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Topic: Identity and Violence (Read 497 times) |
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Blunderov
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Identity and Violence
« on: 2006-08-21 02:26:22 » |
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[Blunderov] I'm hoping to get this soon. Fascinating. How many hats will you wear today?
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1843345,00.html
An identity crisis of our own making
Amartya Sen puts foward a strong case for how the West can understand Islam, says Geraldine Bedell - it must see it as more than a religion
Sunday August 13, 2006
The Observer
Identity and Violence
Amartya Sen
Allen Lane £16.99, pp186
The twin towers of the World Trade Centre, those supposed symbols of Western global reach and domination, were substantially the work of a Muslim. Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Chicago-based engineer from Bangladesh, was responsible for developing their tubular-steel construction and went on to design several other tall buildings, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah.
Amartya Sen reminds us about Fazlur Rahman Khan in his illuminating new book, Identity and Violence. Muslims can be on different sides of many cultural and political divides; to be a Muslim is not to have an unasked-for, all-engulfing identity. Yet the current enthusiasm for tying people down to one simple identity not only fosters a bleakly reductive view of what human beings are and may become, but also frequently fuels violence. Sen's passionate insistence on the need for a more nuanced view takes him into a discussion of some of the most pressing political issues we face: terrorism, Iraq, globalisation and the management of multicultural societies.
The cultivation of what Sen calls 'solitarist' identities plays into the hands of the violent, because it sets up an easy 'us' and 'them'. Worryingly, those who wish to fight terrorism often unwittingly collude in the oversimplifications, unable, it seems, to see Muslim people in any other way than merely Islamic. When Tony Blair talks about the 'true voice of Islam' and seeks to meet moderate Muslim leaders, he is raising religion over all other forms of civic engagement: 'Citizens should not have to speak through Mullahs.' Blair's approach is the obverse of the terrorists' insistence that the only way forward for the Arab political activist is to take pride in the purity of Islam.
This simplification business is not helped, as Sen makes clear, by the West's expropriation of universalist political ideas such as liberty and democracy, along with any other triumph of human civilisation that happens to come along. The dependence of Western science on Chinese inventions, or of mathematics on Indian and Arabic innovations, or the west Asian preservation of the Greco-Roman heritage is routinely written out of Western history, he argues. When the Americans talk about 'imposing' democracy on Iraq, they play into the hands of terrorist leaders who want people to see themselves as the 'other', to define their culture and priorities in hostile response to the dominant power.
One of the great strengths of this book is its basis in personal experience. Sen describes witnessing the murder of a Muslim labourer in Dhaka when he was 11. His bewilderment at why this random man should have been attacked still fuels his thinking, as does his anger at the fact that the man knew it was dangerous to leave home but had no choice if he was to feed his family.
Sen is himself a prime example of a man of multiple identities. Born in Bengal, he is Cambridge-educated, a teacher at Harvard and spends a good deal of time in Italy. He is also a Nobel laureate and one of the clearest thinkers on poverty and globalisation we have. Sen, happily for the rest of us, is sui generis. It's as if he stands on a higher hill with a broader view than we do.
The personal quality may also, however, be the key to the frustration of this book, which is that Sen never addresses the attraction of the solitarist identity. Why should a constraining sense of the self be so alluring? What makes us want to see the world in terms of us and them: is it fear, insecurity, lack of an alternative politics or just a reflexive tic of the brain? Until we can understand the appeal of the grand narrative, the belief of individuals that they have preordained roles in the working out of ancient, cosmic struggles, it will be difficult to replace them with reason.
For this is Sen's response to the parcelling up of people: the exercise of reason. He wouldn't suggest that any of us is unencumbered by identity, but neither does he accept that identity is something discovered. Rather, he argues, it is chosen, differently at different moments, from among our encumbered selves, so that, at any point, it may be more significant to a person that she is a doctor, a woman, a Muslim, a mother, an excellent horsewoman or whatever.
He does, however, tacitly accept that some of us are more encumbered than others. He argues forcefully against faith schools, which he sees as encouraging a fragmentary perception of the demands of living in Britain. Education, he says, is not just about immersing children in an inherited ethos; it is about getting them to reason.
Education, in the broadest sense of exposure to the world, is crucial. And this cuts both ways: there should be a fuller reflection of the intellectual interactions of the past, including the achievements of the non-European world, than there is at present. We all need the capacity to think outside the box.
On each of the discussions that flow from his central thesis, Sen has much to say that is provoking and inspiring. His work has always sought to put the complexity back into economic and political theory and the great power of Identity and Violence is that it recognises the accommodations and adaptations that all of us make on a daily basis.
Societies are not monolithic, as theories about the clash of civilisations would have us believe, and people are not one-dimensional. Amartya Sen gives human complexity its due and he is optimistic about our ability to make wiser choices than some do at present. I really hope he is right.
· To order Identity and Violence for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
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Hermit
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Prime example of a practically perfect person
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Re:Identity and Violence
« Reply #1 on: 2006-08-21 12:46:01 » |
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All "religion" is responsive to its environment. As such religion provides a reliable measure of many factors affecting its adherents. When environments become or are made extreme, religions follow. In a non-stressed society, religion serves to increase diversity unless it becomes a pablum - and at a certain level of diversity, this is its inevitable end. In a strenuously competitive environment, the differences become altogether less significant than the stressing factor, and the very same religions transform into a very widespread toxic adhesive, serving as a label to attract supporters from broadly similar ideospheres, thus reducing diversity, broadening involvement through self-identification with the combatants, and establishing a pervasive environment of extremism.
It is no coincidence that the only thing that has proved able to prevent the many varieties of Christianity and Islam from fighting amongst themselves has been when they have fought each other. Throughout history, when this has occurred on any broad scale, both sides have tended to cohere more as they became less coherent. I suggest this is why both sides tend to see each other as fanatics, and suitable for use as targets; although Islam, which is more prescriptive as to behavior to Christians, tends to be less likely to abandon all standards of decency than Christianity, which sees all Muslims as being hell-bound anyway.
This in turn affects the society hosting such toxic memes, submerging all differences and nuances in the sheer volume of strident extremism. Remember that this round started when the US reinvented and invoked extreme Islam in order to embarrass the Soviets in Afghanistan and achieved a lasting success beyond even their wildest dreams.
Welcome to the United States and the Middle East of today.
Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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