You don’t need to scroll far down a social media feed to find someone expressing “solidarity” for the victims of cruelty or injustice. A show of solidarity feels more emphatic than expressing support or sympathy. As Rowan Williams argues, it can act as “a moral intensifier”, positioning us squarely alongside the victim. It can also be a declaration of innocence, a way of distancing ourselves definitively from the perpetrators and their guilt.
Williams wants to move us beyond this idea of solidarity as unequivocal identification. He has some sharp things to say about “empathy” as a modern solve-all, when it too often serves the needs of “a clamorous self” that “cannot bear the idea of a real stranger”. True solidarity, he argues, is less a virtue to be cultivated than a human condition to be acknowledged. It requires us to accept two stubborn truths: first, that we can never identify completely with someone else, because we are inescapably separate from them in mind and body; and second, that we are innately social beings, linked to each other by invisible threads of obligation and reciprocity.
For Williams, then, solidarity is hard work. It takes time and emotional labour to recognise our fellow humans, in both their implacable otherness and their commonality with us. He is critical of the contemporary idea of human rights as freestanding individual entitlements or “cheques to be cashed”, which makes them liable to turn into “conflicting absolutes” – the fractious and circular debates now raging about free speech being a case in point. The moral interdependence of all human life, he suggests, necessitates an endless dialogue where rights sit alongside obligations. The “dislodging” of the self that this entails can be unsettling. Following the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, Williams calls for a “solidarity of the shaken”, a radical human togetherness formed out of an acceptance of our shared vulnerability and reliance on each other in a fallen world.
Williams is short on prescriptions of how this is to be achieved. He rarely dwells on how solidarity has worked in practice, in radical social movements such as feminism and anti-racism or the trade union led by Lech Wałęsa that was instrumental in the end of Soviet rule in Poland. About the only advice he offers is that solidarity needs some kind of ceremonial expression, a public act of “rebalancing” in which we see ourselves anew as collective beings – something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Michael Sheen’s Passion play performed in the streets of Port Talbot in 2011. Mostly, though, Williams sticks to scholarly discussion, working through his own ideas by carefully unpacking other people’s, particularly 20th-century religious thinkers such as Edith Stein, Józef Tischner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Williams is a subtle and probing writer, but I do wish he had shown some solidarity with his readers by making his prose more inviting. His fondness for abstract nouns and caveated clauses produces lots of sentences like this: “Our action is made intelligible by the persistent hope of mutual intelligibility, even when it involves a recognition of the depth of existing misrecognitions.” He tries to nudge us along with throat-clearing phrases like “it is important to remain alert to” and “the most salient point here is”, when a few analogies and illustrations would have been more helpful. He is self-effacing to a fault. “The modern history of Christian struggles over gender and sexual identity is familiar enough, alas,” he writes. Familiar enough to him, he presumably means (as archbishop of Canterbury, he had to navigate deep divisions in the Anglican communion on female priests and homosexuality) but is too polite to say.
Still, this is a humane and heartening book, “woke” in its original and best sense – although Williams wisely never uses a word drained of all meaning by its enemies. Solidarity should not assure us of our own innocence, he concludes, but acquaint us with how implicated most of us are in the unfairnesses and inequalities of the world. Rather than inspiring some egoistic performance of self-reproach, this should alert us to our shared and flawed humanity – to what Joseph Conrad called “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts”.
Solidarity: The Work of Recognition by Rowan Williams is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
