Identity and violence : the illusion of destiny

197 Pages·2007·0.98 MB·English

by  Sen

Comments on Identity and Violence
“Amartya Sen is just the person to write about the politics of identity and its
dangers. . . . Identity and Violence is a moving, powerful essay about the
mischief of bad ideas.”
—Economist
“Identity and Violence identifies the positive public action that is needed to
make the world a better place.”
—George Soros
“Sen has been perhaps the world’s most distinguished analyst of the welfare of
the poor people over the past three decades. . . . He includes a short, deft and
persuasive discussion of economic globalization. . . . Sen is especially perceptive
about the educational folly that has seized the present British government.”
—Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books
“Amartya Sen is uniquely qualified to explore this central conundrum of our
time. From 1947, when he witnessed the explosive identity violence of India’s
partition, to the identity savagery I witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda, Palestine
and Sudan, and now the war between extreme Islam and the West, our world
cries out for solutions. Amartya Sen challenges and sets conventional wisdom on
its head as he finds new answers.”
—Christiane Amanpour, CNN
“Amartya Sen provides a lucid and convincing critique of current trends in
communitarian and culturalist thinking, underlining for us in a way that only a
scholar of his background and learning can of the complexity and
multidimensionality of modern identity.”
—Francis Fukuyama
“An eloquent and brilliantly argued indictment of violence perpetrated in the
name of what Sen persuasively characterizes as illusory beliefs in unique ethnic,
religious, and other identities.”
—Sissela Bok, author of Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment and
Common Values
“Sen provides critical insight at a critical time. Identity and Violence reveals the
complexities by which people define themselves, it shows a great understanding
of parts of the world that have been otherwise boxed into monochromatic
stereotypes, and from this nuanced discussion arises a more accurate way of
discussing identities, violence, and the route to a more peaceful world. This book
is a gift to the current discourse on war and peace, and Sen’s personal narratives
and observations continue to endow intellectual theory with a vital dose of
humanity.”
—Zainab Salbi, president of Women for Women International and author of
Between Two Worlds
“Sen’s essay makes clear the many inaccuracies and inadequacies of those
theories, as well as the dangers of putting them into practice. Sen brilliantly
shows that when our public policies and attitudes are guided by one-dimensional
simplifications of complex societies, we may unwittingly empower the most
extreme and least tolerant members of those societies.”
—Jeffrey Sachs
“The Harvard-based Indian economist Amartya Sen has produced a wonderful,
richly personal book-length essay on identity and violence, dismantling the
claim that strong identities must be single, exclusive and defended by violence.”
—Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian (London)
“[Identity and Violence] is . . . elegantly written, powerful, convincing, humane,
and necessary . . . we need to avoid falling into precisely the trap that Osama Bin
Laden has deliberately laid for us: to divide the world into Muslim and non-
Muslim.”
—Robert Kagan
“Religion perceived as an absolute identity with no shades of gray is privileged
over any and all other human categories and raised as a banner under which not
just nations but ‘cultures,’ equally monolithic, must clash. Drawing on his
sophisticated understanding of history and politics as well as economics, Sen
reasonably shows such characterizations to be grounded in ignorance of both the
past and the present.”
—Amanda Heller, Boston Globe
Also by Amartya Sen
Choice of Techniques
Collective Choice and Social Welfare
On Economic Inequality
Poverty and Famines
Choice, Welfare, and Measurement
Resources, Values, and Development
Commodities and Capabilities
On Ethics and Economics
Inequality Reexamined
Development as Freedom
Rationality and Freedom
The Argumentative Indian
Issues of Our Time
O
urs has been called an information age, but, though information has never
been more plentiful, ideas are what shape and reshape our world. “Issues of Our
Time” is a series of books in which some of today’s leading thinkers explore
ideas that matter in the new millennium. The authors—beginning with the
philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the lawyer and legal scholar Alan
Dershowitz, and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen—honor
clarity without shying away from complexity; these books are both genuinely
engaged and genuinely engaging. Each recognizes the importance not just of our
values but also of the way we resolve the conflicts among those values. Law,
justice, identity, morality, and freedom: concepts such as these are at once
abstract and utterly close to home. Our understanding of them helps define who
we are and who we hope to be; we are made by what we make of them. These
are books, accordingly, that invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down
assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends. Whether you are moved to
reason together with these authors, or to argue with them, they are sure to leave
your views tested, if not changed. The perspectives of the authors in this series
are diverse, the voices are distinctive, the issues are vital.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., SERIES EDITOR
W. E. B. DU BOIS PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE
THE ILLUSION OF DESTINY
Amartya Sen
To Antara, Nandana, Indrani, and Kabir with the hope of a world less
imprisoned by illusion
CONTENTS
Prologue
Preface
CHAPTER 1 The Violence of Illusion
CHAPTER 2 Making Sense of Identity
CHAPTER 3 Civilizational Confinement
CHAPTER 4 Religious Affiliations and Muslim History
CHAPTER 5 West and Anti-West
CHAPTER 6 Culture and Captivity
CHAPTER 7 Globalization and Voice
CHAPTER 8 Multiculturalism and Freedom
CHAPTER 9 Freedom to Think
Notes
Names Index
Subject Index
PROLOGUE
S
ome years ago when I was returning to England from a short trip abroad (I
was then Master of Trinity College in Cambridge), the immigration officer at
Heathrow, who scrutinized my Indian passport rather thoroughly, posed a
philosophical question of some intricacy. Looking at my home address on the
immigration form (Master’s Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge), he asked me
whether the Master, whose hospitality I evidently enjoyed, was a close friend of
mine. This gave me pause since it was not altogether clear to me whether I could
claim to be a friend of myself. On some reflection, I came to the conclusion that
the answer must be yes, since I often treat myself in a fairly friendly way, and
furthermore, when I say silly things, I can immediately see that with friends like
me, I do not need any enemies. Since all this took some time to work out, the
immigration officer wanted to know why exactly did I hesitate, and in particular
whether there was some irregularity in my being in Britain.
Well, that practical issue was eventually resolved, but the conversation was a
reminder, if one were needed, that identity can be a complicated matter. There is,
of course, no great difficulty in persuading ourselves that an object is identical to
itself. Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, once remarked that “there is no finer
example of a useless proposition” than saying that something is identical to
itself, but he went on to argue that the proposition, though completely useless, is
nevertheless “connected with a certain play of the imagination.”
When we shift our attention from the notion of being identical to oneself to
that of sharing an identity with others of a particular group (which is the form
the idea of social identity very often takes), the complexity increases further.
Indeed, many contemporary political and social issues revolve around