United Nations: Rejecting the concept of clash of civilisations, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen warned against the tendency of categorisation of people according to some singular system, like religion and stressed the need for global interaction.
"The newly popular view of singularity is not only incendiary and dangerous but is astonishing naive," he said.
Delivering a lecture on "Identity in the 21st Century" on Monday, Sen lambasted the Western nations for trying to appropriate to themselves the concept of participatory democracy which had been in vogue for centuries.
He also said that mathematics and other sciences were built over concepts that were achieved in other parts of the world long ago.
He was also highly critical of the Western nations of ignoring persecutions in their part of the world while discussing such instances elsewhere.
Referring to terrorism, he said a lot of violence in the world was being cultivated by singular focus on religious identity of human beings.
He argued that classifying by other criteria like languages a person speaks could have "very positive" contribution in defusing "brutality of starkly inter-religious strife."
"The tendency in the contemporary world to privilege exactly one identity over all others has done a great deal of harm already in fomenting racial violence, religious-related terrorism, suppression of immigrants and denial of basic human rights," he said.
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