Identity and Violence

In his book "Identity and Violence", Amartya Sen describes the dangers of identity-affiliation, arguing that the politics of global confrontation is the corollary of religious and cultural divisions in the world. He declares that "underlying this line of thinking is the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning", and this false but commonly-held notion is in fact irreconcilable with the less discussed but much more plausible notion that we are "diversely different".

In a nutshell, Sen argues that we have "inescapably plural identities", and that the hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clearer understanding of the pluralities of human identity, and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single hardened line of impenetrable division. This line of divisive identities, Sen concludes, tends to "crowd out...any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race."

Sen's ideas about identity and violence are fascinating and uniquely paradigmatic, but I find it difficult to concur with the notion that the removal of classificatory priority that "[places] people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes" will lead to the end of the cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts. He makes reference to numerous examples of such conflicts, including the situations in Rwanda and the Congo, the aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity, and Israel and Palestine, all of which "continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side".

Sen states, quite reasonably, that the same person can be, without any contradiction, "an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist...a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle...", and any of these categories can influence and be used to describe this person. This list of characteristics seems to me to be manifestly carefully chosen. Central to what I think is flawed about Sen's argument is the presumption that religion is just another category that can "move and engage" a person, inasmuch as a shared occupation such as carpentry or a common interest such as fishing can. Religion is powerful and influential on the human psyche and on human life in a way that requires little elaboration, not least of all because it makes authoritative decisions in so many other classifications, or identity-affiliations, that a person may belong to. A deep believer in the Islamic, Christian or Buddhist doctrine, may naturally have to be classified in a huge number of other distinct categories apart from religion, by sheer virtue of his faith — as a vegetarian, a conservative, an anti-abortionist, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, the death penalty, stem cell research, in vitro fertilisation, homosexual marriage etc. All these are categorisations that ostensibly can have great import on a person's decisions, and significantly impact his life. Religion subsumes so many other classifications under its doctrinal wing, and it would be simplistic to treat it as merely another membership category.

Sen laments the "neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning [that] obscures the world in which we live", arguing that "many of the conflicts and barbarities of the world are sustained through the illusion of a unique and choiceless identity". He emphasises the folly of imagining that we have little choice over our identities, labelling this a "conceptual disarray", and concludes that "the prospects of peace in the contemporary world may well lie in the recognition of the plurality of our affiliations and in the use of reasoning as common inhabitants of a wide world... What we need, above all, is a clear-headed understanding of the importance of the freedom that we can have in determining our priorities." Sen's statement makes compelling clear his secularist assumptions, and perhaps reveals also a lack of understanding about the forceful authority behind religion — the belief in an omnipotent God whose word it is a sin to disobey, and whose laws and commandments are the highest authorities and the most transcendent truths. The "freedom that we can have in determining our priorities" must be tempered by religious doctrine, and stilled if it conflicts with divine decree. Followers of faith, once they come to hold their belief, see conservative values as truth, not as choice. The "broad commonality of our shared humanity" must retreat with head bowed, as with all earthly things, once the divine will has been broached. To ask devotees to embrace the glorious "use of reasoning", and the freedom to disregard categories in which they believe the anointed single right answer has been authoritatively chosen by an entity higher than man, is in effect to require them to cast away their original faith in favour of a secularist ideology. Sen's description of the painful illusion of "choiceless singularity" when applied to the religious theme therefore approaches a contradiction in terms.