Reading Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ethics and Strangers
“Now, if I walk down New York’s Fifth Avenue on an ordinary day, I will have within sight more human beings than most of those prehistoric hunter-gatherers saw in a lifetime” (Cosmopolitanism).
Appiah was one of those writers that I found early on that quickly left a mark. This idea above has specifically been a kind of splinter for me. It is a wild thought.
On a random day in 2018, I was driving with firends on our way to Costco. We were passing through the city of Yorba Linda.
We passed a massive housing tract, the kind where all the houses are within three variations of the same model. We slowed to a red light, and Jess said, “look at all those people just living in that area.”
I was audibly blown away from this statement. It’s perfect. It is perhaps the most accurate way to express what it’s like being alive right now.
There are so many of us.
I remember once finding a word in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that tried to describe the sorrow of realizing that every stranger’s life is as detailed as yours and you play an undetailed role in theirs just as they do in yours.
The total amount of personal interaction in one day, from significant encounters across all the identities that we use to make our lives to being backdrop personas for others is astounding. Reading more into Appiah’s work, I found another way in which things become layered:
“Identities make ethical claims because- and this is just a fact about the world we human beings have created -we make our lives as men and as women, as gay and as straight people, as Ghanaians and as Americans, as blacks and as whites…What’s modern is that we conceptualize identity in particular ways. What’s age-old is that when we are asked- and ask ourselves -who we are, we are being asked what we are as well” (The Ethics of Identity).
We are all strangers.
I’ve long been a fan of the big picture, the large-scale zoom-out that shows us all on a big blue ball as a point of reference. One of the last poems of mine to be published moves this way. Of the things I’ve written, it’s still a favorite.
The important thing that should follow after realizing ourselves on this big blue ball is to see that each of the identities we use to make our lives carries a unique version of the question: how should I act?
I would add an undeniable role to this list of the identities we are. Along with being managers, friends, or leaders we are also strangers.
I find it incredible and grounding to realize that we all have the question before us. From our personal to professional lives, we are all involved in the same question of figuring out how we should act.
I think this is a radically beautiful thing.
Trevor
