Amartya Sen confuses predicate (i.e. a property that an object has) with 'identity' (which means inter-changeability for some particular purpose. Thus though I don't look like the baby I once was, any property gifted to that baby remains mine unless I have sold it or lost it. On the other hand, suppose I received admission to a nursery school when I was 3, I can't now go and demand to attend classes because I am now an elderly man)
Oikeiosis is a Greek word which means belonging. You belong to such and such family and such and such neighborhood and such and such nation. Things given or taken from an oikos affect all the individuals who compose it. This alters their behavior in a predictable way. The same can be said of any identity class where inter-changeability obtains. Doctors are inter-changeable for a particular purpose. If some Doctors are punished for malpractice all Doctors change their behavior. Equally increased pay and prestige for some Doctors affects the rest. They are emboldened to claim higher status and remuneration.
Sen says-
"People have been made to fight each other to serve the imagined demands of their allegedly single identity, effectively along the lines of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, expressing itself in ways like communal slaughter, political butchery and wars,"
Conscripts are 'made to fight'- that's true enough. But volunteers fight of their own volition. The alternative to fighting for your race, religion or nationality is enslavement, forcible conversion or ethnic cleansing. Sen should know this. His people had to flee East Bengal.
Collective bargaining- e.g. by Trade Unions- is considered a good thing in Economic theory. It can reduce economic rent, increase output and improve allocative efficiency. Clearly, 'Identity' as the basis of collective action has many benefits. Notice that having a 'threat point' of a symmetric type is enough for a particular identity class to avoid 'communal slaughter or political butchery'. Indeed, to preserve law and order from psychopaths, the law abiding identity class needs to pay taxes and employ policemen and judges.
This single identity is currently "increasingly taking the form of containing a hard and allegedly impenetrable division along the lines of religion or religion-based understanding of civilization," he explained.
This was certainly true of political Islam of a militant type. It wasn't true of the coalition against the terrorists. Some Muslim regimes were part of that coalition as were some Socialists and Christians and so on.
But, Sen noted, that has not always been the case. At the beginning of the 20th century, in World War I, the Germans, the British and the French were all Christians. Nationality, not religion, was the great divider at that time.
Sen does not appear to be aware that the cause of the War was the parlous state of multi-national Empires- that of the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans and the Tzar- none of which survived the war. British and French patriotism enabled both countries to progress towards Social Democracy- including decolonization. American patriotism has been a great force for the good- at least for those, like Sen, who live and work there.
On the other hand, the dissolution of the British Empire in India did mean Sen's people had to run away from Muslim majority East Bengal.
It's important to remember that history, Sen said,
But what that history teaches is that multi-national Empires are fragile. Nationalism is a good thing provided there is collective security- e.g. NATO. Ukraine and Finland and Sweden have learnt that lesson.
because narrow-mindedness "can take many, many different forms. And if you have one kind of narrow-mindedness, another narrow-mindedness is a remedy for that."
This is not just 'narrow-minded', it is deeply silly.
Sen criticized "the presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partition."
Every person can be uniquely identified by a long enough list of predicates- e.g. 59 year old Tamil man residing at such and such address, uniquely identifies me.
What is the alternative to having this unique type of categorization? The police come to arrest me for shitting on Sen's doorstep but they mistake the neighbour's cat for me and thus it is the cat which goes to jail.
"The newly popular singular view of identity is not only incendiary and dangerous. It is also astonishingly naïve," he said.
Come to think of it, in Hinduism a 'Yogijiva' is able to exist simultaneously in many bodies. But it is not 'naive' to believe that most people have only one body. Thus a long enough list of predicates will identify one body and one body only as embodying a particular person's identity.
"In our normal lives, we consider ourselves as members of a great many groups. We belong to all of them."
That is 'oikeiosis' or 'belonging', it is not identity. I can quit a group without quitting life itself but when I quit my body I am dead.
Multiple identities
Sen then cited a variety of ways one person can be identified: "The same person can be — without any contradiction — a U.S. citizen, of Asian background, of Indonesian ancestry,
Since 1965, this is true. Before that it would have been difficult for such a person to become a U.S citizen.
a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a movie fan, an environmental activist, a tennis player, a sprinter, and someone who believes that extraterrestrial beings should be taught how to write graceful sonnets, preferably in good English," he said, drawing laughter with the last identity.
This is foolish. It is obvious that there could be a contradiction in all this. An Indonesian Muslim may feel there was a contradiction in remaining a US citizen while it waged a war in which 1.3 million Muslims died. Some feminists believe that heterosexuality is an imposed identity for women. There can be a contradiction right there. Arguably movies promote the dominant narrative of hetero-normativity. Being a movie fan is not compatible with being a feminist just as being heterosexual is not compatible with that ideology. One can go on in this vein. The fact is that no two predicates applicable to us can't be found to contradict each other from some point of view.
"Each of the collective identities to which this person belongs simultaneously without any contradiction gives her a particular identity,
This is not the case. She can be uniquely identified just by name, date of birth and Social Security number. It is not true that her identity changes because she stops being a movie buff and gets addicted to podcasts.
which can be, depending on the context and circumstances, extremely important for her behavior and priority," he explained. "And these different identities can co-exist without any battle among them."
Or they can battle away with each other to their heart's content. The thing simply doesn't matter very much.
The singular partitioning of the world population according to some overarching criteria of identity makes the work of terrorists and other instigators of violence who exploit the use of singularity much easier for them, he said.
No. The fact that people have bodies makes possible the task of violence. If we were non-corporeal entities we couldn't be stabbed or blown up.
Crime can be suppressed only where we can uniquely identify criminals and pass sentence on them in a manner people consider just and fair. Otherwise there will be vendetta.
"The ultimate issue is not only of personal choice and how we should approach our life and how we may think of our identity, but also of how we may see others," Sen said.
We should see others as having a single identity linked to their physical body.
He illustrated his point with the example of "the demand for expelling all illegal immigrants from the USA."
Which is what the majority of American voters- especially the poorer ones- want.
"Illegal immigrants of course do have the identity of being illegal, as well as illegal in status, and this is significant for public policy," he said. However, propaganda can make many already settled Americans, "particularly those nervous about their jobs," be persuaded "to see the identity of an illegal immigrant as being just that, as illegal, the total description.
This is foolish. Poorer Americans don't want either legal or illegal migration of a type which will undercut their wages. Also they don't want to be turned into a minority in their own land.
"They have other identities, too, not just in terms of their shared humanity, their shared concern about their future, about their children, about families, about neighborhoods," Sen said, "but also in terms of the work they do, particularly for the economy, and the global perspective they can and often do bring directly and indirectly to American public reasoning."
But foreigners can do all this while remaining in their own countries! This is the age of the internet. We can get the perspective of a Nigerian or a Cambodian just from a Google search!
On the other hand, Americans accept that they might have to tolerate skilled immigrants with specialist knowledge or abilities.
Inclusive vs. fragmentary views of world civilization
Sen described two ways of thinking about the pitfalls of civilization in the world. "One is to understand the story in an inclusive form and to encompass the manifestation of world civilization in different parts of the globe, taking on the divisions as well as the interdependences between human lives across the world," he said.
But that story is about how intense competition between enemies drove technological progress as well as social change of a desirable type. America ended Jim Crow because it needed African Americans to play a bigger and bigger part in the defence and prosperity of the country. Nobody can deny the tremendous contribution they have made in this respect.
He contrasted the inclusive approach with the fragmentary approach, "which segregates the beliefs and practices of different regions into separated and self-contained boxes," he continued.
This 'fragmentary approach' is beneficial. America needed to get rid of Jim Crow. India needed to get rid of untouchability. Tagore, cretin that he was, got hold of the opposite end of the stick. He thought India had a Race problem! It didn't. It had a Religion problem. That's why his family lost their estates in East Bengal and also why Sen's family had to flee their ancestral homes.
"Recently, the fragmentary approach has come much into prominence, especially in the threatening form of the so-called clash of civilization," Sen said.
What Sen means is that Huntingdon turned out to be right while he himself turned out to be utterly useless- at least to India.
"The entire subject has been elevated to the position of being of central concern in many Western countries today."
And in India. Sen has spent twenty years railing against Modi to no avail whatsoever. The BJP has become largest opposition party in his own State. Only Mamta's goons keep her in power.
He referred to the "dreadful events of 11 September 2001" having ushered in a period of awful conflicts and distrust in the world.
He won't say that it was the work of Muslims whose ideology was the same as that of those who drove his people out of their ancestral homes. The planner of 9/11 was Khalid Sheikh Muhammad whose father was a Deobandi preacher.
"Indeed, many influential commentators have been tempted to see a firm linkage within the profusion of atrocities that you see around us today and the civilization of division primarily along religious lines," he said.
Salafi Islam turned out not just to be the enemy of Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs. It also wanted to wipe out Christians and Jews and Socialists and Feminists and Movie buffs.
To categorize people according to an identity such as a member of the Western world, the Islamic world, the Hindu world, or the Buddhist world, is to reduce people to this one dimension, as Sen sees it, and to presume this must be the predominant influence in his or her mode of thinking — thereby ignoring all other identities related to economic, social, political, professional, cultural or occupational affiliation.
Why did Sen's people have to flee their ancestral home? It was because their identity was 'kuffar'. Sen won't argue with the Muslims. He prefers to lecture us instead.
In his 2006 book, "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," Sen noted that he discussed the harm that is done by the implicit belief in a single identity and "how this intellectual confusion can be used to foment violence, as terrorists do to recruit people to fierce deeds against ‘those others,’ and how that intellectual disarray can make it very hard to resist violence or to win the so-called war on terror."
Killing terrorists curbs that threat. This involves uniquely identifying them. It is morally unacceptable to just drone strike innocents. The thing will create a backlash.
Celebrating global interdependence
The West is suffering greatly right now from violence against it by those who want to exploit the divisions between civilizations and traditions, Sen said.
The West was suffering from the same thing that Sen's ancestors fled from. Why won't he admit it?
The anti-Western jihadists, including Islamic terrorists, like to promote the idea of a fundamental dichotomy between the West and the non-Western world, he said.
They chased Sen's people out of East Bengal because they were 'kuffar' not because they were 'Western'.
They see themselves as rigidly-separated Muslims, concerned only with their divergence from the West, and not with pursuits they can share with others in the world, including mathematics, science, literature or music.
These guys were playing a game for very high stakes. If they won, their families would be the aristocracy owning plenty of slaves.
Sen called it "altogether astonishing and truly tragic" that Western parochialists do not dispute the fragmentation of civilization and history.
Instead of defending ourselves, we should talk Sen-tentious bollocks. That won't precipitate a tragedy at all. Why did Sen's daddy and mummy flee Dacca? Why did they not stay on to 'dispute the fragmentation of civilization and history'? How come Obama had Osama shot? Why did he not dispute with him instead?
"Rather than resisting the alienation that feeds the anti-Western violence, this adds further force to the terrorists’ segregated vision," he explained.
Till they are killed.
"In this sense, Western parochialism and the belligerence it generates have been in an unstated and implicit alliance with Islamic terrorism."
Very true. A woman who fights back against a rapist is in unstated and implicit alliance with him. Why does she not resist her own alienation from his desire to beat and sodomize her? Truly, this is a shameful and tragic error on her part.
Sen concluded, "The need for recollecting and celebrating the richness of the vast interdependence within our global civilization has never been stronger.
He says this because it is the only thing he can do. But that thing is utterly useless.
It’s a huge intellectual challenge that we face with increasing urgency, I believe."
Sen is mentally challenged. That's true enough.
John Gray, the philosopher, had trenchantly criticized Sen's sen-tentious tosh in the Guardian back in 2006. He thinks Sen is making a
sustained attack on the "solitarist" theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group.
There is no such theory. Identity means inter-changeability. For a particular purpose, possession of a relevant property is the only thing that matters. Thus the authorities may give the order- 'all soldiers must return to their units' which applies to all soldiers but nobody else.
Sen believes this solitarist fallacy shapes much communitarian and multicultural thinking, as well as Samuel Huntingdon's theory of "clashing civilisations".
This simply isn't true. We could speak of trait dominance without committing to determinism of a crude type. Perhaps Sen retained memories of vulgar Marxists who thought class origin conditioned consciousness. But that sort of thinking simply wasn't present in any academic text at any point in his career. He and his friends at College seem to have read Marx as a wooly-minded Tagorean. A Bengali scholar write ' For Sen, Marx’s insistence upon seeing people from many different perspectives was a “vitally important message” for our world, where the penchant for labelling individuals and groups in one-dimensional terms not only robs them of the richness of their plural identities, it also lies at the root of pervasive inequality, exploitation, and conflict.' This is quite bizarre. Marxism stresses the importance of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in paving the road to Communism. The economic substructure determines the superstructure. Some bourgeois types of idealism may give joy but they are a snare and a delusion which intellectuals should guard themselves from.
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.
No such fallacy obtains in Huntingdon's oeuvre which Indians first received as a criticism of modernization theory. One may say that civilization is a function of governability and war or other violent conflict may arise out of a decline in governability which expresses itself as civilizational moral panic. One can't say that Huntingdon is an old fashioned racist who thinks A-rabs are bound to be all 'burqa burqa jihad' while the Chinese are bound to turn into Dr. Fu Manchu, while the Hindus will start yelling 'Kali Maa!' and trying to snatch Indiana Jones's heart out of his rib-cage.
In Sen's view the idea that we can be divided up in this way leads to a "miniaturisation" of humanity, with everyone locked up in tight little boxes from which they emerge only to attack one another.
But Sen only emerges from his tight little box to attack everybody else. Still, if that is what he gets paid to do- good luck to him.
The solitarist view of human identity is plainly false, and it can also be dangerous.
No it can't because nobody holds it. One might as well say 'the view that everybody is actually my neighbor's cat is plainly false. Moreover, it can also be every dangerous because if you try to stroke pussy and it turns out to belong to a big butch lesbian who beats the shit out of you, you end up in hospital or you get arrested for indecent assault. Not that anything of the sort happened to me. It happened to this other bloke I know. We were in the SAS together, so I can't tell you his name.'
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.
Fuck off! Bush was in the White House. He got on great with some members of Osama's family as well as with the Saudis and Gulf Sheikhs. Musharaff, in Pakistan, hastened to become America's ally though he says this was because America threatened to nuke his country back to the stone age. The fact is most Islamic countries were allies in the War against Terror. Indeed, the Egyptians had helped foil the first attempt to level the Twin Towers.
Here, and at several points in Identity and Violence, Sen mounts a timely critique of the contemporary politics of identity.
No he doesn't. He won't go after the Islamists because that would get him in trouble back in West Bengal. Nor would he weigh in on any contentious issue like 'trans' rights vs. traditional Feminism. He just talks vacuous bollocks.
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".
What on earth does that mean? Gandhi, like others in the INC, saw the Indian nation as a union of communities and religions. What else could it have been if not an invented appendage of the British Crown?
In effect, Sen's alternative to multiculturalism is a species of liberal nationalism.
Except everybody can simultaneously belong to lots of other nations- which is cool if you are rich and can get to settle anywhere you like.
Unfortunately he fails to ask how nationhood is achieved, and at what cost.
It was at the cost of his people having to run away from their ancestral homes. There was a 'Clash of Civilizations'. Pakistan was created for the Islamic Civilization. Kaffirs were not welcome.
The emergence of modern nations has done much to emancipate individuals from the tyranny of local communities,
unless they were not able to migrate. But they may have had superior opportunities to do so under multi-national Empires.
but this freedom has come at a heavy price. Nearly everywhere,
No. Only where there was a governance deficit. Norway and Sweden parted ways without a drop of blood being shed.
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.
Yes it is. Burma became independent without 'communal slaughter' and it was only in the Sixties that the Indians were chased away. Sri Lanka had no violence till the Government weakened the Army. Malaya did have anti-Communist violence but was subsequently peaceful. India was exceptional because there was a Muslim minority which was also the majority in one area. That's why Hindu Pandits were chased out of the Valley. Those foolish enough, or helpless enough, to have returned are now being killed one by one.
The US became a modern nation only after a devastating civil war,
I suppose that is one way of describing the Revolutionary War but it isn't the standard one.
France only after Napoleon.
That wasn't a Civil War.
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.
The Chinese did have a Civil War.
Even in its liberal, "civic" varieties, nationalism has spawned violence on a vast scale.
In some places- sure. But not in others.
In comparison, multiculturalism - the chief target of Sen's critique - is a sideshow.
But the First World War was caused by the fragility of multi-ethnic Empires.
There is a deeper unrealism in Sen's analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view.
There is no such view even among the Taliban or ISIS. 'Trait dominance' matters. You can join regardless of background provided you put one loyalty above all others. But this is equally true of the US Army.
I suppose one could call the Khmer Rouge's ideology 'solitarist'. If you had soft hands or wore glasses you should be killed. Only horny handed peasants had the right ideology. On the other hand, Pol Pot's hands were plenty soft.
He tells us "there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful,
It is not successful at all. There is no country in the world where citizens are not encouraged to be good at maths and engineering and so forth along with being loyal to the State.
given the extraordinary naivete of the thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations".
But nobody actually holds this thesis anymore than they think that all beings are actually my neighbor's cat.
Here we touch the heart of Sen's continuing bewilderment.
It pays him to be 'bewildered'. People think 'aw! he must be a really sweet guy to get so bewildered by the fact that some peeps like to murder and rob other people.'
Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error.
Because he gets paid to correct 'intellectual error'. Also he wants to be seen to be 'relevant'. Suppose he wrote a book proving that all human beings are not actually my neighbor's cat, people would think he had lost his marbles.
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?
Because they are all actually my neighbor's cat which, let me tell you, is not very smart or educated at all.
Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists. "Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people," he writes,
Very true. Back in 1977, a bunch of skinheads approached Sen with the intention of kicking in his Paki head. He explained to them that they were very gullible. A belligerent identity had been imposed on them. Actually, they were all a bunch of gay cats. This caused the skinheads to stop being violent. They started saying meow and gave each other rim jobs.
"championed by proficient artisans of terror." But are people really so stupid? Or is the failure of understanding actually in the liberal philosopher?
Or is the liberal philosopher just making this shit up so as to virtue signal?
Writing of sectarian conflict in post-Saddam Iraq,
I was in Iraq between 1968 and 1970. Indian diplomats believed that Shia Sunni violence was imminent. The question was whether Kurdish Arab violence would occur first. The Assyrian Christians, however, had learnt their lesson and were keeping very quiet. But the remaining Jews were expelled in '68. Some were hanged. This annoyed me because the kiddies cartoons were cancelled on TV so people could gaze their fill on Jewish corpses.
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."
This is foolish. The allies knew that there was a separate Kurdish and a separate Turkoman and a separate Marsh Arab and a separate Yezidi and separate tribal identities in addition to Shia/Sunni identity which, in the case of the Shias, was further complicated by allegiances to particular lineages of preceptors. This did mean that Islamic State could be defeated by a complex coalition.
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.
They arise because of political failure which in turn have to do with governability. However, in the case of Iraq one must mention the elephant in the room- viz. massive corruption.
Their causes are many and tangled, including conflicts of interest, rival power structures and competition for resources.
Iraqis feel that corruption needed conflict so as to continue to flourish. In other words, reduced governability was a function of greed.
Iraq is a post-colonial construction
Not really. It was supposed to join up with Syria and Egypt as a Socialist Arab State. Its institutions were 'Ba'athist' not British or Ottoman. It must be said, some Indians admired Iraq just as they admired Nasser's Egypt.
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.
Not really. Most people expected gradual 'de-Ba'athification' with technocrats being kept on so as to have rapid economic recovery. Iraqis believe the US did not take this path for a wholly corrupt reason.
Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities are not at one another's throats because they have a mistaken view of human identity.
That's true enough. Iraqis are religious and humanitarian. On the other hand clannishness and nepotism are leading to bad governance in the Kurdish region where two families have divided up all the spoils and many young and talented people are risking their lives (and paying a lot of money) to get to Europe.
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.
Hindus don't kill Hindus of any sect. They don't even kill Muslims or Christians save in retaliation. By contrast West Pakistan committed genocide on East Pakistan till it became independent with Indian help.
For Sen, as a good liberal rationalist, it is an article of faith that the violence of identity is a result of erroneous beliefs.
Why not simply say that jihad as genocide of kaffirs is sinful? You won't get lots of virgins in Heaven if you blow up people of a different sect.
The fact is Hindus would prefer to pay other people to kill. They believe killing is sinful. It is repugnant. It aint a great way to pass the time. But this means Hindus need to pay taxes for a proper Army and police force. Talking Sen-tentious shite won't help matters.
He cannot accept that its causes are inherent in human beings themselves.
Only in human beings who think there is a Heavenly reward for killing 'infidels'.
But as Berlin perceived, when freedom and order break down it is not because of mistakes in reasoning.
Yes it is. If leaders make stupid decisions, bad shit happens.
The people who knifed the day-labourer 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.
Or calculation. Violence serves a signaling function.
Such atrocities express deep-seated human traits
No. You may say 'men are biologically programmed to rape' but it simply isn't true of most men. They are biologically programmed to whine. We don't like killing. The thing feels icky. Still, disciplined military training can make us better people even if War breaks out and we ourselves have to take human lives.
that are not going to be removed by the kind of conceptual therapy offered by Sen.
Hinduism, remarkably, came to the conclusion that you have to learn statistical game theory to rule justly and minimize violence. This is the message of the Nalophkhyanam.
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.
Sen could have embraced the reverse game theory that is 'mechanism design'. He could have studied 'incomplete contract' theory. Instead he chose to talk vacuous bollocks.
Turning to a more recent evaluation of Sen by Deen Chatterjee, a political philosopher, we get a clue as to why Sen was incapable of connected thought. The plain fact is he was incapable of understanding anything that he read.
Citing the story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke,
A story whose meaning for Christians is that Jesus was the Messiah of all people- not just a particular Jewish sect.
where Jesus questions the idea of a fixed neighborhood,
He does not do so. Only those in the vicinity can help a wounded man. A Priest and a Levite refused to do so though they were in that vicinity or neighborhood. They did not love their neighbor but passed him by. The Samaritan showed love and care for the wounded man though he was of a different sect. He was a good and loving neighbor to him. We must be like that Samaritan if we are to inherit eternal life.
Sen observes that “there are a few non-neighborhoods left in the world today.”
No. Only neighborhoods exist except perhaps at the Quantum level where there might be non-locality and 'entanglement'. It is not the case that putting out good energy or talking virtue signalling bollocks actually helps any injured or oppressed human being.
Going beyond the concept of reciprocity between equals
or non-equals. The Queen may smile at me and I am welcome to smile back. Reciprocity does not entail equality nor does equality entail reciprocity.
that is embedded in the idea of social contract in the dominant Western ethics of justice,
there may be a notion of equality before the law or for a political purpose but this does not entail reciprocity. If the Judge pronounces sentence upon me, I am not at liberty to pronounce sentence upon him.
Sen’s project of global justice takes a critical look at the realities of entrenched inequalities. Citing Buddha’s teaching, Sen argues that we have responsibility to the global poor precisely because of the asymmetry between us—our power and their vulnerability—and not necessarily because of any symmetry that is presumed in the social contract of reciprocity.
This is meaningless. Lord Buddha taught that Time and Causality are an illusion. There can be a pure intention towards loving kindness. But there is no responsibility because nothing complex exists or endures.
There is an asymmetry between people who are poor because they are lazy and those who are rich because they are always working. Should the poor- who have more leisure- use it to judge the rich? Would that be cool? Suppose me and a bunch of my good for nothing friends start emailing smart and hard-working people with our judgments on their hair-style or diets? Would they comply with our judgments?
The fact is, the global poor should be wary of people who claim to feel a great responsibility towards them. Those virtue signaling crackpots may well fuck them over something chronic. When Gandhi first set up his Ashram in Wardha, the poor people there welcomed him. Then they discovered he was a crackpot. By the Eighties, the villagers would actively chase away Gandhian nutjobs who tried to enter their villages. They, quite reasonably, blamed the Gandhians- who said they had a responsibility to the poor- for the backwardness of the area. This was because Gandhians opposed Development schemes for one reason or another.
Although Sen’s idea of justice is relational, it is not transactional
But Justice, like Education, is either a transaction- you pay your money and you get a service- or it is nothing. I want a burger to eat now because I'm hungry and I will pay for it. I don't want an inclusive promise to provide affordable and nutritious food for everybody. I won't give a penny for such nonsense.
—it is inclusive. It is to Sen’s credit that he integrates the uplifting words of two great religious teachers
did he also integrate the uplifting words of Torquemada?
into his secular political philosophy of justice, thereby providing a seamless blending of dimensions that is rich and unique.
Very true. When you blend Time and Space in a unique way you can get Buddha to do your chemistry homework while Christ tells you a nice bed-time story.
Sen's work has helped some bureaucrats and bloviating academics but it had begun to lose both the war of ideas as well as the support of voters by about 1970. Thatcher and Reagan were on the horizon. Sen's students got rich in finance or enterprise. Some retained an irritating tendency to talk bollocks. But they quietly opened their wallets to Right Wing political parties.
Likewise, while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, on a visiting assignment in 1964–1965, Sen was impressed by how minority immigrants growing up under British colonial rule in diverse parts of the world were drawn to Berkeley and found a home,
That had happened much earlier. However, during the First World War, the Brits got the Americans to crack down on the 'Ghaddarites'.
and friendship, in the intellectual and argumentative circles shaped by Berkeley’s free speech movement.
Which created a backlash such that Reagan got two terms as Governor of California.
The New York Times reported: “For foreign students—many coming from countries with strong left-wing movements—the rise in activism made them feel at home, said the Indian economist Amartya Sen…who was teaching at Berkeley at the time.”
Vote for Reagan, otherwise California will be overrun by coolies.
Sen notes that America’s turn toward greater social equity and inclusive public policies over the decades has been in large part due to the free speech movement and activism in the 1960s: “Public debates and radical movements have made a significant contribution to this change”
No. The Second World War and then the Cold War led to a great expansion of the State Sector which in turn helped organized Labor. Women and African Americans could rise because their skills and productivity was needed to finance the Military-Industrial complex. However, there was a backlash. The White working class turned against the Left because they believed 'Welfare Queens' were gaining disproportionately. African American economist too turned to the Right because the Welfare State was destroying Black Families.
Sen enjoyed the thrill of teaching his “astonishingly talented” students at the Delhi School of Economics, after completing his tenure at Cambridge in 1963. He narrates a moving episode of the reaction of his students during one of his lectures when he read aloud a passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in which Smith strongly denounces the practice of slavery in America and Europe and resoundingly praises the people from the coast of Africa as superior to the slave owners.
This is incredibly stupid. Smith said that savages are different from us civilized folk. From a tender age they prepare themselves for a death involving hideous torture. In this sense they are superior to us. We don't scruple to scream and cry and get hysterical when pleading our case. The savage would never do so.
Smith says that the French and Italians were the most polished nations of all. A Frenchman will weep in front of the King if refused a regiment. An Italian will howl more at being fined 20 shillings by the Magistrates than an Englishman facing the noose.
Why did Sen's students not understand that this is racist shite? They knew that the Whites had regarded them as savages. Macaulay had written a lot about the cowardly Bengali who, however, would face the noose with equanimity because, after all, for all his cunning, he was merely a savage.
What Smith is really saying is that 'Fortune' favors the civilized. They were destined to rule over savages. But there was no point beating and torturing dusky folk because they were mere savages. Just make sure they don't get enough to eat while working long hours at boring and menial jobs.
Sen’s students, who in their own investigations found some of the practices of inequality in India close to the inhumanity of slavery, felt an “immediate sense of solidarity” with and a sense of pride in the people far away from them in Africa,
Smith says Asia too is populated by savages.
as they felt with the people nearby. Sen recalls the shock and horror Tagore felt, much as Smith did, in response to the degrading treatment received by a segment of humanity on account of their race or status.
Yes, yes. These guys were always feeling lots of shock and horror. But they ran away from East Bengal swiftly enough.
Sen concludes his memoir thus: “It was reassuring to find that the fundamental respect and understanding of people for which Smith and Tagore argued was so clearly recognized by the students. This must surely be a strong source of hope in the world” (p. 407).
Tagore was the head of an extremely casteist sect though he himself relaxed the rule that only Brahmins could preach from the pulpit. On the other hand, he ensured that all his children married Dalits. I'm kidding. The very idea!
Meeting and interacting with people in different European countries who were open and inclusive during Sen’s youthful travel days gave Sen a sense of watching the “unfolding of European integration.”
Which everybody was cool with so long as White Europeans were getting the benefit.
Indeed, as Sen looks back, he sees “some amazing achievements in Europe” over the intervening years in such important areas as human rights, rule of law, participatory democracy, the rise of the welfare state, and economic and political cooperation. Yet, with dismay, Sen notes the recent rise of a “backward-looking attitude” in several European countries,
Because non-White or Islamic people were seen as getting the benefit.
including Britain, regarding European democratic tradition and European unity (p. 386). This trend reflects a recent surge of polarized politics centered on nativist populism and identity politics in democracies all over the world, posing a threat to the viability of participatory democracy.
No. It's just that Europe doesn't want non-Europeans turning up in great numbers to participate in that Democracy and demand the imposition of Sharia Law.
As with many related areas, Sen’s justice project has an important bearing on this issue.
Thinks nobody at all.
Indeed, his project has innovative prescriptions for a built-in safeguard against the corrosive effects of identity politics within a liberal democracy.
No it doesn't. If Dr. Taslima Nasreen has to run away from Bengal, and then India itself, Sen's 'innovative prescriptions' won't help her any. Who knows? She may have to run away from Scandinavia because of the increasing importance of the Muslim vote- not to mention the bloodthirsty nature of their gangsters.
Sen’s work on global justice has been an exemplary road map for showing the futility of warfare for the cause of peace, security, and justice.
Actually, he has shown the futility of Welfare Econ and Political Philosophy. Warfare, meanwhile, is doing fine. Ukraine will become a great nation precisely because it has come together to fight Putin.
The prime source of conflict between proponents of democratic solidarity and nativist populism on issues of identity is the cherished liberal idea that an impartial liberal theory of justice need not be incompatible with distinct principles of affirmative equality with regard to minority groups, within reason, of course.
Sharia Law for some. Nazism for others. Cool.
This idea helps liberals justify minority accommodation in a pluralistic liberal democracy.
Till there is a backlash.
But it leaves both sides—the minorities and the populists—unhappy, with the complaint of tokenism on one side and that of over-catering to minorities on the other, leading to simmering anger rooted in feelings of powerlessness.
These bleeding heart liberals were God's gift to the Right. Orban is in power thanks to Soros. The American Visa ban on Modi helped him become Prime Minister.
This distrust is a barrier to dialogue and deliberation as a means of negotiating claims of culture and identity, both within and among groups. It makes pluralism—the hallmark of liberal democracy—an elusive goal.
Pluralism is not the hallmark of liberal democracy. It is liberalism. Pluralistic democracy is the sort of shite the Lebanese are stuck with. It doesn't work at all.
In contrast to this divisive solidarity along national, cultural, and ideological lines, Sen’s ideas lay the foundation for an inclusive democratic solidarity.
How come nothing was built on it? The thing simply didn't exist.
During his student days in Cambridge, Sen was instructed by his mentor Piero Sraffa to read Sraffa’s old friend John Maynard Keynes “on the formation—and importance—of public opinion and its role in social transformation…”
Keynes distrusted the public. They were stupid and had 'animal spirits'. Dewey believed in the public. Keynes didn't. The Government needed to instrumentalize the 'money illusion' of the great unwashed to achieve its objectives.
Sen learned, among other things, that for Keynes public reasoning was critically important for a healthy democracy, and that “Keynes was eager to show how crucial it was for different sides to work together for the realization of their respective goals . . . even when their goals do not fully coincide . . . .” (p. 387).
What Sraffa may have meant was that Keynes had intended to write about Capitalism as suffering from a moral, not a technical, problem. However, the least marked reading of 'My early Beliefs' is the conventional one that Keynes had embraced Humeanism. The Bloomsbury group had been over-optimistic. Keynes had lived long enough to concede that 'civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved’.
There is no point reasoning with thugs and brutes. But you can trick them into doing what is necessary.
The importance of public reasoning in a pluralistic democracy
Kant and so forth thought public reasoning (confined to a higher class of public officials including University Professors who were classed as civil servants) was important in an enlightened despotism. You need a class of intellectuals who can suggest better mechanisms without fearing the Inquisition or the Secret Police. But this sort of freedom must be restricted to the genuinely smart.
A pluralistic democracy would not feature public reasoning. Why? Public order would be disrupted because of claims of 'blasphemy' on the one hand and 'fanaticism' on the other.
has been a key component in Sen’s great contribution in the culture and human rights debate,
but what is that contribution? Human rights are nice? That's a contribution? The question is whether incentive compatible remedies exist for rights' violations.
as well as to the topic of justice. Sen has opened the way to bridging the divide between theoretical pronouncements and practical impediments by situating the arguments of justice in the real world of diversity, need, vulnerabilities, and interdependence.
Which is all very well but where is the money to come from? The Rich? But they have multiple identities as the survivors of horrendous sexual self-abuse. Also they have a clear 'capability' to get to Mars. Society must give them the means to do so. Many ninety year old Economists need more honorary Doctorates and Prizes. They must be kept alive- regardless of expense- so as to enjoy this valuable 'functioning'.
Sen’s approach is practical and pluralistic, and based on the discipline of social choice, which pays attention to the lives of people as lived in the real world.
Hilarious! Social choice theory assumes that people have perfect information and costless computation. This means there is no need for language- let alone 'public reasoning'. Everybody already knows everything.
For that, according to Sen, one need not be focused on ideal institutional arrangements, but should instead concentrate on promoting enabling institutions and viable social realizations to ensure the mitigation of injustice.
How? Either by giving them money or enabling them to make money. But Sen isn't saying where the money will come from. The fact is 'multiple identities' means that everybody has some glaring grievance or suffers what they believe is a remediable injustice. This creates a 'concurrency problem'. Where do you start? Who is first in the queue? We may agree that it should be a disabled LGTQ trans-person of color who is currently starving to death. But then it turns out that this is one of the multiple identities of my neighbor's cat. Yet it is me who is going to jail for Welfare fraud! That is terribly unjust!
Accordingly, Sen proposes a comparative approach that is primarily about rectifying injustices rather than locating ideal justice.
But if you have no 'ideal' of Justice then who is to say that we must begin by remedying the injustice I suffer by not being selected Miss Teen Tamil Nadu and getting to marry Queenji in a Lesbian wedding presided over by Popeji? Also, why am I so fat?
This bottom-up approach is in contrast to the dominant Western social-contract paradigm that seeks perfect justice in a liberal democracy.
Actually, people naturally prefer risk pooling through an insurance scheme which takes account of 'moral hazard'.
Sen’s concern is more practical, guided by the realities of people’s lives and capabilities, with a focus on people’s plural identities.
But it has achieved nothing whatsoever. This is because 'plural identities' means that everybody can have an almost infinite claim against society. From one point of view Musk is rich and should pay more in taxes. From another he is a Martian and Society must spend ten trillion dollars to ensure that he can relocate to the Red Planet in a dignified and comfortable manner.
Sen’s comparative approach is open enough to guide people in assessing and ranking available alternatives,
or just pulling them out of their arse
without the need to speculate on all possible outcomes for a perfect resolution.
But any decision can be blocked by a counterclaim.
In fact, his approach is broad and inclusive in its enunciation of what counts as reasonable, and it even accepts the prospect of more than one reasonable option. Even if this procedure cannot always resolve all competing claims,
It can never do so. The capabilities practitioner has the capability of judging that I must get ten trillion dollars. True, objects may have to be inserted into the rectum of the practitioner for this capability to be realized but because they have multiple identities, the pain they experience in one persona is cancelled out by the pleasure gained by their masochistic identity.
Sen points out that this “valuational plurality” makes public reasoning all the more necessary, to be celebrated rather than shunned in a democracy.
Very true! You should respect the valuational plurality displayed by those who beat you and insert things up your rectum even if they would by no means like the same thing to happen to themselves.
Public reasoning emboldens democracy by making it truly participatory.
Thus, everybody should be heard from before any decision is made.
It brings disparate groups together by showcasing their concerns in the shared arena, which generates cooperation and mutual understanding.
Then those disparate groups start beating each other and setting fire to everything. Sen, no doubt, feels that Capitol Hill should be invaded by lunatics every day.
Sen’s justice project is tied to the plurality of impartial reasons
which can never be known to be impartial because we have no means of telling who is really impartial.
embedded in today’s expanding circle of global human-rights approaches.
That circle is contracting. People discovered that it is difficult to detect bogus rights' claims with the result that the remedy was so rationed that obviously deserving candidates could get none.
Because the notion of human rights is predicated on our shared humanity,
why not animal rights predicated on our similar biology?
Sen’s idea of justice is open to the world.
So, anybody who wishes can come in and shit on it. Justice must be protocol bound and kept safe from nutters and hooligans. Sen teaches in places which go to great lengths to keep out stupid assholes like me.
It goes beyond national borders and regards people, rather than states, as sovereign.
Why stop there? Why not see all living beings as omnipotent Gods? Indeed, this is one of my own multiple identities. How come Popeji isn't coming to do my washing up?
Sen is aware that “there are bound to be difficulties in advancing the assessment of global justice through public reasoning,” especially due to social media and the Internet.
Surely both are inexpensive technologies which facilitate communication and reasoning by savants in useful STEM subject fields?
Yet he is cautiously optimistic. He notes: “What is needed is to make
everybody and everything as nice as pie
. . . public reasoning more extensive, more systematic, and much better informed, partly through expanding the vehicles of dissemination of information, strengthening the facilities for ‘fact-checking’ and for the scrutiny of ‘fake news,’ and doing what we can to remove the barriers to public discussion.”
This is happening anyway because there is a market for it. Sen's shite hasn't helped any. On the other hand my demand, first articulated in the Baghdad declaration of 1968, that 'everybody should be nice and not do naughty things' enabled the whole World to advance greatly.
Sen declares that in a world where our lives are globally interdependent as never before, “if the jointness of problems of justice is a global reality, interactive and informed reasoning is surely a global necessity.”
We have found that 'interactive and informed reasoning' does not help the people of Ukraine. There is no fucking 'jointness'. If guys start unjustly invading your territory, you have to fight and kill them. Sen isn't going to come to help you.
Sen gives us a challenging but promising road map toward restoring liberal democracy in the face of populist illiberalism.
Really? Has the guy really figured out a way to get Trump out of American politics?
However, regardless of how inspiring and practicable his path might be, it ultimately depends on the prevailing political will as to whether or not his vision is put into practice.
So the guy is a useless tosser. By contrast, only by implementing my Baghdad Declaration of 1968 can the World become a better place. Alas, this depends on the prevailing political will- something which I realized in 1977 when I issued my New Delhi Declaration demanding that political will become nice. It should stop being naughty.
Sen notes: Keynes’s efforts to “sway contemporary government policy were not immediately successful,” but he “contributed a great deal to the ‘general opinion of the future’. . . .” (p. 388)
The Second World War opened people's eyes to what Government spending could achieve.
Likewise, regardless of whether Sen’s ideas are getting immediate success in responding to the current political challenges, his monumental contribution to the imperatives of justice in our global world is a great gift to scholars and policy makers for generations to come.
Keynes had his 'multiplier effect'. What does Sen have? Nothing but empty words. Be nice. Don't be nasty.
Home in the World
Noted ethicist Sissela Bok observes that when children are
given horrible names by stupid parents (hers were the Myrdals) and then go quietly potty and end up as 'ethicists'.
deprived of a culturally rooted education, “they risk developing a debilitating sense of being exiled everywhere.”
Though this can also happen if they have a culturally rooted education. Actually being exiled from everywhere can, however, lead to one culturally rooting all over the place.
Tagore was well aware of this risk. He made efforts to see that students’ education was firmly rooted in Indian history and culture as well as in the Asian heritage, while simultaneously
talking incessant bollocks to them and encouraging them to do the same.
pursuing relevant knowledge and wisdom gathered from all corners of the world.
Why are more kids not being taught Voodoo? Is it coz of Racism?
Sen was a beneficiary of this well-rounded education early in his life.
But he kept well away from it later on.
In Sen’s world, the local and the global complement each other.
They also compliment each other. The local says to the global 'you have got a smokin' bod!' and the global says 'you have nice eyes'. Then they get smoochy. The National then turns up and accuses the local of being a slut. The Global says 'dude, why you getting jelly? We was just makkin.' The National then says 'the local is underage!' at which point the Global goes running home to the International.
Sen’s affirmation of his humanity and universalism is not rootless globalism or vacuous cosmopolitanism—it is
boring Bengali bullshit
the confluence of the near and the far
and the Future and the Past, not to mention Magic and Science and Humanity and everybody having a multiple identity as my neighbor's cat
in his wide range of experiences, encounters, and intellectual explorations all through his life.
Which was spent studying and teaching worthless shite.
Sen takes pride in his Bengali identity, but it does not prevent him from affirming his other interlocking identities,
which arose because he ran away from India with his best friend's wife
loyalties,
he wasn't loyal to his Bengali wife
and obligations,
like not fucking his best-friend's wife
including an affirmation of his shared humanity.
He certainly shared his jizz with his best-friend's wife.
Instead of the exclusivity of a singular identity,
that of a Hindu husband who considers it wrong to run off with his best-friend's wife
Sen’s vision makes room for a joyous interplay of
adultery
multifaceted and overlapping identities whereby the imperatives of human yearnings are not compromised in the name of local practices or blindly followed while ignoring cultural roots and traditions.
Like the tradition of not fucking your best friend's wife.
He goes beyond the narrow conundrum of conflicting loyalties,
You should be loyal and faithful to your own wife. You should not run off with your best friend's wife.
where the forces of nationalism and ethnocentrism
or the sacrament of marriage
can have an uneasy alliance with the broader vision of our common humanity, as we see in Tagore’s novel The Home and the World.
Which ends with Muslims slaughtering and robbing and raping Hindus.
Sen’s mission is to bring the local and the global together in finding our home in the world.
His people fled their own locality fleetly enough. Then he fled India along with his best-friend's wife. But she was connected in different ways with both Sraffa and Gramsci so the dude was trading up.
Sen himself has felt at home in the world
The world? Nope. Ivy League cloisters aint the world. We are speaking of an Ivory Tower.
in terms of both his ideas and his global engagements.
His best friend's wife was Italian. That was a 'global engagement' right enough.
He has been a leading catalyst for innovative vision in today’s troubled world.
No. His shite only helped UN bureaucrats and worthless academics.
His ideas have been instrumental in exploring the prospects of collective action and value-based dialogue in a divided world where norms clash.
No. There is no substantive content to his shite.
A leading critic of culture
He has made no cultural criticism. The fact is he didn't understand what he read in Tagore or Smith or Marx on anybody else.
and also a passionate global citizen who embraces the best in all cultures,
He certainly embraced his best-friend's wife who he thought better than his own Bengali bride.
Sen rejoices in the shared humanity of the global world.
But does not do so in his own ancestral Dacca. This was because his people decided they wouldn't 'share humanity' very long there because the place was majority Muslim.
Being at home in a global world is the foremost challenge of our time.
Says another Bengali ex-pat teaching worthless shite
By reframing the debate on culture and universal norms in accessible experiential terms,
is the guy for or against abortion or the burqa or animal rights? We don't know.
away from its usually contested cultural and foundational juxtaposition, Amartya Sen has shown us the way toward responding to this global challenge.
He showed other Bengalis the way to emigrate on the basis of bogus erudition in bullshit subjects. But they would have found this path on their own. Still, it warms the cockles of our hearts to think that these boring buddhijivis imagine they have multiple identities as my neighbor's cat which spends a lot of time licking its own arse. Sen will only attain this felicity in his next life. Till then, other Bengali Professors must lick his arse for him.
