The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Yet the background assumption of hierarchy is still available, however loath we are to admit it.22 It shows up in the fact that people will admit to resenting insolence, which is a sort of mirror image of condescension: treating a superior as an equal, or even as an inferior. And, in fact, something like eighteenth-century condescension is a common enough practice still; we have simply lost the name for it. When the president of a university stops to talk courteously to a student after a lecture, he or she is talking down a hierarchy of academic status and the student is likely to be charmed by that. Lay Catholics and nuns gain the same sort of gratification from the considerate attentions of a cardinal; the security guard from the museum trustee who remembers her name; the traffic-court judge from the politesse of a Supreme Court justice. In reporting events like these, it is natural for the beneficiary to describe the behavior of the superior as thoughtful or kind or humble or down-to-earth, and to suggest that it was not to be assumed.