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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