A word from Amartya Sen…
It is officially Blog Action Day 2008. I have just gotten a chance to sit down and post some thoughts so that Idaclare can become a part of a global conversation about poverty. Below is an excerpt from a lecture by Amartya Sen, a philosopher, economist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. I have read his book, Inequality Reexamined, and I was searching for some of his thoughts about poverty. I like this excerpt because it relates the idea of poverty to our broken world today–please read and comment.
To talk about “the Islamic world” or “the Western world” is already to adopt an impoverished vision of humanity as unalterably divided. In fact, civilizations are hard to partition in this way, given the diversities within each society as well as the linkages among different countries and cultures. For example, describing India as a “Hindu civilization” misses the fact that India has more Muslims than any other country except Indonesia and possibly Pakistan. It is futile to try to understand Indian art, literature, music, food or politics without seeing the extensive interactions across barriers of religious communities. These include Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Parsees, Christians (who have been in India since at least the fourth century, well before England’s conversion to Christianity), Jews (present since the fall of Jerusalem), and even atheists and agnostics. Sanskrit has a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language. Speaking of India as a Hindu civilization may be comforting to the Hindu fundamentalist, but it is an odd reading of India…
Dividing the world into discrete civilizations is not just crude. It propels us into the absurd belief that this partitioning is natural and necessary and must overwhelm all other ways of identifying people. That imperious view goes not only against the sentiment that “we human beings are all much the same,” but also against the more plausible understanding that we are diversely different. For example, Bangladesh’s split from Pakistan was not connected with religion, but with language and politics.
Each of us has many features in our self-conception. Our religion, important as it may be, cannot be an all-engulfing identity. Even a shared poverty can be a source of solidarity across the borders. The kind of division highlighted by, say, the so-called “antiglobalization” protesters, whose movement is, incidentally, one of the most globalized in the world, tries to unite the underdogs of the world economy and goes firmly against religious, national or “civilizational” lines of division.
The main hope of harmony lies not in any imagined uniformity, but in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions into impenetrable civilizational camps. Political leaders who think and act in terms of sectioning off humanity into various “worlds” stand to make the world more flammable – even when their intentions are very different. They also end up, in the case of civilizations defined by religion, lending authority to religious leaders seen as spokesmen for their “worlds.” In the process, other voices are muffled and other concerns silenced. The robbing of our plural identities not only reduces us; it impoverishes the world.
I think we have basic commonality in the fact that we are human. We all need food, shelter, community, meaning. Where we get our meaning often comes from the things that set us apart, or the groups we belong to. The most fundamental group is family. We have a name, a first and last name, that sets us apart from other families and other members within our family.
| Posted 8 months, 4 weeks agoSo Amartya is saying that to look at the world as being made up of sectioned-off civilizations, to put people in bright-lined categories of, say, religious traditions, is not a helpful place to start. It’s not helpful because it cuts against the realities that we are all human and we are all individuals. Maybe it’s better to start there — to acknowledge, appreciate, try to understand the things a 27 year old born in Texas, USA shares in common with a 40 year old born in Kerala, India; and to acknowledge, appreciate and try to understand all the things that make those two people so different. For me I think a place to start is to simply be interested in people who are very different than me. So often I ignore those who are different because I don’t want to take the time to think about the differences and the similarities. Seems like simply being more interested is a place to start when it comes to thinking about poverty.
| Posted 8 months, 4 weeks agoI loved this excerpt that you included. It is so well-written about the way we so easily label geographic areas and people under one name, thus giving them a singular identity. In education school, I heard a lot about “people first language” which says that instead of putting the label before the person, we need to put the person before the label. For example, “students with special needs” instead of “special needs students” Sounds hokey, but it communicates something deeper–that we as individuals are more than a label. In reality, it does seem that our similarities are deeper and more meaningful than our differences, often identified by the labels we grow up with and at times name other people with.
| Posted 8 months, 4 weeks agoThis excerpt is important to read during this time, when we frequently hear people from certain parts of the globe labeled or lumped into one type of person and when our foreign policy decisions are being discussed by political candidates often using very generalistic and stereotypical terms.