A School for Conscience
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In the present time people’s identities are too often circumscribed within one description and this fosters what Sen helpfully called the “illusion of Responsibility and Identity
destiny.” Within the whirl of global dynamics there are powerful forces at work seeking to shape people’s identities in order to provide solid bounda-ries between communities. There are also forces working to persuade people of their sovereign power to shape at will and whim who they are and
who they will become.because of the rin chapter 6. No community is free from interaction with others within the space of its life; no one is sovereign over the forces, natural and social, that eflexive interaction among peoples on the global field, noted^15 These strategies of identity-formation usually fail
shape her or his existence. The failure to control the formation of identity often leads to harsher and even more violent means to retain the boundaries or to reassertions of the right of self-formation. That is the engine of a clash of civilizations. Is it really surprising that when interactions among peoples
increase in the global age, so too does conflict and violence? What is needed, we believe, is a vision of the internal complexity of identities and the various ways one can and ought to live with that complexity in self, in community, and in the world. The sovereignty over self that a human being actually
has and limior communities’ identities in order to find non-coercive points of contact In the global situation one needs to articulate the complexity of persons’ ted and yet also more important than usually understood.the degree to which social identities can be freely created are more
among people without loss of distinctive ways of life. In this light, commu-nitarians and contractarians are bedeviled by opposite problems that express hypertheism and overhumanization. Communitarians seek some social identity and see the point of social life in the realization of that conformity to
identity. This underestimates the freedom we possess as social beings to step back and assess our beliefs, values, and even identity, precisely because these are multiple. Contractarians, conversely, understand the importance of free-dom and the rational assessment of ideas and ideals in social existence aimed
at the desire to secure the realm of freedom, they risk enfolding every belief and value within freedom’s domain and thereby enact overhumanization. Freedom is never neutral, and one cannot and need not simultaneously test creative fashioning of new modes of life, new identities. Yet in their
every belief. Sometimes we are justified in living by beliefs and identities untested through free, rational reflection. All that is required is the willingness to test them, if that becomes necessary.