04 Jul If we want to be real cosmopolitan (K. A. APPIAH)
Burton is a standing refutation, then, to those who imagine that prejudice derives only from ignorance, that intimacy must breed amity. You can be genuinely engaged with the ways of other societies without approving, let alone adopting, them. And though his Kasidah endorsed the kind of spiritualism that was common among the educated upper classes in late Victorian England, its image of the shattered mirror—each shard of which reflects one part of a complex truth from its own particular angle—seems to express exactly the conclusion of Burton’s long exposure to the philosophies and the customs of many people and places: you will find parts of the truth (along with much error) everywhere and the whole truth nowhere. The deepest mistake, he supposed, is to think that your little shard of mirror can reflect the whole.
Beyond the Mirror
Life would be easier if we could stop with that thought. We can grant that there’s some insight everywhere else and some error chez nous. But that doesn’t help us when we are trying to decide exactly where the truth lies this time.
You should be faithful to your spouse, we can agree, but I don’t need to be faithful to your spouse. (In fact, I’d better not be!) Someone might say, in the same spirit, “Muslims should go to Mecca, Catholics to Mass.” If you’re not a Muslim, though, you don’t really think Muslims should go to Mecca, and if you are a Muslim, you don’t think that anyone, not even a Catholic, has a duty to go to Mass. On the other hand, unless you’re some kind of libertine—or a rare survivor of one of those experiments with free love that erupted in the 1960s—you probably think that married people ought to keep their pledges of fidelity to their spouses.
Obviously, Muslims believe that they ought to make the hajj and Catholics that they ought to go to Mass. But if you don’t have the beliefs that give those acts their meanings, you presumably think that the people who do think so are mistaken. Either Muhammad was the Prophet or he wasn’t. Either the Koran is the definitive Holy Writ or it isn’t. And if he wasn’t and it isn’t, then Muslims are mistaken. (The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for Mass.) Of course, you probably don’t think there’s much harm done if people do go to Mecca. They think it’s right. We don’t. We don’t think it’s wrong, either, though. Indeed, since we think that integrity matters—that living by your beliefs is important—and since, in this case, there’s no harm done in doing what conscience dictates, perhaps it would be a good thing if they made an effort to go.
It’s important to insist, however, that to say that Muslims should go to Mecca for this reason isn’t to agree with Muslims. It is to give our reason for them to do something that they do for a different reason. One way of seeing why this matters is to remind ourselves that no self-respecting Muslim would think that you understood, let alone respected, the reason they make the hajj if you said, “Of course you have a reason to go: namely, that you think you should, and people should follow their consciences unless to do so will cause harm.” Because that isn’t what Muslims think. What they think is that they should go because God commanded it through the Holy Koran. And that claim is one that you don’t accept at all.
This disagreement is, nevertheless, one that doesn’t have to be resolved for us to get along. I can be (indeed, I am!) perfectly friendly with Catholics and Muslims while not always agreeing with them about theology. I have no more reason to resent those who go to Mecca on the hajj than I have to begrudge the choices of those who go to Scotland for golf or to Milan for opera. Not what I’d do, but, hey, suit yourself.
Still, this live-and-let-live attitude is not shared by everyone.
Readers of this book are unlikely to think that the proper response to adultery is to take offenders before a religious court and, if they are convicted, to organize a crowd to stone them to death. You and I are no doubt appalled (as are a lot of Muslims, it should be said) by the very thought of a person being stoned to death in this way. Yet many people in the world today think that this is what sharia, Muslim religious law, requires. Or take what we often call female circumcision, which Burton documented among Arabs and East Africans (according to whom, he claimed, sexual desire in women was much greater than in men), and which remains prevalent in many regions. We mostly don’t agree with that either. Disagreements like these are perfectly common, even within societies. If you are contemplating an abortion, which you think is morally quite permissible, and I think that you’ll be killing an innocent young human being, I can’t just say, “Fine, go ahead,” can I?
The temptation is to look for a rule book that could tell you how to arbitrate conflicts like that—but then you’d have to agree on the rule book. And even if you did, for reasons I’ll be exploring later, there’s no reason to think you’d be able to agree on its application. So there has long been a seductive alternative. Perhaps, even if we agree on all the facts, what’s morally appropriate for me to do from my point of view is different from what’s morally appropriate for you to do from your point of view. Burton, with his mastery of thirty-nine languages, was something of a freak of nature in his ability to penetrate different cultures—to “go native,” as we say, and do so time and time again. But most of us have that ability to some lesser degree: we can often experience the appeal of values that aren’t, exactly, our own. So perhaps, when it comes to morality, there is no singular truth. In that case, there’s no one shattered mirror; there are lots of mirrors, lots of moral truths, and we can at best agree to differ.
Cosmopolitanism
Kwame Anthony Appiah
