Kwame Anthony Appiah: "The Case for Contamination"

I had the good fortune of finding my email delayed this morning and so went directly to the NY Times web site to pick up today's offerings. With a little browsing I discovered that Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton philosopher originally from Ghana, has done a most provocative and instructive article on our global mix of cultures and their interactions, "The Case for Contamination." I recommend to any and all that they read it. I teach in one of my classes Appiah's piece on racism -- "Racisms" -- which is the most acute analysis of the fundamental types of racism with which I am familiar. The present article in the Times Magazine on the impact of globalization on our cultures -- and us -- is similarly profoundly penetrating. It is based on his latest effort being published later this month by W.W. Norton "Cosmopolitanism, "Ethics in a World of Strangers."

Here is the web site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html

and an excerpt to tempt readers:

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 globalization. . .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 globalization has proved elusive.

The right approach, I think, starts by taking individuals - not nations, tribes or "peoples" - 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 the choices individual people make seriously. But because cultural difference is not the only thing that concerns them, they suspect that many of globalization's cultural critics are aiming at the wrong targets.
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to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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