Rowan Williams on solidarity

I don’t mean to compare myself in any serious way with a major thinker like Rowan Williams, but in his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, he is working on exactly the same problem that I have been working on in recent years: how to restore (or create!) a sense of a common humanity. But he is trying to do so in a very different way than I do, procedurally and conceptually.

Rowan — as almost everyone seems to call him, and which, as will be seen, it is helpful to me to call him here; besides, he’s a friend — Rowan is a philosophical theologian, and this is largely a work of philosophical theology. I am a literary scholar and an essayist, and my approach arises from the preferences that accompany that role. Rowan has a long history of reading Wittgenstein and thinking in a Wittgensteinian way, and I don’t do that at all. For him, unpacking the philosophical implications of a particular vocabulary is important, and while I do that, I do it in a wholly different manner, often with ironic humor. I am much more wayfaring in my thinking, in the manner that is characteristic of the essay as a form. And while Rowan occasionally employs literary illustrations of his points, I habitually, you might even say compulsively, do so.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two of us, on this subject anyway, involves the term “solidarity” itself. It is a term which I have made a point of avoiding. I simply have not felt that it could be rescued from a series of contexts that have turned it into a cliché. But Rowan thinks it’s essential. To be sure, he goes into some detail to demonstrate how the term can be abused — but all by way of making it useful again.

How does he do this? As he says, looking back in the book’s conclusion to its opening pages,

This book began with a question about what it is that prompts people to reach for the language of ‘solidarity’ rather than just ‘support’ or even ‘sympathy’ to express serious moral concern for some other group. The various texts, writers and arguments we have discussed here converge at least on this: serious moral concern for the other is regularly bound up with a sense of belonging in a shared situation, in which what confronts the other is intelligibly similar to what confronts the self. I recognize the fragility of the other as like my own; I understand that the jeopardy of another might be mine. It therefore becomes important to examine and understand the ways in which human beings have educated themselves not to recognize this shared jeopardy, the strategies adopted by various groups designed to minimize recognizability, even where this entails educating people not to trust their own immediate perceptions.

Rowan is highly indebted to the work of Joanna Bourke, and especially Bourke’s contention that we have a natural instinct to emphasize with other people, and indeed with non-human creatures, especially when they suffer (but also, I would add, when we see anything in them that looks like pleasure or delight). Bourke argues that the systems and structures of modernity train us to mistrust and then suppress those instincts. The work of social and economic domination cannot be done as long as our faculties of empathy and our inclination towards solidarity are functioning as they were meant to function — or at least, that’s how I, as a Christian, would put it.

And so, in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another, undergone the discipline of suppressing our instincts for solidarity, then we need to engage in the common labor of restoring those instincts to their proper place. That is, solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense calls for work. So Rowan seeks to conceptualize and formulate the kind of work that we need to do.

Thus much what Rowan does here is the terminological and conceptual excavation that lays the groundwork for this common labor of restoring solidarity. The book takes a curious and fascinating turn when he comes around to playing his thematic melody in a theological key — much of the book is only indirectly theological — and leans heavily on the work of Charles Williams, especially his concept of “co-inherence.”

Williams points to a narrative from second-century North Africa in which Felicitas, the enslaved companion of an aristocratic young woman named Perpetua, condemned to death as a Christian along with her mistress, is mocked by some of her fellow-prisoners as she endures a painful childbirth in prison before execution. How will she face the even worse tortures of the arena? Her reply is that in her martyrdom, ‘another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him’. Williams broadens out the focus of this poignant narrative to unite it with texts from Clement of Alexandria and the fourth-century Desert Fathers5 about giving our lives for one another and ‘putting one’s soul in the place of the neighbour’s’ so as to suffer for the neighbour as the neighbour would — ‘to become, if it were possible, a double man’. More simply, there is the well-known saying of St Antony the Great that ‘your life and your death are with your neighbour’.

(Note to self: I should write at some point on Auden’s use of the idea of the “double man,” which he pretends to take from Montaigne when his debt is actually to C. Williams.) I found this use of C. Williams somewhat startling, at first. Now, Rowan does not uncritically support his namesake. He sees some significant problems in the original articulation of co-inherence, but he thinks the concept is well worth reclaiming and developing. I find Rowan’s argument here very persuasive, and I’m probably going to go back to re-read The Descent of the Dove and He Came Down From Heaven.

Solidarity is a fascinating book that I will return to often. In addition to the reclamation of C. Williams, I also was quite taken with his exposition of Józef Tischner’s idea of a “solidarity without enemies”:

A solidarity without enemies does not mean, then, a universalism beyond conflict. Each community, like each person, brings a history to the encounter with the stranger and does not simply abandon that specific narrative. Each community, like each person, acknowledges that they are still in the process of learning and that part of such learning is learning how to survive the wounds inflicted on the self by the hunger for control and possession. But the horizon within which we all work is not the hope of a straightforward consensus any more than it is the hope for the unqualified victory of one party, licensing it to forget its own history of learning, risk, misrecognition, self-challenge. It is rather, as we have repeatedly seen, the horizon of shared labour, the creation of meaning by the discovery of how we work together to sustain the world. Tischner’s very remarkable aphorism, ‘Work is a particular form of interpersonal conversation that serves to sustain and develop human life’ (or, more briefly, ‘Work is a conversation in the service of life’) opens up the idea of labour as a constant adjustment of meaning under the pressure of making practical sense of communal life, each material element in the technical/constructive process making and demanding an adjustment of the imagined whole and being itself qualified and changed by that imagined whole.

The whole section on Tischner is excerpted here.

And one more quotation, this one on the ways that solidarity among humans should not pre-empt solidarity with the non-human Creation:

It is perhaps a stretch of the imagination to speak about a ‘conversation of labour’ with the non-human environment. But this is not nonsense: learning the intelligible patterns of the embodied life around us, learning what threatens it or enhances it, is at the very least analogous to conversation, analogous to the process by which we create an identity that is new, in which we and other material substances or agencies may find a co-operative mode of living together. A solidarity that does not extend to the whole organic world is still bound to a ‘tribalism of the human’, an assumption that human good is in the last analysis separable from the well-being of the whole finite order. That illusion has been fostered by some religious language, undoubtedly; but it is also profoundly at odds with any coherent understanding of the relation of creation to creator, and we have noted some of the ways in which this perspective has surfaced in accounts of the solidaristic vision.

Rowan is just invaluable. Everything he writes places me more deeply in his debt. This book adds many tools to my intellectual toolbox, and I want to learn to use them well.

P.S. My own work on humanism is chiefly found in my book Breaking Bread with the Dead and in several essays, especially:

“A Humanism of the Abyss”

“Yesterday’s Men”

“Up From Darkness”