One book that travelled with me to Istanbul was Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence. His words, organised in deceptively simply prose together with a disarmingly simple premise are extremely potent. He argues that we have this unfortunate tendency to reduce our group membership to one: Serbian, Muslim, Christian, Marxist, cyclist; and then try to force a vice-like conformity based on that one membership:
"Oh you can’t expect anything else from him, he’s a cyclist."
Amartya Sen usefully bashed away at my mind until some chinks of light got in – we sign up to many groupings, many beliefs: social, religious, philosophical, professional, footbal teams – and to reduce it to one is an act of violence.
We need words to help us see:
What wonders are conjured up by this simple station sign?
I was forced to admit to my own tendency to reduce others to certain key identities (I have long found it difficult to allow Tory and human to exist in the same package – something to work on, I guess), whilst at the same time wishing to avoid identifying myself in order to maintain freedom of thought and action.
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