Hear the Reith lectures

Lord Reith founded the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the world’s largest broadcasting network and a foremost culture disseminator in the UK, if no longer the world. The broadcasters’ motto, often quoted by many, of the duty to inform, educate, entertain, was his and finds form in these annual lectures.

Appia, part Ghanaian and part English, educated in Ghana and Britain, a Cambridge graduate and former teacher at several US Ivy League universities, is now Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

In his four lectures that have just ended on BBC Radio, but available as podcasts, the Reith lecturer invites us to consider how we have come to construct our own individual identities and also have them thrust upon us. He believes that identities are not fate, although they may be conditioned by faith, and that we have to figure out what to do with them.

The world has become an increasingly dangerous place because of the erroneous assumptions that we make about one another’s identities, whether religious, racial, cultural or national. These ideas have become fundamentalist beliefs leading to Brexit and Trumpism that are dogmatic about nationalism as a way of preserving our identities.

In his first lecture on religion and how it shapes us, Prof Appia argues that religious texts have to be relevant and therefore open to interpretation if they are to continue to have believers.

That is why religious beliefs shift, at any one time finding a different focus, as in St Paul writing that women should cover their heads in church and men not, or in Islam where belief that women are inferior to men is derived from a single sentence, ignoring another part of the religious text and allowing for just the opposite, so that in some parts of the Islamic world women have held great political power, eg Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We are left to conclude that religion is as much about practice as it is about belief and is therefore in constant evolution.

Appia is adamant about the nonsense that is racial identity. We should all know by now, especially here in TT, that race is a social construct.

Genetic science has shown us that defining people by the colour of their skin or shape of their nose or size of their jaw or any other physical feature has no basis in science. In fact, there is more diversity among Africans from that continent where all human life started than among Africans and other ethnic groups.

Anyone of us who has lived in another country knows that there we represent not only our country but a “race”. In Japan or China a white, brown or black person is simply that, other. And, in the USA, black, white, Latino all take on a different meaning of “them” and “us”.

National identity that can be tied to religious identity, as in India or Israel, is a potent cocktail as it nearly always carries with it a racial identity.

Prof Appia argues that apart from causing wars, nationalism has eroded our everyday ability to be humane, stopping us from dealing with the current, huge refugee crisis, for example, because we feel that “those people” threaten our identity as much as our native culture and our living.

Donald Trump’s beliefs seem rooted in many of the moral and intellectual confusions Prof Appia identifies. What can anyone say except woe betide us all.

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