brother who has been in Spain for a while
and a couple more brothers who, last I heard, were in the United States .
Some of them still live in Kumasi, one or two in Accra, Ghana's capital.
Eddie, who lives in Japan, speaks his wife's language now. He has to. But he
was never very comfortable in English, the language of our government and
our schools. When he phones me from time to time, he prefers to speak
Asante-Twi.
Centre of power
Over the years, the royal palace buildings in Kumasi have expanded. When I
was a child, we used to visit the previous king, my great-uncle by marriage,
in a small building that the British had allowed his predecessor to build
when he returned from exile in the Seychelles to a restored but diminished
Asante kingship. It is now a museum, dwarfed by the enormous house next door
? built by his successor, my uncle by marriage ? where the current king
lives. Next to it is the suite of offices abutting the veranda where we were
sitting, recently finished by the present king, my uncle's successor. The
British, my mother's people, conquered Asante at the turn of the 20th
century; now, at the turn of the 21st, the palace feels as it must have felt
in the 19th century: a centre of power. The president of Ghana comes from
this world, too. He was born across the street from the palace to a member
of the royal Oyoko clan. But he belongs to other worlds as well: he went to
Oxford; he's a member of one of the Inns of Court in London; he's a
Catholic, with a picture in his sitting room of himself greeting the pope.
What are we to make of this? On Kumasi 's Wednesday festival day, I've seen
visitors from England and the United States wince at what they regarded as
the intrusion of modernity on timeless, traditional rituals ? more evidence,
they think, of a pressure in the modern world towards uniformity. They react
like the assistant on the film set who's supposed to check that the extras
in a sword-and-sandals movie aren't wearing wristwatches. And such pursuits
are not alone. In the past couple of years, UNESCO's members have spent a
great deal of time trying to hammer out a convention on the 'protection and
promotion' of cultural diversity. (It was finally approved at the UNESCO
General Conference in October 2005.) The drafters worried that "the
processes of globalisation? represent a challenge for cultural diversity,
namely in view of risks of imbalances between rich and poor countries." The
fear is that the values and images of western mass culture, like some
invasive weed, are threatening to choke out the world's native flora.
The contradictions in this argument aren't hard to find. This same UNESCO
document is careful to affirm the importance of the free flow of ideas, the
freedom of thought and _expression_ and human rights ? values that, we know,
will become universal only if we make them so. What's really important,
then, cultures or people? In a world where Kumasi and New York ? and Cairo
and Leeds and Istanbul ? are being drawn ever closer together, an ethics of
globalisation has proved elusive.
The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals ? not nations,
tribes or 'people' ? as the proper object of moral concern. It doesn't much
matter what we call such a creed, but in homage to Diogenes, the
fourth-century Greek Cynic and the first philosopher to call himself a
'citizen of the world', we could call it cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitans take
cultural difference seriously, because they take choices individuals make
seriously. But because difference is not the only thing that concerns them,
they suspect that many of globalisation's cultural critics are aiming at the
wrong targets.
Yes, globalisation can produce homogeneity. But globalisation is also a
threat to homogeneity. You can see this as clearly in Kumasi as anywhere.
One thing Kumasi isn't ? simply because it's a city ? is homogeneous.
English, German, Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Burkinabe, Ivorian, Nigerian,
Indian: I can find you families of each description. I can find you Asante
people, whose ancestors have lived in this town for centuries, but also
Hausa households that have been around for centuries, too. There are people
there from every region of the country as well, speaking scores of
languages.
But if you travel just a little way outside Kumasi ? 20 miles, say, in the
right direction ? and if you drive off the main road down one of the many
potholed side roads of red laterite, you won't have difficulty finding
villages that are fairly monocultural. The people have mostly been to Kumasi
and seen the big, polyglot, diverse world of the city. Where they live,
though, there is one everyday language (aside from the English in the
government schools) and an agrarian way of life based on some old crops,
like yams, and some newer ones, like cocoa, which arrived late in the 19th
century as a product for export. They may or may not have electricity. (This
close to Kumasi, they probably do.)
The long arm of commercialism
When people talk of the homogeneity produced by globalisation, what they are
talking about is this: even here, the villagers will have radios (though the
language will be local); you will 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?
It's true that the enclaves of homogeneity you find these days ? in Asante
as in Pennsylvania ? are less distinctive that they were a century ago, but
mostly in good ways. More of them have access to effective medicines. More
of them have access to clean drinking water, and more of them have schools.
Where, as is still too common, they don't have these things, it's something
not to celebrate but to deplore. And whatever loss of difference there has
been, they are constantly inventing new forms of difference: new hairstyles,
new slang, even, from time to time, new religions. No one could say that the
world's villagers are becoming anything like the same.
So why do people in these places sometimes feel that their identities are
threatened? Because the world, their world, is changing, and some of them
don't like it. The pull of the global economy ? witness those cocoa trees,
whose chocolate is eaten all around the world ? created some of the life
they now live. If chocolate prices were to collapse again, as they did in
the early 1990s, Asante farmers might have to find new crops or new forms of
livelihood. That prospect is unsettling for some people (just as it is
exciting for others). Missionaries came a while ago, so many of these
villagers will be Christian, even if they have also kept some of the rites
from earlier days. But new Pentecostal messengers are challenging the
churches they know and condemning the old rites as idolatrous. Again, some
like it; some don't.
Above all, relationships are changing. When my father was young, a man in a
village would farm some land that a chief had granted him, and his maternal
clan (including his younger brothers) would work it with him. When a new
house needed building, he would organise it. He would also make sure his
dependants were fed and clothed, the children educated, marriages and
funerals arranged and paid for. He could expect to pass the farm and the
responsibilities along to the next generation.
Changing times
Nowadays, everything is different. Cocoa prices have not kept pace with the
cost of living. Gas prices have made the transportation of the crop more
expensive. And there are new possibilities for the young in the towns, in
other parts of the country and in other parts of the world. Once, perhaps,
you could have commanded the young ones to stay. Now they have the right to
leave ? perhaps to seek work at one of the new data-processing centres down
south in the nation's capital ? and, anyway, you may not make enough to feed
and clothe and educate them all. So the time of the successful farming
family is passing, and those who were settled in that way of life are as sad
to see it go as American family farmers whose lands are accumulated by giant
agribusinesses. We can sympathise with them. But we cannot afford to
subsidise indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no
longer make economic sense. Nor should we want to.
Human variety matters, cosmopolitans think, because people are entitled to
options. What John Stuart Mill said over a century ago in On Liberty about
diversity within a society serves just as well as an argument for variety
across the globe: "If it were only that people have diversities of taste,
that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model.
But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual
development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the
variety of plants can exist in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.
The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his
higher nature, are hindrances to another? Unless there is a corresponding
diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of
happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral and aesthetic stature of which
their nature is capable." 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.
Even if you grant that people shouldn't be compelled to sustain the older
cultural practices, you might suppose that cosmopolitans should side with
those who are busy around the world 'preserving culture' and resisting
'cultural imperialism'. Yet behind these slogans you often find some curious
assumptions. Take 'preserving culture'. It's one thing to help people
sustain arts they want to sustain. I am all for festivals of Welsh bards in
Llandudno financed by the Welsh arts council. Long live the Ghana National
Cultural Centre in Kumasi, where you can go and learn traditional Akan
dancing and drumming, especially since its classes are overflowing. Restore
the deteriorating film stock of early Hollywood movies; continue the
preservation of Old Norse and early Chinese and Ethiopian manuscripts;
record, transcribe and analyse the oral narratives of Malay and Masai and
Maori. All these are undeniably valuable.
A question of authenticity
But preserving culture ? in the sense of such cultural artefacts ? is
different from preserving cultures. And the cultural preservationists often
pursue the latter, trying to ensure that the Huli of Papua New Guinea (or
even Sikhs in Toronto) maintain their 'authentic' ways. What makes a
cultural _expression_ authentic, though? Are we to stop the importation of
baseball caps into Vietnam so that the Zao will continue to wear their
colourful red headdresses? Why not ask the Zao? Shouldn't the choice be
theirs?
"They have no real choice," the cultural preservationists say. "We've dumped
cheap Western clothes into their markets, and they can no longer afford the
silk they used to wear. If they had what they really wanted, they'd still be
dressed traditionally." But this is no longer an argument about
authenticity. The claim is that they can't afford to do something that
they'd really like to do, something that is expressive of an identity they
care about and want to sustain. This is a genuine problem, one that afflicts
people in many communities: they're too poor to live the life they want to
lead. But if they do get richer, and they still run around in T-shirts,
that's their choice. Talk of authenticity now is just telling other people
what they ought to value in their own traditions.
Not that this is likely to be a problem in the real world. People who can
afford it mostly like to put on traditional garb ? at least from time to
time. I was best man once at a Scottish wedding, at which the bridegroom
wore a kilt and I wore kente cloth. Andrew Oransay, the islander who piped
us up the aisle, whispered in my ear at one point, "Here we all are then, in
our tribal gear." In Kumasi, people who can afford them love to put on their
kente cloths, especially the most 'traditional' ones, woven in colourful
silk strips in the town of Bonwire, as they have been for a couple of
centuries. (The prices are high in part because demand outside Asante has
risen. A fine kente for a man now costs more than the average Ghanaian earns
in a year. Is that bad? Not for the people of Bonwire.) Besides, trying 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 Nambia 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 colours. 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 strips?
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.
(c) Kwame Anthony Appiah 2005. Cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah is
published by Allen Lane and will be released in August 2006
--
"There is nothing more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its
success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things
- because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under
the new."
"The Prince"
Nicolo Machiavelli
--
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