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find that link in your show notes or go to the website conversations withth tyler.com once again join us for a live conversation between Tyler Cowen in Alberto September 9th New York City see you [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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there conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between AC mic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I'm very honored to be here today with
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quame Anthony apia and let's just jump right in I have some questions about Ghana why are there so few atheists in Ghana well I think maybe for the same reason that there were very few atheists in much of the world until relatively
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recently I mean atheism is a relatively modern phenomenon at least the form of atheism that we sort of see around us so there are lots of Christians in Ghana there are lots of Muslims in Ghana and there are lots of Believers in
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traditional religions which are sort of polytheistic uh though they tend to have a high God so there sort of one one big God and there's an Earth goddess and then a bunch of other gods I think probably one reason why people haven't
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given it up is because nobody argues against it and again that's a relatively modern thing to have people in public arguing against theism I don't mean I mean obviously there were atheists in the ancient world but um but since you know since the rise of the abrahamic
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religions there haven't been a lot of atheists except until recently anywhere do you think West Africa is proving to be an exception to the secularization thesis which is coming to many parts of the world many parts of the Middle East
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yes the nominally religious there's not a lot of belief but West Africa seems different Nigeria also yes huge amounts of very successful growing religious denominations especially as in many places in the world the wahhabi version
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of Islam and the and the kind of Pentecostal version of Christianity so um Born Again Christians um charismatic churches lots of singing and dancing people being taken with the spirit and that kind of thing so I guess it's
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certainly not going in the direction of secularization as far as I can see in the sense of moving away from church life and moving or mosque life and moving away from belief that's not happening and marriage across different religions seems especially common in
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West Africa why is that and have those background cultural factors in some way shaped your own views that's a good question I I I think yes uh so my my uncle aif who was a Sunni Muslim was married to my aunt Grace who was who who
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was a Methodist my parents were a different Christian denomination so that's not terribly exciting but they certainly didn't they didn't even go to the same church actually they went to different churches that's relatively
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common in in GH both for Christian couples to go to different churches and for people to marry people who are not Christians Muslims to marry people not Christians and so on is that uh I think it just shows something about the
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character of the belief which is that it's in an odd way though this is somewhat Been Changed by the arrival of Christian American Christian tele evangelism and wahhabism but fundamentally the key thing is belief in and kind of relationship with
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the spiritual world so that it's not very much as long as you agree about that the rest is kind of details and also people have the view which I think is a reasonable view if you're a theist which is who knows exactly what the truth is about these
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things they're very complicated the idea that in you get in early Christianity that it's incredibly important to insist on a long long list of beliefs some of which are philosophical and impossible to understand and you know
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transubstantiation consubstantiation weird stuff like that that's not very common people are very relaxed and the insistence that things are very complicated that sounds like you right in other context yes yes no I mean I I
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think that's that's certainly my view and I think this idea that um a kind of fallibilism the thought that well I might be right I might be wrong that's actually quite a garan attitude people in a way I think understand how hard it
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is to get to know things especially about this sort of thing about about about invisible spirits and Far Away Gods so they are not likely to be super confident about anything outside their own experience so they may be confident
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that they themselves have had conversations with Jesus or something like that but the idea that the rest of it is sort of going to be easy to figure out I think is not a very widespread idea and to some extent it pervades people's life so in other areas of
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belief people are kind of willing to think well I'll go to the doctor if I get sick but if he doesn't do anything I'll go to the traditional healer and it's like a portfolio approach a port to many things yes yes and do you have that
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or I think that I I mean officially I do because my official position I suppose is that because all of our best pictures of the world are slightly wrong we can't rule out a picture just on the grounds that it's wrong inconsistent with some
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other picture that we have because that maybe that the part of the other picture that is inconsistent with is one of the wrong bits so we'd better work with as many pictures as we can or as we can manage which is obviously that's the
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main limitation is just our capacity to hold on to too many pictures because none of our pictures is going to be perfectly right all of your pictures of the world which one do you think is least wrong I think my everyday Common Sense middle-sized object view of the
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world is the one that's least likely to be wrong it's least likely to be wrong that there are tables and chairs and the Very sort of thing that modern in a way modern philosophy Begins by making us wonder whether we know about deart makes
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us wonder do we know about these middle-sized everyday Dry Goods as one philosopher once called them so that I think I I think it's very likely that that I'm wrong about and for which is most likely to be wrong even if you
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think it's true right there's something most likely to be wrong probably some of my views about what the best science is what would those views be well I'm I'm I'm sort of you know I think um believe in the standard deliverances of modern genomics but I
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suspect that we're going to learn lots and lots of stuff in there that we now believe is not quite right but not just incomplete but wrong like what core views or models of yours are most likely to be wrong so my my inclination is to
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believe about the basic physical structure of the world that some mixture of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity can be made to work but we've been trying to do that for a very long time uh basically since they were
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invented those two theories and we haven't had a huge amount of success and the most what people seem to think currently is the most plausible way of reconciling them strikes me as a incredibly difficult to understand string theory and B something that a
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reasonable person might doubt but if you ask me what I think the best current physical theory is I'm going to say String Theory but with a sort of confidence that's probably probably below half take Pana africanism do you think
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in the broader course of history this will go down as merely a 20th century idea or is pan-africanism alive and well today Pana africanism involves two different big strands one is the diasporic Strand and the the word pan-africanism and the panafrican
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congresses were invented in the diaspora uh by by people like Sylvester Williams from Jamaica and WB de Boyce from the United States uh and uh and padmore that idea of a diasporic African identity seems pretty Lively in the world today
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though it's not very it doesn't produce much actual politics or policy but it but the sense of solidarity of people of African descent of the African diaspora seems pretty strong to me but strongest outside of Africa in a way right yes
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where it began yeah uh in Africa I think on the one hand that most contemporary subsaharan Africans do have a sense of themselves as belonging to a kind of African a black African world but if you ask them to do something practical about
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it like take down Borders or or you know do more political integration I don't know that that is going to go anywhere anytime soon which I regret because I think for lots of reasons it would be you know my sister and her husband live
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in Lagos if they want to go to a c by Road they have to cross the border between Nigeria and banin the border between Benin and Togo the border between Togo and Ghana and at each of those borders they probably have to inter interact with people who are going
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to try and extract a tax an illegal tax on them easier to fly to London right easier to fly land back to a that's crazy and and and you know we've had these weird things on the one hand there's probably a million ghans in in
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in Nigeria living Ghan citizens on the other hand we've had massive expulsions from each country not recently but in the past nearly a million Nigerians expelled by Dr buo in the early' 70s and and and then a a Nigerian expulsion
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later and these weren't hugely unpopular so you you can get people to be quite nationalis ISC within Africa even though there's kind of a broad sense that we're all part of one thing that doesn't really include the mreb and North Africa
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and the Arab speaking parts of Africa in quite the same way and that's because of the legacy of racial pictures maybe you could explain Ghanaian history to me in a nutshell so if I read about Ghana today it's commonly cited there's a
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relatively High degree of national Unity or identity politics is fairly coherent but if I go back and I look at history not that long ago there are coups in 1966 1972 1981 uh instability ethnic tensions in 1994 why is GH and now appear to be such
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a stable nation state and not too long ago such an unstable nation state well I think the first question is the really puzzling one the the earlier instability is not too surprising after all uh Ghana was created in 1957 and I I don't just
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mean that it was decolonized in 1957 the country of GH is the union of the former British Togo land with the Gold Coast in 1957 as a result of a plebis in Togo in in the mid-50s so it's it's it's younger than I am the country that it has a
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strong sense of national en is that's the big surprise I think not not the other way around um there are various theories about this I think one of the most interesting is that because most of what's in now in Ghana at least west of
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the VTA Lake once River um um is was at one point or rather within the Ambit of the Asanti Empire which is something that goes back to the 18th century and which radiated trade out from kamasi in the central Southern Ghana you know for hundreds of years
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it's sort of integrated economically it's been integrated economically for quite a long time and people know each other they may speak different languages there are 80 languages spoken in Ghana but people have been speaking tree the the Asanti
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language and which has dialect on the coast as well um and and in between people who who's SEC have had it as a second language since long before the British uh took over which you have to remember happened in the 20th century
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the final the final Asanti British Santi War Anglo Asanti war was in the first decade of the 20th century so my father my father's father was born before British rule in a Santi and died after British rule in the Santi it lasted less
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than his lifetime so that whatever shape that region I don't think it can be those 90 odd years of that because because it seems deeper than that I think the political stability is it can be credited to a significant achievement
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on the part of a man namely president Rawlings Jerry John Rawlings who is not someone I hugely admire in every way but he he came in in one of those coups he was a military ruler for a while he civilianized the country and he actually probably with the assistance of
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Kofi an who was then un peacekeeping head and used ghanan troops a lot he rofessional the ghanan military to think of itself as a military and service of a civilian power and not as people who might come in from time to time to
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correct political mistakes and in ironically at the end of his two terms when he lost he sort of appealed to the Army and they said no you told us that we don't do that so you lost the other guy should come in and we've now had a
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whole set of cycles of the two main parties ating back and forth winning and losing and I think now whereas there was celebration in the streets in coup in the past now people would be really angry if the military intervened and I
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don't know that they could get away with it I mean there would be Bloodshed and horrible stuff and they know that so I think that is the result of political learning watching what happens when you do things with coup and discovering that
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it doesn't get much better if you do it that way and deciding to go with the patience that's required for democracy in the data British background colonies seem to do better than French Spanish or Portuguese do you have a sense of why
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that might be it's not something I've thought about it say in the Caribbean Barbados has been relatively prosperous people have looked at this at Singapore and many other examples I mean I think so I I you know as we're extrapolating
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out from the place I know best which is which is Ghana one thing that happened in the British colonies was that a middle class was created that was not wholly dependent upon the state whereas the kind of middle class in the frankophone countries of West Africa was
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mostly you got middle- class status by being a civil servant or or a lawyer or something by having some kind of relationship with the state that goes with the fact that the that in the British colonies um education tertiary
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education starts earlier already there was a university college in the Gold Coast before independence where as there wasn't in Sagal which is the most sophisticated of the West African French States um so I think that's part of it there
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was this prosperous they were people who'd made money in things like farming and Forestry maybe as mediators in the gold trade I don't know and they they were not you see the French did I mean the the sort of schema Story the cartoon
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story is the British do direct do indirect rule the French do direct role the British therefore leave in place the institutions of chiefy if they exist or create them if they don't the French sort of wipe all that away and create
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their own structures maybe the continuity of political institutions through the colonial period so that the king of Shanti is still in place in the middle of the Republic of Ghana maybe that's another thing that uh helps to explain the existence of a kind of
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stability that's independent of the of the formal State because because he's not he's recognized by the state he's a member of the House of chiefs but but his authority and his legitimacy has nothing to do with the Republic of Ghana
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it's it's older and deeper than that so that may be another thing I mean that doesn't really apply to Singapore of course um that is to say The British didn't didn't use um indirect rule in Singapore so I don't know what the story
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is there I suspect the story in Singapore is is um three words Lee Kwan Yu but and a very good location at the right time well good location um wonderful economic location I in terms of being a major port city in a massively growing area of the world uh
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with um population speaking the two great trading languages of the world Chinese and English and so on so I I think Singapore Singapore has been lucky in many ways I think it was lucky in its leadership I'm not a big fan of the kind
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of authoritarian side of leanu but but he they owe him a lot if cosmopolitanism is so wonderful why are we today seeing a Resurgence of nationalism what's unsatisfying about cosmopolitanism well I want to say first that uh for me it's
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really important to insist that you can be a Cosmopolitan Patriot that you can 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
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interests that are transcend your national identity so 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 is I think
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got no chance of persuading most people they're not going to persuade me and I'm officially a cosmopen so why would I expect them to persuade people who have less reason to be cosmopol than I do and I say I have reason to be cos because I
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you know my my parents are from two different continents I have um my my the three youngest members of my family are my half Russian my half namibian and my half Nigerian great nephews and nieces uh and and their grandparents include a
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Norwegian uh a Ghan and an English woman as well as Russians and um namibians so of course in my family life of course I'm going to be interested in everywhere in the world and feel that I have connections with it but I think that I
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don't I think if you if you make coolism about rejecting the local that won't work I think most of us are are like to be connected with a with a place or a couple of places and to feel rooted in them so the idea that cosol are rootless
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I think is is just a mistake uh or have to be why has so much of the world turned away from things connected with other places so migration and globalization as an economic phenomenon uh which they see as posing threats to
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their economic stability but 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
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moment and part of it is that um the elites that led globalization or that led integration ation in Europe paid almost no attention to the Views they they weren't listening they they didn't they thought it was obvious what they were doing was
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good and so they paid absolutely no attention to to the tensions and and difficulties that were produced but does listening work doesn't a kind of appeasement often make things worse well I don't think the right thing to do was
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appeasement I think the right thing to do was to solve the problems that were being blamed on globalization or Europe by the people who were upset uh which means more should have been done in terms of government policy in the north of England to uh improve employment
20:35
things like that I think that that would have been but even if that's a good idea what if it's just the case that say the rise of China lowers the global status of the West it means stagnant middle class wages in many places and those
20:48
things are just facts we could have done a number of choices differently but at the end of the day people will be upset about that and turn back to nationalism well so I I I agree that the the relative position of the of of the North
21:01
Atlantic Society is uh obviously in Decline England in particular relative one but these are still very very rich societies and so part of the question is whether whether the whether what uh what goods there are are being fairly shared
21:16
among the people in these societies and and if they don't think they are which I think is a reasonable judgment then they will worry more about stagnation of uh income than they do if they think that it's look look you know incomes were no
21:34
doubt stagnant during the second world war in England but people felt hey we're engaged in this common Enterprise together so of course that's okay uh and also we're we're sharing the burdens fairly where there's no nobody's getting
21:47
away with with anything or nobody's uh and in fact there was deep resentment of people who propheter in in in Wartime so I think that it's it's possible to run a society even a society that's sort of coasting that that doesn't doesn't see
22:02
growth in Middle uh in the incomes of middle and workingclass people uh I I think it's possible to to do to manage that in a way that feels fair that makes the burdens feel fairly shared and that if you do that there's the possibility
22:16
of getting people to see that closing off to the world is only going to make things worse and that's that's the big thing you have to persuade people of that that it isn't making things better brexit isn't making things better for
22:28
middle class incomes in Britain is cosmopolitanism not only compatible with nationalism but in a way quite parasitic upon it and in a sense the parasite is being ejected a bit so think back to your boyhood in Kumasi you have all
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these different groups and you're trading with them you see them every day and that works great but there's some Central coherence to Ghana underlying that you go to Lebanon today that Central coherence seems to have been gone for some time and you could call
22:54
Lebanon a Cosmopolitan place but it's not really an advertisement for Lebanon the way it's worked out so are we just moving to a new equilibrium where the parasitism of cosmopolitanism is now being recognized for what it really is I
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mean I don't like the metaphor of the par parasite uh but yes I do want to insist that cosmopolitanism look Cosmopolis as I said is not only requires in a certain or the right kind of cosm requires a kind of uh rooted rootedness but its
23:24
Point precisely is that we are celebrating connections among different places Each of which is rooted in its own something Each of which is has its distinctive virtues and interest Each of which has its own history and we're
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we're making connections with people for whom that place is their first place just as I am in a place which is my first place um so yes cosmopolitism requires I think National sense of solidarities that are not Global and that's why as I say you can be a
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cosmopol and Patriot now if you if you say if the Nationalist says okay but why do we need anything beyond National citizenship the answer is we have a world to manage the economy works better if we integrate and for most of us not
24:15
everybody but for most of us uh interaction with others is really interesting and rewarding uh and a lot of what we value here a lot of what we value about our own stuff our own National stuff is actually the result of dialogue with other places Shakespeare's
24:30
most famous play is about a Dane Japan's most famous poet mat baso um is a is is a is a Buddhist that means he's connected with India he wrote in a script that was invented in China so that a lot of what we value most in the
24:45
in the here turns out to be connected with the there and so um if we were to break off from everywhere as as you know from time to time societies do Japan broke off for a while while the at the end of the Ming Dynasty China broke off
25:00
for a while this was not good for the development of those societies just from an internal point of view it wasn't good should a Cosmopolitan be concerned that so many of the world's marvelous cultural objects are so concentrated in
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a relatively small number of museums and a relatively small number of countries almost exclusively Western yes so British museum should they send back what they have I think what the British museum should do is what I think they are doing uh which is
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to be part of the leadership of a movement in the world of Museum to say the key questions about the great objects are access questions not ownership questions if we fuss about ownership we'll never we'll never make
25:41
any progress let's agree that the challenge is to make a world in which everybody in the world is from time to time close to a significant body of seriously interesting objects and that means that the British museum should be
25:56
sharing as it does does but it should be doing it more it means that and and I think sending back of course is exactly the wrong solution because sending back means you send all the Malian stuff to Mali but the trouble with Mali is not
26:09
that it doesn't have Malian stuff it's that it doesn't have Italian Renaissance stuff it doesn't have Chinese uh Pottery it doesn't have uh tapestries woven by the azex it doesn't have lots of the world's great Treasures better to think
26:24
about the task as being a task of collectively curating the world's collection for everybody and figuring out how to share more of it in places where it'll be accessible more closely accessible to some of the people in the world who don't have access to anything
26:38
now that would be my ambition but more dogen artworks and Molly would be a good start right there could be a museum with 200 of them maybe they wouldn't be taken care of as well but isn't that up to people in Molly to decide what's the
26:51
risk return tradeoff and they simply ought to be sent back they were probably purchased under duress in some cases taken so I don't think that uh I don't agree with you that um it's up to them it's not up to them these things matter to
27:06
all of us and they and they should be their care and concern should be a concern for everybody it should be part of the job of the global Community to think together about how to manage these things now obviously from time to time
27:19
particular objects are in in the trust of various public and private institutions in particular countries and those countries should should make sure that they uh they they perform the duties that come with having such a trust but no I don't think it's just up
27:33
to them and just to take the case of the doong material um the doo material much of it is religious material from a religion that nobody nowadays hardly anybody in practices anymore because Mali is way more Muslim than it was in
27:48
the French Colonial period as a result of interesting processes which we could discuss as a result there is it's it's it's a bit like the situation that there was in Afghanistan under the Taliban they were as as possessors of the Afghan State
28:04
Trustees of a whole bunch of stuff that they thought of as idols and some of what they did was Destroy stuff because they thought it was Idols now fortunately as a result of the the good sense of a lot of curators in Afghanistan who hid stuff from the
28:17
Taliban they didn't succeed in destroying as much as they could have but the thought that the Taliban is in charge of whether we should look after Buddhist material that happens to be in Afghanistan and I think is a mistake I
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think I think in other words I really do think of these things as as as it were belonging to all of us Humanity this is the Cosmopolitan attitude to these things and that of course States as with all Cosmopolitan obligations States play
28:44
a central role in ensuring that they're met and so they have each state has responsibility for the stuff on its territory but it doesn't have special rights to determine what happens to things just because they happen to be on
28:56
its territory any more than the Italians have any special right to decide that you know rusan stuff is bad and therefore we're going to not care for it that would be right they of course they haven't decided that but if they were to
29:08
it wouldn't be sensible to say well because it's in Italy uh the Italians are entitled to do what they like with it they're not now in the middle of all these dialogues we have a segment called overrated versus underrated and I toss
29:20
out a few names of our ideas and you tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated but these will be easy are you ready okay Carl poer that's not easy uh I don't think he's overrated but is he underrated no I think he's rated
29:36
about right okay K's third critique underrated why because most people in the world haven't any idea about it and it's a really important document and amongst philosophers I think philosophers give way more weight to the
29:50
first critique and maybe that's right but not as much more weight than they do ET Mena overrated or underrated Ghan High Life Ghan high life you know I didn't know I haven't asked anybody about him in Ghana recently I hope he's
30:05
not underrated he's one of the great garan Treasures I certainly think that if if he is highly rated that's perfectly correct garan taxi drivers in Washington still know who he is if that's any indication well then that's terrific because I think I think that
30:19
kind of high life was was was one of Ghana's great contributions to Cosmopolitan Global culture Paul Simon's Graceland album how is it aged I don't think pop music generally ages well so it's fine but I don't think it's as important as it seemed at the time why
30:33
doesn't pop music age well well I think because it's meant to be for the moment it's it's not meant to be constructed with the kind of care and detail that goes into making the kinds of works that endure afro futurism overrated or
30:49
underrated um overrated why because because uh that kind of slogan I think doesn't help do anything but the notion that there's some new way to think about African or pan-african identity by Looking forward rather than backward
31:07
that's not a useful idea manifested through science fiction Cinema it seemed to inspire a lot of people well it inspires um a lot of the kind of people that you and I would know about but if you want to know what's really kind of being consumed by Mass
31:26
public in Africa I don't know that afro futurism would count as but say black panther maybe not in Africa but I'm sure it was pirated in Africa as well that's had a major impact on many millions of people have watched it felt in some way
31:40
motivated or inspired was the vision behind that movie a mistake in some way I think it was a very sentimental film which sought to it's a bit like the way in which the pyramids figure in in afrocentrism that is to say uh the
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reality is that Africa did not in develop Advanced Technologies in the remote past and build on them and I think a fantasy in which they did doesn't really help us to think about Africa's future what was it like teaching Jody Foster she's a very smart
32:16
woman what struck you about her uh well she was a very smart woman she was very engaged with thinking about at that point I don't know what she thinks about now she wrote a wonderful senior thesis about about Tony Morrison which I
32:28
admired a few comparisons I'll toss out Gwen versus Augustus John which painter do you prefer I know it's conventional now to prefer Gwen John but I still think that the best Augustus John paintings are pretty amazing and I'm not sure that I think
32:44
that about anything of Gwen Johns James Brown or faak couti I think I'm a James Brown Man by a smidge Mark Twain or harri at Peter Stow Mark Twain why well he's he's uh's he's much funnier for one thing he has a wider
33:03
range uh he's an essayist and a humorist as well as a as a novelist in those in all of those ways he's a more interesting writer harro beer though had a huge influence through one book huge and positive influence which I I'm glad about but as a literary figure I think
33:19
Twain is obviously Superior and here's the question that will really get you in trouble does Ghana or Nigeria have the better Jola rice I think that the answer is that the best jolof rice in West Africa may not be in either Garner or
33:34
Nigeria but but I I'll I'll stick with my own preference for for Gan but that's probably just a question of what you're used to I'm going to have some next weekend so I'll I'll be no no I'm going to be in England but my niece
33:48
whatsapped me an hour ago and said I'm going to bring jice oh great and I thought wow that's that's cool some questions about philosophy just sort of standing on one foot fo briefly how would you position yourself in the philosophic cannon well I think of
34:01
myself as someone whose main contribution is to notice things of interest in philosophical work and draw them to the attention of a public that's wider than the public that already knows about them the philosophical world that
34:15
already knows about them I think also I happened to be in a place and a time in the early um ' 80s in New Haven Connecticut at Yale where there was a possibility of making a kind of connection between analytic philosophy the kind of philosophy I was
34:35
trained in and questions in African and African-American studies and to the extent that there is a field of subfield of African-American studies that's philosophical I think I can claim to have more or less started it of course
34:49
there are ancestors like Duo but but in terms of thinking about how a philosophical training should be brought to bear in thinking about African-American uh stuff that I think I definitely was one of the first people to do I think I
35:00
had the first appointment in philosophy and African-American studies in the world and that was luck I mean they it was the Y that thought of making that appointment I didn't I didn't invent the job but it made me it gave me a
35:12
challenge how can you take this training you've had which has no nothing at all to do with race or gender or sexual orientation or anything else and how can you take that and bring it to bear and thinking about things that are Central
35:24
to African americ I was I'm really lucky that that I was faced with that question just as a teacher because I had to teach things and I had to teach philosophy courses in African-American studies I think I was really lucky and I think
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that it was sort of obvious that there was lots of material that could be brought to bear so to the extent that I sort of have a a place in the in the a tiny place in the history of the subject is probably at that intersection how can
35:48
we bring more diversity racial and otherwise to philosophy what what concretely should we do well the the challenge is that so I don't remember the numbers exactly but it's something like this men and women enter undergraduate philosophy at about the
36:04
same rates but women leave faster and so that by the end of college there are more males and females in most philosophy majors and the same thing happens in um so so there's a there's about a third I think so obviously that
36:20
means that in graduate school there's probably about a third of women to start with but again more of them leave so clearly we're doing something wrong because it isn't that women are not equally interested in the subject because they they right they may have
36:31
more common sense right philosophers are underpaid relative to their smarts and at some point you might just say gee why am I doing this you might but I don't think that that's what's going on I think that the so just on the on the
36:44
paid question uh philosophers are the best paid of humanities Majors so if you're going to stick in the humanities and you're just interested in income you should probably be a philosopher but uh we obviously you you wouldn't commit
36:57
yourself to a life in philosophy if money was the main thing in your life the thing you cared about most so I think they leave because so there's some some psychological evidence about this one reason I think and Sarah Jane Leslie
37:12
who's who's a now a Dean at Princeton but she's a philosopher and psychologist has thought about this what one reason is that there's been a tendency in analytic philosophy to treat the question of how people perform early in the subject
37:27
as an indication of whether they have this thing this it uh that that can make for good good philosophy truth is as in most things uh the good philosophers are people who work hard and who and who maybe have some some psychological traits but they're
37:48
pretty W widely distributed in the population what happens then is that in the first process of developing as a philosopher you you you you meet these teachers who explicitly or implicitly communicate the thought that if you
38:04
don't do well in a paper it's not their fault it's because you don't have it and there this is a place where we're inducing to be more sensible than men that is if they get indications that um that they're uh in in an activity where
38:19
they're not going to do well they wisely moved something where they think they will uh men boys and young men are more like to resist a little bit and to insist on trying again that seems to be the evidence so since it's false that
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there's some it that people have that makes them successful in philosophy we should not be communicating this and so the most important practical thing is to say to all people who teach undergraduate philosophers don't say that explain to them that if they don't
38:49
do well on their first paper it's probably because they haven't worked hard enough or they didn't ask the right they didn't ask enough help from the teacher the or the or the teaching assistants um that if they push on they're likely to get better so I I
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think at that stage that's a really important thing but then we have to worry about the you know the next stage I think at The Graduate level you know we have a climate Committee in our department that thinks all the time
39:11
about making sure that the that's everything about the climate and the department is not put putting off for uh women racial minorities uh trans people and so on gay people anybody who might for one reason or another feel alienated
39:25
we spend a lot of our time making sure that we don't do the things that alienate them another whole category of people who can be alienated uh by college experience are people who come from backgrounds where they don't have
39:36
parents who went to college uh or who don't have very much money in their background interacting with people who do that can be an unsatisfying or unpleasant experience unless the people that you're interacting with are
39:48
thoughtful people so we try as hard as we can to be thoughtful about these things and I and I'm saying we do it in my department with all the Departments all the serious departments would be doing this now does it matter if philosophic realism is true well
40:01
mattering is a two-place relation things matter to somebody uh it matters to me uh but I doesn't it wouldn't have mattered to my mother and I'm I think my mother was a perfectly satisfactory human being for it's not having matter
40:15
to her I mean she knew that I wrote a book about realism I'm glad to say she didn't ask me to explain it to her not because she wasn't smart but because she wasn't interested now you WR a column for the New York Times called the ethicist and
40:29
you give people ethical advice to what extent do you think advice in any context including that is mainly a placebo that people feel they've gotten advice they feel stronger they feel more confident they may go ahead and do what they want to anyway you've benefited
40:42
them but advice is something other than actual advice well honestly the main thing I think I'm doing in the column is helping everybody except the person who write the letter to think about some ethical question which is for them not
41:01
likely to be an urgent one in the way it is for the letter writer for the letter writers of course I don't give advice that I think will do them any harm but I'm not usually feeling that the advice I've given them is either a very
41:16
different from what they would have done without my advice or B really truly satisfactory because if I were in the business of advising as opposed to writing an advice column which is not being in the business of advising I would want to know more in almost
41:29
every case about their situation so my if if they came to me with the question the first thing I'd say is tell me more about this tell me more about that and so on so but the convention is that the letter is all I get and while the fact
41:42
Checkers at the times do call people up to make sure that everything in the letter is true they don't allow me to ask them questions so so I think that um you know in real life a lot of the function of advice is is actually the
41:54
one you you identify it's just being a sounding board it's listening it's the person's going to do something but it's helpful to be heard it's helpful to articulate the problem for yourself uh the advice function the thing that the
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adviser says may not be hugely important do some evidence that people who know just a little about financial literacy do worse than people who know nothing at all because they then think they can go out and make investments but until they
42:20
know a lot that may be counterproductive do you ever worry about that with advice if I thought thought that I was the only resource for the people who who are writing the letters I wouldn't I wouldn't write the column so uh I know I
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think what all I'm trying to do is to identify something in the question that strikes me as worth thinking about um mostly As I say not for the person who wrote to me but for the for the million other people are going to read it and so
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I've never had a question where I thought if I answer this with what I think is the best advice I have there's a risk that something bad will happen I've never had that happen do you think there's a risk that people just feel
43:03
inadequate that they know somewhat what's the right thing to do they ask you you confirm their intuition and then they're like oh my goodness I I already knew I'm not up to that but now Society is really telling me you know I'm not up
43:14
to that and they just go away feeling bad possible I mean as I say I have I get zero information beyond the letter and and perhaps surprisingly people don't often communicate with me uh or try to communicate with me about what I've said especially the people who
43:29
answered who asked the question so it's possible that uh makes people feel bad but I think so my my what I imagine is that there are many reasons why people write in one is they just want to they just want to as it were write it down
43:44
they want to think about that they've got a problem they think if I just write out this question I'll I'll get clearer about what my situation is and maybe this guy will even help me get a little bit clearer but I think a lot of them
43:54
are people who've had an argument with somebody about what they should do and they want me to take sides now they don't explicitly say that and they don't tell me what the other side is usually though occasionally somebody says well
44:04
my wife thinks this and I think that so I think of sometimes as the function of my answer is for to be something that on Sunday morning gets slapped down on The Breakfast Table see he agrees with me all that gets hidden away because
44:17
because I don't agree with you and you don't want your whoever it is you're arguing with u to know that the times ethicist has taken the taken their side but as I say I think it's really important that that I don't believe that anybody who was in serious difficulty
44:32
should think of writing to the New York Times and and waiting perhaps months for an answer is a sensible way to uh seek uh to seek a solution the main function of the column from my point of view as I say is to get out ideas for thinking
44:47
about the big things that happen in everybody's life questions about confidentiality Loyalty The Balancing of Interest whether what difference your relationship with a person makes to what you owe to them these sorts of things
45:02
which I think uh it's philosophy has a lot to say about and it's useful for people to think about whether or not they're currently facing a question of that kind what do you think is the next undervalued moral Revolution on its way say within the
45:17
next decade now I should have a standard answer to that uh but I don't I I think that we're seeing that there's a long tradition in Muslim moral thought of making each of us at least each Muslim responsible for the moral lives of other
45:37
Muslims in a certain way for it's it refers to a passage in the Quran about commanding right and forbidding wrong I think this Society was when I came here 30 something years ago very much a society in which people were sort of
45:52
thought that you left other people to do their own moral thing and that now there's an interesting change going on that people feel inclined to sort of intervene in the moral lives of even of strangers and to and to say what they think about it
46:06
maybe not to not to coerce them of course into doing anything in particular but at least to express a view if that takes hold it will be a huge revolution in the moral life of our society and what in our Behavior will change the most say within 105 years you
46:22
mean if that happens if that happens if it continues well I think a lot of there'll be a lot more what are now called bystander interventions in social life that will mean that probably there'll be a lot less I think uh sexual
46:35
and racial and homophobic harassment because bystanders are very useful in dealing with that kind of thing that would be good uh I mean a lot of people now witness those kinds of things and they think it's wrong but they don't say
46:49
anything because we have this idea that as I said that everybody's responsible for their own moral life kind of thing so that you know if that were to take off it would be a a big change it would have downsides as well as upsides as
47:03
these changes often do because uh because there's a reason why in the Muslim case the tradition says that while you should do this you shouldn't for example be too nosy about what other people are doing because then the balance would shift too far in the other
47:18
direction and there are people who would respond to a change like that by by sort of nosily poking about in other people's lives and I think I think there's a place for moral privacy as well but so so I think it's like all these things
47:32
it's likely to go too far at some point now for our final segment we cover your life I sometimes call this theqa Anthony AIA production function simple question you were a child you met Richard Wright Richard Baldwin what was that like I
47:45
don't remember you don't remember I don't remember my childhood uh I got very very sick when I was eight and spent several months in hospital and I have zero memories of anything before for that unfortunately and when you were
47:57
in the hospital ncuma walked past your hospital bed do you remember that I do remember what was that like I was recovering at that point that was very exciting I knew he'd put my father in prison but he was still the president of
48:09
our country and it was very exciting to have him there and I was kind of upset that he was with the Queen of England and she greeted me and he didn't and I was kind of upset that he didn't say hello um since you know he hadd been a
48:20
very close friend of my parents he he was going to be the best man at their wedding when he became a leader of government business in Ghana so he sent somebody else but so he they'd been very close so even though he was my father's
48:32
imprisoner um I I I think I remember feeling that he should have not tapped his foot and looked at the ceiling which is basically what he did what did you say back to the queen when she greeted you well you you course the queen in
48:47
hospitals tend to ask this slightly dared question which is how are you and the answer should always be when I'm in hospital so you know but of course I said I was very well um the the thing that got me in trouble was that when the
48:58
Duke of Edinburgh who had visited my hometown Kumasi without the queen previously and had met my mother turned around as he was leaving and said give my regards to your mother which is a conventional thing for members of the royal family to say but to somebody that
49:10
about somebody they met before and that that got at that point the president realized that he knew who I was and later what was it like having was it an uncle a great uncle as king uh had both um because the my great uncle was
49:25
succeeded by my uncle they're very different to me because my great uncle was this incredible charismatic symbol of a stiness and we would sometimes go up and see him with my mother and my sisters on a Sunday after church we would just go and sit
49:40
and chat to him but he was it wasn't like sort of chatting with a member of the family he was he was a very Grand figure he was always dressed in these amazing Asanti uh kente robes so that was kind of exciting and you were AED by
49:58
him the next king of Santi my who had been whom I knew as a child as Uncle Matthew before he became king was someone you know when I was a kid I I hung out with him I walked around you know we walked around hand inand when I was a kid and so on I knew him very
50:16
intimately so while it was also the case that somehow being invested with this job made him seem a little bit magical still he was still fundamentally just my uncle Matthew did you know your British Grandfather at all when he was alas no
50:32
he died before I was born fact died before my parents married yeah um he was uh my mother always said about him that everybody because he was chor of the exer in Britain and um in charge of a period of austerity after the war that
50:45
everybody always had this image of him as this kind of austere and um figure capable incapable of enjoyment but in fact she said he he had he was he had lots of fun Churchill um picked up on this this way of thinking about my
51:00
grandfather when he said there there but for the grace of God goes God he said about my grandfather um he was very religious he was very Pious but he wasn't humorous and I think people got the impression that he was what do you learn from having a sheep
51:13
farm in New Jersey I learn that it is possible to be a happy creature that doesn't know about Donald Trump and doesn't worry about the fate of the world my sheep are we feed them properly and they have access to water and they
51:26
can run around and there are no big dogs to scare them or Wolves or anything like that no predators in their Liv seem happy and when I'm visiting them I sort of feel that you can I'm reminded of the possibility of a kind of untroubled existence do you
51:43
think it helps your work to have two very distinct physical habitats to do things in I think it is how does that work I mean so for example the column I almost always work on the column at the weekend in the living room of our house
51:58
in New Jersey I work for six or seven hours maybe just with a laptop and the questions and occasional cups of coffee and that's kind of a very productive space for me I I get that done in that way here in New York I almost never get
52:14
anything done in either of my offices I have an office in the low School an office in the philosophy department but in this In This Very Room too I also sometimes sit uh with my laptop and again I I can sit for six or 7 hours and
52:26
write things I almost I've actually almost never done a column in this space for some reason so that's usually writing lectures or or articles or reviews I have a beautiful study in New Jersey and I've never manage to write a
52:41
single word in it it somehow doesn't work for me it's I have a lovely desk and it's I'm surrounded by a lovely library of of books and there's a fireplace and so on but it just doesn't work the place that works is sitting in a living room with a laptop on my lab I
52:56
love the novel Milkman by the way what have you learned from chering the booker prize that fiction in English is in great shape there are just lots of wonderful novels I read 173 novels for that did that make you a better reader
53:09
or a worse reader I don't think they were I don't think you should read levels in the way you have to read them for that purpose because I I did read them all I mean that is to say I read every page of all almost all well I lie
53:22
I did not read every page of one of them which was but at some point you just know you don't like it you're not going to give the prize to a book which has a great second task right the whole book has to be good yes but still uh we we felt the
53:35
judges felt that we owed it to the these people to read them right through so we did and I wouldn't urge you're reading very very fast because you've you've got less than a year and you got to read all these books and you are reading with a
53:50
question in mind which is not the question you normally have in mind when you read a novel which is is this worthy of this surprise um and it's it's a funny frame of mind one of the good things about it is that there's a so you
54:00
read 173 then you make a long list of 13 and those you can then read again at a reasonable rate uh in the last part of the summer and then once you've picked the six you get to read those again so the so the finalist you've read three
54:13
times and and the last two times you've read them at a reasonable rate uh so you read them in a sort of normal way but it's you know there are books that I read for that that I'm going to read again be because I I didn't feel I read
54:26
them properly and you're now on a committee for an architecture prize is that correct yes and do you visit sites or you're how does that work it's all done through um so there are Architects or designers who actually visit the
54:39
sites but they produce very extensive reports so we picked the finalists the 20 something finalists uh by looking at portfolios and then there's a presentation of each building over a series of days and so on and that's how the choices are made and how effective
54:55
do you think prizes are in stimulating achievement or is it mainly for the readers or the viewers they know what where to go I don't think anybody writes a book because they might get a literary prize I don't think that wouldn't be a
55:08
good enough reason to write a a novel you have to but Fame and Fortune could be a reason right Samuel Johnson at least claimed that's why he wrote yes and sometimes it reads like it um so I think the kind I think literary fiction is not written by people who
55:25
were looking for frame and Fortune uh the author of of of Milkman um she uh she living in a small apartment didn't have very much money when asked what she would do with the prize money she said pay off my debts she she a someone Anna Burns has a
55:42
vocation to write these novels she writes them in a very particular way they they she says they come to her she waits for them and then she writes stuff down and sometimes she knows it's working and sometimes it isn't and so on
55:54
she has a very particular a picture of what she's up to I don't think people like that are motivated by anything like this but of course it doesn't mean there isn't anybody who's motivated in that way I think that recognition is part of
56:04
the important structure of the literary world and prizes big and small are an important part of that I don't think they're unimportant I think it's good to to do them I'm a not a big fan of so I'm also I'm the chair of the prize
56:19
committee for the Bon prize which is a philosophy prize which is a million million dollars a year which go tends to go to people who've had a long career Charles Taylor Charles Taylor or Martha usban people who um well people who started doing what
56:35
they were doing long before there were any prizes so it can't have motivated them so I think certainly for the booker the reason I agreed to do it and it involved you know flying to London once a month and a lot of stress reading all
56:47
those novels um is because of its function for the readers what the booker does is it creates a conv ation in England over the summer about 13 books and then people get really excited about which six are going to be picked and there's another
57:02
conversation about the six and including conversations in which people say that the judges are idiots and they miss something important which is good because that and that comes into the conversation too and then the winner uh
57:12
and again all over England people are talking about this book and people who wouldn't have read it read it and since it's a great book that's a good outcome last question let's say a very smart 19-year-old comes to you maybe at you
57:25
and they say well I want to be the next generation's version of you in some way but of course different what advice do you give them ethical or otherwise I think what I say is um life is not the kind of thing you can plan you can't have a sort of Life plan
57:45
which is a term some ethesis use in your back pocket I was a medical student when I went to University I was going to be a doctor till I was 20 then I realized that I really loved philosophy but I didn't become a philosophy undergraduate
58:02
because I thought I was going to be a philosophy graduate student I became a philosophy undergraduate because I wanted to do more philosophy and then I was going to go home and figure out what to do with the rest of my life I went
58:09
home spent a year in Ghana and the job I got was teaching philosophy at the University of Ghana that made me realize that I liked the teaching which I hadn't done before obviously as an undergraduate and so on so um I would
58:22
say be prepared to discover what's both in you and out there in the world don't don't have a don't have some picture of how you want it to happen because that isn't very that's very unlikely to work have have uh be attentive to the world around you be
58:42
attentive to what you discover about yourself as you go along match the two together I didn't set out to make I didn't set out to make make any kind of impact I just was interested in the subject and wanted wanted to do more
58:55
wanted to write more wanted to think more wanted to teach more I I think that um too much reflection on the kind of effects of of your work as opposed to just on the work itself is probably not a good idea you should just do it and hope that it will
59:10
have uptake and the final thing I'll say is that um there are many many kinds of uptake so there are people whose uptake is almost entirely within professional philosophy who are doing wonderful important work which will never
59:24
explained probably to people outside because there are things you need to know modal logic or or um tensor calculus or something if you're a philosopher of physics that um that that aren't ever going to be explained to everybody that work is very important
59:39
too that sort of work the work that isn't easily explained to the rest of the world is in the background of the work that does get explained more widely so I feel very much as it were standing on the shoulders of perhaps not Giants but anyway pretty large
59:58
people who who are not visible outside the subject uh but who without his work in other words the the work is the product of the community of Scholars and you're just one tiny um uh prosis on that on that vast Amber of philosophy and there's
1:00:16
stuff right in the middle there's there's the there's the nucleus and and in there people are doing things that nobody's ever going to be able to figure out outside the amra itself don't look for any particular kind of impact do the
1:00:29
best work you can and if it's good work it will have some kind of impact maybe not in the world outside philosophy but in philosophy uh and also hold on to the hold on to the the thing that that should have brought you in in the first
1:00:45
place which is your own desire to understand things um I I I'm always in the end what I'm doing even when I'm answering those questions is figuring out what I think try which is the only way I know how to make a contribution is just to figure out the
1:01:00
best answer you can come up with in the available time uh to the question that presents itself to you and these these the questions that in philosophy that present themselves to me seem very urgent to me um even if some of them
1:01:14
have answers that are you know for the ages um and and I'm and I'm mostly working on them because I want to know the answer myself Guam thank you very much thank you it's great to talk to you thanks for listening to
1:01:29
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show