Sen's Identity and Violence: a review

The big idea in Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence is simple and true. We all have multiple identities, many different groups with which we identify:

I can be, at the same time, an Asian, a British citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-brahmin...This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong.

It is, he says, cruel, tyrannical and stupid to reduce us to single identities. And yet this is what British multi-culturalism - which he re-names called "plural monoculturalism" - does. It reduces people to members of religious communities. He complains:

Must a person's relation to Britain be mediated through the "culture of the family in which he or she has been born?...A nation can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments, with citizens assigned fixed places.

This, like much else in the book - such as the demonstration that "western values" of tolerance and democracy are not truly western - is excellent. But there are four issues which aren't tackled fully.
1. How do some identities become more salient than others? Take Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers. He was a son, brother, Yorkshireman, Englishman, university graduate, shopworker, Muslim. So why did he choose to identify himself so strongly with just one portion of his identity - Islamism - that he was willing to kill? Sen is excellent on the pathology of the "colonized mind". But is this the whole story?
2. Is my word "choose" here the right one? How far can we choose our identity? Clearly, there are limits.  Sen is right and wise to oppose the two polar opposites - the wholly rational, freely choosing economic man on the one hand and the person fully constituted by a single "culture" on the other. But what happens between these two polar opposites? Do people choose identities? If so, to what cognitive biases are they prone? What rationality do they use to choose?
3. What tricks do rulers use to manipulate us into single boxes? Sen says:

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

True. But this misses the important point - that it was so easy for this multi-faceted human being to become a mono-identitied murderer. How did this happen? What can we do to stop it? Why is it so easy (apparently) to get people to identify with religion and ethnicity, when Marxists have generally failed for decades to get them to identify with their class?
4. Power. Sen does not fully challenge a key fact - reducing people to single identities is in the interests of our rulers. If people are seen only as Muslims, "community leaders" can get power and influence by claiming to speak for the "community," in a way they could not if being Muslim was seen as only one part of people's identity. And politicians go along with this, becase it's easier to manage people if they are boxed and labeled.
This raises a question. If we are to regard each other as we should - as multi-identitied human beings, rather than carriers of a mono-culture - don't we have to change social structures as well as thought processes? Shouldn't we break down the hiearchies that have an interest in reducing people to mere symbols?

Comments

[Barry Marshall]

"Why is it so easy (apparently) to get people to identify with religion and ethnicity, when Marxists have generally failed for decades to get them to identify with their class?"

Of course the "other lot" - the ruling class - have never had any troule idenitfying with their class, but that's just one issue!

For me the "Marxist" project is about going beyond these definitions: we are and we aren't working class. Being working class, having to sell one's intellectual or physical labour for a living, is something imposed on us by capital and reproduced on a daily basis.

I take the point about fixed identities serving the interests of politicians and self-appointed leaders. In a confusing and fractured world clinging to one facet of our existence might make sense to some. Your ideas about the centre-less and open-endedness of who and what we are seem to lean towards the non-identitarian philosophy of Theodor Adorno.

[strange]

This might be a bit fasicious but maybe Shehzad Tanweer was deploying comparitive advantage. He felt it was much easier for him to be a good Islamist than a good son, or a good brother, or be good at any of his other identities. So he specialised.

Reaching the Islamist ideal simply meant strapping on a few pounds of explosives and nails then setting them off in place crowded with people he didn't know. Being a good son or brother required a lifetime of hard work. Being a good Islamist was therefore much much easier than any of his other identities, and claimed to offer better rewards (in the afterlife). So his choice could be seen as rational, in a deeply twisted way.

[Tim Worstall]

'Why is it so easy (apparently) to get people to identify with religion and ethnicity, when Marxists have generally failed for decades to get them to identify with their class?'

Possibly the failure of this part of Marxism is explained within Sen's larger point. That just as we have multiple identities as far as race, culture, background etc go, we also have multiple class identities. We do not therefore identify with any one specific class as at different times and in different situations, we occupy many different ones.

[Phil]

"Why is it so easy (apparently) to get people to identify with religion and ethnicity, when Marxists have generally failed for decades to get them to identify with their class?"

I think a large part of the answer lies in upbringing, and the pre-rational sense of belonging that it confers. Case in point: I would never cross a picket line; my father was rock-solid Labour and his father was a miner (who went on strike in 1926).

Perhaps radicals are born, not made - there's a depressing thought.

[tom zipp]

I wonder if uncovering Shezad Tanweer's salient identity will reveal his terrorist motivations?
In Plato's Republic Book II the ancestor of Gyges is a subject of the ruler of Lydia and a shepard. When he finds a magic ring that allows him to become invisible at his will he becomes an adulterer and a regicide. Is this due to his "salient identity" or his soul? Would any shepard in Lydia have done the same or was it only this particular ancestor of Gyges?