loyalists are going to canada, about 3500 slaves, ex-slaves go to canada, canada are given land and start a colony in canada. just as a footnote to that, about 10 years later, they say we're not getting a good deal, getting lousy land, mistreated, and asked the british to send them out and they form the modern state of sierra leone. it's another result of the revolution. ..

>> one was the cowboys, and the -- oh. the cowboys got to be everybody for a while. but there were, there were green-coated raiders, and i forgot the name that they had. but one of the little footnotes to history is that when andre is, leaves benedict arnold after having obtained the defense of west point, he's walking along in a british uniform with a gray coat on, and he sees three nondescript soldiers. and he assumes they're tories. and says, i'm a british officer, and they say, well, welcome to

reality, you know? [laughter] we're not. so that's how -- [laughter] that's how mixed up it was. in westchester, yeah. it was delaineys, cowboys. delance says, cowboys. >> we never call -- [inaudible] copley a tori, one of the major painters. >> get out of here early. don't wring up john co -- bring up john copley with me. he is an incredible character, john singleton copley. he does a portrait of paul revere one day, and another day he does a portrait of the british commander in boston. and there's a wonderful little story. before the revolution in a riot against the existing governor whose name is bernard, the riot spills out into the halls of harvard, and there's a portrait

of bernard in one of the halls. and one of the rebels gets on somebody's shoulders, i guess, and he cuts the section out of the portrait that would have been where the heart was if it had been a human being, and he holds it up and says i've take bernard's heart. well, copley shows up, and he repairs it and from then on he's a marked man. and he leaves the country before the rev hughes starts -- revolution starts and becomes a member of what was called the loyalist club this london. in london. >> thomas allen is the author of several books including "remember valley forge." for more information about the author and his new book, visit tories fighting for the kingdom.

>> coming up, kwame anthony appiah argues that more be revolutions from the dehides of duels to solve personal arguments in britain to foot binding in china succeed when riggss come into dispute with the idea of honor. he discusses his book at the harvard bookstore in cambridge, massachusetts. the program is a little over an hour. [applause] >> thank you. thank you so much. thanks to all of you for coming out this evening to this, my favorite week store in the whole wide -- bookstore in the whole wide world. give it up for harvard bookstore. isn't it a great place? [applause] it's my pleasure to introduce kwame anthony appiah. the philosophy of mind and language, african and african-american intellectual history and political

philosophy. appiah as a thinker and a writer is as urbane and as warm, as reflective and as accessible, as challenging and as generous as he is as a friend. a premier scholar of contemporary philosophical thought, his work crosses disciplines as it crosses national boundaries and celebrates human rights, ethnic and cultural pluralism, individual identity, intellectual liberty and a sublime mode of cosmopolitanism. let me review just a few of appiah's earlier accomplishments before talking for a moment about his new book with, "the honor code: how moral revolutions happen." educated in ghana and england where we met some 37 years ago at claire college, appiah quickly rose to prominence as a philosopher at the intersection of the philosophy of language

and the philosophy of mind. he is now the lawrence s. rockefeller university professor of of philosophy and the university center for human values down at princeton university. and prior to arriving at princeton, he taught at yale, cornell and duke. he and i collaborated to realize w.e. duboise' dream of an encyclopedia africana which was brought out in a 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 philosophical thought. his 1992 book, "in my father's house," is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary african thought and is globally connected. cosmopolitanism from the year

2006 prescribes 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 wrings appiah's -- brings appiah's concerns to the question of how moral progress happens. he looks at successful campaigns against practices now considered abhorrent. foot binding in if china, for example, or duels in aristocratic written, and most powerfully for me, slavery in the british empire and the united states. and through intricate and illuminating inquiry, he helps us to understand the role that the appeal to honor plays in

what he rightly calls moral revolution. the honor code has received high praise from some giants in the field of moral inquiry. paul berman of slate o wrote in a review and i quote, reading the honor code is like attending a lecture and is ultimately intent on making you think for yourself. dwight garner in "the new york times" celebrated his, quote, malcolm gladwell story telling in which he, quote, stirs in spoonfuls of narrative honey to help his medicinal tea go down. matthew iglesias on think progress.com calls the book, coat, monstrously interesting and the exact reverse of all the stereotypes of academic overspecialization and who caressism. i like that. and now for the giants, no fence

to my fellow journalists, the book, and i quote, how 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 is essential for us. inescapable in its urgent relevance to the embattled human morality, we live within our codes of the present. edward wilson and walter izaakson address the importance of the honor code as a guide book for the future. wilson says that, and i quote, appiah lays out a concept that is not only compelling in its own right, but also suggests a connection that may, in time, help to colate biological and cultural exploration of human morality. that's a grand complement. and isaacson says, quote, even

honor is sometimes distorted as with honor killings in pakistan, this classical concept can be a load star in dividing us to a better future. it's an amazing and and fascinating insight. this is an indispensable book for honorable citizens. he just delivered just two hours ago, he completed the final of his three duboise' lectures on w.e.b. duboise, the world and the negro in africa, and those, i'm pleased to say, will be published soon, we hope, by the harvard university press. anthony appiah will read to this evening from this remarkable new book, the latest contribution in a truly, truly remarkable career. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my friend, anthony appiah. [applause]

>> so i'm half english, my mother was english, and when people say nice things about you when you're english, you feel embarrassed. [laughter] but i'm half ghanaian. [laughter] and when people say nice things about you when you're ghanaian, you thank them. [laughter] so i think i'll focus on that. thank you very much, indeed. i'm happy to read from the book, if the you like, but i thought i'd just talk about it a little bit first. and then if by the end of my talk you actually want me to read from it, i will. but i think you'll want to ask questions, so we'll see. thank you all very much for coming. one way to sort of explain the book is to think about the intersections of questions that generated it. so let me just 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, as skip

said, i wrote a book about some years ago. and i was looking for examples of conversation across societies about moral questions. and one of the most famous such conversations was the dialogue between largely evangelical christian missionaries, elite women who were wise of european and american businessmen and chinese intellectuals in china in the late 19th century and early 20th century about foot binding of girls in china. so i read some literature on that, and regularly people say that the reason the chinese mandarins gave up foot binding was because it was a stain on the national feeling of china. i can think of a lot better reasons than causing pain to little girls. so tight that they may develop

ab accesses -- ab accesses, they may develop gangrene be can, and sometimes in this the end in the ideal case on this system, the foot is 3 inches long in the adult woman and then wrapped in a beautiful silk shoe which she's made herself usually. so anyway, i thought there were lots of reasons not to do it, and honor seemed like a weird one. i couldn't fit this into the book on cosmopolitanism, but i put it in the back of my mind to think about later. then our alma mater, cambridge university, invited me to give some lectures. no idea why, very kind of them. and i thought, well, this is a historical question, so this is my moment to think about this thing i put aside. and in figuring out how to think about it, it occurred to me that when i had been an undergraduate, philosophy student, i had learned a lot about thinking about how human knowledge works by reading the work of the great philosopher

thomas kuhn which was about scientific revolution. so other people from austria and some of the great french students in the 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 as revolutions had helped us understand something about nonmoral revolutions, maybe moral revolutions would help us understand about moral life. so those two thoughts come together, and i say i'm going to do a historical project like the revolution that ended foot binding, and it looks like the puzzling thing about foot binding is, to me, was this question of honor. so i need to understand honor. i need to -- and i think of myself as a moderately honorable

person. when i went to college, my father said to me -- he looked up over his glasses reading the morning newspaper, he looked up over his glasses, and he said to me, remember the family honor when you go to university. wow. [laughter] it was kindly meant, but it was pretty scary thing to say. so i was brought up to think that there was, there was not just my honor, but a family honor to bear. so i feel i had some sense of it. but i didn't feel i understood the logic of honor, and i thought especially as i'm beginning to talk to historians to examine some historical episode. and the obvious one to start one where there's a clear involvement of honor and where the honor is dueling. that was what led me, then, to begin inspired by these two unrelated thoughts to think about the duel.

and how to think about the duel? well, i happened upon a particular duel which happened in 1829 which struck he as absolutely amazing, absolutely fascinating, as fascinating as the thoughting that honor might havenedded foot binding. -- have ended foot binding. it was a duel between the prime minister of england, the duke of wellington and a man with the marvelous english name of finchhatten. but his style was early of -- earl of noting so these two guys, both obviously members of the house of lords, the duke of wellington at the time is prime minister of england. these two guys fought a famous duel. what was it about? this one sense my answer to that

is i have no idea. i mean, i've read a great deal about it, i know what they said, but in some sense dueling makes no sense to us them, so i can't tell you something that makes you think, okay, that was a reasonable thing to do. but here's what they said it was about. there was a debate going on in parliament about whether catholic should be given the vote, catholic emancipation. very important for britain not so much of catholic voters in the england, but because the majority of voters in ireland were catholic, and at that point ireland was on the research of civil war, and the english had to do something about it. and in a letter to the newspaper the earl said that the duke of wellington who was in favor of catholic emancipation even though he was of a devout anglican and had been opposed in the past, the duke of wellington was in favor of it, was leading the charge to have it happen and had made a very good speech about it in the house of lords, was covering up his sympathies.

the fact that he was secretly a sympathizer with rome and the way he was covering up in competition with london university. to so the duke of wellington and the earl are both involved in setting up this university. is this going to help you understand the duel? i don't know. [laughter] they're both involved in helping set up the university. wellington is, naturally speaking, appalled, first of all, because he's a loyal member of the church of england and agreeing to catholic emancipation was a big deal for him, it was hard for him to accept, and he was only in favor of it because it was the alternative to civil war in ireland which was where he was born. so anyway, so he says to the

earl, you have to apologize. you published this accusation. and the earl says, well, i'm sorry, i can't. the earl sauls his second -- calls his second who was a distinguished soldier who went on to become commander in chief and also viceroy of india later. he asked him to go and talk to the earl, and they arranged this duel, and they had the duel. what happens in the duel? well, a lot of comical things, but one of them is -- and, by the way, the fact is from our point of view, duels always look ridiculous and funny so even though this was serious and 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 reason. so they have this fight. the earl -- wellington as the person who's challenged first. he fires and misses.

this is not surprising because though wellington was one of the great soldiers of his time, he was a famously bad shot so nobody really expected him to hit anybody. but what's really amazing is what happens next. it's now the earl's turn. what does he do? points the gun in the air and fires in the air. this is the man who didn't have to have this duel, right? why does he fire in the air? we don't know, but as soon as he's fired in the air, he takes an apology and says now we'll apologize. why? well, reconstructed, the earl felt that once the duke of wellington had asked him to apologize in the context where he had appointed a second, the people could have thought the earl was not fighting because he was afraid of the duel. so he had to be shot at in order, then, to be able to apologize. this may make sense to you, but it doesn't make sense to me, but it certainly made sense to them.

by the way, the earl is the grandfather of the guy that robert redford played in out of africa. [laughter] dennis. so, so you could ask me more if you like about what happened in this case, but here's what i learned, and i'm so glad i started with this case. here's what i 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 i. it was against the common law of england. if you read blackstone, he says if you kill someone in a duel, it's ordinary murder. so it's illegal. it's un-christian. dueling was condemned in the ninth century by the church. not in the 19th, the ninth. and that condemnation was repeat

bed at the end of the reformation and was common place of the protestant churches when they came into being with. no christian thought -- every christian thought there was a serious christian argument existence dueling. why? -- against dueling. why? for dueling to make sense, there has to be the some connection between who's right and who wins. ask the only person who can -- and the only person who can make that connection is him. and if you use the duel to force him to make his choice, you are tempting god. and not tempting god is something that christ himself explicitly said we mustn't do. remember, he's on the temple, and he's asked to throw himself down so that the angels will lift him up, and he says, no, thou shalt not tempt the lord god. christian and, by the way, also jewish reason. so it's un-christian. it's illegal. it's plainly immoral.

plainly immoral because one reason for having a duel is because somebody has accused you of being dishonest. now,ing falsely accusing you of being dishonest is bad, but it's not a capital offense. morality does not think the appropriate punishment for lying about somebody is death. so it's illegal, it's un-christian, it's immoral, and as i've said, it's also crazy. [laughter] because there's no connection between who wents and who's right, as -- wins and who's right, as i said. you can try to tempt god, but he's not going to succumb. so you have this practice which is irrational, un-christian, illegal and immoral. and yet for 3 be 00 year -- 300 years any gentleman in england who was challenged to a duel said yes. the beginnings of resistance happen in the late 18th century when people who we know for other reasons, the new surge, kind of reality in england,

wilbur wouldn't have accepted it. he was a gentleman. he was entitled to, but he would have denied it, and he was very cross with his friends when he accepted because he thought it was wrong for the christian reason. so he thought that was a good enough reason not to do it, all these other people said, well, i know it's not christian, but i have to defend my honor. so what do you learn? the really important first lesson of the duel is that honor will make people do things that are illegal, immoral, un-christian and crazy. doesn't make sense, but never the heads, they'll do -- nevertheless, they'll do it. a very powerful discovery, i think, for me because i hadn't thought about it before. the second thing you learn is that the duke of wellington fights this fight in 1829, right? in 1850 if you challenge somebody to a duel in england, people laugh. it's ri tick louse --

ridiculous. in 20 years, and this is why i talk about moral revolutions, it goes from being something that a gentleman can and probably should do to something that is not just now recognized to be wrong, it's recognized to be a source of dishonor. it goes from being the honorable thing to do to being the ridiculous thing to do. there's nothing more dishonorable than being ridiculous. so it goes from an honorable thing to a ridiculous thing just, like, in 20 years. why? that's a complicated score story, read the book, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that it was an aristocratic practice, and england is democratizing, and it only works to sustain your honor if only aristocrats do it. if anybody can do it, it doesn't distinguish you, and one of the things that happens in the early 19th century is what had been called this predicting this --

in predicting this, he said barbers and butchers and other rude mechanicals, he said. remember, that's what shakespeare calls the characters in midsummer night's dream, rude mechanicals. bacon says already 300 year before it comes to an end once regular people start doing it, it won't work anymore, and so it'll come to an end. now, he thought it was going to happen a good deal sooner. it didn't happen until the 19th century, but it did happen. it couldn't do its job anymore. but as i say, it's democratizing, becoming not just regarded as wrong but ridiculous, and so, as i say, by 1850 you, you get mocked in the london times if you duel. and, of course, by the end of the 19th century -- there's a wonderful line in one of the war novels, officers and gentlemen,

where sort of an english officer from an aristocratic background is asked what he would do if he were challenged to a duel, and he gives a one-word sentence answer. he says, laugh. all right. so the story teaches another thing which is that if honor is reformed as it was, if you have new ideas about it seems to be a gentleman, then you can turn honor in the right direction. in the 1850s cardinal newman writing about the idea of the university says a gentleman above all is someone who will do no harm. so you've come from the model of a gentleman if is a warrior noble to the model of a gentleman as a victorian high biewrnlg boy respectable person who's got a stiff upper lip. you can insult him, and he'll think it reflects badly on you.

so there are these shifts, and they happen very fast. there are three other cases in the book, and maybe you can ask me questions about slavery. i just want to make one final point about how this applies in the present. if you want to defend honor, there are sort of some obvious objections. the first is it looks undemocratic. i've argued that it can be democratized. the second is that it's associated with violence. but the third is look what it's doing in the world today. what is honor doing today? it's killing a thousand women in pakistan a year in honor killings. it's killing at least 5,000 women in the world that way, and that's terrible but much worse than that, i think, is millions of women are terrorized. so the dead woman are only a small proportion of the victims. and payoff our times -- because of our time it is not a muslim

practice, it is condemned by islam, it is condemned by scholars in cairo, it's condemned by a fatwa of 40 pakistani religious leaders, it's not a muslim practice and, indeed, in south asia it's carried out by hindus and, indeed, in the mediterranean world in the 19th century it was done by christians. so it's a pre-christian, pre-muslim practice which survived in some places. of course, there are or large parts of the muslim world where it doesn't happen at all. it doesn't happen in indonesia. so i don't want to say -- it's not a muslim practice. that's important to my argument. first, there's an internal tension in the motion of honor that leads to honor killing. the notion of honor that leads to honor killing associates men with, the honor of men with the sexual purity of their women. voluntary or not.

i mean, you can get honor killed because you were raped, but it has nothing to do with whether you're a good person. it has to do with whether you've been marked with the stigma of this kind of dishonor. but those very same systems of honor say that men are responsible for the safety of their women. so there's a deep tension there. and the first thing i think -- and this is happening already. people in pakistan, a very distinguished woman lawyer, say there is no honor in honor killings. she's not saying there's no honor, she's saying there's no honor in honor killing. if you think that a woman in your family has done something that's prohibited by islam, then there's a mechanism that is prescribed for dealing with it which is to go to the courts. it is not to kill your daughter, your mother, your sister, your wife. first thing. second thing, that's individual -- the level of

individual and family honor. but there's another huge argument to be made in the name of honor against honor killing and it's this: pakistan was created to be the country of the muslims in south asia. it's a muslim state by definition. it has an established religion pakistani honor and muslim honor are all tied up in stopping this practice. i don't think anyone in pakistan should take notice of me saying that, but they're saying it there. and if you want to support somebody who's fighting against honor killing in pakistan, support the people who are making these arguments. support the people who are saying look how it makes us look. and notice that in order to see what's bad about how it makes us look, you have to understand

that it's wrong. so honor here is working to reinforce moral argument. now not working against morality. so collective honor, i believe, can be mobilized against honor killing. i think the conception of honor that leads to honor killing can be reformed, and those two moves i'm hopeful will lead to the end of honor killing in about the same amount of time it took to end foot binding which is about 20 years. if we do it right. a similar process in west africa led by an organization has led to the abandonment of female genital cutting in thousands, i repeat that, thousands ofages. finish can villages. so it can be made to work in defense of the lives and the body of women. so i reject the idea that honor can't be turned, in this case, to good service and can, finally, if you think it should

be rejected, i tell you, you have no chance. honor is too deep in us. what we have to do is not abandon it, but reform it. to restructure it so that it's serving purposes that we can applaud. thank you. [applause] >> i didn't mean to end on the word applause, i'm sorry. but you're very suggestible. [laughter] if okay. when we were in cambridge, heard a story about a british soldier who gave his life by sacrificing himself.

>> my question -- i have two questions, but the first or is where do we draw the line? where do can you draw the line in what's honorable, in what's not? how do we know how we're supposed to feel about defending the homeland against invaders or, you know, killing someone in the name of the cup that we -- country that we love and we value. and the second thing which i know you've written about and i've read, i thought you might share this with your audience in

"the washington post", it's easy to look back at foot binding and think, well, how ridiculous, what were they thinking, and dueling, etc. but maybe you'll share your list of things that the next generation will look back at us and say, what were these people thinking? >> good. so on the first question, this is really a question about how honor needs reform. because the right question to ask when an honor practice demands something of someone is, first of all, is what they're demanding consistent with reality? now, i think that self-sacrifice for your country is consistent with morality. i don't think there's a moral objection to it. there may be an objection of prudence to it. that is, it's not in your self-interest to throw yourself on the grenade in order to protect your buddies. but i don't believe that prudence is the right way to understand morality, and i think that it's not just an honorable thing to do to save your

buddies, it's a good thing in the context of a war that is it just and so on, obviously. so the first thing is we look at honor practices, i think we should look at honor practices and ask how can we reform them to become consistent with reality? not the same as reality, they don't have to be the same but consistent with reality. and when they're -- as in the case of honor killing, the second point is in focusing on the moral cases which i do in the book, you may lose track of something else that honor does which is that it does, it serves to support all kinds of values that have nothing at all to do with morality. we give honorary degrees. one of the honorary degrees each year is for the philanthropist, so i guess that person gets to be regarded as morality superior, but the rest of the

people nobody's warn teeing -- guaranteeing. when i give, when you give an honorary degree to a nobel laureate, it's because he's a great scholar or a great writer, he or she. so honor is used to sustain values other than moral values. it's very important, i think, that we honor great movie makers, documentary makers, actors, we honor excellence. and excellence is not all moral crens. there's all -- excellence. there's all kinds of excellence. indeed, it seems to me -- i should say a little bit about theory. i think of honor as essentially involving rights to respect. so to be honorable is to be entitled to respect, to have a right to respect, and to care about your honor is to care about being entitled to respect. you'll want to be respected too,

but it's the entitlement to respect that comes first for an honorable person. someone who just wants to be respected is, you know, of course. he's bernie maid off. -- bear ney madoff. an honorable person wants to be respected because she's entitled to the respect. and i think that that means that when you care about something, when you have a value like scholarly values and the respect we probably all have for artistic achievements, one way you manifest your respect for that value is by honoring those who are, who achieve beyond the norm in that domain. indeed, i wouldn't understand someone who said i respect the value of music, but i don't respect the people who are good at it. what would that heene? mean? so honoring great athletes,

musicians, scholars, nurses who do, 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 responding to these people. think about this. we ask soldier to do things that you congress possibly require -- couldn't possibly require them to do because offering your life is not something that you can require someone to do. but it's, as it were, a good thing if soldiers are willing to give or risk their lives. so we can't punish them for not giving up their lives because they don't have a duty to give up their lives. you can only punish people for doing things they have to do. nor is it usually possible to do

it by offering money. i suppose if we said to every soldier in the world do you want a billion dollars or a medal of honor, maybe some of them would take the billion dollar, but many of them would take the medal of honor. and honor is perfect for this. honor gets the soldiers to do this thing we can't command them to do, but they will to it for honor. and if it's in a good cause f the cause just -- if the cause is just, then honor is serving to get people to do something that it's worth getting people to do but which we couldn't possibly require them to do because giving up your life is not the kind of of thing you can require someone to do, it seems to me. always, as the philosophers say, it's always going beyond the call of duty to offer your life. >> [inaudible] >> oh, yes. so now one of the things that i think they'll say what were they thinking about in the 100 years or less, well, there's a long

list, but here's a couple that i think you might find interesting. one, i think, is i think you would all come up with if skip had asked the question ten minutes ago, you would have all come up with it by now. i think there's a revolution going on in our attitude to the treatment of animals in the production of food. people who eat meat -- i have sheep actually -- but i just think that the cruelty involved in the production particularly of pork and beef, if you look at it, you cannot enforce it. and i think -- endorse it. and i think our grandchildren are going to look back and say what did they think they were doing, you know? they'll see videotape of feed lots, and can they'll just say, i mean, never mind the environmental disaster that feed lots are. just the suffering of the animals, right? they'll also worry about the environment, too, and they'll

wonder why we weren't thinking more about that. so i think lots of environmentalists -- animal right issues, there are environmental its who will say why couldn't they get their act together. but the other one that i think perhaps people won't necessarily come up with at least quickly by themselves is i think that the fact that the home of the free, this 4% of humanity with hearn citizenship,s has 25% of the world's incarcerated people. the t just preos rouse. finish preposterous. never mind, forget about the morality of it. well, don't. it is immoral. it can't be right to set up a system that ends up with that result. and it cannot be right having produced it not to do anything about it. i mean, maybe we sort of slummerred our -- slumbered our way into it, but we jolly well ought to be getting out of it. just think of the waste.

the waste of human lives this those prisons and the waste of the things that they could be doing for the rest of us, things that they could be contributing to our gross domestic product, for god's sake. so i think it's completely -- and i think people will look back and just say we have no idea how it could have been that a society, one of the central values is liberty, could have ended up being the largest incars ray to have on the planet, actually on the history of the planet. nobody else has ever locked up this large a proportion of it citizens, and it's not just that we have a quarter of the world's prisoners. we have lots of people who aren't in prison who have been in prison and whose lives have been ruined because -- well, i don't want to go on about this. it seems to me they will look back, and we will -- they will say what we would say about slavery, they would say shame on you. shame on you for allowing this. shame on us. so there are others, obviously,

and there are disputed cases. i did not include abortion. i don't think -- i have a different view about what the right answer is in that case, but there are many people who think that abortion will disappear, but not, i think, for this reason. for technological reasons. >> thank you. >> ems. i'm sorry. 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 but at least -- >> it's an improvement. >> yeah. some evidence that people are better served, both the public and the prisoners. but the other question i wanted to ask was since honor depends on a consensus, how do you -- where does the authority come from to change that consensus? >> um -- >> and if it's moral -- [inaudible] >> well, no. see, what i think is that this cases at least that i looked at,

nobody was going to argue the other moral side. people weren't going to our a moral defense to slavery. there were propagandists in the 1840s and '50s, people like cannibal and what's his name? you know, the guy who wrote cannibal. but i just don't think they believed what they were saying. and certainly other people didn't believe them. they just said things no reasonable person at the time could believe. so what there was was a sense of the necessity of the practice, right? to the life of plantations and, therefore, from the point of view of plantation owners and life of the society. but the idea that it was morally -- so i don't think -- what happens when people realize that it's wrong is not that they defend it as they do two things. one is they say things that they don't believe which isn't, i mean, that's a kind of defense, but it's not ip sincere -- insincere defense, and the other

thing they do is they try very hard not to think about it. they engage this what i call strategic ignorance. incarceration is something where there's a vast amount of strategic irg in accordance with. -- ignorance. people don't want to think about the fact that you're more likely to have of of t.b. or aids when you come out, you're more likely to be raped, for men it's the most likely place to be raped in the united states. now, i don't think that we, when we send people to prison we're sentencing them to being raped. and they're our responsibility, and they shouldn't be raped, and if they are, we have to accept responsibility and do something about it. >> something like dueling, the dueling was equally morally wrong when it started. >> it was. i think -- well, this is a

complicated question because this notion of morality that i'm using is 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's what i mean by with morality. the problem with -- dueling is actually 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 sort of are are inclined to think it's sort of up to them. so it's a complicated case from that point of view. but let me try and answer your question about how you shift the norm. i think the is answer is this,

and the best example is what happened in the foot binding case. you have to have a social movement. they had foot binding societies, and the foot binding societies have to commit themselves to the new norm, right? so you have to have societies of people who say i'm not going to vote for someone who increases the rate of cars ration, or -- incarceration, or i'm not going to eat food that's produced through this mean of production. not just i, we, right? we are. and that's what happened in the foot binding case. they got together, anti-foot binding societies made a double promise. the you join the anti-foot binding society, i won't bind the feet of my daughters, and i won't marry my son to a woman whose feet are bound. that way in getting rid of foot finding, you created the husbands for these women at the

same time as changing the practice. it was a brilliant, i mean, i don't know who thought of this. it's uncheer to me because i can't -- unclear to me because i can't read the chinese sources, but it was a brilliant design. and this is similar to what they've dope in west africa -- done in west africa. when these men and women committed themselves to end genital cutting, first of all, they only do it at the same time in a village and the village from which the husbands come of the daughters of the village, right? they work them out, they have the conversation together. that's the first thing. 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, my friend likes to call it a tipping point. at some point there's a new normal. and when there's a new normal, all the social pressure that was on the side of dueling or foot binding or sort of going along with slavery flips.

and suddenly you feel bad about yourself for going along with it. and i think that's -- so this is a book about honor and it's role in this, but if you want to make the change, there are other things you have to do, and among them, i think, is real social organization of social movements, groups of people who commit themselves to a new, new convention, a new norm. and then, you know, once enough people do it you can stop p talking about it because nobody's going to do it anymore except, you know, weirdoes. >> [inaudible] >> conversion point. >> with -- yes. it's a paradigm shift. >> i wonder what you think are the prospects of the movement to a post-carbon world in that respect. in other words, a lot of the scientists say we're going to be

looking back in 20 years, and we're going to be asking that question, what were they thinking? you know? >> uh-huh. >> can using a finite resource as if it were infinitely available, causing no harm when, in fact, it's going to probably destabilize the human enterprise. what were they thinking? we've 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 though probably, anthropologists have written about honor and shame as a duality, and just as the revolution occurred, things can flip from honor to shameful very quickly, and that's essentially dynamic of each one of your chapters. what do we need to do to move the carbon where we actually have muscular suv drivers who are saying, you know, i'm going

to drive this thing to kingdom come. and in the process they're hastening kingdom come as it were. how do you get them to flip to the point where they're saying to themselves, what was i thinking? >> okay. so the question is what's going to make the flip happen in relation to moving to a post-carbon economy to a world in which we're not essentially fouling the nest and making it much harder for the biological survival of our own kind which is the sort of thing that our grandchildren in particular -- if there are any -- should be particularly inclined to say, well, what were they thinking about? well, look, this one is, i think, a little bit different from some of the others in the following sense: it's got a collective action problem in it

in a way the others don't, right? that is to say it's really true that my suv is doing it. if everybody else stopped 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 and watch him being whipped by your overseer, it's a kind of -- there's a direct feedback to you. and when you are wounded or killed or lose a friend in a duel, there's a direct feedback. i think -- so there's an extra dimension of difficulties which we have to solve, of course. it's not an excuse, it's an observation. we have to if figure out, and honor is actually the ideal mechanism for doing that. notice what happened in the dueling case, right? the reason dueling -- what was dueling about? well, one of the things it was

of about was defining the distinction between gentleman and everyone else. but another of the things it was explicitly was about was maintaining civility among the air stock cra si. with all these people who are very prickly about their honor, you 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 friends polite, right? well, honor -- once you got me concerned about my honor, i forget about the fact that i'm making my friends polite. if we can shame the people in the suvs, then each time they drive around -- and that's one case. there are lots -- all of us are doing something we should with ashamed of, suvs are just a mop strows, visible --

monstrous, visible example. none of us can excuse ourself. we're all engaged 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 street in my suv people are thinking, what kind of a shmuck is that, you know? [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> but the trouble is, the driver of the suv isn't thinking that you're thinking that, and also the driver doesn't care that you're thinking that because the driver of the suv hasn't yet been converted to the norm according to which there is a problem in what he's doing. but the point about the collective action problem is it's not going, it's not just a matter of telling people things. you do have to produce a cost, a social cost that's -- and that we can do, but only o collectively. you can't do it one at a time. we have to, again, create a movement which is willing to say to people, you know, you're

poisoning the human nest. >> but wasn't there an aspect, especially of the shave trade and the flip that occurred there, that has to do with providing a positive alternative? in other words, it's the free labor division in the slave trade thing, and europe moving out of the need for plantation -- >> absolutely. >> -- mercantile capital to industrial capital and why not keep them in africa to -- >> right. this is absolutely crucial. isn't it important there was an alternative? so, yes. that's the other thing. telling people that what they're doing bad or even shameful isn't helpful unless you tell them there's something else they can be doing that is honorable. and so it's not enough.

you're absolutely right, and i should have said this because it's a very important part. it's, actually, part of the argument at the end of the book on cosmopolitanism. you can't just tell people they're bad. that's hopeless. it just, i mean, they'll ignore you, they'll dislike you, but they won't change if you just tell them they're bad. what you have to do is say, you know, you're doing a bad thing, but here's this good thing you could be doing instead. it would satisfy many of the same interests in a way that's morally preferable. and i think that -- so when we think about these things, we have succeeded in a certain sense, right? the prius is sex is i. -- sexy. now, the prius is not the be all and end all, i don't mean it's a post-carbon solution, but we have made them more environmentally, slightly more environmentally acceptable car, the kind of one that you can feel proud about driving at least if you're sort of of thinking about the environment. again, there are people who are

proud of driving suvs, and we have to work very hard to explain why that's not a good frame of mind to be in. i think i'm supposed to allow -- okay. a few more questions? i'm not going to decide who's going to -- maybe close by is a good place to be. >> yes, that's right. i saw your piece in "the new york times" magazine about, basically, a couple components of social change movements with people from the exterior, especially in foot binding, and you wrote that one of the key components for campaigns with significant involvement of people from the outside is respect so that, for instance, the missionaries who worked on the anti-foot binding campaigns many times immersed themselves in chinese culture and really tried to avoid coming into it from a position of arrogance or superiority. how i understand reading it. >> yes. >> i guess i'm wondering how that can be done. it seems like a delicate balance

to be approaching culturally-sensitive issues that are then sometimes argued about in this kind of framework that we are the human rights crusaders and then p people can get defensive and feel that that's cultural imearlyism. >> okay. do you need he to -- yeah. just so that i just repeat that, the gist of the question for the recording. so she was of talking about having read the piece i wrote in the times, new york times hag zien in this which one -- magazine in which one of the things i stressed about the role of outsiders in helping to bring about change is at least in the chinese case the reason i believe it worked was because the relevant outsiders were people who had -- and could be seep to have -- a deep -- seen to have, a deep respect for chinese civilization. timothy rashad who was one of the important people in this, he learned his confucian text. he wrote beautiful, classical

chinese and published it in the newspaper. he, they couldn't think, oh, this is some ignorant outsider who doesn't respect us, so why should we take any notice of him, right? ..

>> so your society, all of you will be better off if you don't do this thing. unless the outsiders look like that. what you will get as i pointed out is the opposite problem, reaction. you get a national backlash which we got in relation to female genital cutting in kenya. it became an item of faith of the country, that you have to maintain this practice as a sign of identity. profoundly it was counterproductive intervention. now, let me underline the point, given what most muslims in the world reasonably believe about, rightly or wrongly, but reasonably believe about many americans, american voices on

these questions don't sound like they're coming from a place of respect and concern. they sound like they are coming from a place of this respect, content and ignorance, and often we have to admit they are. so those of us who believe, i'm an american citizen, proud to be an american citizen. unlike you i have chosen to be an american citizen. my choice but it's important for those of us who represent, who can because we're americans represent our country in a different way, it's important for us to say when idiots byrne grants or idiots opposed the creation of press, between which world trade center there are women with no tops on, this place where we're supposed to regard as a place of great sanctity and honor.

when people do things like that we have to make it clear that some of us just aren't any different place with respect to these things. and that is those of us that they might want to seek help from and maybe even discuss with him on these things. i don't want them to talk to the got under the got in florida. of course, they don't want to talk to him. but i don't want him to talk them. is there any reason they should take any notice at all? they should ignore him. in fact, i think they should have contempt for him, the very contempt he has for them. it would be better if they both changed for them to have respect for each other. i can respect everything in the church of islam because i disagree. i'm not saying you should begin to agree with things you don't agree with. you can manifest respect someone was still telling them that they are wrong.

by the way just to take a point from my earlier -- in this conversation which i'm not modeling very well, you have to listen as well as talk. one of the great problems we have is we don't hear anything. the guy who is the religious figure, the prayer center that will eventually be filled now at the world trade center, he took the trouble to write a book about the relationship between islam and the american identity. and it is true as glenn beck said that he believed we should have -- he thinks we haven't already. he thinks the american constitution is founded on principle and that's what makes you genuinely. that's what they are facing. it's dishonest. it's profoundly dishonest. to misrepresent them in this

way. not that it is a project glenn beck on occasion is a little soft. [laughter] i'm saying this because glenn beck has been talking about our honor, and our honor is at stake in these matters. american honor is at stake. his personal honor is at stake when he lies about these things. he knows it's true, by the way. it's not that he is mistaken. confused, he knows this. he was doing things before this all happened. my point is this book for us all to be doing is, but like all the work that needs to be done in these areas you can't do it one at a time. you need to organize ourselves. i'm glad to say that lots of people are organizing. imam brown is one of the key signatures -- figures. he goes to churches and synagogues all the time. the imam brown was there at the

funeral in his home. he's an american, by the way. he's one of us. in that very important respect. so i do think, back to your question, sorry i got sidetracked there, i have anxiety of not this particular topic, but i think there's something for us to be doing. what used to get the complex in which there is productive dialogue. and in a productive dialogue we will come as well as i hope change their lives. i was talking the other day about the guy who got the nobel prize, to an audience that includes some young chinese. they didn't agree with everything i said, but in the response to me they said we are

glad to be in this country, standing in this country, that's fine. we are not unhappy to be here, but we notice that your consulate talking about the things that we are doing wrong. us, that china is doing. she said, can we talk of it about what you are doing in iraq and afghanistan puts i said absolutely. if we had these conversations you have to tell us how it looks. as it happens about those things, i agree with you. but i'm sure you'll tell me things i don't agree with you about. they were more skeptical about prospects of democracy in china than i am. i believe that roughly speaking all the problems with democracy, which there are of course, we can now see having done the experiment. they are still there. they kept telling me luck, the vast peasantry of china is a

day. eyes of the vast peasantry of the united states may be ignorant, too. but they are still entitled to vote. and impact to the extent, it should give you at least a modest interest of informing ourselves. it turns out people don't do that, reasons for political. proficient. so yes, we have to have, has to be a dialogue an and a has to be respectful, and then we can help each other. they will help us, we will help them. the other topic i mentioned was i think that this country kind of warehousing many old people. now, i grew up in a place where if you try to warehouse old people who have families, people would think you were a monster.

so there's a place where the conversation i think would lead to, where we here have a great deal to learn. it's a complicated matter. i don't think they would just be able to solve it or tell us what to do but i think we would learn from dialogue on that. [applause] >> thank you. >> kwame anthony appiah is a philosophy professor at princeton university and the author of several books. >> author and journalist tom wolfe is being awarded the 2010 medal for distinguished

contribution to american letters here at the national book awards. if you had to describe your contribution to american arts and letters, how would you describe them? >> i would rather not. most of my life i spent doing nonfiction, for 55 years of my life. i still think it's the most important genre to come out of -- well, out of the second half of the 20th century. and right now the riders to watch both nonfiction writers. they are totally nonfiction. >> why do you think you have become so well-known been for your fiction? >> well, i think it just turned out to be -- it's because i

leave the building that i do just as much reporting for a novel as ideal for a nonfiction. in fact, i want my fiction to be intensely journalistic. intensely journalistic, because unless you get out and look at what's going on these days, you're going to miss the things that are influencing yourself and everybody else. i mean, like a great example is the so-called sexual revolution. that's a very mild term for the lord carnival that is actually going on. and it's such a complete turnaround from when i was growing up. now, eyes met, our lips met, our

bodies met, and then we went and produced a baby. and when i was working, i happened to be sitting on a lounge of a dormitory, where there were two sofas back up one from the other. i was on one sofa, nobody was there. behind me was a couple, and this girl was tweeting with this guy saying, please, you have to do this for me, you have to do this for me. he said i can't. it would be like incest. know, you've got to do it for me. i just want you to do this i can't go around and do this. please, i don't trust anybody else. he says no, it's just not right, it's incest. talk about a conversation. that's the conversation of the 21st century.

>> tom wolfe winning the contribution to american arts and letters award from the national book foundation here at the national book award. >> would hit the to national press club national press club withstand very, very and kathy goldmark to talk about their new book "write that book already!." tell us what this book is about. >> it's a book about how to get published and how to keep going as an author, how to get your career up and running. so we do encourage people how to write, but it's not so much a craft of writing a book as the business of being an author. >> once somebody advise you have? >> your book will not get finished unless you start a. that's the thing. you have to write a bit every day you possibly can, and we have a lot of tips for the moment when you get stuck, the moments when you feel insecure, tips about finding an agent. we sort of walk the authors

through the publishing process from beginning to end, and we hope to give people sort of a more realistic sense of how the whole thing works. >> and i notice the forward is by maya angelou. how did you work that out because well, i will admit she and i have been friends for 25 years. i called her up and asked her. >> what are some of the other books that you have written? >> i've written a novel, in my shoes keep walking back to you, and i've written quite a few essays for anthologies. i also cowrote a rock-and-roll joke book, and i'm the founder of the literary rock band, the rock bottom remainders. i've written a book with my bandmates as well. >> i wrote a book called how to play the harmonica and other life lessons. it's a humor book, and i also wrote a column with kathy in book page called the author enablers. it's kind of dear abby for inspirinit