YouSaid · the spoken record

Kwame Anthony Appiah

lines on the record: 83
first: 2019-07-31
most recent: 2019-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't think that I don't agree with you that it's up to them. It's not up to them. These things matter to all of us and their care and concern should be concerned for everybody. It should be part of the job of the global community to think together about how to manage these things. Now, obviously, from time to time, particular objects are in the trust of various public and private institutions in particular countries, and those countries should make sure that they perform the duties that come with having such a trust. But no, I don't think it's just up to them. And just to take the case of the Dogon material, the Dogon material, much of it is religious material from a religion that nobody nowadays, hardly anybody practices anymore, because Mali is way more Muslim than it was in the French colonial period as a result of interesting processes which we could discuss. As a result,”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tapestry is woven by the Aztecs. It doesn't have lots of the world's great treasures. Better to think about the task as being a task of collectively curating the world's collection for everybody and figuring out how to share more of it in places where it will be accessible, more closely accessible to some of the people in the world who don't have access to anything now. That would be my ambition.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what the British Museum should do is, well, I think they are doing, which is to be part of the leadership of a movement in the world of museums to say the key questions about the great objects are access questions, not ownership questions. If we fuss about ownership, we'll never make any progress. Let's agree that the challenge is to make a world in which everybody in the world is from time to time close to a significant body of seriously interesting objects. And that means that the British Museum should be sharing, as it does, but it should be doing it more. It means that, and I think sending back, of course, is exactly the wrong solution, because sending back means you send all the Malian stuff to Mali. Well, the trouble with Mali is not that it doesn't have Malian stuff, it's that it doesn't have Italian Renaissance stuff, it doesn't have Chinese pottery, it doesn't have...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the Ming Dynasty, China broke off for a while. This was not good for the development of those societies, just from an internal point of view. It wasn't good.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need anything beyond national citizenship? The answer is we have a world to manage. The economy works better if we integrate. And for most of us, not everybody, but for most of us, interaction with others is really interesting and rewarding. And a lot of what we value here, a lot of what we value about our own stuff, our own national stuff, is actually the result of dialogue with other places. Shakespeare's most famous play is about a Dane. Japan's most famous poet Mazzo Basho is a Buddhist. That means he's connected with India. He wrote in a script that was invented in China so that a lot of what we value most in the here turns out to be connected with the there. And so if we were to break off from everywhere, as from time to time societies do, Japan broke off for a while.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't like the metaphor of the parasite. Yes, I do want to insist that Cosmopolitanism, look, cosmopolitanism, as I said, is not only requires in a certain sense, or the right kind of cosmopolitanism requires a kind of rootedness, but its point precisely is that we are celebrating connections among different places, each of which is rooted in its own something. Each of which has its distinctive virtues and interest. Each of which has its own history. And we're making connections with people for whom that place is their first place, just as I am in a place which is my first place. So yes, cosmopolitanism requires, I think, national sense of solidarities that are not global. And that's why, as I say, you can be a Cosmopolitan patriot. Now, if you say, if the nationalist says, okay, but why?”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't see growth in the incomes of middle and working class people. I think it's possible to manage that in a way that feels fair, that makes the burdens feel fairly shared, and that if you do that, there's the possibility of getting people to see that closing off to the world is only going to make things worse. And that's the big thing you have to persuade people of, that it isn't making things better. Brexit isn't making things better for middle class incomes in Britain.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“relative one but these are still very very rich societies and so part of the question is whether the whether what what goods there are are being fairly shared among the people in these societies and if they don't think they are which i think is a reasonable judgment then they will worry more about stagnation of income than they do if they think that it's look look you know incomes were no doubt stagnant during the second world war in england but people felt hey we're engaged in this common enterprise together so of course that's okay uh and also we're we're sharing the burdens fairly there's nobody's getting away with with anything or nobody's and in fact there was deep resentment of people who profiteered in wartime so i think that it's it's possible to run a society even a society that's sort of coasting that”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't think the right thing to do was appeasement. I think the right thing to do was to solve the problems that were being blamed on globalization or Europe by the people who were upset, which means more should have been done in terms of government policy in the north of England to improve employment, things like that. I think that that would have been...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The elites that led globalization or that led integration in Europe paid almost no attention to the the views they weren't listening they thought it was obvious what they were doing was good and so they paid absolutely no attention to the tensions and difficulties that were produced”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And their grandparents included Norwegian and an English woman, as well as Russians and Namibians. So, of course, in my family life, of course, I'm going to be interested in everywhere in the world and feel that I have connections with it. But I think that if you make cosmopolitanism about rejecting the local, that won't work. I think most of us like to be connected with a place or a couple of places and to feel rooted in them. So the idea that cosmos are rootless, I think, is just a mistake or have to be. Why has so much of the world turned away from things connected with other places, so migration and globalization as an economic phenomenon, which they see as posing threats to their economic stability? Well, partly, I think, because they've been encouraged to think so, even though I think it's just objectively false that globalization has been terrifically bad for many of the people who are most nationalist at the moment. And part of it is that”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I want to say first that for me it's really important to insist that you can be a cosmopolitan patriot, that you can be rooted in a place, care about it in a special way, and still be a citizen of the world and think that you have obligations and concerns and interests that transcends your national identity. So I'm not the kind of Cosmopolitan who's opposed to national identity. And that's an important part of the answer because the kind of cosmopolitan who does want to drag people away from their roots is, I think, got no chance of persuading most people. They're not going to persuade me. And I'm officially a cosmopolitan. So why would I expect them to persuade people who have less reason to be Cosmopolitan than I do? And I say I have reason to be cosmopolitan because my parents are from two different continents. The three youngest members of my family are my half-Russian, my half Namibian and my half Nigerian great-nephews and nieces.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, good location, wonderful economic location in terms of being a major port city in a massively growing area of the world with populations speaking the two great trading languages of the world, Chinese and English, and so on. So I think Singapore, Singapore has been lucky in many ways. I think it was lucky in its leadership. I'm not a big fan of the kind of authoritarian side of Li Kuan Yu, but they owe him a lot.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But his authority and his legitimacy has nothing to do with the Republic of Ghana. It's older and deeper than that. So that may be another thing. I mean, that doesn't really apply to Singapore, of course. That is to say the British didn't use indirect rule in Singapore. So I don't know what the story is there. I suspect the story in Singapore is three words Lee Kwan Yu.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that's part of it, there was this prosperous, that there were people who'd made money in things like farming and forestry, maybe as mediators in the gold trade, I don't know. And they were not, you see, the French, I mean, the sort of schema story, the cartoon story is the British doctrine. The French do direct rule. The British therefore leave in place the institutions of chieftaincy if they exist or create them if they don't. The French sort of wipe all that away and create their own structures. Maybe the continuity of political institutions through the colonial period so that the King of Shanti is still in place in the middle of the Republic of Ghana. Maybe that's another thing that helps to explain the existence of a kind of stability that's independent of the formal state because he's not, he's recognized by the state, he's a member of the House achieves.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think as it were, extrapolating out from the place I know best, which is Ghana, one thing that happened in the British colonies was that a middle class was created that was not wholly dependent upon the state, whereas the kind of middle class in the francophone countries of West Africa was mostly you got middle class status by being a civil servant or a lawyer or something by having some kind of relationship with the state. That goes with the fact that in the British colonies education tertiary education starts earlier. Already there was a university college in the Gold Coast for independence, whereas there wasn't in Senegal just the most sophisticated of the West African French states.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“learning, watching what happens when you do things with coups and discovering that it doesn't get much better if you do it that way and deciding to go with the patients that's required for democracy.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a military ruler for a while, he civilianized the country, and he actually, probably with the assistance of Kofi Annan, who was then UN peacekeeping head, and used Ghanaian troops a lot, he re-professionalized the Ghanaian military to think of itself as a military in service of a civilian power and not as people who might come in from time to time to correct political mistakes. And ironically, at the end of his two terms when he lost, he sort of appealed to the army and they said, no, you taught us that we don't do that. You lost. The other guy should come in. And we've now had a whole set of cycles of the two main parties oscillating back and forth, winning and losing. And I think now, whereas there was celebration in the streets in coups in the past, now people would be really angry if the military intervened. And I don't know that they could get away with it. I mean, there would be bloodshed and horrible stuff. And they know that. So I think that is the result of political...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that whatever shapes that region, I don't think it can be those 90-odd years of that because it seems deeper than that. I think the political stability is can be credited to a significant achievement on the part of a man, namely President Rawlings, Jerry John Rawlings, who is not someone I hugely admire in every way, but he came in in one of those coups.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kamasi in the central southern Ghana for hundreds of years. It's sort of integrated economically. It's been integrated economically for quite a long time. And people know each other. They may speak different languages. There are 80 languages spoken in Ghana. But people have been speaking tree, the Asanti language, which has dialects on the coast as well and in between. people who have had it as a second language since long before the British took over, which you have to remember happened in the 20th century, the final Assanti British anti-war Anglo-Assanti War was in the first decade of the 20th century. So my father, my father's father, was born before British rule in Asante and died after British rule in Asante. It lasted less than his lifetime.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the first question is the really puzzling one. The earlier instability is not too surprising, after all. Ghana was created in 1957, and I don't just mean that it was decolonized in 1957. The country of Ghana is the union of the former British Togoland with the Gold Coast in 1957 as a result of a plebiscite in Togo in the mid-50s. It's younger than I am, the country, that it has a strong sense of national anything. That's the big surprise, I think, not the other way around. There are various theories about this. I think one of the most interesting is that because most of what's now in Ghana, at least west of the Volta lake once river, was at one point or rather within the ambit of the Asanti Empire, which is something that goes back to the 18th century and which radiated trade out”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much easier to fly to London than back to a crowd. That's crazy. And we've had these weird things. On the one hand, there's probably a million Ghanaians in Nigeria, living Ghanaian citizens. On the other hand, we've had massive expulsions from each country, not recently, but in the past, nearly a million Nigerians expelled by Dr. Buzia in the early 70s and then a Nigerian expulsion later. And these weren't hugely unpopular. You can get people to be quite nationalistic within Africa, even though there's kind of a broad sense that we're all part of one thing. That doesn't really include the Maghreb and North Africa and the Arab-speaking parts of Africa in quite the same way. And that's because of the legacy of racial pictures.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, where it began. In Africa, I think on the one hand that most contemporary sub-Saharan Africans do have a sense of themselves as belonging to a kind of a black African world. But if you ask them to do something practical about it, like take down borders or do more political integration, I don't know that that is going to go anywhere anytime soon, which I regret because I think for lots of reasons it would be, you know, my sister and her husband live in Lagos. If they want to go to a cra by road, they have to cross the border between Nigeria and Benin, the border between Benin and Togo, the border between Togo and Ghana, and at each of those borders, they probably have to interact with people who are going to try and extract an illegal tax on them.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pan Africanism involves two different big strands. One is the diasporic strand, and the word pan-Africanism and the Pan-African Congresses were invented in the diaspora by people like Sylvester Williams from Jamaica and W.B. Du Bois from the United States and Padmore. That idea of a diasporic African identity seems pretty lively in the world today, though it's not very it doesn't produce much actual politics or policy. the sense of solidarity of people of African descent, of the African diaspora, seems pretty strong to me.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my inclination is to believe about the basic physical structure of the world that some mixture of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity can be made to work. But we've been trying to do that for a very long time, basically since they were invented, those two theories, and we haven't had a huge amount of success. And the most what people seem to think currently is the most plausible way of reconciling them strikes me as a incredibly difficult to understand string theory. And B, Something that a reasonable person might doubt. But if you ask me what I think the best current physical theory is, I'm going to say string theory, but with a sort of confidence that's probably below half.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm sort of, I think, believe in the standard deliverances of modern genomics, but I suspect that we're going to learn lots and lots of stuff in there that we now believe is not quite right.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think my everyday common sense middle sized object view of the world is the one that's least likely to be wrong, it's least likely to be wrong that there are tables and chairs and the very sort of thing that modern, in a way, modern philosophy begins by making us wonder whether we know about Descartes, makes us wonder, do we know about these middle-sized everyday dry goods, as one philosopher once called them. So that, I think it's very unlikely that I'm wrong about.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I, I mean, officially I do because of my official position, I suppose, is that because all of our best pictures of the world are slightly wrong, we can't rule out a picture just on the grounds that it's wrong, inconsistent with some other picture that we have, because maybe that the part of the other picture that is inconsistent with is one of the wrong bits. So we'd better work with as many pictures as we can, or as we can manage, which is obviously the main limitation, is just our capacity to hold on to too many pictures. Because none of our pictures is going to be perfectly right.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. No, I mean, I think that's certainly my view. And I think this idea that a kind of fallibilism, the thought that, well, I might be right, I might be wrong, that's actually quite a Ghanaian attitude. People, in a way, I think understand how hard it is to get to know things, especially about this sort of thing about invisible spirits and faraway gods. So they are not likely to be super confident about anything outside their own experience. So they may be confident that they themselves have had conversations with Jesus or something like that. But the idea that the rest of it is sort of going to be easy to figure out, I think is not a very widespread idea. And to some extent it pervades people's life. So in other areas of belief, people are kind of willing to think, well, I'll go to the doctor if I get sick, but if he doesn't do anything, I'll go to the...”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the spiritual world so that it's not very much as long as you agree about that the rest is kind of details and also people have the view which i think is a reasonable view if you're a theist which is who knows exactly what the truth is about these things they're very complicated the idea that you get in early christianity that it's incredibly important to insist on a long long list of beliefs some of which are philosophical and impossible to understand and you know transubstantiation consubstantiation weird stuff like that that's not very common people are very relaxed”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think, yes, so my uncle Avif, who was a Sunni Muslim, was married to my aunt Grace, who is a Methodist. My parents were a different Christian denomination, so that's not terribly exciting, but they certainly didn't even go to the same church, actually. They went to different churches. Relatively common in Ghana, both for Christian couples to go to different churches and for people to marry, people who are not Christians, Muslims to marry people who are not Christians and so on. Is that I think it just shows something about the character of the belief, which is that it's in an odd way, though this has somewhat been changed by the arrival of Christian American Christian televangelism and Wahhabiism, but fundamentally the key thing is belief and kind of relationship with”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, huge amounts of very successful growing religious denominations, especially, as in many places in the world, the Wahhabi version of Islam and the kind of Pentecostal version of Christianity. So born-again Christians, charismatic churches, lots of singing and dancing, people being taken with the spirit and that kind of thing. So I guess it's certainly not going in the direction of secularization, as far as I can see, in the sense of moving away from church life and moving or mosque life and moving away from belief. That's not happening”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think maybe for the same reason that there were very few atheists in much of the world until relatively recently. I mean, atheism is a relatively modern phenomenon, at least the form of atheism that we sort of see around us. So there are lots of Christians in Ghana. There are lots of Muslims in Ghana, and there are lots of believers in traditional religions which are sort of polytheistic, though they tend to have a high god. So that's sort of one big god, and there's an earth goddess and then a bunch of other gods. I think probably one reason why people haven't given it up is because nobody argues against it. And again, that's a relatively modern thing to have people in public arguing against theism. I don't mean, I mean, obviously there were atheists in the ancient world. But since the rise of the Abrahamic religions, there haven't been a lot of atheists except until recently anywhere.”
2019-07-31 · Conversations with Tyler · Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source