Philosopher Edith Stein, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Solidarity: The Work of Recognition,
by Rowan Williams
(Bloomsbury Continuum, £20.00 / €24.00)
This is an important book. It throws light on a central political problem of our time: how to find a balance between belonging and autonomy. We need belonging because we need a narrative that to give shape to our lives, we need autonomy to make the story it allows, our own.
Two things can go awry. We can find ourselves trapped in a narrative that denies us the recognition that we deserve. We cannot flourish in the roles it proffers. We can find ourselves in a culture that offers a weak and attenuated sense of belonging, and we are threatened by the disintegration of the bonds of our common world.
Belonging and autonomy are intertwined. What is the good of belonging without autonomy? Of autonomy without belonging?
All recognise that our political culture changed. Many welcome the change as the modernisation of society, evidence of progress and the promise of further progress.
Others are more uncertain. For them it is a story of losses and gains in which the losses outweigh the gains. But what exactly has changed? A political order can be characterised by the terms in which it justifies its rule. It is these terms that have changed.
Market
We have moved from a nation-state to a market, or opportunity, state. The former justified its rule with its promise to defend and advance the welfare of the nation. In the latter, the state commits to increasing the opportunities of its citizens. The move is from a De Valera or a De Gaulle to a Thatcher or a Regan.
Although inequalities have increased and the balance of power moves in favour of capital, the division departs our politics”
The left-right division dominated the politics of the nation-state.
The deep divisions it represented were contained by a shared commitment to the welfare of the nation. Civil war was transmuted into competition between political parties with roots deep in society, offering different visions of that welfare. Although inequalities have increased and the balance of power moves in favour of capital, the division departs our politics.
Disintegration
The division between those who protest the oppressions of belonging and those who fear its disintegration replace it. Those who fear their common world is undermined and their voice unheard oppose those who fight for entitlements, demand recognition. The former focus their anxieties on the threats they perceive in immigration. The latter identify as victims. A politics that was once moderated by a shared belonging, is undermined by populisms on both left and right. Can the centre hold?
We face a crisis of belonging. We need to rethink what we owe each other. We need this profound study of solidarity by Rowan Williams, philosopher, theologian, poet and former Archbishop of Canterbury.
When we think of solidarity, we suppose it to be a feeling prompted by the suffering of a group, or individual that moves us to support them. This is inadequate, superficial. Williams digs deeper.
He starts his inquiry with a discussion of empathy, drawing on the work of the philosopher Edith Stein (otherwise, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, 1891-1942).
The analysis is complicated but the lesson is clear. It is in our relationships with others as we engage with the world, mastering language, that we come to an awareness of ourselves as subjects. Empathy that puts in the position of another is crucial to this emergence of subjects in a world of other subjects.
Empathy does not give us access to another’s inner world. Others are opaque, just as we are opaque to ourselves. It is the possibility of expanding our understanding of ourselves and others and the world that we share.
When we place someone in the “basket of deplorables”, or reject the foreigner as a dangerous intruder, we diminish ourselves.
Solidarity is dialogue. Williams does not give us a worked-out thesis. His book is not a monologue but as a series of dialogues that explore the implications of the foundations laid by Stein, adding nuance and depth. Readers of this paper will be interested to note that CST is one of his ‘interlocutors’.
As a student of History and Politics in UCD in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I could not have imagined a world where Catholic Social Teaching would be centre of the stage. In those days, the left/right distinction prevailed.
Response
Yet, that is where it is today as the response to Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas shows. The Pope and the tradition out of which he speaks addresses the anxieties of our time before which the secular and progressive establishments are mute: the threat and promise of AI, the collapse of the international order, the promoting of war as an instrument of politics, and the fear that the degeneration of democracy in the United States, manifest in Trump, is also our fate.
How often have we read ‘it’s the economy stupid’ as votes swing this way or that? Perceived economic well-being is, if not the only, then the most important metric. Governments take our money and then dish it out as parents dispense pocket money, to buy our support.
Motivated by the Gospels’ injunction to give priority to the poor, instructed by Aristotle and Aquinas, CST provides a far richer language in which to acknowledge our interdependence as we pursue the common good. Williams traces its development as it responds to changing circumstances.
We live in a time of epochal change. No doubt a new form of politics will emerge. Williams provides invaluable lessons to guide us. The picture is complicated, as it must be. Nonetheless, the message is clear: solidarity is the recognition that in caring for others we come to know ourselves.