Excerpt from “Identity & Violence” – Amartya Sen
There is an interesting lesson in an old Italian story – from the 1920s when support for fascist politics was spreading rapidly across Italy – concerning a political recruiter from the Fascist Party arguing with a rural socialist that he should join the Fascist Party instead.
“How can I,” said the potential recruit, “join your party?!! My father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist. I cannot really join the Fascist Party.”
“What kind of an argument is this?” said the Fascist recruiter, reasonably enough.
“What would you have done,” he asked the rural socialist, ‘if your father had been a murderer and your grandfather had also been a murderer? What would you have done then?”
“Ah, then,” said the potential recruit, “then, of course, I would have joined the Fascist Party.”
Book jacket/ Front Cover insert: Sen argues in this book that conflict and violence are sustained today, no less than in the past, by the illusion of a unique identity. Indeed, the world is increasingly taken to be divided between religions (or ‘cultures’ or ‘civilizations’), ignoring the relevance of other ways in which people see themselves through class, gender, profession, language, literature, science, music, morals or politics, and denying the possibilities of reasoned choices. When good relations among different human beings identified in this way, human beings are deeply miniaturized and deposited into little boxes.
Chapter 1: The Violence of Illusion
Langston Hughes , the African-American writer, describes in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, the exhilaration that seized him as he left New York for Africa. He threw his American books into the sea” “It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart.”
He was on his way to his “Africa, Motherland of negro people!” Soon he would experience “the real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.
A sense of identity can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence. It is not surprising that the idea of identify receives such widespread admiration, from popular advocacy of loving your neighbor to high theories of social capital and of communitarian self-definition.
And yet identity can also kill – and kill with abandon. A strong – and exclusive – sense of belonging to one group can in many cases carry with it the perception of distance and divergence from other groups.
Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord. We may suddenly be informed that we are not just Rwandans but specifically Hutus (“we hate Tutsis”), or that we are not merely Yugoslavs but actually Serbs (“we absolutely don’t like Muslims”).
From my childhood memory of Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1940s, linked with the politics of partition, I recollect the speed with which the broad human beings of January were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Indians and fierce Muslims of July.
The sense of identity can make an important contribution to the strength and the warmth of our relations with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens, or followers of the same religion.
Our focus on a particular identity can enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centred lives. The recent literature on “social capital”, powerfully explored by Robert Putnam and others, has brought out clearly enough how an identity with others in the same social community; a sense of belonging to a community is thus seen as a resource – like capital.
That understanding is important, but it has to be supplemented by a further recognition that a sense of identity can firmly exclude many people even as it warmly embraces others.
The well-integrated community in which residents instinctively do absolutely wonderful things for each other with great immediacy and solidarity can be the very same community in which bricks are thrown through the windows of immigrants who move into the region from elsewhere. The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion.
The cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts seems to repeat itself around the world with increasing persistence. Even though the balance of power in Rwanda and Congo may have changed, the targeting of one group by another continues with much force (SETHU NOTE: This book by Amartya Sen was published in 2006 and the next couple of paragraphs need to be read in that context). The marshaling of an aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity along with exploitation of racial divisions has led to the raping and killing of overpowered victims in the south of that appallingly militarized polity.
Israel and Palestine continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side. Al Qaeda relies heavily on cultivating and exploiting a militant Islamic identity specifically aimed against Western people.
And reports keep coming in, from Abu Gharib and elsewhere (SETHU NOTE: Again - this book by was published in 2006 and this reference to the excesses at Abu Gharib need to be read in that context), that the activities of some Americans or British soldiers sent out to fight for the cause of freedom and democracy included what is called a “softening-up” of prisoners in utterly human ways.
Unrestrained power over the lives of suspected enemy combatants, or presumed miscreants, sharply bifurcates the prisoners and the custodians across a hardened line of divisive identities (“they are a separate breed from us”).
It seems to crowd out, often enough, 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.
