Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time)

Smashing such stereotypes as the monolithic Middle East or the Western Mind, Amartya Sen examines the much-misunderstood concept of identity.

The world may be more riven by murderous violence than ever before; yet Amartya Sen, the galvanizing Nobel Laureate, proposes in this sweeping philosophical work that the brutalities are driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Conflict and violence are sustained by the illusion of a unique identity, overlooking the need for reason and choice in deciding on bonds of class, gender, profession, scientific interests, moral beliefs, and even our shared identity as human beings. Challenging the reductionist view that people of the world can be partitioned into little boxes in terms of civilizational categories, Sen draws on history, economics, science, literature, and his own memories of difficult as well as easy times on three continents to present an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward violence and war.

About the series: Issues of Our Time: Aware of the competition for the attention of readers, W. W. Norton & Company and I have created the Issues of Our Time as a lucid series of highly readable books through which some of today's most thoughtful intellectuals seek to challenge the general reader to reexamine received truths and grapple with powerful trends that are shaping the world in which we live. The series launches with Anthony Appiah, Alan Dershowitz, and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as the first of an illustrious group who will tackle some of the most plangent and central issues defining our society today through books that deal withsuch issues as sexual and racial identities, the economics of the developing world, and the concept of citizenship in a truly globalized twenty-first-century world culture. Above all else, these books are designed to be read and enjoyed.--Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"Nobel Prize — winning economist Sen deplores the 'little boxes' that divide us in this high-minded but seldom penetrating brief against identity politics. Sen observes that ideologies of hate typically slot people into communities based on a single dimension that trumps the multifaceted affinities of class, sex, politics and personal interest that make up individual identities. This 'reductionist' us-versus-them outlook is not limited to jihadists, he argues, but is a widespread intellectual tendency seen in Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' paradigm, in postcolonial critiques of democracy and rationalism as 'Western' ideals, as well as in efforts to 'dialogue' with moderate Muslims. (These last, he feels, pigeonhole Muslims in purely religious terms.) Sen rebuts the 'singular affiliation' falsehood with a cursory historical, literary and cultural survey of the diversity of supposedly monolithic civilizations (Akbar, a 16th-century Mughal emperor and champion of religious toleration, is a favorite citation.) Sen's previous work (Development as Freedom) injected liberal values into development economics; here, he argues that the freedom to choose one's identity affiliations is the antidote to divisive extremism. Stitched together from lectures, the book is dry and repetitive. While Sen's defense of humane pluralism against narrow-minded communalism is laudable, he never really elucidates the social psychology that translates group identity into violence." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Nowadays the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen travels the world, opinions at the ready. His subjects are rarely economic. In the main, he works 'out of area,' taking on a wide range of political and social issues that have little to do with the dismal science. He is serene and confident, full of good cheer, ready to see the best in everyone.

Over this discursive little book lies... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the shadow of Sen's formidable Harvard colleague, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with his celebrated theory of the 'clash of civilizations.' Sen has assigned himself the role of the anti-Huntington: Sen sees Huntington's thesis of cultural conflict yielding a one-dimensional approach to human identity — and leading to the 'civilizational and religious partitioning of the world,' which can only occasion greater global disorder.

Here, in contrast, is Sen celebrating the complexity of human identity: 'The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician,' etc. One's civilizational identity is not one's destiny, Sen observes, and civilizational 'partitioning' — seeing the planet culture by culture — does not capture the messiness of the world. This Earth of ours, he says, is made more 'flammable' by warring definitions of human identity, rather than an embrace of the many different facets that make us human.

Sen's faith in the multiplicity of claims on human loyalty is admirable, but it can hardly stand up to the fury of the true believers. In our combustible world today, Huntington's outlook has much greater power. His 'cartography' of civilizations may have been too sharply drawn and he may have been a bit cavalier about modernity's appeal across cultural lines, but he came forth with a formidable work. Nor did he fail to see the fissures at the heart of particular societies — hence his category of 'torn countries,' places like Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where the matter of loyalty and identity is fiercely contested. But Sen needs his straw man, and Huntington is pressed into the role.

Sen is a product of Western (British) education. But he sees no clear demarcation between the West and the rest (the language is Huntington's). There is nothing peculiarly Western about democracy, Sen argues. It has global roots; there were antecedents of it in India and in the Muslim world at about the same time when 'Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake.' In his most intensely argued assertion, Sen sees the democratic inheritance as a truly universal enterprise. 'The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas,' he writes. 'While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world.' Western practice was not 'sequestered' then, and it has not developed in some 'splendid isolation.'

It is the unease of Islam, of course, and the violence of some of its radical adherents that have given the question of identity its contemporary global relevance. On that issue Huntington was at his most prophetic, writing of Islam's 'bloody borders' and of the 'youth bulge' in Muslim societies that had unhinged and radicalized the Muslim world. He did so in the early 1990s, and then history — 9/11 and all that followed — provided his thesis with cruel compliance.

Sen, however, wishes to rescue Islam from this 'confinement.' He makes his way through Islam's history and its wide geographic sweep in order to find great Muslim practitioners of tolerance and periods of genuine enlightenment. There is Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, who 'insisted in the 1590s on the need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged recurrent discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu thinkers, but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists.' In the face of the anti-Semitic bigotry of today's radical Islamism, Sen offers the example of Muslim rule in Cordoba and the Iberian Peninsula — that time of convivencia, where a Judeo-Islamic civilization in court life, letters and philosophy had a genuine flowering.

Sen works with the anecdote: His potted history is tailored for interfaith dialogues. He writes of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who, when forced to emigrate from 'an intolerant Europe' in the 12th century, was able to find 'a tolerant refuge in the Arab world' in the court of the great Muslim ruler Saladin. But this will not do as history. Maimonides, born in 1135, did not flee 'Europe' for the 'Arab world': He fled his native Cordoba in Spain, which was then in the grip of religious-political terror, choking under the yoke of a Berber Muslim dynasty, the Almohads, that was to snuff out all that remained of the culture of convivencia and made the life of Spain's Jews (and of the free spirits among its Muslims) utter hell. Maimonides and his family fled the fire of the Muslim city-states in the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco and then to Jerusalem. There was darkness and terror in Morocco as well, and Jerusalem was equally inhospitable in the time of the Crusader Kingdom. Deliverance came only in Cairo — the exception, not the rule, its social peace maintained by the enlightened Saladin.

Here, for Sen's benefit, is a passage from Maimonides' seminal 'Epistle to Yemen': 'Our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and our strength wanes because of the dire misfortunes that have come upon us in the form of religious persecution in the two ends of the world, the East and the West.' Maimonides' geography was Islamic: The East in the 'Epistle' was Yemen, then a battleground between Sunni and Shiite Islam, a place where Jews were being subjected to forced conversions to Islam; the Western lands were the burning grounds of Andalusia. The Almohads' pitiless warriors were in every way the Taliban of their age, the ancestors of today's religious radicals in the world of Islam. They put to the sword the fabled world of Andalusian tolerance, and young Maimonides witnessed the shattering collapse of that culture. There had been Andalusian bliss, and Muslim rulers with Jewish courtiers and poets, and philosophers who believed in the primacy of reason, but that world was scorched.

Inspirational history can go only so far; it will not bend to Sen's good cheer.

Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. His books include 'The Arab Predicament' and 'The Vanished Imam.'" Reviewed by Fouad Ajami, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

"In his most intensely argued assertion, Sen sees the democratic inheritance as a truly universal enterprise." Washington Post

"Reminding us that each person is actually a composite of many affiliations, the author informs us that he is Asian, an Indian citizen...an economist, a teacher of philosophy...a believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, and a nonbeliever in afterlife; he omits, perhaps out of modesty, that he is a Nobel Prize winner." Booklist

"When civilizations conflict it is because of a failure...to appreciate the true diversity of identities that infuse them. Sen eloquently describes the dangers of this flattening of human identity." Foreign Affairs

The 1998 Nobel Laureate in economics, Sen (Harvard U.) responds to what he calls the appalling effects of the miniaturization of people. This happens, he explains, when in order to stop violence, people are reduced to a single identity--for example a moderate Shi'ite or a Hindu nationalist--that authorities believe they can address without considering all the other dimensions of reality each person occupies. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Examining the much-misunderstood concept of identity, Nobel Prize winner Sen proposes that conflict and violence are sustained by the illusion of a unique identity, overlooking the need for reason and choice in deciding on bonds of class, gender, profession, scientific interests, moral beliefs, and even our shared identity as human beings.

Amartya is the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science.