tv Book TV CSPAN January 8, 2011 8:00pm-9:15pm EST
8:00 pm
own news package. >> bill kovach, tom rosensteil, "blur how to know what is true in the age of information overload." .. >> thank you, thank you so much. thanks for all of you coming out this evening for my favorite store in the whole wide world. give it up for harvard oak store. is that a great place?
8:01 pm
[applause] now it is my pleasure to introduce kwame anthony appiah. kwame anthony appiah has approached the rarest combination of rigor and humanity at but the philosophy of mind and language, african and african-american intellectual history history and political philosophy. appiah is a thinker and a writer. he has his urbane, warm and accessible as challenging and as generous as he is a friend. a premier scholar of contemporary philosophical thought, his work crosses disciplines as it crosses national boundaries. and celebrates human rights, it ethnic and cultural pluralism, individual identity, intellectual liberty and a sublime mode of "cosmopolitanism." let me review just a few of his earlier accomplishments before talking a moment about his new book, "the honor code: how moral revolutions happen".
8:02 pm
educated in ghana and in england where we met some 37 years ago, and claire college at the university of cambridge, appiah quickly rose to prominence as a philosopher, a probabilistic semantics at the intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. he is now the lawrence as rockefeller university professor of philosophy and the university center for human values down at princeton university. prior to arriving at princeton he taught at yale, at cornell and at duke. he and i collaborated along with no better -- nobel laureates to realize ev do but dream as an africana which we published in 1999 and which was brought out in the second edition by the oxford university press in the year 2005. appiah's textbook called thinking it through published in 2003 is a standard introduction for students of contemporary
8:03 pm
philosophical thought. his 1992 book, and my father's house, which i confess is my favorite is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary african but as geographically specific and globally connected. "cosmopolitanism" "cosmopolitanism" describes a pragmatic and wholly ethical philosophy of how we can get along in our globalized interconnected but also divided world. appiah's work including three smart and entertaining mystery novels is discipline crossing and is first and last deeply invested in human rights and individual liberty. the honor code brings obvious concerns to the question of how moral progress happens. he looks at successful campaigns against practices now considered abhorrent, foot binding in china for example or duels in the aristocratic britain and most
8:04 pm
powerfully for me, slavery in the british empire and the united states. and through intricate and eliminating inquiry, he helped us to understand the role that the appeals honor plays and what he rightly calls moral revolution. the honor code has received high praise from both reviewers and it also giants in the field of moral inquiry who i will get to momentarily. paul berman of slate wrote in a review in the quote that reading the honor code is like attending a lecture i a lucid and and a lucid and abelian professor who chuckles over his colorful and goats but is ultimately intent on making you think for yourself. dwight gardner in "the new york times" celebrated his quote malcolm gladwell like balance between arguments and storytelling. in which he quote stirs in spoonfuls of narrative honey to help his medicinal p go down. matthew iglesias on think
8:05 pm
progress.com calls the book quote, monstrously interesting and the exact reverse of all the stereotypes of academic over specialization and who caresism. i like that. now for the giants and no offense to my fellow journalist but nobel laureate who has never shied away from moral complexity or philosophical nuances that the book and i quote is so stimulating it is to read the remarkable research of a brilliant mind into the concept of honor as the origin of morality as we know it practiced or not. the book continues is essential for us. inescapable in his urgent relevance to the embattled human morality we live within our codes of the present. edward wilson and walter isaacson both judge the importance of the honor code not only for current moral inquiry but also as a guidebook for the future. wilson says and i quote, appiah
8:06 pm
lays out a concept that is not only compelling in its own right but also suggest a connection that may in time help to collate biological and cultural exploration of human morality. that is a grand complement. and isakson says quote him even though honor is sometimes distorted as with honor killings in pakistan, this classical concept can be a lodestar in guiding us to a better future. it is an amazing and fascinating insight. this he concludes is an indispensable book or moral philosophers and honorable citizens. he just delivered just two hours ago, he completed the final of his three du bois lectures on w.e.b. dubois, the world and the africa and those will be published soon we hope by the harvard university press. anthony appiah will read to us this evening from his remarkable new book, the latest
8:07 pm
contribution in a truly, truly remarkable career. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend anthony appiah. [applause] >> you so, i am half english. my mother was english and when people say nice things about you when you are english, you feel embarrassed. [laughter] but i am -- [laughter] and bring people say nice things about youth you thanked them. so i think i will focus on that. thank you very much indeed. i was going to read from the book and i'm happy to read from the book if you would like but i just thought i would talk about it a bit. and then by the end of my talk if you want me to read from it i will but i think by then you'll want to ask questions but we will see. thank you all very much for coming.
8:08 pm
so one way to explain the book is to think about the intersections of questions so let me say a little bit about two strands of thought that led me to the work in this book. one was i was thinking about "cosmopolitanism" which i read a book about some years ago and i was looking for examples of conversations across societies about moral questions. one of the most famous such compositions was the dialogue between largely evangelical christian missionaries, e. leadf european and american businessman and chinese intellectuals in china in the late 19th century and earlier 20th century about flip timing of girls in china. so i read that, read some literature on that it regularly in the literature people say the reason that the chinese mandarins gave up foot binding was because it was a stain on the national honor of china.
8:09 pm
now i don't know about you but i can think of a lot of better reasons for not causing intense pain to little girls which is what foot binding involves. it involves binding the feet of these girls at the age of two or three so tight that they are going to weep and so tight that they may develop abscesses. they may in fact developed gangrene and sometimes in and in the ideal case in the system the foot is 3 inches long and the adult woman and then wrapped in a shoe which is made of felt the usually. anyway i thought there were lots of reasons not to do it and it seemed like a weird one. i couldn't fit this into the book on "cosmopolitanism" but i put in the back of my mind to think about later. then the history department for some reason invited me to give a lecture. no idea why, very kind of them. and i thought well this is a question so i have to think of it. this is my moment to think about
8:10 pm
this. and figuring out how to think about it it occurred to me that when i have been an undergraduate philosophy student, i have learned a lot about thinking about how human knowledge works i reading the work of the great philosopher thomas kuhn's which was about scientific revolution. scientific -- from austria and some of the great french scientific revolution had i thought written things that helped us to understand knowledge by studying revolutions. it occurred to me that there are moral revolutions so maybe just the scientific revolutions would help us understand something about nonmoral knowledge. maybe it would help us understand something about moral life. so those two thoughts come together and i say i am going to do historical projects focused on more of revolutions like the revolution that ended foot binding.
8:11 pm
and it looks like the puzzling thing about foot binding is to me was this question of honor so i need to understand on her. and i think of myself as a moderately honorable person. when i went to college my father said to me looking over his glasses with a cigarette which he is that it is not rating a modern newspaper with a cup of tea beside him in the bed he looked up over his glasses and said to me, remember the family honor when you go to the university. i thought wow. [laughter] which was kindly meant that it was a pretty scary thing to say. so i was brought up to think that there was not just my honor but a family honor to bear so i felt i had something that i didn't feel understood the logic of honor and the way to understand it i thought especially from beginning to talk to historians is to examine some historical episode. the obvious one to start, one
8:12 pm
where there is a clear involvement of honor and where the honor involved is a relatively -- on her is -- that is what led me then to begin inspired by these two related lots to think about the dual. and how to think about the dual? i happened upon a particular dual which happened in 1829 which struck me as absolutely amazing, absolutely fascinating, as fascinating as the thought that honor might have ended foot binding. it was a dual between the prime minister of england, the duke of wellington, the victor of waterloo and a man with a marvelous english name finch his family name was and, but his style was of nottingham. i think he was the tenth winston the 15th or something like
8:13 pm
that. anyway these two guys both members of the house of lords the duke of wellington at the time is primary serving them. these two guys thought a famous duel. what was it about? in one sense my answer to that is i have no idea. i mean i have read a great deal about it. i know what they said that in some sense dueling makes no sense to us anymore so i can't till you something that makes you think okay that was wasn't a reasonable thing to do. at here is what they said it was about. there was a debate going on in parliament about whether catholics should be given the vote. catholic emancipation. very important to britain not so much because of catholics in england but the majority in ireland were catholic and at that point they were on the verge of a civil war and had to figure out something to do about it. wellington was born in ireland. and in a letter to the newspapef wellington who was in favor of
8:14 pm
catholic emancipation even though he was at about anglican and have been opposed to catholic emancipation in the past, and duke of wellington who was prime minister was in favor of avid and leading the charge to have it happen and had made a good speech about in the house of lords, was covering up his crypto papist sympathies. the fact that he was secretly a sympathizer with from and away he was covering this up was by pretending to support the foundation of kings college london college london which was founded as an anglican university in competition with the secular universities which is just been founded a little while earlier. the duke of wellington and -- worse involved in setting up this university. is this going to help you understand the duel? i don't know. he accuses wellington of concealing his papers and wellington is naturally speaking of paul. first of all because he is the loyal to the church of england
8:15 pm
and agreeing to catholic emancipation was a big deal for him. it is hard for him to accept the catholic should be allowed to vote and only in favor of it because it was the alternative to civil war in ireland which was where he was born. so anyway, solis says, you have to apologize. he says i am sorry i can't. he calls his second, it was a very distinguished soldier also and he had lost his arm a few days before waterloo so we didn't fight at waterloo but became commander-in-chief the second of the british forces in the crimea war and was also viceroy of india baker so distinguished englishmen. he asked them to go and talk to him and they arrange this deal and they had the duel. what happens in the duel? a lot of comical things but one of the myths and by the way the fact is from our point of view
8:16 pm
duels look ridiculous and funny so even though this was serious and this was an episode in which the prime minister of england could have been shot in the middle of a constitutional crisis nevertheless it looks ridiculous to us i think for good reasons. so they have this fight. wellington is the person who has challenged first. he fires and misses. this is not surprising because wellington was one of the great soldiers of his time. he was a famously bad shot so nobody would have expected him to hit anybody but what is amazing is what happens next. is now one shall see time. what does he do? heap points the gun in the air in fires in the air. this is a man who didn't have to have this duel. white as a fire in the air? we don't know but he takes an apology out of his pocket and says now i will apologize. why? here is the way to reconstruct
8:17 pm
it. people could have thought that when josie was not fighting because he was afraid of the duel so he had to have the duel and be shot at in order to bend to be able to apologize. this may make sense to you but doesn't make much sense to me and it certainly made sense to them. that was -- by the way the. [inaudible] so you can ask me more if you would like about what happened in this case but here is what i've learned and i'm so glad i started with this. here's what i've learned about honor from thinking about this case. you may not know this, but dueling was illegal in england from the time of queen elizabeth the first. it was against the common law of england. if you read blackstone he says
8:18 pm
willing to kill someone is just ordinary murder. it is a capital crime. so it is illegal. it is unchristian. dueling was condemned by the christian church in the ninth century. no christian thought that their -- every christian thought there was a serious christian argument against dueling. why? for dueling to make sense there has to be some connection between who is right in who wins and the only person who can make that connection is him. and you use the tool to force him to make his choice you are tempting god. and not tempting god is something that we mustn't do. and remember he is on the temple
8:19 pm
temple -- the angels to lift him up and he says no doubt shall not tempt the lord thy god. it is undetectable for this perfectly good christian and by the way also jewish reason. so it is unchristian. it is illegal. this plainly if all because one reason for having a duel is because somebody has accused you you of being dishonest. now falsely accusing you of being dishonest is bad but it is not a capital offense. plurality does not think the appropriate punishment for lying about somebody is death. so it is illegal. is unchristian and as i said it is also crazy. because there is no connection between who wins and who is right. god is in going to make it happen. you can try to tempt god that he is not going to succumb so you have this practice which is a rational, unchristian illegal and immoral. and yet for 300 years and a
8:20 pm
gentleman in england who was challenged to a duel said yes. the beginnings of resistance happened in the late 18th century when people lead wilberforce and for other reasons, the new search, new kind of orality evangelical christian reality wilberforce was not accepted. is a chump money and was entitled but he would have denied it and he was very close with his friends have accepted that he thought it was wrong for the christian recent. he thought that it was a good enough reason not to do it but all these other people said i know it is not christian but i have to defend my honor. so what he learned, the really important first lesson of the duel is that honor will make people do things that are illegal, immoral, unchristian, i'm jewish and crazy. it doesn't make sense but nevertheless they will do it. that is a very important lesson about honor. it is a very powerful discovery i think for me because i hadn't
8:21 pm
thought about it before. the duke of wellington bites and and -- and in 1850 if you challenge somebody to a duel in england people laugh. it is ridiculous. and 20 years and this is why a talk about moral revolutions. goes from being something that a gentleman can and probably should do to something that is not just now recognized to be wrong. is recognized to be a source of dishonor. it goes from being the honorable thing to do to being the ridiculous thing to do. there is nothing more dishonorable than being ridiculous. so it goes from an honorable thing to a ridiculous thing just like in 20 years. why? that is a collocated story. read the book. but a lot of it has to do, great deal of it has to do with the fact that it was an aristocratic practice in england and it only works to sustain your honor if
8:22 pm
only aristocrats do it. if anybody can do it then it doesn't distinguish you from it in one of the things that happens in the early 19th centuries that what frances bacon for the fourth rated beers called earlier, had called in predicting this, frances bacon predicted this. he said once butchers and something like barbers and butchers another route mechanicals he said. that is what shakespeare caused the characters, route mechanicals. bacon says already 300 years before it comes to an end, once regular people start doing it won't work anymore to do the thing that it does so to come to an in. he thought it was going to happen a good to -- deal sooner. but it did happen and that is one of things come he couldn't do his job any anymore. another thing was i say as besides that -- society was democratizing.
8:23 pm
so as i say by 1850, you get mocked in the london times if you have duels and of course by the hand of the 19th century there is a wonderful line in one of these award novels officer and a gentleman where an english officer from an irish background is asked what he would do if you were challenged to a duel and he gives a one word, one-word sentence answer. he says last. alright, so if the story teaches another thing which is if honor is reformed as it was, if you have new ideas about what it is to be a gentleman then you can turn on or in the right direction. in the 1850s cardinal newman, talking about the idea of the university says a gentleman above all this someone who will do no harm. so you have come from the model of a gentleman is a warrior nobles to the moral of the
8:24 pm
gentleman is a victorian high bourjois respectable person who has a stiff upper lip and you can think it reflects value on you. so i talk much about one case and there are three other cases in the book and maybe you can ask me questions about the book or questions about the case. i just want to make one final point though about how this applies to the present. if you want to defend honor their obvious objections objections. the first objection is it looks undemocratic. the second is that is associated with violence. i've argued it can be turned against violence but the third is look what it is doing in the world today and the third argument is from -- it is killing 1000 women in pakistan year in honor killings and killing at least 5000 women in the world that day and that is
8:25 pm
terrible but much worse than that i think is the fact that millions of women are terrorized are going the dead women are only a small proportion of the victims and because of our times and because of the world situation today i shall say i talk about honor killing in pakistan which is a muslim country and to talk about muslim honor killings. is not a muslim practice. is condemned by islam. is condemned by the grand ayatollah and condemned by scholars and a fatwa of pakistani religious leaders. it is not a muslim practice and indeed of course and south asia it is carried out by sikhs and in the mediterranean world was done by christians. is a pre-christian pre-muslim practice which survives in some places. of course a large part -- [inaudible] that is important to her of my
8:26 pm
argument because i want to say is this. first there is an internal tension the notion of honor that leads to honor killing. the notion of honor killing associates man with the honor of men with the sexual impurity of women. voluntary or not. you can get on or killed because you were raped but it has nothing to do with whether you are a good person. it has to do with whether you have been marked with the stigma of dishonor. but those very same systems of honor say that men are responsible for the sanctity of their women. there is a deep tension there and the first thing i think, and this is happening already people in pakistan, a distinguished woman lawyer, say there is no honor in honor killing that she is not saying there is no honor. she is saying there's no honor in honor killing. if you think a woman and your family has done something
8:27 pm
prohibited by islam, then there is a mechanism that is not prescribed for dealing with it because of the courts. it is not to kill your daughter, your mother, your sister, your wife. the second thing, that individual, level of individual his family honor but there is another argument to be made against honor killing. pakistan was created to be a the country of the muslims. it is a wednesday by definition. it is an established religion. it wrings dishonor to islam for a muslim state to allow this on muslim practice which damages the muslim women of pakistan. third, pakistani honor and muslim honor are all tied up his seems to me. i don't think anyone in pakistan should take anything from me saying that but they are saying
8:28 pm
up there and if you want to support somebody against honor killing support the people who make these arguments. support the people who are saying lookout makes us look a notice in order to see what is add about how it makes us look you have to understand it is wrong. so on are here is working to reinforce the moral argument. it is now not working against rowdy. collective honorably can be mobilized against honor killing and i think honor itself in the conception of honor killing can be reformed and those to move i am hopeful will lead to the end of honor killing in about the same amount of time of foot binding which is about 20 years if we do it right. a similar practice in west africa led by an organization has led to the abandonment of female cutting. thousands of villages, so it can
8:29 pm
be made to work in defense of the lives and bodies of women. so i reject the idea that honor can't be turned in this case to good service and finally if you think it should be rejected i tell you you have no chance. honor is to deepen us. what we have to do is not abandon it that reformat, to restructure it so that it is serving purposes that we can applaud. thank you. [applause] >> i didn't mean to end on the word applaud. i am sorry. [laughter] but you are very suggestible. >> when we were at cambridge, we
8:30 pm
heard a story about a british soldier who gave his life by sacrificing himself. he knew the ship is going to blow up in the only way to -- was to sacrifice himself. that night he was going up to his room and churchill college and he saw a bus and he sat down and broke to play for which he got the nobel prize which is about how man's best friend, the chief noble in the court, is to commit ritual suicide 30 days actress king dies. so my question, i have to question but that first question is where do we draw the line? where do you draw the line and what is honorable and what is not? how do we know how we are supposed to feel about defending
8:31 pm
the homeland against invaders or killing someone in the name of the country that we love and we value. the second thing which i know you have written about and i read and i thought you might share this with your audience in the "washington post", it is easy to look back at foot binding now and think how ridiculous, what were they thinking? and dueling, etc. but maybe you will share your list of things the next generation will look back at us and say what were these people thinking? >> the first question, this is really a question about how honor needs reform, because the right question to ask when an honor practice demand something of the someone is what they are demanding consistent with morality? now i think that self-sacrifice for your country is consistent with morality. i don't think there is a moral objection to it. there may be an objection of prudence to it, different kind
8:32 pm
of value. i don't believe that prudence is the right way for morality and i think it is not just and honorable thing to do to say but it is a good thing in the context of the war that is itself --. sewed the first thing is, we look at practices and we should get honor practices and ask how can we reform them to be consistent with morality? not the same as morality. they wouldn't be interesting if they were the same as morality but consistent with morality and as in the case of honor killing egregious way immoral than reform is clearly an order. that is the first . the second is that in focusing on the moral which i do in the book, you may lose track of something else that honor does which is that it does serve to
8:33 pm
support all kinds of values that have nothing at all to do with morality. we give on their -- one of the honorary degrees is for philanthropists of that person is regarded as morally superior but the rest of the honorary degrees are given to people whose moral been a fight is nobody warrants a guarantee. when i give, when we give you at harvard or at and send give a degree to a nobel laureate it is not because we think he is a super person. it is because he is a great scholar or a great writer, he or she. so, honor is used to sustain values other than moral values. it is a very important i think that's about honor that we honor great moviemakers and we honor great documentary makers and we honor great actors. excellence and there is all kinds of excellence. it seems to me i should tell you a little bit about -- i think if
8:34 pm
honor is essentially involving rights to respect so to be honorable is to be entitled to respect to have her right to respect and to care about your honor is to care about any entitled to respect. now of course if you care about being entitled to respect the will be want one -- want to be respected but it is the entitlement that comes first. someone who just wants to be respected, of course he is bernie madoff. bernie madoff wants to be respected but isn't care about whether he deserves the respect he is getting. and honorable person was to be respected but wants to be respected because she is entitled to the respect. i think that that means when you care about something when you have the value like scholarly values or the respect we have for great artistic achievement one way you've managed that, your respect for that value is by honoring those who achieve
8:35 pm
eons the norm in that domain are going deed i wouldn't understand someone who said i respect the value of music that i don't respect the people who are good at it. what would that mean? so honoring great exes, athletes, musicians, scholars, nurses who go above and beyond the call of duty in their work as nurses and so on, honoring those people, soldiers who do not just what they have to do but go way beyond what they have to do, honor is the ideal way of response to these people. think about this. we ask soldiers to do things that you couldn't possibly require them to do because offering your life is not something that you can require someone to do. but it is as up for a good thing soldiers are willing to give or
8:36 pm
risk their lives, so we can't punish them for not giving us their lives because they don't have a duty to give us their lives. we have to punish them for doing things that they have to do. nor is it usually possible to get people to risk their lives by offering them money. it is not the kind of money we have available. i supposedly said to every soldier in the world for a billion dollars, if do you want a billion dollars for honor some of them would take the billion dollars but many of them would take the medal of honor. on or get soldiers to do the things we we can't commanded to do. we can tell them they have to do it but they will do it for honor and if it is in a good cause cometh the cause is just, then it seems to me honor is serving to get people to do something that is worth getting people to do for which we couldn't possibly require them to do because giving up their life is not the kind of thing you can require someone to do.
8:37 pm
it is always going beyond the call of duty to offer your life. so now, one of the things i think i will say what were they thinking about an in 100 years or less. there is a long list but here is a couple that i think you might find interesting. one i think you would all come up with, if you would have asked the question 10 minutes ago you would have, but that by now. there's a great attitude for the treatment of animals and the production of food. it is our ready begun many people who eat meat-- ie meet, but i just think the cruelty involved in the production particularly of pork and beef is -- so if you look at it you cannot endorse it. and i think our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will go look back and say what in the
8:38 pm
heck were they doing? they will just say, nevermind the more mental disaster that feedlots are but the suffering of animals. they will also worry about it and wonder why we didn't say more about that. i think lots of environmentalists-- animal rights issues and if our mental issues, they would say why couldn't they get their act together? but the other one i think caps people won't necessarily come up with quickly by themselves is this one. i think that the fact that the home of the free is the focus of humanity with american citizenship has 25% of the worlds incarcerated people is just preposterous. forget it tomorrow-- forget about the morality. it is immoral. which is can't be right. it can't be right to set up a system that ends up that way and
8:39 pm
it can't be right having produced a system that results not to do anything about it. maybe we sort of slumbered her way into it but we jolly well ought to be getting our way out of it. forget about that. think of the waste of human lives in those prisons and the waste of the things they could be doing for the rest of us, things they could be contributing to our gross domestic product for god sakes. i think people will say we have no idea how it could have been in a society-- one who centralizes, could have ended up being the largest incarcerate her on the planet. actually on the history of the planet. nobody else has ever locked up this larger proportion of its citizens and it is not just that we have a -- of prisoners. we have lots of people who have been imprisoned and whose lives have been ruined because, i
8:40 pm
don't need to talk about this. it seems to me we will look back and say-- they will say what we would say as far as slavery. they would say shame on you. shame on you for allowing this. so there there are others obviously and there are disputed cases. when i wrote the speech in the "washington post" i that did not include abortion. i have a different view about what the right answer is in this case but there are many people, and it may be abortions will disappear but not for this reason, for technological reasons. thank you. >> just quickly on your thing about incarceration. there are some efforts now to use electronic monitoring as an alternative to locking people up which may have other problems. >> and improvements. >> and some evidence that people are better served both republican presidents but the other question i wanted to ask
8:41 pm
was, since honor depends on a consensus, where does the authority come from two can change that consensus? >> well, no. you see what i think in the cases that i looked at nobody was going to argue the other moral size. people weren't going to offer a moral defense for slavery. [inaudible] search me other people didn't believe them. they said things that no reasonable person could believe so there was no serious -- what there was was a sense of the insanity of the practice to the life of plantations and the life of society but the idea-- so i don't think what happens when
8:42 pm
people realize it is wrong is not that they defended. they do two things. one as they say things they don't believe. that is the kind of defense but not in cynthia -- sincere defense and the other thing they do is try hard not to think about it. they engage in what i call strategic ignorance and incarceration is something where there is a vast amount of strategic ignorance. they don't want to think about the fact that the prisons in this industrial society are more likely to have tv when you come out than when he went in and more likely to have aids and are likely to be raped by a man and american prison and is a woman too than -- most likely place to be raped in the united states are gone now, i don't think when we sentence people to prison where sentencing them to being raped. once they are in prison they are our responsibility and they shouldn't be raped and if they
8:43 pm
are we should have to accept responsibility for doing something about it. >> to people since morality change over time because the dueling was equally morally wrong when it started. >> it was. well, this is a complicated question because this notion of morality that i'm using as a bit of a technical as it were, notion, what i mean by morality is the set of norms we have about what we owe to other people. that is what i meant by morality. the problem with dueling is actually morally very complicated from the point of view of morality understood that way because whatever you can say about dueling, it is in the end between consenting adults. and normally while we can think what consenting adults do is crazy or silly or even wrong, we
8:44 pm
sort of are inclined to think it is sort of up to them. so it is a complicated case from that point of view but let me answer your question about how you share the norm. i think the answer is this, and the best example of this i think is what happened in the foot dining case. hugh have to have a social movement. they have foot binding societies in the foot binding societies have to commit themselves to the new norm. so you have to have societies of people who say i'm not going to vote for someone who increases the rate of incarceration for i'm not going to eat food that is produced through this means of production. i, we. we are and that is what happened in the foot mining case. they got together and anti-foot winding societies were modeled on something that they had done before. they made a double promise, if
8:45 pm
you join the society you you are made two promises. i won't find the feed of my daughters and i won't marry to to -- my son to a woman whose feet are bound. that way in getting rid of that fighting you created the husbands for these women at the same time is changing the practice. it was a brilliant's -- i don't know who thought of this. i can't read the chinese sources but it was a brilliant design. this is similar to what they have done, pakistan is done in west africa when these women and men in these villages commit themselves in female genital cutting. what they say is first of all they only do it at the same time in a village and the village from which the husband comes from the daughter of the village. they have the conversation together. and then they say we won't do it and we won't allow, we won't marry into families that do it and if enough people do it, like
8:46 pm
my friend malcolm gladwell likes to call a tipping point. at some point there is a new normal and when there is a new normal all the social pressure that was on the side of dueling or foot landing or going along with slavery flips and suddenly you feel bad about yourself. i think that is -- so this is a book about honor and its role in this but if you want to make the changes there were other things you have to do and among them i think is real social organization of social movemento commit themselves to a new convention, a new norm and then once enough people do it, you can stop talking about it is nobody's going to do it anymore except weirdos. [laughter]
8:47 pm
[inaudible] >> i wonder what you think about the prospects of the movement to a post-carbon world in that respect? in other words, a lot of scientists say we are going to be looking back in 20 years and we are going to be asking that question, what were they thinking? using a finite resource as if it were intimately available, causing no harm but when in fact it is probably going to destabilize the human enterprise. what were they thinking? we just had an election in the last 48 hours where the public thinking was to reject any self-imposed self-restraint about the use of carbon. now as you know, anthropologists have written about honor and shame as duality, as this flip situation and just as draconian revolution occurs things can
8:48 pm
flip from honor to shameful very quickly. what do we need to do to move the carbon where we actually have muscular suv drivers who are saying i'm going to drive this thing until kingdom, and in the process they are hastening the kingdom as it were. how do you get them to flip to the point where they're standing back and saying to themselves, what was i thinking? >> okay, so the question is what is going to make the flip happened in relation to moving to a post-carbon economy tour world in which we are not essentially -- and making it much harder for the biological survival of our own kind which is the sort of thing our grandchildren in particular, if there are any, should be particularly inclined to say. what were they thinking about?
8:49 pm
well, look, this one is i think a little bit different from some of the others and in the following sense. it has got a collective action problem in a way that the others don't. that is to say, it is really true that my suv isn't doing it. if everybody else stops and i went on with my suv everything would be fine. when you have to listen to the sound of your daughter weeping or when you have to see the slave at your table or watch him eating whipped by an overseer, it is a direct feedback to you and when you are funded or killed or lose a friend in a duel there is a direct feedback to you. so there is an extra dimension of difficulty i believe in this case which we have to solve of
8:50 pm
course. it is not an excuse. it is just an observation. we have to figure out and honor is the ideal mechanism for doing that because what honor does is saved notice what happened in the dueling case. the recent dueling -- what was doing about? one of the things that was about was defining a gentleman and everybody else was across boundary mechanism. honor was maintaining civility among the aristocracy because the idea was with all these people who are very about their honor you had better be polite because otherwise you'll end up at the end of a sword. but, why should i risk my life in order to make my friend's polite? once you got me concerned about my honor i forget about the fact that i'm having this side effect that make you my friend's polite. if we can make a dishonorable,
8:51 pm
they can change the people in the suvs where each time they drive around and that is one case. all of us are doing something we should be ashamed up in the sphere. none of us i think can excuse ourselves. we are all engage in practices that are part of the problem. if we can get ourselves to see, to sort of have the feeling that as i drive down the avenue in my suv people are thinking what kind of a schmuck is that? yes, good. but the trouble is the driver of the suv is thinking -- and also the driver doesn't care because the driver of the suv hasn't been converted to the norm according to which there is a problem. but the point about the collective action problem is, it is is not just a matter of
8:52 pm
telling people things. you do have to produce a social cost of and that we can do but only collectively. not one of the time. we have to again create a movement which is willing to say to people you know, you are poisoning the human masses. >> especially this flip that occurred there. that has to do with providing a positive alternative. in other words it is the free labor provision in the slave trade thing and europe moving out of the need for plantations, mercantile capital to industrial capital and why not keep them in africa instead of bringing them to the west indies to grow sugar? >> this is absolutely crucial. the question is, is that important in the slave case, there was an alternative. it could produce the -- so, yes.
8:53 pm
that is the other thing. telling people that what they are doing is bad or even shameful isn't helpful in the to tell them there is something else they can be doing and is honorable. it is not enough, you are absolutely right and i should've said this because it is a very important part of the argument at the end of the book. you can't just tell people they are bad. that is hopeless. they will ignore you. they will dislike you but they won't change if you just tell them they are back. what you have to say is you are doing a bad thing but here's as good thing you can be doing instead which satisfies many of the same interest but it would do so in a way that is morally preferable. and i think, when we think about these things, we have succeeded in a certain sense. the prius is sexy. the prius is not the be-all and
8:54 pm
end-all to the carbon solution but the point is we have made them more environmentally, slightly more environmentally acceptable car. the kind of one you can feel proud about driving at least if you are thinking about the environment. again they are people who are proud of driving suvs and we have to work hard to convince them why that is not a good friend of mine to be in. i think i'm supposed to allow -- anymore questions? >> i saw your piece in "the new york times" magazine about basically a couple of components of social change movement with people from the exterior especially in foot dining in the road that one of the key components for a campaign with significant involvement of people from the outside so for instance the missionaries who were coming anti-for finding
8:55 pm
campaigns immerse themselves in chinese culture and really try to avoid coming into it from a position of arrogant source appear at a is how i understand from reading it. i guess i am wondering how that can be done. it seems like a delicate talents to be approaching culturally sensitive issues that are sometimes argued about in the kind of framework that we are the human race and people can get defensive and feel that is cultural imperialism. >> just so that i repeat back the question for the recording, so, she was talking about having read a piece i wrote in "the new york times" magazine in which one of the things i stressed about the role of outsiders in helping to bring about change is that it least in the chinese case, the reason i believe it worked was because the relevant outsiders were people who had
8:56 pm
and seemed to have a deep respect or chinese civilization. timothy rashad the evangelical that this minister, one of the important people in this, he learned his text. he knew his confucian text. he published it in the newspaper and they couldn't think of something to an outsider who didn't respect us so why should we take any notice with him? so the first duty of someone who wants to be helpful i think from the outside just to make sure you know what the heck you are talking about and not just know what the heck you are talking about a show that knowing what you are talking about is rooted not in contempt for these other people but is a concern for them. and a concern for the girls whose are being cut or for the girl who. >> or being bound or the women who risk being assassinated by a
8:57 pm
member of their own family. but also for the family because in killing your daughter you have lost something and she has lost the most important thing. if you have lost something too so all of you will lose if you don't do this thing. unless the outsiders look like that, what you will get as i pointed out is the opposite from reaction. you will get the nationalist backlash which we don't in relation to female genital cutting in kenya. the result was -- and it became an item of faith that you had to maintain this practice as a sign of your identity. profoundly to put it mildly counterproductive intervention.
8:58 pm
given what most muslims in the world of reasonably believe rightly or wrongly but reasonably believe about many americans, american voices on these questions don't sound like they are coming from a place of respect and concern. they sound like they're coming from a place of disrespect, contempt and ignorance and often we have to admit they are. so those of us who believe that it is -- i am an american citizen and i am glad to be an american citizen and unlike you i chose choose to be an american citizen. is very important for those of us who represent, who can because we are americans represent our country in a different way. it is important for us to say when idiots want to burn the koran or idiots want to oppose the creation of prayer centers, prayer centers between which and
8:59 pm
the world trade center there are bars with women but their tops on in this place that would be regarded as a great place of sanctity and on her. when people do things like that we have to make it clear that some of us at least just are in a different place with respect to these things. and it is those of us that they might want to seek help from and maybe even discuss about these things. i don't want them to talk to the guy in florida who is burning korans. of course they don't want to talk to him, and of course that is the right. we should ignore him and in fact i think they should have contempt for him, the very contempt he has for them. but it would be better if both of them could change their ways and make it possible for them to have respect for each other as i try to have respect for what i
9:00 pm
can respect. i can't respect everything in the traditions of islam. i'm not saying to pretend to agree with things you don't agree with but you can manifest respect for someone while still telling them what you think. by the way just to take a point from my earlier -- and this conversation which i'm i am not modeling very well you have to listen as well as talk. one of the great problems we have with the muslim world as we don't hear anything. imam roff who is the guy who is the head religious figure in the prayer center that i hope will eventually be in the world trade center, took the problem to write a book about the american identity and it is true that as glenn beck said he believes we should have -- in the united states. ..
9:01 pm
9:02 pm
people are organized to be doing it. one of the key figures in interface debates and discussions are in this country and conversations in the country, churches and synagogues are in all the time. he was there when danny pearl's funeral happened in his home; right so there are -- and he's an american-muslim by the way. he's one of us in that very important respect, so i do think that back to your question, i got distracted right there about my anxiety on the topic, but i believe there is something for us to do which is create the context in which there is a productive dialogue, and within that productive dialogue we will learn as well as i hope change their minds. i was talking about the other day a man i'm a fan of who got the nobel peace prize the other
9:03 pm
day and minorities that included some chinese, and they didn't agree with everything i said, but in their response to me, they said we live -- we're glad to be in this country. that's fine, we're not unhappy to be here, but we noticed that you're constantly talking about the things we're doing wrong, telling us that china is doing this. well, this woman said, can we talk a bit about what you are doing in iraq and afghanistan? i said, absolutely. if we have these conversations, you have to tell us how it looks. as it happens with those thing, i agree with you. i'm sure you tell me things that i don't agree with you on. they were more skeptical about the democracy in china an i am. i believe, i believe that roughly speaking all the problems that there are with
9:04 pm
democracy which there are, of course, we can now see having done the experiment that they are still there. they kept telling me, kept telling me, well, the vast peasantry are ignore rapt. i said that may be, but they are intended to vote. it should give you at least the honest motive for informing yourself since it's an important decision on who should run your state or your country. it turns out people don't actually invest a lot of time in for reasons of political science in which they should. it has to be a dialogue. it has to be respectful, and then we can help each other. they'll help us, we'll help them. just the other topic i mentioned in the "washington post" piece i think that what we're in this country kind of wear housing many --
9:05 pm
ware warehousing many old people. i grew up in a place where you tried to warehouse old people, at least people who had families, people thought you were a monster. there's a place where the conversation, i think, would lead to, you know, where we here have a great deal to learn. it's a complicated matter. i don't mean they tell us how to solve it or what to do, but we would learn from dialogue i think from that. thank you. [applause] thank you. [applause] [applause] >> he is a philosophy professor at princeton university and author of several books. for more information, visit his
9:06 pm
website, appiah.net >> we're here at the national press club talking about his new book, "poisenning the press." can you tell us what this is about? >> you bet. the title comes from during the nixon white house, they plotted to poisen a journalist, an investigative reporter, jack anderson. nobody under the age of 60 remembers who-or knows who he was, but he was the most feared investigative reporter in the country, and he drove richard nixon crazy, and the white house tapes are filled with these to get anderson in a plot to poisen him. >> do you know if anyone else had previously written about this aspect of the nixon history? >> no, nobody had, and it was really surprising to me. i was an investigative reporter
9:07 pm
myself and went to grad school, and i'm a historian now. the connection between history and journalism, there's a lot of great dirt in the past to be found if you know how to look and where to look and interview the right people. there are amazing tales i found in the book of sex scandals and love letters and blackmail and forgery and bribery, all juicy stuff in history that textbooks leave out. >> what are the more surprising things you found? >> i'm not sure i can say them on the air. one was the way hoover slimed martin luther king. that's been known, but i got a hold of the memos that describes actually what hoover districted to the press and all over washington of what king supposedly said in bed, stories of him chasing prostitutes. they were made up propositions,
9:08 pm
and that was startling to me. another was an allegation with president ford when he was still in congress involved in a tall girl rim, that a lobbyist sploid in a hotel in washington. the details are in my book, and that kind of scandal and the fbi bugged his hotel sweet in washington and blackmailed ford about this. you know, those are the scandals that had been broken at the time would have ended a career in washington. in this day and age, i don't think something like that stays secret, but then you didn't write about sec lies. >> did you find it difficult to sit through and determine what was true and simply made up? >> yes, yes, it was. you know, i had actual corroboration in the form of documentation which i did with the king allegations or i had a source who went on the record and was named as i did in the ford allegations.
9:09 pm
that mustered with not just my own standards, but with the publisher and legal betting that they did. >> thank you very much for your time. >> visit booktv.org to watch any programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left hand side of the page and selecting the format. book tv streams for 48 hours on the weekend with nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. every weekend, booktv brings you 48 hours of history, biography, and public affairs. here's a portion of one of our programs. >> thomas, what do you think of hip hop now? >> sunk to new lows.
9:10 pm
[laughter] the inspiration from the book started thinking about -- >> sunk to new lows you said. wow. >> i do. i started writing this book -- well i wrote in 2007, and i believe that the dominant artists at the time, not the sole artists, but the art is that were really driving the media coverage of the genera and that were really setting the culture tone were soldier boy. if you compare that to the so-called gangster rappers of the early 90s like jay-z, that's such a decline in artistic quality in the message. >> you're cool with biggie? >> i'm not, but i think he had a lot more complexity than what you see a lot now. i am kind of interested in watching a guy like drake, but i don't think that, you know, one artist guides an entire culture. >> you say it sank to new lows.
9:11 pm
explain to me why you feel that way. i mean, these are street poets, okay? why do you feel that they have sunk to new lows if they are expressing their reality? >> well, it's debatable if they are expressing their reality. a lot of them are simply prop ganding the worst stereotypes about black people that ever existed. >> so -- [applause] okay. if that's their reality, should they did silent? >> it's not many of their realities. some of them do have pretty gritty realities. >> there's a movie about biggie, and we can see he rapped about his reality in the streets. >> no, biggie was a guy who observed some other people's realities more than his own. i've lived in the fort green area of brooklyn for a few years, and the part that he comes from is quite nice
9:12 pm
compared to the parts of the rural south where a lot of -- it's much nicer than where james baldwin grew up in, and it was better than the environment my father grew up in. >> the guy was a drug dealer. >> yeah, others deal drugs too because it was very cool. >> right. >> his mother was a schoolteacher, and he didn't have to deal drugs to feed himself. >> right, but that was his choice. >> it was, exactly. >> let me ask you this. what is good hip hop to you? >> well, i want to be very clear about this. my book is not about muse ig. it's not -- mewsessic. it's not a critique of the merit that i dent dispute. >> losing my cool, how a father's love and 15,000 books beat hip-hop culture. >> it's about a system of values that the music doesn't create, but it provides a sound check in an echo chamber and magnifies
9:13 pm
and glorifies and row manet sizes these things. a lot of older critics have a problem with hip hop and find it inferior to jazz and other forms of black music. that's not my argument whatsoever. i'm trying to attack ideas and cultural values and critique them and talk about what i see as the secular religion of hip hop which is 5 way of living and reaching for a cup of water or greeting someone on the street. it's a way of dismissing certain ideas that are not real. i'm not talking about whether an artist has ability. clearly they do and i think the music -- i don't need to critique the culture if the music was trash. one of the reasons it's powerful is because the music, the culture is pleasing in a lot of ways. >> but that's the history of african-american's music in a
9:14 pm
sense. >> well, not really. if you listen to a love supreme by john culture, there's no similarities between that and something like the burr print to, you know? >> right. [laughter] [applause] >> i'm a john cold train fan, but -- >> me too. >> i am, i am. i want to go back to my question which i want you to answer directly. what would be good hip-hop? >> well, i can list -- we could spend the rest of the panel. >> no. what would be good hip-hopceps you're saying it's -- >> good hip-hop music is reasonable doubt by jay-z, ready to die by biggie smalls. now, is the concept and message involved in the great music poisen? yes, it is. if you try to live your life the way jay-z instructs you
147 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN2 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on