Identity and Violence

On Amartya Sen’s “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”

I wish Mr. Sen chose his subtitle for his title. “The Illusion of Destiny” sums up his effort in telling brevity. I could imagine the mad genius of a Nietzsche coining this – perhaps in ironic rebuttal of some Hegel.

Mr. Sen’s long essay advocates a soporific world beyond the ugliness of clash and tussle. And there is the rub. This book in spite of all its empirical detail is a prescription, not a description. The fundamental prescription is: “global civil society”. Whoever would care to consider such ambition, selfless and grand as it is, dreamy?

Mr. Sen, rightly rejects single identities. You are not merely a Bengali, or a biologist, or a homosexual, or a member of your tennis club, or music lover, or a Christian or much else. You are rather all of these simultaneously. From these evidently right premises, Mr. Sen rushes forward to a wide conclusion: since everybody is thus so palpably diverse, why be a convert to some set and unique destiny, why seek particular identity, singular and mock, why not bury our several and conflicting hatchets, why indulge in so many fanaticisms, why not let vanish the illusion of destiny?

This indeed is a clarion call, a great sermon – if you are prepared to forget, as Mr. Sen obviously is, that our many identities nonetheless obey a hierarchy of priorities. And there is the snag. Your being an angler and an Arab can and does bring you in admirably close quarters to an angler who is a Jew. But in serious crises, when ruffians riot and your very existence trembles, you are, so hopelessly often, an Arab or a Jew at first count – and not an angler or chess enthusiast. And many elements frame the fabric of this preference: your history, your language, what you look like, whether you visit a mosque or a church or neither. You may very well be nice to the children in your neighbourhood; but if a bomb were to explode, you will automatically seek to save YOUR children first and not your golf partner’s. And the mob does rage, civilizations do clash. (Incidentally, Samuel Huntington, Mr. Sen’s favourite antagonist, does not pre-require sharp and distinct separations of civilizations for them to clash). In crises, what clinches the issue is not the exclusivity of some certain difference but its predominance: You are what he is not. Amidst all fraternity, animosity often rules the waves.

Each of us normally has a paltry sliver of experience. Brotherhood of man is a charming agenda as long as you are no immediate witness to fear and death. But if we were to throw open our windows wide we shall witness a desultory state of affairs - here in Europe today, and elsewhere:

There are schools in Berlin with zero – I repeat zero – non-Muslim children, the last few having been mobbed out. Arab Muslim students, all from affluent families, none a poor down-trodden Palestinian, left Hamburg to launch attacks on the twin towers.

Islamist terrorists bombed and maimed in London, in Madrid, in Paris, Egypt and Bali – to quote but a few instances. For his anti-Islamist film the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was knifed on the streets – not of Rawalpindi but – of Amsterdam.

I could make the list longer, much longer – or very short, were I to borrow Mr. Sen’s dignified euphemism “accentuated religiosity” to summarize all horrors in a word. In which quarters of which town does Mr. Sen live, I wonder. Perhaps only hilarity can bear the absurdity of Mr. Sen’s diagnosis here.

Let us have a brief look at Mr. Sen contrasting economies. Mr. Sen loathes Mr. Huntington’s credo “cultures count”. In the sixties, Huntington says, Ghana’s and Korea’s economies were quite similar. Thirty years later the gap is staggering. And Huntington does put it down in a way to “differences in culture”. Mr. Sen stoops to concede there is a gap. But the gap comes from better education, closer relations to the United States etc. But he would have none of this “culture” stuff. Interesting though, is what Mr. Sen chooses not to mention; namely, culture or not, the stultifying influence, in Ghana as once in India, of the dogma: the state will manage it. Mr. Nehru, if I remember right, called the hideous mess he fathered “democratic socialism”. And this socialism explains India’s, and Ghana’s, having long remained captive to utter destitution. India has always had a significant business class. But business or not, the country was severely married – as in foreign policy, so too in economy – to the dying Soviet Union, then already malodorous.

Mr. Sen’s prose is succinct and mercifully undramatic – notwithstanding the depth and compass of his crusade. He it seems is quite fond of the term “dialectic”, of the person M. Gandhi and of the institution United Nations. Well, all that is his choice. It is man butchering man, children starving and full of AIDS, flourishing billionaires and raped, burned and slaughtered Sudan that have made Mr. Sen so vocal in his anguish, in his despair.

But he does not halt at anguish. “An elderly adult’s” journey proceeds to light, to harmony. Is there any at the end of our day, in humankind’s tomorrow? He says here a confident “yes”. No matter how remorselessly human history shows the obverse. Salvational hope binds us to a grand vision, to our common destiny.

But there is a dilemma here, in this vision’s immanent teleology, a teleology that Mr. Sen is so eager to reject. Because your teleologist would point out that destiny shaped, and not inherited, is destiny nonetheless.