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Today sees the broadcast of the first of this year’s BBC Reith Lectures. Over the next few weeks, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is delivering four lectures on the theme of ‘Mistaken Identities’, arguing that we have false assumptions about identities built around creed (religion), country, colour, and culture.

In the question and answer session following the recording of the first lecture, Appiah used a telling metaphor.

He quoted Victorian explorer Richard Burton on belief, who said that the truth is like a mirror broken into fragments and scattered over the world. Everyone who has a piece thinks that their shard is the whole. This echoes another analogy, often used to explain the impossibility of having access to all knowledge about God. In this the truth is an elephant, and religious thinkers are blindfold and feeling different parts. One has the tail and says ‘God is like a rope’; another a leg and declares 'God is like a tree'; and the third has the trunk and concludes God is similar to a snake.

It all sounds lovely and pluralist – a metaphor intended to remove the possibility of anyone feeling superior. And Appiah's lecture was designed to do the same thing. He attacked religious fundamentalism by pointing out that sacred texts are complex and difficult to interpret. He spoke repeatedly of the "fundamentalist fallacy" and the error of "scriptural determinism" which assumes that you can pick a passage of scripture at random and predict what the religion will look like.

To which, many in the audience who had given it more than a moment’s thought, inwardly responded "no kidding". A lack of originality is one problem in a Reith lecture. As I tried to graciously point out in the question I was able to ask, none of this is news to religious believers. Polly Toynbee, sitting next to me at the recording, who I’m sure would be happy to agree is no scholar or sympathiser of religion, commented “wasn’t it slightly…obvious?”

The deeper flaw with both the lead metaphor and the lecture itself is more troubling. The lecture attempted to make the case for ‘modesty’ in religious beliefs, to persuade fundamentalists that they might want to be a bit less zealous and a bit less certain. But the person telling the story about the elephant is the one person without the blindfold. They are the only one who can see that the truth is in fact an elephant and everyone else has but a part of it. Richard Burton presumably thinks he has a fuller knowledge, as he is the one who knows a whole mirror existed. Appiah is placing himself in that role.

The impression was of concern and (very polite) hostility to any strongly held beliefs. Appiah is, and was, erudite, amusing and charming, and his project seems on the surface reasonable and logical. The trouble is, that in calling for modesty in others, Appiah failed to notice a lack of modesty in his own.

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Appiah is a philosopher and author of, most famously, a book called Cosmopolitanism. It wrestles with the difficulties of extending our ethical concern to those beyond our immediate group, and how to take others' culture seriously. It's a big, serious, important book. I first encountered his thinking on dealing with difference through the excellent On Being podcast. The idea of 'sidling up to difference', and building "a human connection… [through] simple association, habits of co-existence”, really chimes with what we've found through Theos' research. Relational approaches to difference, which take the other seriously, starting from a point of curiosity and common endeavour rather than hostility, seem to me to be of increasing importance.

Sadly, the lecture did not model that approach to difference. The subtext was about how to change the minds of fundamentalists to make them more liberal. I suspect the next three lectures will be about making nationalists less wedded to their national identity, minority race groups less concerned with racial identity etc.

Identity is clearly a pressing current issue. Tribal identities can be, and often are, problematic. Where we use them as an excuse to demonise the other, to separate from our common life, to demand special treatment, they need challenging. One of liberalism’s great triumphs was to create space for individuals to feel freer to choose their own identities, rather than having them imposed. However, the excesses of liberal individualism tends to prioritise not the dignity of choice, but the need to question and undermine all shared identities, and to see liberal individualism as the desired end point - the view from nowhere that transcends those old, troubling loyalties. Right thinking is the goal.

In laying out the challenge of good hermeneutics by picking verses and suras from sacred texts that seem to contradict each other, Appiah clearly struggled to be fair. No Leviticus scouring new atheist is he. Yes, this passage in the New Testament seems to require women to be submissive, but elsewhere, St Paul says “there is no male or female”. There is no reason, he argued, that Christianity or Islam will then end up oppressing women. Unfortunately, he framed it as “a person with the right attitudes, coming to the material” can reach broadly the "right conclusions". The 'right' attitudes and 'right' conclusions are, of course, self-evident for Appiah, not requiring grounding or explanation.

The trouble with holding up fundamentalists as the 'other' who come to their positions irrationally is that it exposes how shaky is the ground on which we all rest. A cosmopolitan, liberal commitment to equality (which I am very much not hostile to) is not, in fact, self-evident. It isn’t, and probably shouldn’t be, held modestly. The person-with-the-right-attitudes, like Appiah, like most of the people in the audience, does not get to them from nowhere, but is just as much immersed in a lingua franca, a set of trusted voices, a shared identity – a system of representation, in his terms – as anyone. We are not the self-actualising individuals freely choosing rational options he seems to think we are, and this doesn’t just go for religious fundamentalists.

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Ultimately, Appiah’s analysis won’t help us make much practical progress. By assuming that you can deal with fundamentalism by arguing people out of it from your more ‘rational’ starting point, you have lost the game before it’s even begun. Hoping that people will move beyond their ‘irrational’ shared identities with enough logic and argument, as recent history shows, is a forlorn hope. It might not actually even be the right goal.

There are some things that, when they are threatened, we rightly leap to defend. Freedom of speech, the dignity of all human persons, equality before the law: these are all vital, precious underpinnings of just civilisations (and incidentally, fruits of some pretty ‘immodest’ forms of Christianity). Appiah is simply echoing a broader anger and distress at their possible erosion. The trouble is, anger and distress, and the often resulting more 'muscular liberal' approach are counter-productive. For those who hold other things more or equally sacred, nothing is more likely to make them harden than being told by elites that those beliefs are not allowed, they are illegitimate, that these western gods trump their own, by default. One questioner, understandably angry at some of the treatment of women in the Middle East, asked “how can we help them [i.e., Islamic fundamentalists] or hurt them out of their beliefs?” Any approach which starts with how to hurt the other, no matter how justified it seems, is doomed to fail. No one was ever bombed into the liberal consensus.

So what might actually help us to live together well with our differences? The route is not by making fundamentalists more liberal, but by increasing our understanding of each other. In the question and answer, Appiah revealed himself to understand more of this than I’d feared, talking about the importance of listening. The approach I’d admired earlier was alluded to. This approach is – of course – far more demanding. It requires all groups – in this instance, the liberal fundamentalists and their religious counterparts – laying down at least some of their armour, and engaging in real human relationships.

Our report ‘Making Multiculturalism Work’ examined how groups like London Citizens bring together vastly diverse groups, who agree on very little, to work on common projects. Its conclusion was simple. Rather than lecturing, patronising or refusing to share platforms with people who disagree with you, get to know them as human beings. Share space. Share meals. Try and understand why they read their scriptures like they do. Try and explain why you hold the values you hold. Have hard conversations. Work with them on common goals.

And stop thinking you’re the one who can see the elephant.

Elizabeth Oldfield is the Director of Theos

@TheosElizabeth

Image by Fronteiras do Pensamento via flickr under CreativeCommons 2.0