Sen Sri Lanka and sense

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(August 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Armartya Sen was a much respected man in my worldview, but he went down more than a notch in my estimation after I read his rather long essay in book-form titled “Identity and violence: the illusion of destiny.’’

Sen according to columnist David Arranovich writing recently in a British newspaper, is classed by some institution or another as the 8th ranked intellectual of the world, a fact which Sen himself is said to have modesty dismissed saying “we were among the first ten.’’

In his essay on identity politics, Sen must be addressing the mildly mentally challenged, because he seems to repeat in various ways the rather simple and acceptable concept that people have multiple identities, and cannot be defined exclusively by their religious or national identities alone.

As he says, a Muslim can also be a woman, and a mathematician for instance at the same time, making her a person of multiple identities not deserving to be defined for all intents and purposes as a Muslim and a Muslim alone.

Sen is damned right, but in his unctuous politeness, seems rather intellectually unwilling to challenge dominant power structures of the world, which condemn people to these religious or national slots - - identities — for the insidious, self-serving purposes of the self-same power structures.

We shall come to that, but to digress, living in Britain and being celebrated as an Oxonian Professor and onetime Master and whatnot in some Inn or other, Sen seems too timid to stand out of the system entirely, that brought him the level of recognition that garners him a slot among the top ten global intellectuals.

Blair’s relentless pursuit

I say so because he says, tongue firmly out of cheek, that he admires Tony Blair’s relentless pursuit for justice, or words to that effect. In the same breath he seems to mumble some opposition to the UK’s Iraqi invasion, as if this same Tony Blair has nothing to do with that type of global politics which depended on the same kind of identity delineations (“Islamic terrorists”?) that Sen deplores.

Sen wishes that religious fanatics did not define people in terms of their religious identities alone, and wishes that patrons of British society and British politicians for instance, do not slot people into racial and religious pigeon holes, claming that if each person belongs to his own convenient slot “we can then be a mosaic of religious entities and divergent cultures.’’

So, it seems that Sen is the ultimate savant of the melting pot doctrine, though he articulates that vision in less evocative but more suitably turgid intellectually resonant jargon-strewn lingo.

While he challenges all and sundry including the rulers of Britain and the arbiters of the world order from Western to occidental elites for compartmentalizing men and women, and condemning them to singular identities of religion or nation, he seems to do so with kid gloves on, condemning individuals for their individual compartmentalising tendencies.

You would never catch him, for instance, saying that almost the entire world —- the powerful elite leadership of the world that is — for instance, recently defined the Sinhalse as perpetuating a civil war against the Tamils, and exhorting that the Sinhalese state be punished for this act.

Iraq was bombed on the basis that Iraqis are somehow responsible together with Osama bin Laden for laying waste the New York World Trade Centre on 9/11.

Multiple identities

In other words, its Iraqi citizen Farook or Abdullah’s religious identity that is being used by some other extraneous force to flatten his country, take away his freedoms and perhaps plunder his oil.

When that is the case, Farook or Abdullah cannot muster opposition to this extraneous challenge by seeking recourse in his “mathematician’’ identity or his “musician’’ identity, some of those multiple identities that Sen takes such pains to say are inherent in a person, and which he also holds, have been so painfully submerged in the face of this all consuming “national’’ or ‘religious’’ identities that people are forced to inherit. Very few people want to be identified by their religious identities or their national or racial identities, but then, when they are for example, physically (..or militarily) challenged just because they are Sinhalese, or when they are being attacked in the main because they are Muslims, it is difficult for them to stand on their heads and say “but no we are musicians’’ unless they want to collectively have their heads blown off, musical part, left sphere right sphere spatial thinking grey cells and all of it.

Why doesn’t Sen point out to any of these aspects even remotely in his essay which sort of lumps everyone together as equal offenders and says, you know, we are all guilty of this identity politics as the next man is. Maybe partially true, but the fact remains that a lot of the violence done to people by external forces is (a) on the basis of religious and national identities and (b) by people who have no reason to be antagonistic about these identities, but nevertheless regularly use them as a handle to plunder other countries for their spoils or to plunder them for some other sort of geopolitical or strategic benefit or advantage.

I think the moral cupidity of this vastly admired intellectual Sen cannot just be sourced to timidity (Aaranovich paints him as a pacifist and a saint like non-confrontational figure...) but at least 5/8ths sleight of hand.

He is loath to take on in any meaningful and substantial way the milieus which afforded him the space to be an intellectual of his measure of recognition — in other words one does not become Master at Oxford for nothing, one does it to protect Oxford’s system of values and gloss over the flaws that milieu and the surrounding milieu helped create and continues to help foster. Flaws such as, for instance, the views of Tony Blair which Sen even sees, alarmingly, as being justice seeking and truth seeking values!

Surely, Sen seems to be in some Zen like somnambulist state of denial...?

-Courtesy: Lakbima News

-Sri Lanka Guardian