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with distant “others” is our privileging of one or two “concentric circles” of
obligations and commitments that we have made locally, to our families
and neighbors, for the “widest circle” of all: humanity (Fischer 53).
Therefore, it is not necessarily a battle for supremacy over basic values, e.g.
western democracy versus Islamic fundamentalism, as much as those who
have exploited nationalist and nativist sentiment would like us to believe
it is. If we cannot necessarily transcend the so-called local agreements
that keep us apart globally, we can at least reach some agreement over the
values we do share. But such empathy and understanding for one another
must be won rhetorically.
Let us return to Anson’s island scenario and imagine things a bit
differently. Something has happened on the island recently or in the not
too distant past (it doesn’t matter exactly when) and the inhabitants are
asked how to judge this event, to decide whether whatever occurred was
“cruel” or “just,” and what to do about it. Along with canonical knowledge
in their metaphorical suitcases, the inhabitants have all brought a set of
moral and ethical criteria in which to judge a situation or event. While in
Anson’s original scenario, the process of negotiating and building a canon
of knowledge went rather smoothly, here, the situation is tenser. What
kind of new “golden rule,” baseline language for evaluating and making
ethical decisions, could these newly arriving inhabitants share without
some insisting their judgments are more valid than others’?
In all likelihood, the island inhabitants would be unable to reach
an agreement over how to ethically judge an affair—especially if new
inhabitants with new perspectives and prejudices continue to arrive.
But what they will do, and this is what Appiah’s theory of rooted
cosmopolitanism rests upon, is “[getting] used to each other.” As he
explains:
I am urging that we should learn about people in other
places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments,
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their errors, their achievements, not because they will bring
us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one
another. If that is the aim, then the fact that we have all these
opportunities for disagreement about values need not put us
off. Understanding one another may be hard: it can certainly be
interesting. But it doesn’t require that we come to agreement.
(Appiah 78, emphasis added)
If it is impossible or virtually impossible to ever agree on universal
values how does sophistic rhetoric help us “get used to” each other? The
answer, it appears, is through the imagination. But it is a concept of the
imagination that is built upon three neo-pragmatic rhetorical concepts:
Burkean “identification” and “transformation,” Rorty’s liberal ironist hope
for a “contingent (global) community,” and the ever-expanding notion of
Fish’s “interpretive community” of rhetorically self-aware readers.
One of the critiques of the sophists is that their endless undercutting
of logical propositions and claims of truth do not provide much help
when urgent decisions have to be made. This is the same charge made
against the postmodernists, that their rejection of universal values and
absolute truth provide no ground to make urgent ethical decisions. If
something is always right and wrong at the same time, how then do we
know when and how to judge a given situation? It would be reactionary
to implicate sophistry and its postmodern variety with nihilism and
vulgar cultural relativism, those who would answer every political crisis
with “why worry?” or “that’s just how they do things down there.” By
extension, returning to the notion that either reason alone or religious
authority can provide a basis for universal values is also not possible or
desirable either. This is where people like Burke, Rorty, and Fish seem to
coalesce around a modern “sophist” figure like Nietzsche and his call for a
“dramatization” of truth—an expressive representation of human fears and
desires that lead to self-knowledge and community engagement. Hence,
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