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| Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons |
This has been a depressing and confusing week, with the news
having been mostly bad. The fact that I am far from the action and the hub of
sentiment, makes it worse. Having to limit my discussions to the fickle forum
that is social media leaves thoughts in a tangle, the anxieties stoked by those
within my ideological circle and misgivings heightened by the few on my news
feeds who express a contrary view and justify the actions that are causing
distress. Like many of my friends, I retreat into a closed nest of words, written by those I believe have thought long and hard about such issues and seem to have
the sort of wisdom that provides clarity, if not relief.
One of the podcasts I was pointed to a while ago but that I
got around to catching up only in the past two days is BBC’s Reith Lectures—often
unfairly compared to their more glitzy younger cousin, the TED Talks. Named for
the first Director General of the BBC, the lectures have been given annually by
public intellectuals since 1948, beginning with Bertrand Russell, and including
such notables as Robert Oppenheimer (1953), Richard Hoggart (1971), mostly a whole
series of “old white men” (and much criticized for this over the years). In
response to some of this criticism, recent speakers have been somewhat more
diverse, both in terms of gender (the first woman to deliver the lecture was
British historian Dame Margery Pelham in 1961) and much later, race (Prof Ali
Mazrui in 1979), but some might argue that they still largely represent Western
(and male) scholarship. The first woman of colour was Patricia Williams in
1997. In this sense, the Reith Lecture archives could offer a site to build a
history of ideas as represented by a certain perception of public scholarship. Digging
into the Reith archive, BBC’s Laurie Taylor examines
the history of the Lectures and their evolution over the past eight decades,
trying to unpack what drove the choice of speaker and the definition of “public
intellectual”, drawing on Edward Said’s 1993 lecture to illustrate the point. The
lectures have been criticized alternatively for being too high brow and too “dumbed
down” (according to The Spectator), and Taylor himself asks whether the
lectures in recent times have become less provocative and too wary of giving
offense. However, they have also become more inventive in format and varied in
theme, with a small increase in the number of women speakers (3 of 9 in this
past decade, including Hillary Mantel in 2017).
While the format continues to evolve, for the past few years
each speaker has given a series of four talks unified by a theme. The lectures
are delivered to an audience, with each lecture (sometimes) taking place in a
different location. Now, the talk lasts for about half an hour, followed by
another half hour of discussion. Given that the selected speaker is given two
years’ notice, the talks are expected to be well constructed, thought
provoking, and drawing on long years of scholarship.
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| Prof Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Image source: www.nyu.edu) |
But coming back to why I chose to devote close to four hours
over the last two days listening to a particular set of lectures. I had come
across the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah several years ago, but it was only
recently that I found some of his ideas closely resonant with themes I was
exploring--identity, race, culture, cosmopolitanism (incidentally, the title of
one of his books). Appiah, now a professor of philosophy at New York
University, delivered the 2016 series of lectures on the broad theme “Mistaken
Identities”, exploring it through four alliterative prisms—Creed, Country,
Colour and Culture. While each of the four lectures offers much to think about,
the second in the series (“Country”), delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, seemed to
address the questions that had been plaguing me ever since the whole tamasha of
the Citizen’s Amendment Bill had begun, and one that seems to take on a
particular urgency today.
Appiah does not dismiss the idea of nation, but calls
attention to the violence we do in the process of defining citizenship and
fixing its attributes. He calls attention to the growing internal complexity of
countries, the impossibility of calling on some homogenous notion of culture to
define belonging, remarking, for instance, that “India, China and Indonesia are
wildly diverse in their ethnicities, whether or not they acknowledge it,” and
that we need to attend to calls for “self-determination” or “territorial
integrity” with “caution and inconsistency”. A fundamental “incoherence” in the
idea of nation is that the idea of the “we” (as in “We the People”) is always—necessarily—in
flux. Can we not, as “cosmopolitans” become comfortable with a fluid idea of
this “We”? Can we not, as a people, imagine a more welcoming, inclusive, “We”
for that purpose of self-determination? He does raise the confounding question:
“How do we hold countries together?” Without offering a conclusive answer, he notes
that it must draw from an acknowledgement that we have a multiplicity of
histories, a diversity of traditions, that “national identity is not a mineral
to be excavated, but a fabric to be woven....” Most importantly, he concludes,
quoting Ernest Reynolds, “Forgetting....[and I would even say, historical error]
is an essential element in the creation of a nation. Recognize that nations are
being invented, and you’ll see they are always being reinvented.”
Can we call upon our country to be what Appiah calls a “liberal
state” which has as its anthem, “we can work it out”? At this point in India’s journey,
we need a willingness to work it out, to open our doors and hearts to each
other.
Listening to Appiah is not only a treat for the mind, but
his eloquence makes it a smooth treat for the ears. While Laurie Taylor remarks
in his review of the Lectures on the occasion of their 60th
anniversary, “The Reith Lectures ... make serious demands...on our ears,” the attention is well worth it.
Here is the link to the episodes and the transcripts:
Or from the BBC archives: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/the-reith-lectures/archive
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