Illusion of destiny

Amartya Sen

IDENTITIES: Amartya Sen speaks on his latest book and its relevance to the world today.

If Amartya Sen is surprised to have the last word in the subtitle of his latest book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, seized upon as a way to start an interview on it, he doesn't show it.

Any Nobel laureate who holds a chair as professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, one may argue, could be asked tangential questions. So: what does he make of that vexatious old question of "free will" versus "predestination"?

"It's quite a difficult subject," he says, after what seems like a nanosecond of reminiscence, "and at one stage I was very interested in it "" and argued that the kind of contrast Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin were doing was somehow misleading, if not wrong."

He wrote about this, eliciting some response from Berlin, who subsequently mentioned him alongside Spinoza as an opponent of his own view ("I was very flattered").

It was the early 1960s.

Sen remains a strong exponent of free will as expressed in terms of freedom of choice, even if influenced by circumstances and constrained by what's permissible and what one is capable of.

By way of identity, for instance, he chooses to assert the identity of an economist or a philosopher (among other things) depending on what is relevant for that particular discussion.

"These are choices, among others, open to me, as are similarly relevant choices for anyone else." As are the positions he takes on issues of politics, parties, ideologies and so on.

"When choices exist, and not to recognise they exist is an epistemic mistake and also a root of irresponsibility "" if we attribute our choices to others."

Predestination, on the other hand, Sen just does not believe in. But that, he says, is not the same as "determinism". Between free will and determinism, Sen sees no conflict. It is possible, for instance, that someone who knows him well enough can predict the choices he makes.

This, he is happy enough to accept, indeed assert. "I can exercise free choice," he explains, "and yet somebody could predict my behaviour... so determinism in the sense of scientific determinism is consistent with free will."

If Sen's book makes a proposition to the individual reader, it's with a similar sense of clarity: choose your identity of your own free will. But it also says something to the current world order, as it were: don't slap single-identity labels on people.

As Sen elaborates, he may think it very important in some specific context to assert the identity of an economist, a professor and of somebody left-of-centre... but anyone trying to predict his choices on the basis of any one single description to the exclusion of others would be making an error.

Further, "Nor is every moral argument an identity-based idea." And trying to squeeze him into any of those discrete boxes would thus be futile, both because there are many identities a person has and also because a person is not guided only by identity.

But even civilisations are being put into boxes these days, with scientific rationality itself coming to be portrayed as something of an "immaculate Western conception", to use a term from the book. Is this by oversight or strategic choice?

"It's certainly not a strategic choice, but not entirely an oversight either," says Sen, adding, "It is primarily an epistemic mistake, and it is from this that a moral mistake may follow."

The result, perhaps, of a subsconscious predisposition "to think of the world as isolated pieces", continues Sen, no less worried now than earlier about the way even academia ignores the cross-cultural ferment that gave us the intellectual world of the past millennium.

The sad part is that vivisectional education, to use a Gandhian term from his book, doesn't look anywhere near ending anytime soon. Not so long as Samuel Huntington's "clash" thesis claims so many adherents around the world.

Is the "war on terror", then, the way it's being waged, a failure of secular reasoning as much as Huntington's thesis is? "It is a failure of secular reasoning "" and also a failure of clear-headed thinking. It reflects a big mistake in policy," in Sen's view. Towards a corrective, it is imperative to clear the current confusion about the causes of violence.

Addressing that could be part of a broader globalisation challenge, of finding a way for economic benefits (and intellectual recognition) to be shared more equitably across the world. Market forces alone, Sen is clear, are just not enough.

"The market economy is important "" and yet exclusive reliance on it is a big mistake. It's one among many important institutions."

Appropriately enough, an ode to the pursuit of reason is the climactic note, in a sense, of his book. Might leadership of this pursuit be critical to eventual economic success? "I don't know," replies Sen, declaring himself enough of a fan of reason to value it for itself, and in possession of "no proof to say that it must, of necessity, be better for economic progress".

Yet, he adds, "I would be surprised if the pursuit of reason were counterproductive to economic progress."

At least we know on which side to err, on balance of expectations, if err we do.

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Cross disciplinary insight

Amartya Sen won his Nobel prize for an achievement in what is broadly called Welfare Economics "" for a Social Choice Theory breakthrough that re-examined something called Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, itself based on some of the social choice questions raised by the 18th century thinker and mathematician Marquis de Condercet.

Sen changed the prevailing outlook on welfare economics by bringing "interpersonal comparisons of individual well-being" into the picture. "In formal philosophy," he says, "the line between interpersonal comparisons and measurement of personal utility has never been sharply drawn, and cannot be so drawn." It made the difference.