AFTERWORD

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Last month I went to a wedding in Namibia, in a village of two hundred people just south of the Angolan border. The bride was a young Ovambo woman. She was born in Moscow, where her father, who was a member of the liberation movement that freed Namibia from South African colonial control, had been posted at the time she was born. And she had studied economics in South Korea. Still her lineage was local on both her mother’s and her father’s side for many centuries. The bridegroom’s lineage was a little more complicated. He was the son of a Norwegian father. But he too is at least in part a child of Africa, because his mother’s father was a Ghanaian politician, who, like his bride’s father, was involved in the anticolonial struggle. His grandmother, though, was British. So the bridegroom’s family gathered in this small African vilage from Norway, England, and Ghana; and also from America and Nigeria, since one of his aunts had married a Nigerian and his uncle was married to an American. I could add that one of his uncles has a Chinese brother-in-law. Or that he has cousins in Kenya and the United States, as well as Ghana, Norway, and Nigeria. But the point is that this is a modern family, connecting people from many nations into a network of relationships that will endure through generations.

In a world like this, the idea that we can live in isolated moral cultures makes no sense, so far as I can see. Even if we grow up in places with different ideas about manners and cuisine and religion and even if, in part as a result, we disagree about some moral questions, the problem of how to share the world with people who have different views about these matters is not a theoretical but a practical one. Among the people at the wedding party were some who were ethical vegetarians: the proper food at a grand Ovambo wedding is a series of cows slaughtered and cooked for the occasion. Something had to be prepared for the vegetarians: they had to agree to join a party where most people were eating meat. Male circumcision was once an Ovambo tradition: and if it had still been, then the bride and groom, if they had a son, would have had to decide whether to do it, since most Norwegians think nonmedical circumcision is wrong.

Those who have read my book on cosmopolitanism may recall that I think we will usually find the answer to these questions best if we are in regular conversation with one another across the boundaries of race, religion, tribe, and nationality. You will also know that I think the heart of a conversation is not about the search for agreement. It is about getting to know each other in ways that mean we can share the world precisely without agreement. We do not converse in order to convert, though we may be passionately argumentative. The right model for talk aimed at conversion is the sermon or the lecture. And lecturing across societies, far from being helpful for peaceful coexistence, probably threatens it. Conversation, then, as I say, is not about coming to agreement, so to take up the metaphor of conversation across cultures is not to urge a search for agreement.

Nor do we converse in order to establish or sustain relationships with our interlocutors. Of course, conversation, if it goes on long enough, usually does both these things. But it only does them if that is not seen as its point. Conversation is a way of being together with others that has no further aim than the rewards of being together: it is a reflection of our deep human sociability.

Now people who are in regular conversation with each other may or may not know much about each other’s lives. But it does mean that they are used to being together. So to take up the metaphor of cross-cultural conversation is not to recommend a search either for cross-cultural intimacy or a simple pursuit of cross-cultural knowledge or understanding.

Of course, cross-cultural conversations will yield some agreements and some mutual knowledge and mutual understanding. These are commendable in and of themselves, and are a useful background to peaceful cohabitation. But the real virtue of conversation across cultures is that it allows people to get used to spending time together in a way that is rewarding despite their misunderstandings and disagreements. Conversation partners are used to one another, in all their mutual strangeness. They can disagree without being disagreeable.

I mentioned at the start that in a globally interconnected world, there are practical problems about how we should decide things like whether to circumcise your son. Because these are practical problems, sensible people solve them practically. (I am not one of those philosophers who says, “I know, I know. It works in practice. But does it work in theory?”) Let me give you a fictional example.

In the British television series, Skins, which is about a group of students in the English town of Bristol, one of the characters is Anwar, an English teenager of South Asian ancestry, whose father is a devout Muslim. In one episode, he has a birthday party and invites his best friend, Maxxie, who happens to be gay. Now Maxxie’s been waiting for Anwar to tell his parents, which Anwar has been afraid to do. So Maxxie is standing outside, refusing to come in to the party until Anwar tells them, as he’s promised. While they’re talking, Anwar’s father comes out and invites Maxxie in: his wife has made a spicy curry just for him. As Anwar’s father talks, Anwar, in the background, finally says “Dad, Maxxie’s gay.” But his father ignores him. So then Maxxie himself says “I’m gay, Mr. Kharral. I always have been.” There’s a long silence and Anwar waits anxiously to hear what his father will say.

And then Mr. Kharral says this: “It’s a … stupid messed-up world. I’ve got my God, he speaks to me every day. Some things I just can’t work out. So I leave them be, okay, even if I think they’re wrong. Because I know one day He’ll make me understand. I’ve got that trust. It’s called belief. I’m a lucky man. Right. Come Maxxie, the food’s ready.”

This is how things are with people who are in conversation with one another. They do not have to agree. They have only to accept each other. And they can do that without a theory or a principle, because being together has generated commitments that can transcend even serious disagreement. This kind of cosmopolitan cohabitation is something we all know how to do. But we are only going to bother to take this step if we are already in conversation with one another. And, as I say, that means sharing our thoughts about the things we agree about and about the things we disagree about. Big things and small things. Politics, religion, television shows, movies, the gossip about other people in the dorm.

This is not the advice of a relativist. I’m not saying that you can accept anything at all: if Mr. Kharral had wanted to kill Maxxie or have him locked up; if Maxxie had wanted to curse the Prophet for being a homophobe; they would each have crossed a boundary that made cohabitation impossible, at least until one of them changed his mind. But Mr. Kharral begins in exactly the right place: with an admission that he can’t work out everything. That the world is hard to understand and he may not be right about everything. He doesn’t abandon his belief that homosexuality is wrong: he lays it aside as something to work out later. Right now what matters is celebrating his son’s seventeenth birthday with his son’s best friend. This works in practice. It doesn’t need a theory. I am a philosopher. I like theories. But theory isn’t the only thing that matters. And sometimes it doesn’t matter at all.

And I know this not just because I have thought about these things for a long time but because the family I began with is my family: the bridegroom was my sister Isobel’s son Kristian.