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

by Amartya Sen (Author), Henry Louis Gates (Series Editor)
Key Phrases: plural monoculturalism, singular affiliation, identity disregard, Making Sense of Identity, Civilizational Confinement, South Africa (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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. (Mar.)
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From The Washington Post
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 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.

ere, 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 Córdoba 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 Córdoba 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's 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's 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.

Reviewed by Fouad Ajami
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton (March 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393060071
• ISBN-13: 978-0393060072
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #513,063 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Every Rational Being, July 31, 2006

By	Theodore Godlaski "plinius the elder" (Lexington, Kentucky United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a work that is at once literate, insightful, and witty. Dr. Sen discusses how the narrowness of self-definition has and does lead to violence among groups who, if they but thought more critically about it, have far more that binds them in common concern than that divides them into antagonistic camps. He also discusses how over generalizing can also dismiss the legitimate concerns especially of minorities. He does this in language that is a pleasure to read and with a mind that is at once incisive and also compassionate. The humor comes from recognition of how easily humans are led away from finding common ground by those who benefit most from keeping peoples divided.

This book is a necessary read for anyone who still prizes the ability to think critically and broadly.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars identity need not mean violent destiny, January 17, 2007

By	Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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."

28 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Off Topic, November 28, 2006

By	J. Gladfelter "peace maker" (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Thankfully this book is not very long, so my disappointed is only so deep. It must be said that if Samuel Huntington did not write his "Clash of Civilizations", then this book would not have written or published. This is an attempt to argue Huntington's theory, which is fine, but in the wrong method.
Entitled "Identity and Violence", Sen covers very little on Identity and even less on violence. Sen states that we all have multiple IDs. He then restates it. And then again. And then again with the added ideal that focusing on one ID is dangerous. He repeats this too many times.
What Sen fails to address, recognize or grasp is the concept of an Identity. What is it? Why do we have them? What influences IDs? What are the connections between ID and violence. What is violence? Why is it used? Why is it bad? Is violence bad? Just way too many questions about Identity and Violence are left unanswered, unaddressed, and avoided in a book called "Identity and Violence".