Sunday was Independence Day in the United States, or was it Monday? However the holiday was split, the nation celebrated its declared independence from foreign rule along with its affirmation of the equality of all human beings before our Creator, even if there were a great many exceptions to the equality back in the early years of the nation’s life and even though there continue to be exceptions to equality today in this disturbing time when civil and human rights are held up to scorn by political opportunists playing upon the fear and rage inflamed predictably by our current Great Recession.

My personal celebration of the nation’s birthday included buying and beginning to read Amartya Sen’s short book, Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny. Because I have been doing more writing the reading, I am only about 50 pages into the book, but Sen has already made one of his major arguments quite clear: he objects to the currently popular notion that we are engaged in a great and supremely decisive clash of civilizations. All the rage these days (underscore “rage”) is the pseudo-apocalyptic vision of an Armageddon between Western Civilization and Muslim Civilization. Supposedly the world has also a Hindu Civilization and a Buddhist Civilization. Sen argues convincingly that no such grand, simple, and overriding categories actually exist on the living planet Earth. We human beings are not segregated so neatly into civilizations.