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• Article by Dr. Appiah
• Dr. Appiah's bio
• About Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

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Tavis: Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor of philosophy at Princeton and the author of a thought-provoking new book that was the subject of a recent 'New York Times Magazine' cover piece. The book is called "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.' Professor Appiah, nice to have you on the program.

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Very nice to be here.

Tavis: Happy to have you here on the west coast. I didn't know you guys left the east coast.

Appiah: (Laughter) Only very rarely. Especially, though, in the winter.

Tavis: We're glad to have you on the west coast. Before I get to the book about cosmopolitanism, well, let me start there with a definition of cosmopolitan. I want to follow up on that.

Appiah: Okay. Well, it's from a Greek phrase, unfortunately, so I'm going to have to explain that to you (laughter). Cosmopolitan means citizen of the world. So anybody who calls himself or herself a cosmopolitan is someone that has some way of interpreting the idea that we're all citizens of one world. There've been many ways of interpreting that, obviously. Mine stresses two things. One is we're fellow citizens. We're responsible for each other collectively, so that everybody on the planet has to matter to everybody else on the plant.

The second thing is that everybody matters, but everybody doesn't have to be the same. Many people who think that everybody matters want everybody to be the same. The Mormons think everybody matters, but they want everybody to be Mormon. Cosmopolitans don't want everybody to be anything. We think it's great that the world is diverse. We like the fact that there are different civilizations, different cultures, different ways of going on.

Tavis: It's one thing to say, Anthony, that everybody matters. It seems to me to be quite another thing to suggest that everybody should matter to everybody else. I'm having difficulty trying to juxtapose that notion against the reality, as I see it, at least, of the world we live in where people are becoming more native, that is to say, turning inward and caring only about themselves.

Appiah: Right. Well, that's why I hope this is a timely book because I think that's a mistake. You know, when this phrase was first invented, it was invented in the fourth century B.C. by a guy called Diogenes who was the first person to say, "I am a citizen of the world." But he couldn't be a citizen of the world. He didn't know anything about what was going on in most of the world and he couldn't affect what was going on in most of the world. Whereas, nowadays any of us who have minimum resources of a person in the rich world can find out about what's going on in any country in the world either through the media or just by going on the Web.

And everything we do has effects in other places. Every decision you make - do you buy fair trade coffee or do you just buy regular coffee? Do you support a government that's going to have one kind of trade policy or a government that's going to have another kind of trade policy? All these decisions we make all the time affect other people outside this country, so we have the possibility of taking that global responsibility seriously in a way that wasn't in the past.

Tavis: To your latter point here, I suspect that this notion of cosmopolitanism can be viewed one way by those who are outside of the United States and viewed indeed another way by those of us who live inside the United States. What I mean to suggest by that, or ask as a result of that, is whether or not you think that we really are citizens of the world.

Are we really cosmopolitans inside of our borders given that we set the rules; we try to make everybody play by the rules that we set? With all due respect, we have a president who hadn't traveled anywhere basically before he became president. I mean, how do we as Americans who don't really know much of nothing about the world really claim to be cosmopolitans?

Appiah: Well, to be a cosmopolitan, one of the things you have to accept is that you aren't in charge of setting the terms that other people live on. Trying to set the terms that everybody else lives by is itself an un-cosmopolitan act. It's also un-cosmopolitan to remain ignorant about what's going on in the rest of the world and we cannot afford that ignorance any more. If we are - and we have to accept that we are now the most powerful country on the planet - we make decisions all the time where you need to know what's going on.

We're responsive to the fact that there are people in the world who hate the United States. Why do they hate the United States? Well, a lot of people in this country haven't the faintest idea what thoughts in other cultures lead people to be hostile to us. If we're going to live in the world just in order to be safe, we need to understand people better than we do.

Tavis: Let me drop in here then. If we were going to rank, then, on a scale of one to ten, ten being expert, zero being completely ignorant of what it means to be a cosmopolitan, certainly in terms of acting in a cosmopolitan way, with regard to how we engage the world or don't engage the world, what would we rank on that scale of zero to ten?

I mean, I assume there may be somebody in the world who takes this notion much more seriously than we do given that we are becoming more nativist. On the one hand, we say we want to export democracy around the world, but to your point, we really ain't trying to understand people in the way that we ought to. What do we rank as Americans? That's an over-generalization, but what do we rank?

Appiah: Well, one thing we always have to remember about this country, it's a big country. There's nearly three hundred million of us now, and people are very different. We have, I think, for example, arguably the most cosmopolitan university system in the world. In our university system, we have people from all over the world and most of my colleagues and most universities are very, very glad that they have students from all over the world and they really want them and they are upset with the government for making it harder for students to come from other places. So parts of the United States are very cosmopolitan.

There are also places where people don't want to know anything about anybody else anywhere, including outside their own little community. I mean, there are people in this country who are not just sort of American nativists, but they're not interested in what happens outside their little town, so people vary a great deal. I think the main challenge for us is to make our government more cosmopolitan. It's not just the president who hasn't traveled very much. Some years ago, as you know, people discovered that many members of Congress didn't own passports.

Now most Europeans and most Africans would find it astonishing to be represented in an elected democracy by a House of Representatives or a Parliament in which most people hadn't been anywhere else. So I think that is a challenge. The very fact that people don't care, apparently, that their representatives haven't been anywhere else and apparently don't want to because you need a passport to go (laughter), that ought to worry people more than I think it does.

Tavis: What's the danger, then, of us continuing to elect, to your formulation, the danger of our continuing to elect a Congress or persons to represent us who are really ignorant of the world which then dwell in the House and the Senate and proclaim all kinds of stuff every day?

Appiah: Well, it's going to cost us eventually, they now say, about a trillion dollars to deal with the problems of Iraq. It's hard to say what September 11 cost, but it cost billions and billions and billions of dollars. The problem isn't the people who blow the thing up. I mean, that's a police problem. That's a problem we have to solve in that way. The problem is that not everybody in the world thinks what they did was wrong and that poses just cost for us.

Never mind if you don't care about people in the rest of the world. If you don't know why it is that there are some people who think Osama bin Laden is a hero, you are endangering yourself. We have to be more open to the world and more understanding. The more understanding we are, I think, the fewer people will be out there who think that Osama bin Laden is a hero.

Tavis: The other point that you raised with regard to this notion of cosmopolitanism is that we don't - one of the other points you raised - is that we don't all have to be the same. Everybody matters, we should all matter to each other, we don't all need to be the same, and yet we live in the most multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic America ever. So, again, balance those two things for me.

Appiah: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States is that it is a country that is very self-consciously diverse now and that's good, but you have to remember that that diversity comes with a great deal of shared American stuff. For example, 99.something percent of Americans understand and speak English. Now in the country I grew up in, in Ghana, there is no language that 99 percent of the people understand. Barely fifty percent of the population can communicate reliably in the government language, which is English. So we think of ourselves as very diverse, but in many ways, we're actually less diverse than we think we are.

What holds the United States together in many senses is the fact that, despite this acceptance of the diversity of identities, people are in fact, you know, remarkably similar. If you come from outside the United States, one of the first things that strikes you, I think, is, on the one hand, they all keep saying how different they are. On the other hand, they all seem, to the outsider, so American.

When Americans go abroad - and this is one of the reasons why I think Americans should go abroad more - one of the things they discover is that people who think of themselves as very different here - African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans, for example - you put them both down in Nairobi and suddenly they recognize that they have a great deal in common. So it's good, I think, that we accept and celebrate our diversity, but we have to remember that it's sort of within a certain framework.

I'll give you another example. When religions settle in the United States, they tend to become Americans in a certain way. For example, Islam in the United States. The broad majority of Muslims in the United States believe in the separation of church and state. The broad majority of Muslims in many other countries don't. They think that it would be better to have (unintelligible). Most American Muslims are not after that. They're like most American Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Buddhists. They think it's just fine to have religion be something that you do and make decisions about privately and the government not be religious at all.

Tavis: Let me close, Anthony. I'm out of time, but I want to squeeze this in right quick. When I last saw you, we were in New York together at the American Philosophical Association, the APA. I'm not a member, as you can tell. I was just there (laughter). I was there in part because there were friends of mine like Anthony Appiah and Cornel West and Brother Lucius out of Vanderbilt. A number of persons who I know and respect were speaking at this conference. I was in New York and I stopped by for a half a day or so to hang out at this conference to see a number of presentations.

I was struck by how empowered I was being there. I was even more struck by the number of people who were struck by the fact that Tavis Smiley was walking around an APA conference. I eventually figured out they were all surprised to see me there because nobody in the media shows up at an APA conference with a bunch of philosophers walking around dialoguing and discussing and dealing with these world issues.

I raise that right quick because I'm curious as to - at the end of this conversation, it's like a bizarre question to ask at the end - but why these philosophical conversations matter and how we can get a country to engage in deep thought and Socratic dialogue about the kinds of issues like cosmopolitanism that can make us better citizens of the world? Does that make sense?

Appiah: Yes, absolutely. Well, I think one of the things is that too much of our discussion in this country today, in my opinion, is kind of polarized and too much is focused on the end of the conversation and not the beginning of the conversation. Listening to each other, trying to share the concepts that we can use and think about things together.

I think we would have many fewer fights in this country if we had more conversations that were, in a sense, more philosophical, more that is engaged with the fundamental questions where I think it's possible for us to understand one another, even to come to agreements more fundamentally than the way we do now, which is to focus on what we disagree about: pro choice, pro life or gay rights, Defense of Marriage Amendment.

Tavis: So I guess the answer is love, not war and let's all become more cosmopolitan. The new book from Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor at Princeton, is "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.' Nice to have you in person. Enjoyed talking to you.

Appiah: It's been very nice to be here.

Tavis: Up next on this program, actress Lynn Redgrave. Stay with us.