SIMILAR experiences can produce very different philosophies. Witnessing the Russian revolution as a child in Petrograd, Isaiah Berlin saw a crowd dragging off a struggling man, pale and terrified, to be killed. He used to say that the episode gave him a life-long horror of violence, and it undoubtedly bred in him a suspicion of theories that suggested a radiant future could be realized by the use of force.
The experience did not make him a pacifist — he served as a government official in the World War II — nor did it lead him to condemn all revolutions. What it did was implant in him a deep sense of the fragility of freedom. Unlike most liberal thinkers, Berlin understood that, while freedom may be a universal value, it is far from being an overriding human need.
Humans want freedom but they also fear it, and in times of insecurity they tend to retreat into closed, hostile groups. Reason can help us understand this process, but it cannot be reasoned away.
Amartya Sen had a parallel experience, when as a child he witnessed an unknown man stumbling into the garden of his parent’s house, bleeding heavily and asking for water. Sen shouted for his parents, and his father took the man to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The victim was a Muslim day-laborer who had been stabbed by Hindus during the riots that occurred in Bengal in the last years of the British Raj.
Sen continues to be not only horrified but also baffled by the communal violence he witnessed at that time. As he puts it in Identity and Violence: “Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing.” Why should people who have lived together peaceably suddenly turn on one another in years of violence that cost hundreds of thousands of lives? How could the poor day- laborer be seen as having only one identity — as a Muslim who belonged to an “enemy” community — when he belonged to many other communities as well? “For a bewildered child,” Sen writes, “the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy for a still bewildered elderly adult.”
Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment. As an economist Sen has been hugely influential, helping found the new discipline of social choice theory and winning the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1998. Through his seminal studies of famine and his theory of freedom as a positive condition involving the full exercise of human capabilities, he has done more to criticize standard models of economic development than any other living thinker.
In his new book he writes more as a liberal philosopher than as an economist. Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the “solitarist” theory that says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group. Sen believes this solitarist fallacy shapes much communitarian and multicultural thinking, as well as Samuel Huntingdon’s theory of “clashing civilizations.”
In each case it involves the fallacy of defining the multiple and shifting identities present in every human being in terms of a single, unchanging essence. In Sen’s view the idea that we can be divided up in this way leads to a “miniaturization” of humanity, with everyone locked up in tight little boxes from which they emerge only to attack one another.
The solitarist view of human identity is plainly false, and it can also be dangerous. Sen notes astutely how Huntingdon’s crude theory has been used in the “war on terror” to entrench the perception that Muslims are defined only by their religious identity, itself supposedly defined in “anti-Western” terms. Here, and at several points in Identity and Violence, Sen mounts a timely critique of the contemporary politics of identity. Yet his critique is undermined by a pervasive lack of realism. He attacks the multicultural view of society, contrasting it with Gandhi’s “far-sighted refusal to see a nation as a federation of communities and religions.”
In effect, Sen’s alternative to multiculturalism is a species of liberal nationalism. Unfortunately he fails to ask how nationhood is achieved, and at what cost. The emergence of modern nations has done much to emancipate individuals from the tyranny of local communities, but this freedom has come at a heavy price. Nearly everywhere, large-scale violence has been an integral feature of the construction of nation-states.
The communal slaughter that accompanied Indian independence is in no way exceptional. The US became a modern nation only after a devastating civil war, France only after Napoleon. In Africa and the Balkans the formation of nations has gone hand in hand with tribal conflict and ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is under way today involves the ruthless suppression of Tibetan and Muslim minorities. Even in its liberal, “civic” varieties, nationalism has spawned violence on a vast scale. In comparison, multiculturalism — the chief target of Sen’s critique — is a sideshow.
There is a deeper unrealism in Sen’s analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view. He tells us “there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful, given the extraordinary naivete of the thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations.” Here we touch the heart of Sen’s continuing bewilderment. Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error. But if the error of solitarism is so blatantly obvious, why do large numbers of people continue to believe in it and act on it? Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists. “Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people,” he writes, “championed by proficient artisans of terror.” But are people really so stupid? Or is the failure of understanding actually in the liberal philosopher?
Writing of sectarian conflict in post-Saddam Iraq, Sen observes: “It should not be so surprising that the overlooking of all the identities of people other than those connected with religion can prove to be a problematic way of trying to reduce the hold of religious sectarianism.” The implication is that sectarianism in Iraq is a product of intellectual confusion — whether in Iraq or in its current Western occupiers is unclear.
But human divisions are not the result of any simple fallacy. Their causes are many and tangled, including conflicts of interest, rival power structures and competition for resources. Iraq is a post-colonial construction whose populations are divided not only by ethnic and religious allegiances but also by rival claims on its oil reserves. Toppling Saddam’s tyranny meant destroying the state and plunging the country into chaos.
Shiites, Sunni and Kurdish communities are not at one another’s throats because they have a mistaken view of human identity. Trapped by the brutal logic of anarchy, they are locked in a battle for survival that could go on for generations. It has become fashionable to argue that the solution lies in partition, but if smaller and more viable states do eventually emerge in Iraq it will only be after a long period of mass slaughter as horrific as any that occurred when India was partitioned.
For Sen, as a good liberal rationalist, it is an article of faith that the violence of identity is a result of erroneous beliefs. He cannot accept that its causes are inherent in human beings themselves. But as Berlin perceived, when freedom and order break down it is not because of mistakes in reasoning.
The people who knifed the day-laborer in Bengal and who dragged off the man to his death in Petrograd made no error. They did what they did from fear, desperation or cruelty. Such atrocities express deep-seated human traits that are not going to be removed by the kind of conceptual therapy offered by Sen. If he cannot accept this fact it is because it suggests that ridding the world of identity-driven violence is going to be infinitely more difficult than he would like to believe.
