In considering the reactions from the Kenyan public to the tragedy in Haiti, to Jamaican preacher Abdullah Al-Faisal, to those that took to the street in demonstrating for his freedom and to the crackdown on Somali immigrants in Nairobi's Eastleigh district, we provide here a link to a Kwame Appiah lecture, Ethics in a World of Strangers.
In it he proposes that cosmopolitanism is not a
solution, but a great challenge. He suggests that modern society has exaggerated the power of difference while neglecting the power of commonality.
In the lecture, he explores our obligations to strangers, the world beyond that of our fellow citizens, and recalls from Honore De Balzac's Father Goriot,
“You laugh, but you don’t know what it is all about. Have you read
Rousseau?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that he asks the reader somewhere what he would do if
he could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin somewhere in China by
mere force of wishing it, and without stirring from Paris?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“Pshaw! I am at my thirty-third mandarin.”
“Seriously, though. Look here, suppose you were sure that you could do
it, and had only to give a nod. Would you do it?”
“Is he well stricken in years, this mandarin of yours? Pshaw! after
all, young or old, paralytic, or well and sound, my word for it. . . .
Well, then. Hang it, no!”
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