Identity and Violence
Reading about the news from Britain today, about the planned bombing plot at Heathrow, the question that returned to me was one that I had come across in a review recently: “Why do identity politics so often rest on hatreds that do as much damage to the aggressors as to their victims?” (The same question appears with greater force when you think about the distaster unfolding in Lebanon.) In the review, Alan Ryan had this to say about those who, sympathetically but critically, try to understand the outrage of the humiliated citizens of our world:
Both Sen and Appiah take two things for granted. The first is that identity matters—that people need roots in some cultural soil or other, even if they should not be so rooted that they cannot migrate physically, linguistically, socially, and culturally. The second is that we all possess multiple identities—that a man will not just be gay, but gay and Catholic and Croatian. What neither writer does is provide a wholly satisfactory account of the ways in which, and the conditions under which, one of those identities swallows up the rest. Sen points out over and over again that we may attach importance to all our identities without slighting one or other of them, although he acknowledges that some forms of affiliation or group identification are likely to be much stronger than others. But on the subject of why people so easily forget this and attack those who seem different, he says little more than that trouble breaks out when someone with an interest in fomenting violence persuades people—poor Hindu laborers in Gujarat, perhaps—that the only thing that matters is that they are Hindu, and that all their misfortunes are to be laid at the door of their Muslim enemies.
The puzzle remains: Why do we succumb so readily to appeals based on the irrational forms of identity—ethnic, racial, religious—rather than to appeals based on the rational forms— economic above all? Or, to put it in dramatic terms: Why do identity politics so often rest on hatreds that do as much damage to the aggressors as to their victims? Until we have a deeper understanding of the answers to that question, both Professor Sen and Professor Appiah are somewhat in the position of explaining what it would be like to behave better to an audience that often seems, unhappily, incapable of following their advice.
