Solidarity

If democracy is about more people being able to realize their dreams, solidarity is about more people seeing each other’s dreams as part of their own. The idea is described well by Martin Luther King:

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

I have been inspired by the folks who have written about the deeply spiritual elements of the idea: Martin Buber writing in I and Thou about how to approach other as the infinite souls they are; Lewis Hyde writing in The Gift about the meaning of a bleeding heart; and Pope Francis speaking about our call to be a “field hospital” for the wounded around us.

But I’ve also been inspired by the folks who talk about solidarity as a very practical matter, too. On the macro-level, you have Robert Putnam writing in Bowling Alone about the importance of reinvigorating our shared institutions, trust, and fellow-feeling. On the meso-level, you have Jane Addams, through her Settlement Houses, perfecting a model of community-building, social work, and moral uplift. And on the micro-level, you have Dorothy Day reminding us that:

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’

In the long run, I am hoping to one day organize Solidarity Virginia, a solidarity-building group for my region. It will aim to foster a local counterculture of solidarity that can serve as an alternative to our modern culture of isolation, centralization, and hyper-individualism. I believe there are millions of Americans out there who desire a deeper relationship with their neighbors. But most people don’t know where to start — it’s too hard to live out an alternative alone. That’s what I’m hoping the Solidarity Virginia concept could one day be: a central access point for those dedicated to weaving their communities together through the work of the hands (like the corporal works of mercy), the heart (community-building among those participating in the work), and the head (policy advocacy and institution-building around serving community needs).

I have worked on similar solidarity-building projects (such as CommonPlace) in the past and have been deeply interested in historic attempts at solidarity-building, like the Solidarity movement in Poland, Jane Addams’ Settlement House movement, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, and Alcoholics Anonymous. (I owe much of this line of thinking to Elias Crim’s Solidarity Hall, which is a wonderful clearinghouse for all things solidarity. Our continuing conversation on how to build solidarity can be found in the Dorothy’s Place podcast.) As I work to eventually develop Solidarity Virginia, I hope to build on these experiences and learnings.

Additionally, I want to gather my research on solidarity-building concepts, ideas, and precedents into a book, provisionally titled Solidarity in America, which aims to reflect on what solidarity means on both a spiritual and practical level, call attention to America’s crisis of social solidarity, spotlight heroes of American solidarity, and share what we can do to build American solidarity in the coming decades.