200 years ago, at least a couple of people in power took a more imaginative approach…

The potato had been in Europe for a well over a hundred years, but in 1785 the French were still suspicious of the things. Potatoes were fine as hog feed but thought to cause Leprosy in humans. Antoine-Augustine Parmentier knew different as he had been imprisoned by the Prussians and forced to live on a spud-based diet whilst incarcerated. Now, you’d have thought that anyone who’s survived on a single vegetable of dubious repute when in jail would be heartily sick of the damn things, but Parmentier was a scientist, a pharmacist who was impressed by their nutritional value. When back in France, he extolled their virtues in scientific papers and embarked on a series of publicity stunts to promote them for the important purpose of reducing famine. One, in particular, was a stroke of pure genius.

Having persuaded Louis XVI of their virtues, the King gave Parmentier some otherwise unwanted land outside Paris in which to plant the things. The masterstroke was to station some of the king’s elite guards around the potato fields during the daytime but then also remove them each night. Sure enough, the locals were soon persuaded of the immense value of this new crop by the presence of the guards, and before long they were raiding the fields under cover of darkness with the subsequent result that these novel tubers became widely cultivated across France.

The ruse is pleasing because its purpose was benign and the reluctance of the populace to eating this now familiar tuber is comical. Louis and Parmentier showed an admirable astuteness in their knowledge of human behaviour that is rare in politicians today. What they realised is that merely decreeing that spuds are good would be of no use since they weren’t sufficiently trusted, and forcing people to grow them would just generate resentment. Was it deception? Well no one was explicitly misinformed; the fact that they jumped to certain conclusions was entirely their own doing. The raiders thought they were having one over on the powers that be, but they had been double-bluffed.

Current leaders, on the other hand, prefer a simplistic monocausal approach to influencing behaviour. At the extreme end of this manipulation is the act of banning things. Two simple examples: the outlawing of fox hunting (in the UK) and the banning of the full face veil in public places (proposed in the Netherlands). These acts seem to ignore the very contrariness in human nature that Parmentier and Louis made use of. The politicians appear unaware of what could be called Newton’s third law of politics: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The result of the fox hunting ban has been to revitalise a marginal and anachronistic group and to allow them to construct a narrative about urban oppression of country dwellers. The result of mere discussions about banning veils has been to help turn an obvious mark of male subjugation into an identity-affirming act of defiance.

Prior to being at the receiving end of concerted opposition, veil wearing and fox hunting were largely irrelevant fringe activities. They may have been symptoms of society’s troubled attitudes to women and to animals but they remained eccentric oddities to majority (European) society. If people are truly concerned about women or animals there are many other more important areas to tackle. Regarding women, domestic violence and equality of opportunity spring to mind, and regarding animals, horrendous farming practices and wholesale habitat destruction could be mentioned. Veil-wearing and hunting are both symbolic acts; their visibility as memes outshines any harm as practices. Memes and symbols are nourished by attention and positively thrive with opposition, as stubborn practitioners harden their attitudes in the face of the new threats. So the stronger the Government action the more counterproductive it becomes.

It’s all too easy to think of other political actions that have had the opposite effect to that desired. Some involve the military, others involve audits and targets. I do constantly despair of politicians’ lack of psychological insight, but I have to admit that I’m not at all sure how to improve things. In today’s all-pervasive media maelstrom, sneaky techniques such as used by the potato-heads above would soon be exposed, and we are simply not as naive, in fact we’re downright cynical these days. We’re always looking out for how to undermine control, which is usually a good thing in any case but does make any leader’s job similar to herding cats.

As our energy and resource usage continues to grow around the World, and particularly quickly in Asia and the far East, we are running out of planet; there’s simply not enough for all to live as materially profligate a lifestyle as we do in the US and Europe. It is morally and politically unacceptable for the West to decree that no one else can aspire to its level of comfort so something has to give. The clever way is to follow Buckminster Fuller’s definition of progress and learn to do more with less, but when we’re not clever enough some are going to have to put up with doing less with less. Either way we’re going to have to accept significant changes to survive.

The irony of the potato story is that growing potatoes was actually in the interests of the farmers and there was an immediate win for them, yet some skilful mind manipulation was still needed to persuade them. How much harder will it be to convince people to accept short term hits to gain long term benefits? Read any online discussion of any environmental issue and you will see a wide range of opinions expressed. On climate change, for instance, some will say that the Earth isn’t warming, others that it is but this isn’t due to mankind, some will propose that the change is occurring but it’s a good thing (“more bikini-clad women” to quote one quip), a different bunch will agree disastrous change exists but argue there’s nothing we can do so we should live the high life while we can, and some meanies say that if people choose to overpopulate low lying or marginal lands its their fault if they suffer. Somewhere, lost in the discussion, might be someone like me fuming and calling for a few lifestyle changes to bring about greater energy efficiency. Gathering this bunch together in order for action of any sort to take place is going to require leadership. This may be from scientists, economists, celebrities, politicians, the media or from anyone else. What is certain is that merely analysing the problem and presenting solutions will not be enough. Someone, somewhere is going to need to employ a great and wondrous leap of the imagination to inspire, cajole, persuade or possibly even outwit people into accepting change.

Well, the World is facing some pretty shaky times and we need to look for saviours to take on the Willis role. So whom should we pick? After reading Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny I’m proposing Amartya Sen. OK, he might cut a diminutive figure next to Willis, and he won’t handle weapons with quite the same panache, but if anyone paid attention to his careful, patient, prose we would be a darn sight closer to saving civilisation.

He’s only writing here on identity and sectarianism so we might need others for other issues. George Monbiot to fight global warming? Arundhati Roy to fight for people against power blocks? Richard Dawkins to tackle faith and superstition? But learning from Sen how better to get on with each other as individuals and communities would make a good start toward tackling the other problems.

Sen is a septuagenarian Nobel-prize-winning economist who made his name in development economics. In addition to providing complex mathematical analyses he would take time to point out simpler truths: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” As a child, he saw both famines and communal killings in his native India prior to partition. Famines due to British mismanagement, and killings due to sectarian hatreds being stoked up by self-serving local leaders. He seems to have spent the rest of his life investigating how to deal with these evils.

The key point of Identity and Violence is that we all have complex multiple aspects to our personalities. As well as religious, ethnic, class and cultural backgrounds, we have many other facets that may include professional interests, political or sporting allegiances, social involvements, tastes in food, art or music and so on. To reduce any individual to being a cypher defined by a single feature is to diminish them greatly.

The second point is that the pressures for this reductive diminishing come from opposing sides embracing each other in a deadly dance. To respond to a stupid claim such as “all Muslims are terrorists, Islam is a religion of the sword” by saying “no, all Muslims are peace loving, Islam is a religion of beauty and truth” is simply to take on board the original accuser’s tactic of lumping a diverse and varied group together as one unified entity. It is in the interests both of the opponents of a group and of the leaders of the group itself to sharpen the group’s boundaries and lay claims to the group’s focus as being the defining feature of each of its members. But it is not necessarily in its members’ (or de facto members’) interests since once this reduction is agreed the racists’ work is largely done.

Sen therefore attacks the official views of multicultural Britain as “federations of communities”, where everyone is slotted into a single rigid, defining and unchanging community box. He calls this plural monoculturalism and argues that government attempts to tackle terrorism through the aid of religion (by cosying up to religious leaders, for instance) have magnified the power of the clerics over non-religious domains such as the social and political. The reductionist claims of the religious extremists are then strengthened not diluted.

He reviews arguments for and against globalisation trying to tease out meaning from this sprawling term. He points out that global trade in goods and ideas is nothing new and that the global influence on supposedly Western ideas should be better recognised. There is no real logic in opposing science just because it is seen as Western, but Sen reminds us that it’s as much the result of Indian, Chinese and Arab ideas (amongst others) as “Western” ones anyway, adding a further irony to this self-defeating stance. In fact, he warns that any exclusively oppositional mindset (against the West, against Islam, against the ex-coloniser, or whatever) is a severely restricted one since it cannot escape from being locked in relation to whatever is being opposed.

On specific issues he shows himself to be on the side of the light; he is solidly opposed to the arms trade (85% of arms are from the G8 countries, 50% from the US), to fatally restrictive patent laws, and to the outrageous barriers to trade facing poorer nations. He outlines the difference between trade justice where the poor are paid fairly, and trade exploitation where, in their desperation, they are forced to accept a pittance, and thus blows the trickle down/rising tide theories right out of the water.

He regards the UK government’s moves to widen state support for faith schools as outrageously divisive; we need more ways to enable the mixing of cultures, not to separate them. True multiculturalism (as opposed to plural monoculturalism) arises where people make informed and reasoned choices about how to live unrestrained by tradition or other pressures. For instance, a woman should freely choose her manner of dress, not be forced by one group into wearing a veil, nor by others into wearing a short skirt (my example). A particular behaviour is followed freely only where the awareness of (and possibility of picking) alternatives exists.

I’ve been dipping in and out of the frenetic exchanges on Pickled Politics and Ali Eteraz’s old and new sites, skimming the correspondence on the New Generation Network, and wading through the reams of comments on The Guardian’s CiF pages, and seen relatively few mentions of Sen. This surprises me, as I think he talks a lot of sense (and the NGN really should make him their patron saint!). At times I feel that much of what he says is blatantly obvious, but when I look around at the comments of bloggers it is more than evident that not everyone thinks this way. At other times his incisive turn of phrase gives clear expression to an otherwise murky or vague set of concepts (and I hope that I haven’t misrepresented him too horribly above). He’s an academic, a good-mannered campaigner, so he doesn’t shout or harangue you, even when covering emotive or volatile topics. But at the end of his quiet and precise book I found much to like and nothing to disagree with. That’s rare for me, and that’s why I think he’s a such a hero.