Not the Only Category
Amartya Sen makes an excellent point, one I’ve seen him make often before (but it needs to be made over and over again, because it goes against a very strong stream of current opinion and it doesn’t make much headway), in this article in the New York Review of Books.
The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world’s population into distinct “civilizations” defined largely by religion (for example Samuel Huntington’s partitioning of the world into such categories as “Western civilization,” “Islamic civilization,” and “Hindu civilization”). There is, as a result, a widespread inclination to understand people mainly through their religious beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science, mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray the broad civilization of India as “Hindu civilization”—to use the phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu political activists.
Exactly. I think I’ve made a similar point here quite a few times – but again (and considerably less surprisingly, what with my not being a Nobel economist and not writing in the NYRB and all) it doesn’t do any good so I just go on making it. This radical simplification has a lot of disastrous consequences, some of which are very noticeable indeed in what one might call contemporary hegemonic discourse. I wouldn’t call it that, but one might. One of the most noticeable is the intense reluctance on the part of a lot of leftists to criticise Islam, for fear that that will be taken as criticising Muslims which will be taken as criticising brown or Third World people – with the immensely dreary and discouraging result that leftist, feminist, gay, secular, atheist, dissident people from e.g. Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and the like are ignored or even rebuked by people who ought to be their allies. Another is probably the (mostly unexamined, unaware, taken for granted) idea that religion is and should be and must be immune from criticism in a way that other systems of ideas are not. The over-developed sensitivity and caution and tact about saying any religion and especially Islam might have some truly bad ideas right at its core.
Where did this contemporary tendency that Sen mentions come from, anyway? Is it just a short-cut? Just journalistic laziness? Is it just that it’s faster to say ‘Muslim countries’ than it is to say ‘countries with large or majority Muslim populations’? Or is it more to do with underlying ideas about identity politics? Or is it both? Or both plus more? I don’t know, but I wish everyone would point it out and disagree with it every time it appears until it stops appearing.
I recently dropped out of a program to get my social science-history teaching credential. One thing that really got me down was how this arbitrary division of “civilizations” has now been codified and made into a legal requirement for the teaching of world history in California. Maybe I’ll go back to the education field when all this standards garbage passes.
I think in a sense that intellectual threads that interconnect different people are harder to identify than religious ones; not necessarily because they are less important but because they can be so intrinsic that they float under the radar. I think it must be a hugely rewarding and exciting area to study ,as anthropology, social science or through the humanities: tracing the relative weighting of certain types of achievement (ingenuity against reliability, say) to intellectual movements or the particular timing of scientific advancement; how the trade of ideas shaped the cultures they found a home in.
But I don’t think it’s just journalistic laziness that people generally don’t approach the world in this way. Firstly, I wonder whether there is a coherent and useful vocabulary to describe these differences: is there a word to describe a culture whose intellectual development was originally informed by a plenitude of different sources, but then was chiefly insular? Or what to name a culture where the advent of science was not pitted against the previous approaches to knowledge? I suspect there are, but I’m unaware of them, and they certainly seem more ethereal concepts, being rooted in ‘what happened then that is causing now’ than ‘they are Hindus’.
The other issue is that it may not be possible to carve nature at these particular joints: perhaps that the passage of ideas and the development of intellectual fashions is not discrete enough to plausibly claim “India is the x civilisation, whilst Europe is the Y and Russia the X and P”. Or whatever.
The neatness about religions is that they are discrete and exclusive.
Yeah. And of course that’s also part of the problem – the neatness and exclusiveness. That neatness and exclusiveness are achieved at the cost of immense inaccuracy, for one thing. India is far from all Hindu, and putative ‘Muslim’ countries inevitably contain non-theists, who are simply erased by the description.
True about the difficulty of naming, or labeling – of summing up such complicated qualities in one word. So it would be good if people would just give up doing that. Geographic names ought to be enough by way of one-word labels.
I’m going all Sapir-Whorf, here, but what can I do? I do think that if we keep being told that various countries are Muslim [or Hindu, Christian, etc] countries we 1) come to believe it and 2) get a grossly distorted idea of those countries and the people in them as a result.
On a smaller scale, we see this same stupid mindset at work in the recent U.S. post-election brouhaha. Liberals and conservatives, Dems and GOPers, are acting as if the red-blue divisions among the states are absolute and immutable categories. Distraught liberals are vowing never to speak to Red-staters ever again. Angry conservative midwesterners are denouncing Blue states as hateful dens of iniquity. Yadda yadda yadda. In reality, however, many of these places are only marginally pro-Dem or pro-GOP. Ridiculous! Can I stay with you guys in London till this idiocy blows over?
Oh, God, I know, that red state blue state thing just drives me insane. It is so stooopid. I mean just for one thing (as you point out) it’s not as if the vote is 100% either red or blue in any of those places. And we’re supposed to have more than one party, that’s not supposed to be cause for weeping and wailing. And we’ve always been ‘divided’ – duh! Why wouldn’t we be? We’re not clones after all! And
pant pant
Sure, you can stay with Jeremy in London until all this blows over, but I’m afraid I’m back here where it’s still blowing. I was in London only for a brief touristy stay, I don’t live there.
(But doncha just envy them? Their political campaigns last two weeks!! Can you imagine the bliss…)
You can stay with me, Karl. But you probably wouldn’t like it. I live smack dab in Berkeley, the Grand Central Station of blue-state freak-out. Personally I’m enjoying watching the liberal Dems and the Christian right try to outdo each other in paranoia and maudlin self-pity. It’s frickin high-larious!
Thanks, Connie, but I already live in the Bay Area. That’d be a busman’s holiday.