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Their Claimors Mingle: A Review of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence In the summer of 1993, Samuel P. Huntington, the Eaton Professor of Government here at Harvard, set forth a sweeping and provocative new take on the global political order emerging after the Cold War. More than twelve years on, that article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” has become one of the most influential—certainly the most widely known—of the abundant and often all-too hubristic attempts to make some systematic sense of the new global landscape. In place of the old bilateral division around secular ideologies, Huntington suggests that the political character of the world today is now best explained in cultural terms, by reference to nine distinct “civilizations,” including “the West” and “the Islamic World.” Understanding the world in this way, as politically divided by something as deeply personal as culture, gives the present patterns of conflict an intransigent quality. For example, the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged not merely in a squabble over land, or a petty difference of ideas, to be resolved, perhaps, with shrewd diplomacy. They are fighting an ancient and intractable struggle over history, identity and preserving their ways of life. In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, published in March 2006 by W. W. Norton, Amartya Sen thinks that “we can do better than that.” In his latest effort, the galvanizing Nobel Laureate employs his uniquely lucid style to attack what he identifies as the implicit psychological foundations of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” This leads Sen to two main claims against Huntington: that his argument is descriptively “crude” and politically “confrontational.” The notion of a clash, Sen contends, requires a “singular affiliation” theory of identity that understands the individual as belonging to exactly one community, as having exactly one identity that “trumps” all others. Sen takes pains to emphasize that individuals are instead “diversely diverse”: since their various contexts endow them with a variety of possibilities, they have considerable latitude in reasoning about and choosing their identities. Indeed, he never seems shy to rattle off sometimes cumbersome lists of the plural and often conflicting identities a person might have: |
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I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a teacher of philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in afterlife (and also, in case you want to know, a nonbeliever in “before-life” as well). |
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Individuals can choose which of these possible identities to give priority; they can choose whether or not to identify with a particular civilization, and, if so, whether or not that identity will ‘clash’ with others. Not to realize this is to miss an intuitively obvious picture of human freedom and to succumb, as Sen accuses Huntington of doing, to the “illusion of destiny.” Sen, however, rarely succeeds in developing a watertight critique of the singular affiliation theory, or even a complete picture of the precise role choice plays in the formation of identity. As such, he fails to effectively support his first main claim against Huntington, the alleged “crudeness” of the “clash of civilizations” argument. Despite his imperative that we understand identity essentially as a choice, Sen admits that individuals are nevertheless constrained by a number of factors beyond their control, notably by the accidents of their birth and heritage and by the perceptions of others. While an individual can, in theory, choose whatever identity he pleases, a few, some, or even most, of those identities will be socially or psychologically unavailable to him. Sen fails to attack the singular affiliation theory effectively because he fails to demonstrate exactly how individuals—all individuals—can escape the narrow destiny of singular identity. To do so would require either an effective dismissal of the significance of social and psychological obstacles, or a rather generous account of the individual’s ability to overcome them. Sen, however, does little more than touch upon these points. Instead of an extensive rebuttal, grounded in hard fact, he rests his critique of singular affiliation on an intuitive picture of human freedom. Sen thus sometimes seems to be saying merely that choice is somehow very important—that individuals can choose their identities to some unspecified but crucial extent—without addressing why the evidence can, and has, been made to powerfully contradict that. A successful critique of Huntington has to rely on the kind of hard facts Huntington himself employs, and not, as Sen does, on an emotionally stirring or picturesque appeal to freedom, or the power of the individual. Sen would have to argue that although ‘civilizations’ may indeed seem to be clashing, the evidence—and not just what we should like to think—exposes the so-called clash as fantasy. After all, Huntington’s argument explicitly shuns any vision of what we should like the world to be, or become, presenting only a dismally persuasive account of what it may actually look like. But, at the same time, developing a deeply rigorous account of a particular conception of identity formation, or of the global political order, is by far the less important of the two projects Sen undertakes in this book. Even if Sen ultimately fails to demolish the idea that contemporary global politics can be accurately, or even usefully, understood as a clash of civilizations, that is no great matter. The second project, attacking Huntington’s theory as politically confrontational and, as Sen is brave enough to suggest, productive of actual violence in the world, stands on impeccable moral and philosophical footing. The most serious problem, if not the most serious intellectual flaw, with the theory of clashing civilizations has nothing to do with its (perhaps uncertain) value as a way of understanding the world, but with its reception and assimilation by others, from policy-makers to citizens and soldiers. Sen’s book is therefore at its best when exposing how the idea of clashing civilizations fosters a dangerously combative view of the world. Consider, as Sen does, the recent comments of U.S. Lieutenant General William Boykin about his outlook on the Iraq War: “’I knew that my God was bigger than his,’ and that the Christian God ‘was a real God, and that the Muslim’s was an idol.” In this crucial sense, the problem with Huntington is that he rationalizes and edifies sectarian violence, even genocide, with the shroud of objectivity and political science. On this much more important moral plain, Sen’s is a noble, if sometimes unsatisfying, effort. For Sen, as it should be for us, it is not that the people perhaps do not actually identify most intimately, or singularly, with a particular community or ‘civilization,’ but rather that they by no means have to—and that the world would be a much more peaceful place if they didn’t.
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