Kwame Anthony Appiah: preference

Transcript context

…If cosmopolitanism is so wonderful, why are we today seeing a resurgence of nationalism? What’s unsatisfying about cosmopolitanism? I want to say first that, for me, it’s really important to insist that you can be a cosmopolitan patriot. You can be rooted in a place, care about it in a special way, and still be a citizen of the world, and think that you have obligations and concerns and interests that transcend your national identity. I’m not the kind of cosmopolitan who’s opposed to national identity, and that’s an important part of the answer because the kind of cosmopolitan who does want to drag people away from their roots has, I think, got no chance of persuading most people. They’re not going to persuade me, and I’m officially a cosmopolitan, so why would I expect them to persuade people who have less reason to be cosmopolitan than I do? And I say I have reason to be cosmopolitan because my parents are from two different continents. The three youngest members of my family are my half-Russian, my half-Namibian, and my half-Nigerian great nephews and nieces. And their grandparents include a Norwegian, a Ghanaian, and an Englishwoman, as well as Russians and Namibians. So of course, in my family life, I’m going to be interested in everywhere in the world and feel that I have connections with it. But I think if you make cosmopolitanism about rejecting the local, that won’t work. Most of us like to be connected with a place or a couple of places and to feel rooted in them. The idea that cosmopolitans are rootless is just a mistake — or have to be. Why has so much of the world turned away from things connected with other places — migration and globalization as an economic phenomenon — which they see as posing threats to their economic stability? Partly, I think, because they’ve been encouraged to think so, even though I think it’s just objectively false that globalization has been terrifically bad for many of the people who are most nationalist at the moment. And part of it is that the elites that led globalization, or that led integration in Europe, paid almost no attention to the views . . . They weren’t listening. They thought it was obvious what they were doing was good, so they paid absolutely no attention to the tensions and difficulties that were produced. But does listening work? Doesn’t a kind of appeasement often make things worse?…

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