New Bulgarian What Can Be Done to Stop Identity Leading to Violence Paper

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How can identity lead to violence (as seen in Amartya Sen's book)? What can be done to stop identity leading to violence?

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Thinking out of the box John Gray on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's meditation on human frailty, Identity and Violence 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen 240pp, Allen Lane, £16.99 Similar experiences can produce very different philosophies. Witnessing the Russian revolution as a child in Petrograd, Isaiah Berlin saw a crowd dragging off a struggling man, pale and terrified, to be killed. He used to say that the episode gave him a life-long horror of violence, and it undoubtedly bred in him a suspicion of theories that suggested a radiant future could be realised by the use of force. The experience did not make him a pacifist - he served as a government official in the second world war - nor did it lead him to condemn all revolutions. What it did was implant in him a deep sense of the fragility of freedom. Unlike most liberal thinkers, Berlin understood that, while freedom may be a universal value, it is far from being an overriding human need. Humans want freedom but they also fear it, and in times of insecurity they tend to retreat into closed, hostile groups. Reason can help us understand this process, but it cannot be reasoned away. Amartya Sen had a parallel experience, when as a child he witnessed an unknown man stumbling into the garden of his parent's house, bleeding heavily and asking for water. Sen shouted for his parents, and his father took the man to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The victim was a Muslim day-labourer who had been stabbed by Hindus during the riots that occurred in Bengal in the last years of the British Raj. Sen continues to be not only horrified but also baffled by the communal violence he witnessed at that time. As he puts it in Identity and Violence: "Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing." Why should people who have lived together peaceably suddenly turn on one another in years of violence that cost hundreds of thousands of lives? How could the poor day-labourer be seen as having only one identity - as a Muslim who belonged to an "enemy" community - when he belonged to many other communities as well? "For a bewildered child," Sen writes, "the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy for a still bewildered elderly adult." Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment. As an economist Sen has been hugely influential, helping found the new discipline of social choice theory and winning the Nobel prize for economic sciences in 1998. Through his seminal studies of famine and his theory of freedom as a positive condition involving the full exercise of human capabilities, he has done more to criticise standard models of economic development than any other living thinker. In his new book he writes more as a liberal philosopher than as an economist. Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the "solitarist" theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group. Sen believes this solitarist fallacy shapes much communitarian and multicultural thinking, as well as Samuel Huntingdon's theory of "clashing civilisations". In each case it involves the fallacy of defining the multiple and shifting identities present in every human being in terms of a single, unchanging essence. In Sen's view the idea that we can be divided up in this way leads to a "miniaturisation" of humanity, with everyone locked up in tight little boxes from which they emerge only to attack one another. The solitarist view of human identity is plainly false, and it can also be dangerous. Sen notes astutely how Huntingdon's crude theory has been used in the "war on terror" to entrench the perception that Muslims are defined only by their religious identity, itself supposedly defined in "anti-western" terms. Here, and at several points in Identity and Violence, Sen mounts a timely critique of the contemporary politics of identity. Yet his critique is undermined by a pervasive lack of realism. He attacks the multicultural view of society, contrasting it with Gandhi's "far-sighted refusal to see a nation as a federation of communities and religions" The Journey with Jesus: Book Notes Reviews By Dan Clendenin Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence; The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 215pp. Amartya Sen, Harvard professor and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, still remembers the day sixty-three years ago when a Muslim day laborer named Kader Mia stumbled through the gate into his family's yard in Dhaka, bleeding from knife wounds and begging for help. His father rushed him to the hospital where he eventually died. Kader was a Muslim who was murdered by a Hindu thug, and was but one of the thousands of people who died in Muslim-Hindu riots that erupted in British India in the 1940's. Although most of the rioters shared an economic class identity as poor people, partisans demonized each other with a lethal, singularist "identity of violence," in this instance a diminution of their humanity to religious ethnicity: "The illusion of a uniquely confrontational reality had thoroughly reduced human beings and eclipsed the protagonists' freedom to think." Sen's book is an exploration of this memory of his as a bewildered eleven-year-old boy. Far too much violence in the world today is fomented by the illusion that people are destined to a "sectarian singularity." Stereotyping people with a singular identity leads to fatalism, resignation, and a sense of inevitability about violence. It partitions people and civilizations into binary oppositions, it ignores the plural ways that people understand themselves, and obscures what Sen calls our "diverse diversities." In particular, he objects to the "clash of civilizations" thesis made popular by Samuel Huntington. Along the way he explores the implications of his thesis for multiculturalism, public policy, globalization, terrorism, anti-Western rage, democracy, and theories of culture. Sen argues against identity violence caused by the illusion of destiny in three ways. First, he appeals to our common humanity; everyone laughs at weddings, cries at funerals, and worries about their children. More important than any of our external differences, even though these are powerful and important, is our shared humanity. Second, he makes the obvious point that all people enjoy plural identities. To understand a person one must consider factors of civilization, religion, nationality, class, community, culture, gender, profession, language, politics, morals, family of origin, skin color, and a multitude of other markers. Plus, these diverse differences within a single individual depend on one's social context, whether the trait is durable over time, relevant, a factor of constraint or free choice, and so on. Finally, Sen urges us to transcend the illusion of destiny and identity violence by what he calls "reasoned choice." Instead of living as if some irrational fate destines people to confrontation with others who are different, a person needs to make a rational choice about what relative importance to attach to any single trait. Although Sen never explains why rational people succumb to the irrational violence of identity instead of choosing enlightened self-interest, economic incentives, and geo-political peace, this readable book by one of our most brilliant thinkers conveys an important reminder: "We can do better."
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Running head: IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE

Identity and violence
Student affiliation
Institution affiliation

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IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE

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Identity has been used to develop various philosophies of life. People differentiate
themselves from others through the inherent qualities that only belong to a single person.
Agreeably, the concept of identity is much of philosophical subject than it is conceivable.
Typically, identity is a bio-socially determined aspect of an individual’s personality that is both
genetically defined and socially reshaped. Inadvertently, these aspects of differences breed a
sense of singularity in a society. By this conception of identity, Amartya Sen presents a
comprehensive argument that s...


Anonymous
Excellent resource! Really helped me get the gist of things.

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