Review of Amartya Sen's "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny"

This book is interested in the question of human identity, its inherent multiplicity, and the choices that we make in regard to aligning ourselves with certain identities over others. We all have multiple identities, which Sen repeatedly points out. For example, he says of himself that "I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in an after-life" (p. 19). To what extent do these identities compete with one another? And in which ways are our senses of self and community vitiated when, instead of recognizing the fullness of all of these aspects, we recognize just one or two (for example, religion or nationality)?

Seeing the world as just sets of different religions imposes a "divisive power of classificatory priority" on the world which distorts and misshapes understanding of the people in it. When we point out that a terrorist is Muslim (or overemphasize that aspect of their identity), we fall into a trap of identify someone by just one identity - often the most inflammatory, controversial one. Suggesting that "not all Muslims are violent," which sounds like a helpful corrective measure, commits the same fallacy of associating one aspect of someone's identity - their religion - with their behavior. This is one of the fundamental mistakes that Samuel Huntingdon makes in his influential book "Clash of Civilizations." In referring to various regions as "the Christian world," "the Muslim world," or "the Hindu world," his conclusions are largely drawn from skewed perceptions of one aspect of a community's identity.

While Sen hardly touches on this explicitly, it is obvious that this can have important consequences for how the media covers news. In a time where even the most important stories get only a few minutes of coverage on a national broadcast, it is easy to see how the complexities of both individuals and communities are ignored. Historical misunderstanding can result just as frequently, as when the tradition of democracy, or religious toleration, is identified solely with Europe or the Occident. Sen discusses some of these just before the book starts to go into an irrelevant tailspin at approximately its halfway point.

These ideas are important. However, there isn't a lot here that most intelligent people who have considered these things couldn't have concluded for themselves. It's already more than a little obvious how detrimental this for people who consume a lot of news - which is what probably spurred many thoughtful people to think about this issue in the first place. Also, this book is about twice as long as it needs to be. The last sections of the book, about globalization and multiculturalism, are tangentially related to the book's thesis but really need another book of their own. Sen said early on in the book that he would emphasize the role of choice-making in the book, so more on social choice theory would have been appreciated, instead of the aimless wandering from topic to topic that is all the second half of the book provides. This would have been a good, if uncontroversial, article aimed at a more scholarly audience. There was no practical use in doubling its length to make a book. Unfortunately, this seems to be a common trait in Norton's "Issues of Our Time" series, as Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Cosmopolitanism" suffers from similar shortcomings.

Review of Allen G. Debus' "Man and Nature in the Renaissance"

These days "magic" seems quite separate from the pursuit of science; Paracelsian iatrochemistry sounds about as scientific as the use of an ouija board. But to divorce these two different kinds practices - the art of magic, the power to conjure, to discern the occult "mathematical secrets of the universe" on the one hand and what we would consider rigorous, empirical observation on the other - is quite ahistorical and misunderstands the spirit of science in the Renaissance. Allen Debus, professor for many years at the University of Chicago and historian of early modern science, drives this point home repeatedly in each of the general area discussed in this book.

The topics covered are ones that you would expect to be found in a book that summarizes the history of major scientific developments from approximately 1400 to 1650 - the study of nature (especially flora and fauna), the increased understanding of human physiology, cosmology, and a brief precis explaining the development of the scientific method generally speaking. 

Many of the Renaissance humanists, most notably Paracelsus, wholly rejected the scholasticism and Aristotelianism of previous generations and wished to infuse science and the study of nature with a renewed appreciation for mysticism and alchemy. While a religious understanding of the universe was utterly central to Paracelsian science, he simultaneously emphasized observation, which had been critically ignored by Aristotle and his studious promulgators. (His interest in chemistry, especially iatrochemistry, speaks to his interest in observation.) Aristotle's appreciation of science had been vitiated of all divine wisdom and knowledge by his paganism; Paracelsus wished to correct for this by suffusing science with neo-Platonic, Hermetic, and alchemical texts. He thought that the mathematical formalism of science resembled scholasticism, and he avoided it like the plague. 

Empiricism and observation critically improved a number of scientific areas, not just alchemical medicine. In the fifteenth century, crude medieval woodcuts of plants based on Pliny's centuries-old descriptions dominated the scholarship of botany. The drawings of Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner and Italian botanist Aldrovandi were much more accurate than previous ones, and therefore could greatly benefit both botanists and physicians alike.

In the area of medicine, matters had similarly stagnated. The practices of Galen predominated for a millennium after Galen's death because of their wide use and various translations. Debus discusses the historical developments contributed by those from Vesalius to William Harvey, the first person to accurately characterize blood flow in the human body.

This book is a wonderful introduction for two reasons: it covers the wide range of what were considered the sciences in the few centuries Debus is most concerned with without overwhelming the non-specialist reader, and he continually stresses the continuity between what we would today consider “magic” and empirical, rational, deductive reasoning, or what we would be more likely today to associate with science. He does this effectively in every chapter, and as someone who has a longstanding interest in the history of medieval and Renaissance science, it is refreshing to see an author who isn’t trying to retrospectively make modern science out of something supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus. He lets the two stand side by side in whatever tension they might have, and deals with them as they are, not as he wants them to be.