Kwame Appiah is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. Over his long career he has written about topics including political philosophy, ethics, literature, African and African-American studies. As the author of more than 20 books, his notable works include Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. His newest book, and the subject of our conversation today, is entitled Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science. Kwame was also recently featured in an episode of Wisdom Keepers, a PBS show exploring life’s fundamental questions.
How do we express our religious commitments? Some may say faith, but this article proposes another idea. Learn what role hope plays in belief by reading Religious Commitment: A Hopeful Approach By Daniel Speak.
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Thomas Burnett: Kwame, welcome to the show.
Kwame Appiah: I am very glad to be talking to you.
Thomas Burnett: Yeah, I’m looking forward to delving into your new book. But I wanna start by actually asking about your own background. So, if you could tell our listeners where did you spend your childhood and maybe a few of your most indelible memories.
Kwame Appiah: My mother was British, my father was Ghanaian, and I spent my childhood between England and Ghana. Our home, from the age of one for me, was in Kumasi, in Ghana, and the capital of the Ashanti region. And I went to boarding school in England when I was eight because of one of my most formative experiences, which was that my father was imprisoned by the president of Ghana. When presidents imprisoned you, they don’t always explain why. My father was a member of the opposition. He was in Parliament, and I was quite ill at the time. I was in hospital, and the Queen of England visited Ghana for the first time as a foreign head of state, the first time after we became a republic.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: And she came by my bed. And as they were wandering away, the Duke of Edinburgh, the queen’s husband, turned around and said to me, please give my regards to your mother. And that, that point, the president knew that my father was a political opponent of theirs. He did that sort of thing. Apparently, he was famous for tweaking foreign heads of state, and this made the president very mad, and my doctor was fired, and so on. And my mother thought, in those circumstances with all the problems going on, that it was better for me not to be there. So, I was sent to England to my mother and my grandmother, and she put me in a school near her. And so, I started my education in England, but my home was in Ghana. And in terms of religion, which is the topic of my book, my father was a Methodist. My mother belonged to an interdenominational protestant church, so I was raised a Protestant. The school I was sent to was an Anglican school. So, I grew up in a Christian family, but with Muslim cousins. One of my Ghanaian aunts married a Lebanese, Sunni Muslim, and some of my English cousins were Jewish. And my husband is Jewish, so I’ve grown up between religions. One of the things I learned in my English boarding school was transcendental meditation, so I learned a bit of a South Asian tradition as well that way. And all of that obviously shapes my views, both in terms of the experience of religious life and in terms of conversations with people of a variety of religious traditions, including, of course, since I’m a philosopher, I’ve talked to a lot of atheists.
Thomas Burnett: No doubt.
Kwame Appiah: I’d say one other thing, actually, which is I feel increasingly important to stress that I think of myself as having come from a background of great privilege. In my hometown in Ghana, my great uncle was the king, succeeded by my uncle, and my mother’s family in England, my great-grandfather was in the House of Lords. So another part of my experience of life is the experience of someone who has been given by history an extraordinary set of privileges, which I’m very conscious of, and very grateful for.
Thomas Burnett: Going to school in England and your home in Ghana, I’m curious, what were just some of the activities and passions and curiosities that you gravitated towards even in your kind of earliest memories?
Kwame Appiah: The most important social group that I hung out with in secondary school was actually a group of, what I guess people would call, evangelical Christians. These days, when you say Evangelical Christian, that suggests that you might have been conservative, but this was the late sixties, and we were definitely not conservative.
I mean, we were very preoccupied with issues of social justice, I suppose, but also theological questions. So, I spent a lot of my teens reading a certain amount of theology, and also as a result of that reading philosophy. And by the time I got to university I, I realized that that’s what I really wanted to think about.
Thomas Burnett: Yeah. I read in your book that. Once you got to college, you stumbled upon a, a community that was very tight-knit. Can you tell me a little bit about who that group was and your participation?
Kwame Appiah: Yes, I was very lucky. So I went to university, actually as a medical student. I, I switched to philosophy in the second year, and my biochemistry teacher introduced me to a group called the Epiphany Philosophers. And they weren’t just philosophers. As I say, my biochemistry teacher was involved with it. There was a physicist Ted Bastin, involved with it. There were a number of linguists, some of the founders of Modern Computer Science were also members of this group. Dorothy Emmett was, I think, one of the most important philosophers of social science that Britain has produced. And she was especially well-connected in anthropology. And I think in part because of that, she knew about philosophy in West Africa. And it was she that introduced me to the work of Robin Horton, who was. The philosopher anthropologist who really continued the tradition of Tyler, who is the anthropologist who’s the subject of one of the chapters of my book.
Tyler invented the idea of animism. The idea that the essence of religion, belief all around the world, from the simplest societies to the most complex, was belief in spirits, in invisible beings. And what Robin Horton did was to show how, if you took at face value, the claims about invisible beings made in these traditional African religions. You could understand almost everything about the way those religions live.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s fascinating that a group of people that these epiphany philosophers that you met with an undergraduate could be so formative into a book that you would write, what, 45 years later, right? I mean, you carry that with you,
Kwame Appiah: You’re, you’re being generous. It’s actually 50 years.
Thomas Burnett: Wow.
Kwame Appiah: I don’t know how my life would’ve gone if I hadn’t met Dorothy in particular. The idea that there was a natural intersection between anthropological interest in particularly in religion and philosophy, was something that I definitely got from her, and that’s important because. Otherwise, my education was very, very mainstream analytic philosophy.
And I’m very grateful for having learned that, and I enjoyed it, and I still have an interest in it. But I don’t think I would’ve been led to these questions if I had just done the regular philosophy degree and that. I owe very much, as I say, in particular to Dorothy.
Thomas Burnett: I wanna turn directly to your new book. It’s entitled Captive Gods, Religion and the Rise of Social Science. And one thing I’ve noticed, in my reading, is that the scholarly study of religion often looks very remote from what people do with religion. So, I’m wondering from your vantage point, what do scholars themselves contribute that you find valuable in the study of religion?
Kwame Appiah: Well, I think it’s important to stress the point that It’s not clear that, say, Durkheim’s description of the Aboriginal Religions of Australia, and his understanding of them would’ve made much sense to the Aboriginal people that he was talking about. And it is interesting that these four important founding figures that I focus of the book. So, these were people with their own interesting religious backgrounds.
And nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the things they said about religion would seem strange to focus on for people in the religious traditions they were talking about. I think one reason for this, which I perhaps don’t say enough about in the book, is that there’s a kind of methodological atheism that guides a lot of social science.
So a, a lot of social scientists are like a lot of people religious, they participate in the lives of some religious communities, some, uh, some church or temple or mosque. But the way, a lot of. Sociology and anthropology treat, religion brackets the question of the truth of the theological claims. So, let’s take the Kalari, whom Robin Horton worked among. Why did the Kalari switch to Christianity is because, God sent missionaries to them and they received the faith. That’s a perfectly intelligible answer. That’s not an answer that an anthropologist or a sociologist would ever give.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: They would talk about parallels between the pre-Christian beliefs of the Kalari and Christianity. They would talk about how the Kalari would’ve understood Christianity as a result, and so on. So, my Ghanaian grandfather, I think he would’ve thought it very odd to focus on anything other than the fact that what Christianity had brought to Ghana was the truth about religion. So, there is this gap between the methodological. Tendency not to draw on religious claims. That is a feature of the sociology and the anthropology of religion, and what seems central to many religious people.
Now, one of the things it’s important to stress, given the diversity of the world’s religions, is that theology is not important for many religious traditions. Many modern Jewish communities contain many people who would say, well, if you ask me what my theology is, I’m an atheist. What matters to me is the practice of Judaism. And so what matters is not orthodoxy, correct belief, but orthopraxy, collective practice.
I think Tyler’s claim that animism is important because it stresses the fact that when people say things about God, they think they’re talking about someone who’s really there. I think that’s an important point about the practice of many people, and it’s sort of oddly absent in a fair amount of the sociology of religion.
Thomas Burnett: I want to follow up on your comment about animism, and I’m wondering, something I’ve long wondered about, we’ve got the major world religions. You can kind of name off five or six or seven maybe that have more than 10 to 20 million adherence. And then it seems like there’s this huge bucket of the everything else had you call it animism or indigenous beliefs or this or that.
I’m wondering is that really a coherent category that all these groups have so much in common, we can give them one name in contrast to these world religions, or is it such a crazy mix that that is just really a false category?
Kwame Appiah: I don’t think it’s super helpful. We can see how it happened because the collection of scholarly knowledge about these non-European religions was done by people who came from Christian societies.
They might not have been Christian themselves, but they came from overwhelmingly Christian societies. And one way to think about how they identified religion in the societies they visited was to say, they asked themselves the question, what do they have instead of Christianity? So that, of course, if you come thinking that way. Then the less something looks like Christianity, the less it looks theological, the less it looks scriptural, the less it looks ecclesial in terms of having churches and temples and so on, the more you are going to put it into a sort of box and the category of things that are not, like Christianity isn’t obviously going to turn out to be a coherent category, any more than of course, Gentiles.
Thomas Burnett: Right,
Kwame Appiah: Gentiles are just people who aren’t Jews and, and infidels, translating a Muslim term, are just people who aren’t Muslims. And there’ll be lots of those, and there’ll be different in many ways. Now, one of the things, however. If you come from a Christian society and you come from the Abrahamic tradition, so this applies to Jews and Muslims as well, is that you will be very sharp on the distinction between monotheism and everything else.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: However, I think there’s some truth to Tyler’s thought that if you believe in one or many invisible beings, there will be features of the way you act that are explicable in terms of that.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: And so, it will be the case that all around the world when people believe in invisible beings, and if we’re going to call that religion or we’re going to call that animism, then there will be something that they have in common. But saying that is a bit like saying that everybody in the world will have in common that they speak a language, which is perfectly consistent with the languages being extremely diverse. Once you have the idea, the Tyler’s idea of animism, the idea that belief and invisible beings are the key thing, then of course you won’t really pause things the way that classification, in terms of the Great world Religions plus animism, does, because you’ll think of the Abrahamic faiths as also animistic.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: It’s true that they claim to be monotheistic, but they also have many invisible beings. Right. The Koran is full of things called gin, spirits, angels, and archangels, and all the glorious company of heaven, as it says in the English Prayer Book. These are also, invisible beings and when a, an ordinary, everyday, Catholic farmer goes to a shrine, a lot of the, interpersonal character of that conversation with the saint, he’s very like the interpersonal conversations that my, say, my, father’s family would have with our ancestors. And in a way, Tyler’s animism consists mostly in saying they, they mean what they say when they say that such and such a spirit.
Thomas Burnett: Yeah. Another thing I’m wondering, people are curious not just about the multitude of different religious belief systems that exist in our world today, but where these systems came from, where did religion come from? Is it apt to make comparisons between any groups today and how it might’ve been literally 30,000 years ago?
Kwame Appiah: I mean, only to the extent that it’s apt to make comparisons between you and me and people. 30,000 years
Thomas Burnett: Yeah.
Kwame Appiah: This is one of the problems with Durkheim’s book on religion, right? He took accounts of, to him, contemporary Aboriginal religious practice to be a model of the origin of all religions. And it just seems to me that that just ignores the fact that every group has a history, and that one of the nice things about the work of Robin Horton is that he has a very famous, wonderful paper called A Hundred Years of Change in Cali Religion. And his point is these are not just people doing what their ancestors did.
Nobody’s doing just what their ancestors did. And he shows how, over just a hundred years, up until the sixties. A change occurred in the Caba religion. And if you think. That only happened when Europeans arrived; then you don’t understand the human historical processes. My Asanti ancestors were not in Ashanti where they are now; a thousand years ago, they were somewhere else. They came south. You can’t but think that moving from somewhere, perhaps in the Sahara, perhaps to the west, the east of the Sahara, to the coast of Guinea, you can’t believe that that could happen to a people, and they just go on doing all the things they were doing when they started out.
So I think the idea that modern indigenous people are kind of a mirror of ancient people, if that’s supposed to mean that they don’t have any history, it’s just not right. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t learn things.
I mean, if the Saturn people of the Kalahari are able to live in the desiccated landscape and make a living as hunter-gatherers, maybe that tells us something about what hunter-gatherers have always been able to do. So, I don’t mean we learn nothing, any more than we can’t learn from how people talk today to each other what conversation must have been like, a thousand, 10,000, 30,000 years ago. One of the great sort of European sort of fantasies is that there is, that there are, is that there are people without history.
Thomas Burnett: Yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna turn to another concept you brought up in your book. This is the concept of awe. I think in particular, it’s germane to the John Templeton Foundation. We have a tagline that we aim to inspire, awe, and wonder. So I wonder if you can tell me what does awe have to do with religion and how we understand it?
Kwame Appiah: We’ve already skirted around the fact that, because of the diversity of religions, it’s hard to find generalizations that are true of all of them. But for many religions, and especially I would say for the, ones that became canonized as the great World religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Abrahamic, traditions, Confucius and Taoism, one of the things that, particularly the monastics in those traditions, had was a kind of experience of the divine that, produced in them the experience of, awe and of the, let’s say it’s like the, the what, what in the 18th century they called the sublime. There’s a feeling you have when you stand before an alp, right?
Or before Niagara Falls. It’s a sense of the power and maybe a little bit of the surprise that comes from facing something in the world that is bigger and grander than you are.
Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm.
Kwame Appiah: And, and that sense of awe can come from just looking up at night at the starry heavens, and just thinking how teeny I am by comparison with all that. So there’s this response that humans have to the awesome things that awe us, that is one of the things that both motivates, I think, theological theorizing. How is this possible? Why does the universe produce this response in me? And it’s natural to interpret that as evidence of something there. But also I think, the feeling you have when you are being awed, it is a kind of experience that one might want to have more than once, one might want to go back to it. And so certain religious practices, monastic practices in particular, practices of meditation, and so on, seem to be connected with recovering that sense.
And once you have that sense, it’s very hard to think of the universe as lifeless or just there, you know? Now that may or may not be a reasonable response. Philosophers could argue about that. But it is a response that people have. And so when Rudolph Otto wrote about the idea of the holy part of what he was talking about was that sense that we have faced with the awesome of awe,
Something’s awesome if it makes or appropriate.
Thomas Burnett: Right, right.
Kwame Appiah: So I think it’s not surprising that that’s one of the things that is central to the experience of many religions and religious thinkers, they want to know why the world produces that experience in them. And that’s a very good question.
Thomas Burnett: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me turn the question back on you and, I wonder what, what fills you with awe, and where do you seek awe in your life?
Kwame Appiah: I mean, I, I do have that sense of the sublime, very often faced with nature. And you know, every time I’m outside a city and look up at night and there’s no clouds, for me it happens sometimes listening to music as well. Actually, particularly music written for religious purposes by classical and romantic European composers. But also, when listening to hymns, when you sing a hymn, you have that sense of solidarity. You’re doing this thing together, but you’re also singing about awesome, awesome things. Sometimes I have this experience when I think I’ve come in touch with a deep idea,
Thomas Burnett: Hmm.
Kwame Appiah: And that experience never feels to me like me doing something. It feels like something happening to me. Two other occasions when I experienced it. One was the first time I was, did a transcendental meditation with a trainer, and I just felt drawn into deep reality by this experience.
But the other, and this shows I think the diversity of the kinds of things that can produce this experience, was the last time I went rowing at the end of a season, on the river as it happens near Henley, which is one of the great places where rowing goes on, the Henley Royal Regatta. And coming back together, that sense of the unity with which we were operating, that we were in tune with one another. And that we were doing this incredibly difficult thing, maintaining the balance of eight clunky boys, shooting across the water. It made me feel the way the blessed Jillian of Norridge felt when she said, All will be well and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. I think that experience happens for different people. In the face of different things, and the things in the face of which it happens are like religious traditions, incredibly diverse.
Thomas Burnett: Yep. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a really good note to end on.
So, I want to thank you for coming on the show and talking to me today.
Kwame Appiah: It was a pleasure. Very good to talk to you.
