Why we can't get along. (Amartya Sen)

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts : Identity and Violence BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN: "One might have been tempted--had one been consulted--to suggest a renaming of this latest book by Amartya Sen. "Identity and Violence" is much too lurid. "Sen and Sensibility," by contrast, would have been a perfect title, reflecting better the author's exquisite concern for everyone's personal feelings and his desire to make large-hearted accommodation for every political and social bent--except, notably, the religious and nationalist kind.

Mr. Sen, now a professor at Harvard, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to the field of welfare economics. He has a CV so seriously good that everyone, surely, knows of his being (in his previous post) the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the apex of the British academic pyramid.

"Identity and Violence" is not an entirely tedious book, although it is more than a tad repetitive. Its thesis is that the ascription to individuals of "singular identities"--in other words, to speak of a person as "a Muslim" to the exclusion of other facets of his personality--leads to the "miniaturization of human beings." And this, he avers, is Not Good. It is also Not Accurate. And Unhelpful. And Divisive. And Dangerous.

Put another way, the reduction of individuals to a "choiceless singularity"--religion being, for the most part, a state one is born into--leads to the "solitarist belittling of human identity." Such reductiveness, Mr. Sen claims, merely plays into the hands of that rabble-rouser Samuel Huntington, who insists on seeing the world in terms of differentiated civilizations based largely on religion. Mr. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations," published in 1996, continues to play a Manichaean role--in Mr. Sen's view--in the war on terror. Mr. Sen asserts that, in truth, people have multiple identities and that the Huntingtonian view (which Mr. Sen simplifies to the point of caricature) is willfully blind to this complexity. But what exactly are these layers of identity that Mr. Sen speaks of?"