Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s current focus is not economics but the violent sectarian schisms that bedevil our present times. He recently delivered the Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz. A Siliconeer report.



(Above): Amartya Sen speaking at Santa Cruz. (Bottom, r) UCSC foundation president Anuradha Luthra and acting chancellor George Blumenthal

The ordinary fact is that the same person can be without any contradiction whatever, many different things—an American citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Indian ancestry, a Tamil, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a school teacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician and someone who belongs to an outer space club where members take the view that aliens from space are widely present on earth because of illegal immigration from outer space that had been going over the centuries and these aliens are hard to detect because they do look just like us, though here is the good news: They can be unmasked by making use of the fact that these space wetbacks are particularly fond of reciting Shakespeare.

That’s vintage Sen for you. Meticulous argument, delivered without polemical hyperbole, and leavened with a gentle wit.

Just how can this sense of multiple identity play out in an enlightened society? Sen gives the example of India, not without a touch of pride:

I think India has a lot of failures, but in terms of democracy we have reason to take some pride in the fact that if you look at the three principal positions in a country with more than 80 percent Hindu population, the fact that the president is a Muslim, Abdul Kalam, the prime minister is a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, and the leader of the ruling party is a Christian, a Catholic, namely, Sonia Gandhi—not one of the three principal positions is occupied by the majority community—it’s interesting that that does not appear at all peculiar and there is no reason why it should be, because they are not seen just as representatives of their communities at all. Abdul Kalam is a scientist, Manmohan is an economist as well as a great administrator and Sonia Gandhi is a tactician and politician and a visionary statesman who brought the secular identity very strongly to the elections in 2004 following the Gujarat riots which was a tremendous transgression and in a sense, allowed the voters to do what they did, namely reject the party which was in office responsible for that. I think that has become possible when one can think of each other not in sectarian terms and for that you need civil society—without a media, without interaction, I don’t think any of these would appear as natural as they do in India today.

Sen is the first to concede that despite a reality that suggests otherwise, the notion of a single-minded, sectarian identity has been gaining ground. He calls it the tyranny of singular identity, and warns about its dangers.

The tyranny of a singular identity in a world of manifestly plural affiliation may be contrary to common sense, and yet it is very successful, alarmingly so, sometimes with extremely bloody consequences.
The cultivation of a singular identity to the exclusion of all other manifold association not only serves as an instrument of incarceration that tyrannizes our lives, it can also generate some terrible consequences. A strong and exclusive sense of belonging to one group can go with the perception of distance and divergence from other groups. Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord.

Sen does not reserve his criticism just for sectarian fanatics. He is equally critical of an odd tendency among Western policymakers and leaders to implicitly accept the fanatic’s unifocal definition of identity:

It’s really not surprising that inciters of riots and terrorism like to reduce many dimensional human beings into one particular identity only suitable for instigation and recruitment.
What is really tragic and sad is when those who want to resist violence and defeat terrorism fall for the same denuded, miniaturized and I believe dehumanized view of people.
For example, the recent British use of singular partition of the British population based on religion, separating out British Muslims, British Hindus, British Sikhs and other newcomers drastically miniaturizes human beings and their many affiliations related for example to politics, civil society, citizenship, occupation, linguistic background.
This reductionism not only involves an epistemic failure in understanding the nature of human identity, it also entails political befuddlement.
To take just one case, Bangladesh’s emergence as a new country was not linked with religion but mainly with the Bengali language and culture and with commitment to secular politics for which a great many people, hundreds of thousands, in fact, gave their lives. But now, in official reckoning, the Bangladeshis in Britain of Muslim origin are defined simply by a single category of being British Muslims, whether you come from Morocco, or Bangladesh, Pakistan or Sudan.
On the 7th of July, 2005, after the bombs went in London, when the government was asking British Muslims “to get their act together,” a Bangladeshi Muslim friend of mine in Britain, a British citizen, as it happens, totally shocked by the events, but also a little startled by the governmental invitation that followed it, told me, “The political leaders of my country, Great Britain, want me to act not as a British citizen, not as a member of the Labor Party, nor as someone active in civil society, nor as a secularist of Bangladeshi origin, but as a Muslim, who must act within what the government has defined as my community.”

Sen is also critical of the broader tendency in the West to look upon democracy as a uniquely Western tradition, waiting to be exported to the rest of the world.

Democracy cannot be seen as a purely Western cultural condition. Democracy is political decision-making and participatory public reasoning and there’s a widespread history in the world of varying success in the cultivation of that value. It has had ups and downs everywhere including in the West and the fact that the West has been able to make excellent use of that mode of decision making over the last two and a half centuries or so is a matter for global celebration rather than for it being used as the basis of a parochial theory of a purely Western notion of democracy ignoring our global past. It’s particularly important to see that democracy does demand not just voting but also a civil society that is not fragmented into little boxes of communities.

Sen questions the very notion inherent of a debate of whether Western countries can “impose” democracy on Iraq or any other country.

While he is the first to concede that modern democracy and public reasoning have been tremendously influenced by the European Enlightenment, the French revolution and the American revolution, he dismisses the attempt to extrapolate backwards from this and posit a quintessential dichotomy between the West and non-West. Sen says it makes more sense to take a broader view of the social and political context which makes democracy possible.

Democracy is not about ballots and votes but about public deliberation and reasoning by what John Stuart Mill called government by discussion. While public reasoning did flourish in ancient Greece, it also did so in several other civilizations, sometimes spectacularly so. For example some of the earliest open general meetings aimed specifically at settling disputes between different points of view took place in India beginning in the 6th century BC in the so-called Buddhist councils, the first having been held in 6th century BC where adherents of the different points of view got together to argue out their differences. Ashoka in Pataliputra also was the author of the first primitively formed Robert’s Rules of Order about how to conduct a discussion and how to listen to each other.

Public deliberation and reasoning flourished in the Middle East as well, he said.

Middle Eastern history and the history of Muslim people also include a great many accounts of public discussion and political participation through dialogue. In the Muslim kingdom centered around Cairo, Baghdad or Istanbul, or in Iraq or India, or for that matter Spain, there were many champions of public discussion such as Caliph al-Rahman III of Cordova in the 10th century whose prime minister, incidentally, was a Jewish intellectual called Hisdai ibn Shaprut or Emperor Akbar of India in the 16th century.

In fact, when at the turn of the 16th century Emperor Akbar was completing his codification of the right of religious freedom for all, and also arranging dialogues between Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains and others including atheists, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in Campo de Fieri, in fact, because of apostasy exactly at the same time.

(Right): Prof. Amartya Sen with the UC Santa Cruz Foundation medal, the highest honor awarded by the university.

In today’s troubled world, the need was to rekindle in our tense, riven societies a more tempered, nuanced and reasoned view of society and its members that acknowledges and accepts our many different identities, instead of drawing lines on the basis of one particular aspect, Sen urges.

The hope of harmony in the contemporary world lies to a great extent in a clear understanding in the pluralities of human identity and in the appreciation that they cut across each other and work against a sharp separation along one single line of hardened and impervious division.

After his lecture, Sen was presented with the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Medal — the highest honor awarded by the university. Acting chancellor George Blumenthal noted that this tribute is granted to “individuals of exceptionally distinguished achievement whose life and contributions to society illustrate the ideals and the vision of UC Santa Cruz.”

The Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture at UCSC was established in 2001 by Foundation president Anuradha Luther Maitra to honor the memory of her late husband who was a distinguished scientist and visionary entrepreneur. His lecture was followed by a screening of Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World).

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