Sen's Violence & Identity

Violence is what happens to you if you don't act rationally on the basis of your objective, unique, identity as the person who occupies a vulnerable corporeal body. In order to keep yourself safe you may have to change some of your traits or seek or reaffirm membership in particular 'equivalence classes' such that violence against one member of the class triggers collective retaliation 

In Identity & Violence, Sen writes-

Langston Hughes, the African-American writer,

who didn't keep getting beaten up or lynched because he was hella smart 

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: “[I]t was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart.” He was on his way to his “Africa, Motherland of the negro people!”

What Hughes is expressing is a sense of 'oikeiosis'-  the perception of something as one's own, as belonging to oneself. Hughes wasn't African but he knew he had maternal ancestors from Africa. He was literally returning to their motherland. But, he had sense enough not to stay there.

Soon he would experience “the real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.”

Hughes was a poet. He would find much inspiration in his travels. 

 A sense of identity

 Hughes already had a sense of identity which concerned being the person who occupied his own body. However, he- like many African American intellectuals- felt he did not fully belong in American society. He hoped to find a greater sense of oikeiosis in Africa. 

The irony here is that it is African Americans who, along with kikes and wops, have made American culture so attractive to people around the world- more particularly over the course of my life-time.

can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence. It is not surprising that the idea of identity receives such widespread admiration,

Very true. People who ask to check our ID are doing so because they feel great admiration for such documents. It is not the case that we find it admirable that a person has a strong sense of oikeiosis- i.e. strong bonds to his family, community, religion and culture. What we get excited about is the fact that he occupies a body and has DNA and dental records which tie his identity to that body and no other.  

from popular advocacy of loving your neighbor

which has nothing to do with identity but may have to do with oikeiosis. But, you may be encouraged to pick your neighbors carefully. If there is a brothel or crack house next door, maybe you should find somewhere else to raise your kids.  

to high theories of social capital and of communitarian selfdefinition.

again, this has nothing to do with identity. People may move to where there is better social capital. As for 'self-definition' of any sort, it does not change identity. I may say I am Beyonce and I may have plastic surgery to look like her but I remain me, I don't become Beyonce. 

And yet identity can also kill—and kill with abandon.

No. People can kill. Identity can't.  

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.

So can a sense of not belonging to any group. Also, being paid to kill people can alter your perceptions. If you are offered a billion dollars for killing your brother,  you start to reflect you weren't really that close. 

Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord.

But what is that within-group solidarity fed on? The answer is the need to belong- i.e. oikeiosis- which supervenes on a particular type of human identity. The Stoic sage has an identity but develops a superior oikeiosis as belonging to the whole world.  

We may suddenly be informed that we are not just Rwandans but specifically Hutus (“we hate Tutsis”),

Sen is mad. He does not know that just as he knew he was a Hindu and not a Muslim, so too did Rwandans know what Religion and tribe they belonged to. It wasn't the case that some malevolent person suddenly informed Sen that he was a boy not a girl and a Baidya not a Brahmin.  

or that we are not really mere Yugoslavs but actually Serbs (“we absolutely don’t like Muslims”).

Who 'suddenly informed' Christians they were Christians and Muslims that they were Muslims? How did they do so? Did they send out ten million individual telegrams or letters? Or was a personal messenger appointed to go tell each citizen what their religion and ethnicity was deemed to be?  

From my own childhood memory of HinduMuslim 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 Hindus and fierce Muslims of July.

His parents did not know they were Hindus. Premier Suhrawardy sent them a telegram. Thus they understood they should run the fuck away from Muslim majority areas.  

Hundreds of thousands perished at the hands of people who, led by the commanders of carnage, killed others on behalf of their “own people.”

In return for which they got money and land and greater prestige amongst their own people.  

Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people,

Very true. There was this guy who was having sex and beating this lady. She said 'stop raping and assaulting me!' Thus, a belligerent criminal identity was imposed upon that gullible fellow. Had she said 'thank you for fixing my computer', instead of having the identity of a rapist, he would have been an honored and respected computer engineer.  

championed by proficient artisans of terror.

Al Qaeda was proficient in terror. Did you know that prior to 9/11 very few people knew whether they were Muslim or Christian? The Pope would often observe Ramadan just in case he was actually Muslim. Then, after the twin towers fell, the Pope had a Christian identity imposed on him. This made him very sad. He had to wave goodbye to his four wives. On the other hand, he got to eat pork.  

The sense of identity

no, the sense of oikeiosis or affiliation 

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.

Equally, we might criticize those affiliated with us and seek to hold them to a higher standard by scolding them incessantly. They may begin to give us a wide berth.  

Our focus on particular identities

not identities but affiliative mechanisms. You remain the same person even if you join the Freemasons as well as the Labor Party and Gay Pride so as to enjoy a richer, more varied, social life.  

can enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centered lives.

We may make self-centered decisions to improve our social life by getting married or joining a club or Church or whatever.  

The recent literature on “social capital,” powerfully explored by Robert Putnam and others, has brought out clearly enough how an

affiliation not 

identity with others in the same social community can make the lives of all go much better in that community; a sense of belonging to a community is thus seen as a resource—like capital.

Forming affectionate ties with others may be a good thing. Loneliness, speaking generally, is a bad thing. But, it may be better to run away from a place where you are likely to starve or be killed. Sen's family was well settled in their ancestral Dacca. But it was safer for them to run away to a Hindu majority area. Sen still does not get this.  

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.

Sen teaches at places which firmly exclude most of the people who want to study there. No doubt, Rahul Gandhi is warmly embraced in those places. But this has nothing to do with identity. It has to do with snobbishness.  

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 community donates bricks to immigrants. They run away. But they are replaced by tougher immigrants who donate beating and rape to the community. What is wrong with that?  

The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion.

Some kids get into Harvard. Others don't. But, if everybody could go to Harvard nobody would want to go there.  

The cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts seems to repeat itself around the world with increasing persistence.

Unless there is an effective police force or Army. But there is plenty of violence in places where there are no 'identity conflicts'. The countries with the highest murder rates have a problem with organized crime, not ethnic or communal strife. About 20 percent of homicides arise in that way. Nine out of ten killings arise from disputes between individuals. Almost half of all women who are killed are killed by a current or former partner. Wars don't kill people with as great an avidity as people do. T 

 Even though the balance of power in Rwanda and Congo may have changed, the targeting of one group by another continues with much force.

But that targeting kills fewer people than conflicts between individuals.  

The marshaling of an aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity

or an Arab identity against non-Arab Sudanese Muslims 

along with exploitation of racial divisions has led to the raping and killing of overpowered victims in the south

they are now free to butcher each other  

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.

It appears the current conflict will spillover into Lebanon.  

Al Qaeda relies heavily on cultivating and exploiting a militant Islamic identity specifically aimed against Western people.

No. It relied on the fact that it had money and could get more money. It was playing a high stakes game for control of the vast mineral wealth of the MENA.  

And reports keep coming in, from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, that the activities of some American 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 inhuman ways.

Why are American and British soldiers not running away from Muslims? That is what nice humans, like Sen's parents do.  

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”).

Sen does not understand that different 'breeds' are part of any given coalition. Soldiers understand that they must not fire on allies. They must fire on the enemy even if they are of the same 'breed'.  

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.

Why are people paid to be soldiers obeying orders and firing on the enemy? Why do they not reflect that enemy soldiers are fellow human beings? Also, why do restaurants charge money to hungry people in return for food? Should we not feed the hungry without demanding payment? Are we not fellow human beings? Worse yet, some people wipe their own bum but do not go around wiping the bums of everybody in the vicinity. It appears that identity causes people to selfishly wipe only their own bum. Yet do not all human beings have bums? Don't all bums require wiping? 

Recognition of Competing Affiliations

If identity-based thinking can be amenable to such brutal manipulation,

e.g. cruelly failing to wipe your neighbor's bum 

where can the remedy be found?

Not in Sen's work. They are utterly vacuous.  

It can hardly be sought in trying to suppress or stifle the invoking of identity in general.

Nobody invokes identity. They may invoke collective interests or obligations arising out of affiliations.  

For one thing, identity can be a source of richness and warmth

if you have an identity you have a body which can feel rich and warm 

as well as of violence and terror, and it would make little sense to treat identity as a general evil.

Why not? One could say, we have multiple identities on the astral plane but, encased in these meat-suits, we are confined to just a singular identity on this horrible planet.  

Rather, we have to draw on the understanding that the force of a bellicose identity can be challenged by

the police or the army. Pay professionals to deal with homicidal nutter or criminal gangs or crazy terrorists.  

the power of competing identities.

In other words, appealing to 'the better nature' of the bad guys. Sadly, this is no substitute for a professional police force and army. Still, it should be noted that Sen's parents did not try appealing to the 'competing identities' of Bengali Muslims in East Bengal. They preferred to run away. Guys who like running away may feel that no police or army is required.  

These can, of course, include the broad commonality of our shared humanity, but also many other identities that everyone simultaneously has. This leads to other ways of classifying people, which can restrain the exploitation of a specifically aggressive use of one particular categorization.

Sen thinks some guy classifying people in a different way can prevent war and crime and naughtiness. Why are we wasting money on the police and the army?  

A Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis, and yet he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer, and a human being.

But the Hutu laborer who doesn't get with the program may be killed. That's a strong incentive right there. If somebody chops your head off you stop being a Kigalian, an African, or even a human being.  

Along with the recognition of the plurality of our identities and their diverse implications, there is a critically important need to see the role of choice in determining the cogency and relevance of particular identities which are inescapably diverse.

What Sen's family found critically important was to run the fuck away from Muslims. Sen himself migrated to places still ruled by White Christians with kick-ass armies and police forces.  

That may be plain enough, but it is important to see that this illusion receives well-intentioned but rather disastrous support from practitioners of a variety of respected—and indeed highly respectable— schools of intellectual thought. They include, among others, dedicated communitarians who take the community identity to be peerless and paramount in a predetermined way, as if by nature, without any need for human volition (just “recognition”—to use a much-loved concept), and also unswerving cultural theorists who partition the people of the world into little boxes of disparate civilizations.

Nothing wrong with that provided these guys recognize that communities need to be productive enough to pay for an effective police force and army. Otherwise, they are at risk. Raising productivity is what economics should be about. Still, if it is your practice to run away to somewhere other people will keep you safe, why bother with productivity? If an enemy attacks, you can always just run away again so as to talk virtue signaling bollocks in a place where it is still safe to do so.  

In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups—we belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups.

Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity.

No. The fact that she has a corporeal body gives her an identity. That body of hers may be linked biologically or affectionately to a family and community. She may also join various groups. But it is her body alone which gives her a particular identity. Identical twins who belong to all the same groups nevertheless have separate identities because they have different bodies.   

None of them can be taken to be the person’s only identity or singular membership category.

A person has only one identity- that of the person with a particular physical body. I may be a member of a group of people all of whom claim to be the genuine, authentic, Beyonce. But this does not change the fact that I am not Beyonce. She has a beautiful female body. I have an ugly male body.  

Constraints and Freedoms

Many communitarian thinkers

don't favor running away as a solution to collective action problems. This is because not everybody is a cowardly virtue signaling cretin.  

tend to argue that a dominant communal identity is only a matter of selfrealization, not of choice.

Unless you choose to run away.  

It is, however, hard to believe

for people who have a long ancestral tradition of running away 

that a person really has no choice in deciding what relative importance to attach to the various groups to which he or she belongs, and that she must just  “discover” her identities, as if it were a purely natural phenomenon (like determining whether it is day or night).

Why not run away from your own community with your best friend's wife?  

In fact, we are all constantly making choices, if only implicitly, about the priorities to be attached to our different affiliations and associations.

Only in the sense that a chair makes implicit choices about being a chair rather than a table.  

The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value, and defend.

Only in the sense that the freedom to determine to freely determine our free determination to freely determine stuff is very very very very fucking important.  

The existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that there are no constraints restricting choice.

The non-existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that choice does not exist. It's just that lots of constraints restrict the fuck out of it.  

Indeed, choices are always made within the limits of what are seen as feasible.

Implicitly no doubt. That's one reason few chairs take up careers in air-conditioner repair.  

The feasibilities in the case of identities will depend on individual characteristics and circumstances that determine the alternative possibilities open to us.

Feasibilities are different from 'what are seen as feasible'. They differ for different people but this does not mean they depend on differences between those people. Sen is pretending that 'identity' is something chosen and this changes what is feasible for the person. Why is he doing so? The answer is, he is suggesting that we can get rid of violence and crime and naughtiness just by talking bollocks about choice theory or by 'assessing' or 'classifying'. It is a complete waste of money to pay soldiers and policemen and judges. All we need is Sen-tentious professors explaining why everybody should choose a nice identity and be nice. That way nastiness will disappear. The problem here is that many of us prefer to maintain an identity which actually knows Econ and thus which rejects Sen-tentious bollocks as sheer magical thinking.  

This, however, is not a remarkable fact.

It is a lie.  

It is just the way every choice in any field is actually faced.

No. Sen, very foolishly, forgets that choices exist even where there is no scarcity and thus no 'budget constraint'. The economic theory of choice has no role to play when it comes to 'free goods'.  

Indeed, nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits.

No. You can breathe as little or as much as you like.  

For example, when we decide what to buy at the market, we can hardly ignore the fact that there are limits on how much we can spend.

Only scarce goods are sold in markets.  

The “budget constraint,” as economists call it, is omnipresent.

Only where scarcity obtains and allocation is done through a market mechanism.  

The fact that every buyer has to make choices does not indicate that there is no budget constraint, but only that choices have to be made within the budget constraint the person faces.

One can choose how much of a free good to take without any budget constraint. Sen doesn't even understand High School Economics.  

What is true in elementary economics is also true in complex political and social decisions.

No. What Sen has said is false in every type of decision.  

Even when one is inescapably seen—by oneself as well as by others—as French, or Jewish, or Brazilian, or AfricanAmerican, or (particularly in the context of the present-day turmoil) as an Arab or as a Muslim, one still has to decide what exact importance to attach to that identity over the relevance of other categories to which one also belongs.

Thus, if the Nazis identify you as a Jew and load you onto a cattle truck, you still have to decide what exact importance to attach to the fact that you will soon be gassed to death.  

In fact, a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture.

People are uniquely characterized by their bodies. They can either defend those bodies themselves or pool resources to hire a police force and an army to do the job for them. But this means that a particular collection of people need to be more productive so as to have a bigger surplus available for mutual defense. That is how the problem of violence and fraud and torts of various types are dealt with. Sen refuses to see that the job of the economist is to figure out how to raise productivity not to scold some imaginary savants who made some horrible metaphysical mistake 300,000 years ago with the result that our species features quite high degrees of inter-species violence. 

The implicit belief in the overarching power of a singular classification can make the world thoroughly inflammable.

No. People with stupid implicit beliefs can be beaten to death before they have managed to set fire to very much. But beating people costs money. Let less productive people beat each other to their heart's content. The more productive can afford collective security.  

A uniquely divisive view goes not only against the old-fashioned belief that all human beings are much the same but also against the less discussed but much more plausible understanding that we are diversely different.

But only one type of difference matters- productivity. Economists can be useful if they find ways to raise productivity. If they start talking bollocks about how everybody should have a multiple identity as Santa fucking Claus.  

The world is frequently taken to be a collection of religions (or of “civilizations” or “cultures”),

it may be useful to do so for a particular purpose. It is wholly useless to pretend that people of a particular sect are more likely to support each other against people of another sect.  

ignoring the other identities that people have and value, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics.

If you are paid to do a job, you ignore stuff which is irrelevant.  

This unique divisiveness is much more confrontational than the universe of plural and diverse classifications that shape the world in which we actually live.

We actually live in a world where most people have to be productive. Not everybody will get paid for talking vacuous bollocks.  

The reductionism of high theory can make a major contribution, often inadvertently, to the violence of low politics.

Because crazy jihadis read Habermas- right?  

Also, global attempts to overcome such violence are often handicapped by

our unwillingness to squander blood and treasure.  

a similar conceptual disarray, with the acceptance—explicitly or by implication—of a unique identity forestalling many of the obvious avenues of resistance.

Very true. If only Marshall Petain and Jean Paul Sartre had come out as a Gay couple, Hitler would have turned back his tanks. 

As a consequence, religion-based violence might end up being challenged not through the strengthening of civil society (obvious as that course is) but through the deployment of different religious leaders of apparently “moderate” persuasion who are charged with vanquishing the extremists in an intrareligious battle, possibly through suitably redefining the demands of the religion involved.

Fuck off! The way to deal with any type of violence is to pay people to kill the cunts doing it. Alternatively, you could run away.   

When interpersonal relations are seen in singular intergroup terms, as “amity” or “dialogue” among civilizations or religious ethnicities, paying no attention to other groups to which the same persons also belong (involving economic, social, political, or other cultural connections), then much of importance in human life is altogether lost, and individuals are put into little boxes.

Sen's family would have been put into little boxes- i.e. coffins- if they hadn't run away from religious violence.  

On the other hand, it must be admitted, probably the worst thing you can do to a person you are stabbing repeatedly has to do with ignoring her multiple identity as a librarian, a Lesbian and a person who is bleeding to death.