[Assam] Amartya Sen on the 'Clash of Civilizations' - Wash. Post

Mon Jun 12 16:00:10 PDT 2006

Dear Ram,

Appended below please find the "Preface" to the drama NIRVANA. I had to deal with the debate of Huntington's "singular identity" vs. Amartya Sen's "many identities" in this Preface. The approach may be considered as an alternative to what Fouad Ajami has tabulated as hopelessness. In the PREFACE, I used the collapse of post-second-world-war dramatic art as an indicator of the same hopelessness. 

We Indians need not fall for this. That's what the drama NIRVANA stands for. Indian philosophy is positive, self-corrective and self-sustaining. At the grass-root, Indians see the Universe as True, Conscious and Joyful (sat-chit-ananda) --- something not obvious to the Western mind. The drama NIRVANA is now under print. I'll appreciate if netters send me theirs comments, starting with the PREFACE below. My efforts will be successful only when the young generations will enjoy a peaceful world.

With love to everybody,
Himendra

APPENDIX: Preface to drama NIRVANA:

PREFACE

Being published in 2006, the drama NIRVANA is a desperate attempt to apply the wisdom of Particle Physics for preventing global terrorism that causes slaughter of human beings.

Terrorism nurtures fanaticism, which leads people to differentiate themselves into different identities. In his March 2006 book "Identity & Violence", Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winning Harvard Professor, has suggested many identities of a human being as an answer to the "singular identity" advocated by another Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington who predicted a major intercivilizational war between core states in his influential 1996 book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order." Professor Huntington based his argument on a system of singular categorization of human beings along his so-called civilizational lines, which closely follow religious divisions made up with cults and sects.

In this debate of Huntington's "singular identity" vs. Amartya Sen's "many identities", the drama NIRVANA invokes the wisdom of "no identity" from particle physics. 

Human Consciousness, first observed when a caveman etched a hunting graphic on a cave wall --- precursor of Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings and scientific imaginations ---- gradually developing into a faculty of logic and science, helps us today travel two million light years to the Andromeda Galaxy with our mind in the drama NIRVANA. When we look back, the Earth appears as a mere dust particle. We are all dust particles, rather subatomic electronic particles, getting arranged and rearranged at every birth and death.  

As I finished reading Dr. Fritjof Capra's momentous book "The Tao of Physics" in 1975, I attended lectures of Swami Sarvagatananda, who taught us the Advaita philosophy at Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston in 1976 to 1980. Many of my thoughts were initially shaped from those experiences. So, I dedicate the drama NIRVANA to Swamiji. 

The wisdom of "The Tao of Physics" did not penetrate into the minds of religious fanatics. Foreseeing the coming of religious and sectarian terrorism, I wrote the drama NIRVANA with a US-Europe background and copyrighted it in 1990. The recent version is rewritten with an Indian background focusing on hereditary caste system in India, similar to racism all over the world. The blind folly of "identity by racism" has already caused the Second World War in 1939-1945 at the cost of thirty million lives. It is a matter of great frustration that, half a century later, subtracting "civility" from the word "civilization," some scholars advocate for "remaking of World Order" based on racial, cultural, religious, sectarian identities along the so called "civilizational" lines. 

Pinning hope in the future, NIRVANA is targeted at younger audience, fondly remembering how my son grew up with his Star Wars movies which had significant impact on his thought process.  However, when it came to its dissemination by professional drama groups, particularly in India, it had to be tested against the "Theatre of the Absurd" that they have imbibed from the post-Second-World-War Europe. 

The world has not yet recovered from the post-Second-World-War pessimism. It may be worthwhile to examine one indicator : the loss of the theatre art.  

The term "Theater of the Absurd" was coined by drama critic Martin Esslin, who derived it from an essay 'Myth of Sisyphus', written in 1942 by Albert Camus, a tragic figure witnessing the moral collapse of the Western Culture during the Second World War. 

After the First World War (1914-1918), all the hopes that Western intellectuals pinned on the radical social revolution were shattered when Stalin turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian dictatorship. To assuage Germany who suffered from the war penalties forced by the Treaty of Versailles, rise of Hitler was naively tolerated by the Western intellectuals. However, they very soon found out the immorality practiced by Hitler by his widespread untruthfulness and denial of treaties which ultimately led to the Second World War, during which Hitler continued to commit unbelievable barbarism, mass murder and genocide. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the intellectuals observed the spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. The root causes that disintegrated all previously held firm beliefs of the Western civilization now reappear as "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order" rationalizing indirectly the cult of terrorism in modern era.

Focusing on spiritual emptiness in their "absurd" plays, the dramatists like Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter and others saw the human situation as "basically meaningless and absurd." They all contributed to the view that "man was inhabiting a universe with which he was out of step." According to these intellectuals, the meaning of the Universe was indecipherable. Man's place in the Universe was without any purpose whatsoever. 

India did not have this problem. Indian philosophy is positive, self-corrective and self-sustaining. At the grass-root, Indians see the Universe as True, Conscious and Joyful (sat-chit-ananda) --- something not obvious to the Western mind. It is true that India did go through the sufferings of the two world wars and communal rioting created by non-Indian thought, and it is also true that India did degenerate throughout the eight hundred years of foreign rule, but India never lost its soul. At the time when Hitler was hatching his plans for secret  rearmament with camouflaged war tanks and airplanes (1922-1934), Mahatma Gandhi was perfecting his technique of a non-violent struggle and surprised the world with his Salt March (1931). 

Unfortunately, today many intellectuals in India copy their Western counterparts blindly. The field of drama has been a major victim. The atmosphere of Indian drama today is overwhelmed by the absurd dramas copying Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and others. Most of the new dramas are based on exaltation and euphemizing of the defunct and illogical postulations of Freudian psychology. 

The gap between the intellectuals and common people is widening every day. I would like to cite one example here. In his Nobel-Prize winning drama of 1953, Samuel Beckett presented two vagabonds "Waiting for Godot" which kept the western audience spellbound because every person in the audience had been "waiting"  for the second-coming of Christ as the last ray of hope deep in their mind. In India, this feeling is absent. The Indian audience failed to respond to "Waiting for Godot" to a great dismay of the importers. 

Carrying the torch from "The Tao of Physics", the drama NIRVANA is a journey to Truth, Consciousness and Joy (sat-chit-ananda) through the path of particle physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, the climax being the Truth seen in the Chandogya Upanishad "Whatever is Sky so is the Love"  (yadeva kham tadeva kam iti), resolved into the ideology of unconditional love (niskama prema) to everybody, where all the barriers of hereditary caste system and racism disappear, all identities vanish, and the world becomes a joyful place.

My efforts will be successful only when the young generations will enjoy a peaceful world.

Himendra Thakur

May 17, 2006

 . 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ram Sarangapani 
  To: ASSAMNET 
  Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 11:30 AM
  Subject: [Assam] Amartya Sen on the 'Clash of Civilizations' - Wash. Post

  If there really isn't a Clash of Civilizations as Sen claims, how does he explain away the constant and continuing clashes amongst religions.

  Sen, does, however make a point in saying that 'civilizations' are not that cut & dried, and there are many influences and mixes. But by looking at the situation in today's context, there are some clearly defined broad categories of religions. 

  --Ram

  Enemies, a Love Story
  A Nobel laureate argues that civilizations are not clashing.

  Reviewed by Fouad Ajami
  Sunday, April 2, 2006; BW07

  IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE

  The Illusion of Destiny

  By Amartya Sen

  Norton. 215 pp. $24.95

  Nowadays the economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen travels the world, opinions at the ready. His subjects are rarely economic. In the main, he works "out of area," taking on a wide range of political and social issues that have little to do with the dismal science. He is serene and confident, full of good cheer, ready to see the best in everyone. 

  Over this discursive little book lies the shadow of Sen's formidable Harvard colleague, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with his celebrated theory of the "clash of civilizations." Sen has assigned himself the role of the anti-Huntington: Sen sees Huntington's thesis of cultural conflict yielding a one-dimensional approach to human identity -- and leading to the "civilizational and religious partitioning of the world," which can only occasion greater global disorder. 

  ere, in contrast, is Sen celebrating the complexity of human identity: "The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician," etc. One's civilizational identity is not one's destiny, Sen observes, and civilizational "partitioning" -- seeing the planet culture by culture -- does not capture the messiness of the world. This Earth of ours, he says, is made more "flammable" by warring definitions of human identity, rather than an embrace of the many different facets that make us human. 

  Sen's faith in the multiplicity of claims on human loyalty is admirable, but it can hardly stand up to the fury of the true believers. In our combustible world today, Huntington's outlook has much greater power. His "cartography" of civilizations may have been too sharply drawn and he may have been a bit cavalier about modernity's appeal across cultural lines, but he came forth with a formidable work. Nor did he fail to see the fissures at the heart of particular societies -- hence his category of "torn countries," places like Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where the matter of loyalty and identity is fiercely contested. But Sen needs his straw man, and Huntington is pressed into the role. 

  Sen is a product of Western (British) education. But he sees no clear demarcation between the West and the rest (the language is Huntington's). There is nothing peculiarly Western about democracy, Sen argues. It has global roots; there were antecedents of it in India and in the Muslim world at about the same time when "Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake." In his most intensely argued assertion, Sen sees the democratic inheritance as a truly universal enterprise. "The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas," he writes. "While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world." Western practice was not "sequestered" then, and it has not developed in some "splendid isolation." 

  It is the unease of Islam, of course, and the violence of some of its radical adherents that have given the question of identity its contemporary global relevance. On that issue Huntington was at his most prophetic, writing of Islam's "bloody borders" and of the "youth bulge" in Muslim societies that had unhinged and radicalized the Muslim world. He did so in the early 1990s, and then history -- 9/11 and all that followed -- provided his thesis with cruel compliance. 

  Sen, however, wishes to rescue Islam from this "confinement." He makes his way through Islam's history and its wide geographic sweep in order to find great Muslim practitioners of tolerance and periods of genuine enlightenment. There is Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, who "insisted in the 1590s on the need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged recurrent discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu thinkers, but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists." In the face of the anti-Semitic bigotry of today's radical Islamism, Sen offers the example of Muslim rule in Córdoba and the Iberian Peninsula -- that time of convivencia , where a Judeo-Islamic civilization in court life, letters and philosophy had a genuine flowering.

  Sen works with the anecdote: His potted history is tailored for interfaith dialogues. He writes of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who, when forced to emigrate from "an intolerant Europe" in the 12th century, was able to find "a tolerant refuge in the Arab world" in the court of the great Muslim ruler Saladin. But this will not do as history. Maimonides, born in 1135, did not flee "Europe" for the "Arab world": He fled his native Córdoba in Spain, which was then in the grip of religious-political terror, choking under the yoke of a Berber Muslim dynasty, the Almohads, that was to snuff out all that remained of the culture of convivencia and made the life of Spain's Jews (and of the free spirits among its Muslims) utter hell. Maimonides and his family fled the fire of the Muslim city-states in the Iberian Peninsula to Morocco and then to Jerusalem. There was darkness and terror in Morocco as well, and Jerusalem was equally inhospitable in the time of the Crusader Kingdom. Deliverance came only in Cairo -- the exception, not the rule, its social peace maintained by the enlightened Saladin. 

  Here, for Sen's benefit, is a passage from Maimonides's seminal Epistle to Yemen : "Our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and our strength wanes because of the dire misfortunes that have come upon us in the form of religious persecution in the two ends of the world, the East and the West." Maimonides's geography was Islamic: The East in the Epistle was Yemen, then a battleground between Sunni and Shiite Islam, a place where Jews were being subjected to forced conversions to Islam; the Western lands were the burning grounds of Andalusia. The Almohads' pitiless warriors were in every way the Taliban of their age, the ancestors of today's religious radicals in the world of Islam. They put to the sword the fabled world of Andalusian tolerance, and young Maimonides witnessed the shattering collapse of that culture. There had been Andalusian bliss, and Muslim rulers with Jewish courtiers and poets, and philosophers who believed in the primacy of reason, but that world was scorched. 

  Inspirational history can go only so far; it will not bend to Sen's good cheer. ·

  Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. His books include "The Arab Predicament" and "The Vanished Imam." 

  © 2006 The Washington Post Company

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