Fallibilism can break America’s political fever (original) (raw)

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at New York University and is the author of “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.” This piece is adapted from his 2024 acceptance speech for the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, which is awarded every two years.

I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live their lives with “main character energy.” Yet, with a little more work, we can also view ourselves the way historians and social scientists might: as creatures shaped by larger forces and bound by a culture’s pre-written scripts. That means seeing ourselves as the inheritor and inhabitant of various social identities — and, therefore, as a person like every other.

Something shifts once you reframe color, creed, gender and so forth within the more abstract concept of social identity. When a dimension of our life is grasped as a social identity, it becomes a phenomenon to take its place alongside a plentitude of other identities, each with points of commonality and distinction. We gain access to a third-person vantage on our first-person perspectives.

From the first-person perspective, the scripts of identity are often below consciousness. We’re Black or gay or female, trans, Latino, a conservative, a Mormon — perhaps in some combination — and we experience these things as essential aspects of our selfhood, things we live rather than things we think about. In video game terms, you might say we’re never a non-playable character to ourselves.

But when you fully apprehend an identity as an identity, you can see it is something historically mutable and contingent: not less powerful, but perhaps less permanent — perhaps something you might join with others to try to renegotiate. If we do this, we can be subjects of an identity without being wholly controlled by it, precisely because we recognize it as a version of something that others have, too. We can live it from the inside while also seeing from the outside. We can learn to think in the third person.

I’m not claiming that we can calm the so-called identity wars by an act of intellectual discipline. Yet the human capacity to think in the third person, to abstract away from our individual particularity, has proved immensely powerful in our social and political history.

Think about the development of liberal toleration in early modern Europe. Religious tolerance, as moral philosophers have noted, requires you to see what you’re tolerating as, in fact, a religion. That abstract category did real work — and it hadn’t been around very long. No word in the biblical scriptures or in the Quran quite corresponds to our concept of religion. An act of imagination, in other words, was required to conceptualize other people’s sacred beliefs and practices as religions rather than just heresies or errors.

What brought down the curtain on a long, bloody era of religious warfare in Europe, then, was a form of tolerance that required stepping outside yourself. Societies confronted by internal diversity increasingly accepted that others were entitled to live by their own understandings. But to do that, you had to adopt an outside perspective and see your own understanding as one understanding among others. And that slow revolution changed everything.

So pluralism begins with plural nouns: not religion, but religions. Indeed, religion, like identity, only makes sense in the plural. We must be persuaded that all these shockingly different things are things of the same kind. Abstraction isn’t merely subtraction. Thinking in the third person can be transformative.

Consider morality’s expanding circle, the process in which the care and concern we direct toward members of an in-group, starting with our kin and kith, extend ever outward. It’s a dynamic that has been explored by both the 19th-century historian William Lecky and the contemporary philosopher Peter Singer. And what’s plain is that it has always been powered by thinking in the third person. Seeing oneself as an object makes it easier to see other living beings as subjects.

These days, as social media feeds our snarling outrage and starves the quieter stirrings of our humanity, we’ve increasingly allowed partisan political identities to control us. When we forget to think in the third person, dialogue can desiccate into acrid debate.

Turning that third-person perspective on myself, I realize that my attitudes have been shaped by my own background. My parents, for example, were deeply enmeshed in the independence movements that, in the middle of the last century, swept across the African continent. My father was a roommate and one-time intimate of Kwame Nkrumah, who would become Ghana’s first head of state, and had been friendly with Jomo Kenyatta, Léopold Sédar Senghor and others who would also go on to lead other newly independent African states.

It was an era of so much hope — and so much heartbreak. Independence leaders who spoke the language of liberty often switched, once in power, to dark talk of sedition. After my father broke with the Ghanaian president and helped found an opposition party, he wound up a political prisoner; some of his dearest friends died in custody.

Nkrumah soon banned opposition parties and decreed himself president for life. And though presidents for life might talk about themselves in the third person, they seldom think about themselves in the third person. Nkrumah came to view political dissenters in the manner of a church that sees other faiths only as heresies.

But now a thorny question arises. We all have our political convictions, and they grip us — otherwise they wouldn’t be convictions. How, then, can we be guided by convictions and remain aware that we’re historical subjects, shaped by forces and contexts that we can’t transcend?

The answer starts with the recognition that thinking in the third person doesn’t impoverish the first person. It enriches it, by sponsoring a habit that philosophers call fallibilism.

Michel de Montaigne captured the idea in an essay he wrote a quarter of a century after the Peace of Augsburg, in 1555, helped end the civil strife between Catholics and Lutherans within the Holy Roman Empire. Reflecting on what he had heard about the cultures of the Americas, as Europeans discovered and then conquered them, he wrote, “I find that there is nothing barbarous or savage in that nation as far as what I have been told is concerned, except that everyone calls ‘barbarous’ everything that is not their own custom.”

The liberal fallibilism he espoused was the need to recognize, from an outsider’s perspective, that one is subject to the same tendency to error that one sees in others. Some of the ancient skeptics had concluded that one should avoid belief and strive to suspend judgment. But Montaigne’s more reasonable view was that we should use our natural capacities to form judgments while remaining always open to the possibility that we are wrong.

You can speak with confidence, he thought, so long as you keep your ears open to the voices of demurral and dissent. And this fallibilism is an ally, not an enemy, of the idea of truth. It’s simply the recognition that accuracy can be elusive. It urges modesty and care in making claims about truth.

E.L. Doctorow, the novelist, once remarked that writing is like driving a car at night: You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can still make the whole trip that way. Living in the first person is like peering at the world by your headlights. We all do this. It’s just that we humans can imagine ourselves into other perspectives, too, which is something Doctorow himself had a gift for. We can try to scrutinize the headlights we are using to see. We can, using our imagination, visualize our car as one among many, some with different itineraries or headed to shared destinations by different routes.

Allow me to tell you about an actual drive I once took with a neighbor of my English grandmother. He was an extremely right-wing member of the British Parliament, and you might have thought the cordiality between him and my grandmother was curious because she had married into one of the great English families of the left, one filled with Labour Party luminaries.

But our neighbor, perhaps because he and his wife had no children of their own, took it upon himself to be a mentor. He taught me things he might have taught his son or grandson. He showed me how to fish for trout, with some success. He showed me how to box … with less success.

He even helped me pick my college, and he drove me across England to visit it because my parents were in Ghana. On the long drive back from the visit that set my academic path, we argued for hours.

As a Tory M.P., he was about to vote on a bill in Parliament that would have reintroduced capital punishment. I made the case passionately against it. My neighbor, who had practiced as a lawyer, rebutted vigorously. Thinking about the political divisions of the country that has become mine, I wonder what many of my fellow Americans would make of the sight of a young brown man with a great mop of hair — alas, long gone — and a subscription to the Soviet News (useful for annoying my teachers), seated by a balding White fellow who was as solid a conservative as Britain could produce, both talking for hours about politics without one word spoken in anger or resentment.

Neither of us changed the other’s mind that day. At the end of the journey, he announced genially as he clambered out of the car, “Well, you won all the arguments today, Anthony, but I’m not switching my vote.” You’ll regard the conversation as an exercise in futility if you have a narrowly instrumental view of conversation — if you ultimately think of conversation as conversion. Yet the ability to converse amid disagreement is precisely what enables us to share and help steer a republic together.

The trouble doesn’t come when we disagree. Disagreement in a republic is inevitable. The trouble comes when the spirit of conversation is edged aside by another sentiment — “Die, heretic!” — and when differences of partisan identity swamp all the other identities, including our American identity, that we have in common.

We can try our utmost to prevail in the political arena without seeking to cast out everyone who disagrees. And that human ability to think in the third person helps keep that car on the road.

Our differences are real. Gender, sexuality, color, class, creed, country, culture — all such categories can bring some people together and keep others apart. You’re bound to look at the world from somewhere and as someone, a person with a specific set of identities, a particular perspective.

Yet you also have the capacity, as a human being, to stand at a certain distance from yourself and grasp that you are a person among persons, and that others, like you, may be entitled to make their lives in the light of their own aims and their own understandings. Once that happens, there are conversations to be had — in the first person.