Kwame Anthony Appiah on Huntington

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has some interesting thoughts on identity and cosmopolitanism. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Appiah in which he addresses / challenges Huntington:

The first is that the new immigrants, like the old, learn English. They may not speak it all the time, but then neither did the old immigrants. But not only do Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States learn English de facto, they believe in learning English. Polling data show that 97 percent of Spanish-speaking immigrants say it is very important for their children to learn English. So the idea that there is a resistance to accepting, for example, English as the political language is false.

Now, as for the question about whether something from Protestantism is crucial to American identity, this is one of the ways in which talk of culture gets in the way. Individuality clearly has roots in European Protestantism. This particular way of conceiving of the individual conscience as sovereign, and therefore each person having special responsibility for the management of his or her own life, is clearly there. It is an important part of what happened in the Reformation. Its development through John Locke, in the Treatise on Toleration, and into Mill, has a Protestant background. But it is an idea you can separate from any creedal or other form of affiliation to any particular denomination.

This is an idea held by Americans, and which divides the United States from Europe. It is a sort of skepticism about the state, codified by the Founders in the Madisonian structure of our Constitution, which is designed to make government difficult. In the arguments for the First Amendment freedom of the free exercise of religion, part of Madison's thinking was that if you allow these varieties of sects to remain strong, you will have sources of social power outside of the government to counterbalance the dangerous accumulation of too much power by the government.

Now, this is not a Protestant argument; this is a separate argument based in a political theory that the American Founders developed. Many Europeans find this instinctive hostility to government—the instinctive assumption that if the government is doing it we should first ask whether somebody else couldn't do it better—to be part of American individuality, but it has nothing to do with Protestantism.

On the question of sovereignty, that we are in charge of our own lives, it appears that Spanish-speaking immigrants have bought in to the idea. I haven't seen data yet on the issue of skepticism about government.

These are empirical disagreements; these are not disagreements of principle. If things were going the way Sam Huntington thinks they were going, I would be worried too. I don't have any abstract objection to the worry; I have an empirical objection to his account of what is happening.