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In this wide-ranging conversation Dr. Appiah and Dr. Shermer review the 5 \\u201cCs\\u201d of identity\\u2014Creed, Country, Color, Class, and Culture\\u2014and what they tell us about who we are, or at least who we think we are. Dr. Appiah\\u2019s new book The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity explores the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn\\u2019t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation\\u2014of self-rule\\u2014is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. These \\u201cmistaken identities,\\u201d Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities\\u2014from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren\\u2019t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns. Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who\\u2014and what\\u2014\\u201cwe\\u201d are.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a professor at NYU in the department of philosophy and the school of law, the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and the author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Experiments in Ethics, and most recently The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.

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This remote Science Salon was recorded on August 21, 2018.

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