Solidarity in America
I am working on a book project about what solidarity means in 21st century America, provisionally titled Solidarity in America. It will aim to explain what solidarity means on both a spiritual and practical level, call attention to America’s crisis of social solidarity, spotlight heroes of American solidarity (like Dorothy Day and Bill Wilson) and share what we can do to build American solidarity in the coming decades.
Below are some links and excerpts to past writing that speaks to similar themes as this upcoming book:
Here is some of my past writing regarding this theme:
The Revolution of the Bleeding Heart (June 25, 2018)
Martin Luther King often described his moral vision as one of "agapic love.” Agape is Greek for "distinterested love" — to King it was "a love in which the individual seeks not his own good,” but the good of his or her neighbor. Agape “does not discriminate between worthy and unworthy people" — it is about “discovering the neighbor” in every person it meets. It is not "weak, passive love" but "love in action." It seeks to "go to any length to restore community." King's vision of overflowing love — beyond worthiness, beyond borders — reminds me of one of my favorite Catholic symbols: the bleeding heart. The writer Lewis Hyde calls the bleeding heart "the image of the Christian era." If tribalism was about keeping the spirit of community (the tribe's lifeblood) flowing inside the boundaries of one's tribe, Christianity was to be about welcoming all into the community. Hyde summarizes the promise of Christian grace in these terms: "If we only open the heart with faith, we will be lifted to a greater circulation" and "the spirit may cover the world and vivify everything." In the Christian heart, all Others are to become Brothers — our compassion, not our genetics, is to connect us. The bleeding heart was a revolutionary symbol and the plea for agapic love was a revolutionary call. I say revolutionary because the idea of loving beyond the boundaries of your tribe ran counter to common beliefs and practices. People were used to loving their Brothers and fearing the Others. Whole systems of law and exchange and war were set up to differentiate how you treat neighbors from how you treat strangers. And yet, for many, the revolution of the bleeding heart took hold. For some, it came directly through religion. For others, it came through the universalist politics of classical liberalism or socialism. For most, it came through the revolution burrowing into daily life, through ideas and practices in music, science, books, and commerce that aimed to turn strangers into neighbors. Despite all of the ways in which we fail to live up to this revolution, its core idea remains the dominant creed in our country today. You can tell that it is because everybody pays lip service to it. No matter what our leaders do, most still feel compelled to justify their actions in terms of bringing people together, loving across divides, and seeking solidarity in mind and heart rather than in blood and soil. Universal love remains America’s professed state religion. And yet, of course, we are not practicing what we preach. Despite the politicians’ applause lines and the dreamers’ song lyrics and the greeting cards’ cliches, love has not held sway in 21st century America. We are not discovering the neighbor in every person we meet. We are not going to any length to restore community. We are not trusting that grace will lift us up if we open our hearts. In fact, we are often doing the exact opposite: treating our literal neighbors as threatening strangers, spending our energy affirming divides, and letting fear be the doorman of our hearts.
Martin Luther King Jr. and today’s road to Jericho (America Magazine, April 2, 2018)
But when we say we do not want to live in this time—when we pretend to live in the past or wait to live in the future—we are acting more like the priest than like the Samaritan. When we want to escape from our times into irony or nostalgia or self-satisfaction or resentment we are doing so because we, like the priest in the parable, are afraid. That April night, 50 years ago, King called on the crowd to stand, like the good Samaritan, with greater determination—to remember that the important question is not “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to me?” but rather “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” He reminded them that they had a blessed opportunity “to make America a better nation”— not necessarily great again but rather “what it ought to be.”
Patriots (July 5, 2017)
My favorite 4th of July song is "I am a Patriot"- originally written by E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt and covered wonderfully by Jackson Browne and Eddie Vedder. The chorus nails what patriotism means to me: "I am a patriot and I love my country because my country is all I know. I want to be with my family, people who understand me — I've got nowhere else to go." I don't love my country because it's the best. I don't love my country because our people deserve any more care than any other people do. I don't love my country because it's uniquely great or just. (In fact, in many ways, my country is especially troubled.) I don't even love my country because it's the one I would necessarily choose. Rather, I love America because I didn't choose it. It's like my family or like the rights we were promised in the Declaration of Independence: inalienable. These people - my fellow Americans - are the ones who understand me. This homeland - our patria, from Yosemite to my neighborhood strip mall - is all I know. Like Van Zandt says: I've got nowhere else to go.
Snakes and Samaritans (May 2, 2017)
With his parable, Trump is not only failing to practice tenderness-- he is actively condemning it. As Pope Francis explained in his TED talk this past week, tenderness “is the love that comes close and becomes real.” To be tender is “to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other… to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need.” It is to be “on the same level as the other,” lowering ourselves, as God has, so that we can best speak “the real, concrete language of love.” Loving one another, acknowledging one another, listening to one another, humbling ourselves to care for one another… this is what Trump is rejecting when he mocks the tender-hearted. Francis reminds us that “tenderness is not weakness… it is fortitude.” Tenderness is the path that “the strongest, most courageous men and women” choose. To be unable to practice tenderness is, in fact, a sure sign of weakness. And when power is bestowed on men who are too weak to practice tenderness, Francis warns, bad things happen. A weak man can be neighborly to those who are exactly like him. A weak people can hold together a nation where everybody looks and thinks and acts the same. But the challenge and promise of America is that we don’t look and think and act the same. To be held together as a nation, we need to do the hard work of turning strangers into neighbors. To do this work, we need to be strong… strong enough to practice tenderness. This is the work of mercy that makes a country what it is: not the thickening of its outlines, but the deepening of its solidarity. We are fortified as a country by our open hearts, not our closed borders.
Solidarity: Five Ideas from Dr. King (Remarks at the March for Unity, Racial Healing & Justice, January 16, 2017)
Solidarity is a project (October 11, 2016)
But this is not the case. As conservatives know -- and discuss frequently amongst themselves! -- our nation's moral and political culture is quite susceptible to change: we can have a hand in cultural revival, decline or transformation, but only if we care to work on it. If the American people no longer trust experts, then there is a project in need of our time and effort: the project of rebuilding trust between our nation's experts and the population at large. If tens of millions of Americans do not feel invested in the lives of neighbors who are different than them, then there is a project in need of our time and effort: building up a sense of cross-racial and cross-class neighborliness so that more people believe we are in this together. If we are trapped in misinformation bubbles, addicted to partisan clickbait, then there is a project in need of our time and effort: building cross-cultural information channels that re-build shared national understandings. These all fall under the grand project of rebuilding national solidarity: reinvigorating our shared institutions, trust and fellow-feeling so as to make us one nation again. It is the flip side of Trump's "if we don't have borders, we don't have a country" riff: if we don't have national solidarity, we don't have a country. And solidarity does not mysteriously rise and fall: it's a project that we have the choice to care for, work on, or let crumble.
Freedom, Participation, and Solidarity (September 5, 2016)
Ralph Nader often explains that political rights are worth nothing without remedies, which in turn are worth nothing without facilities. By the first half of this dictum, he means that a right does not mean much if you do not have a venue in which to claim that your right was breached and the possibility of a formal remedy to that breach. For example, the right to free speech means nothing if you do not have a court system in which you can claim your right to speak was breached and have a chance at the force of the courts coming to the defense of your speech. By the second half, he means that remedies will go unused unless there are institutions organized to facilitate their use. For example, if public interest legal groups do not exist to bring free speech cases for those without the time and money to seek remedies when their free speech rights are breached, the remedy of the courts and the right to free speech might as well not exist. A similar principle applies to solidarity and participation in power. Democratic freedom is worth nothing without venues for participation, which in turn are worth nothing without facilities for solidarity. Being a democracy does not mean much unless you have venues -- like routine elections, accessible representatives, comment periods, court systems, referenda, newspapers, open markets, access to capital, a public culture, and public places -- through which opportunities for participation are available. But in turn, these venues for participation will go unused unless there are facilities to foster and channel the solidarity of people.
What does it mean to ‘Humanize the Caring Economy’? (July 1, 2016)
Those on the margins of our conception of “normal life” — the physically and mentally ill, the imprisoned, the very young, the very old, the destitute, the displaced — used to be wholly and directly cared for by their families and neighbors. In recent centuries, three trends changed this: (1) old models of family (e.g. multi-generational households) and community (e.g. caring about your neighbors) began to change; (2) we developed public standards of care that cast light on the failures of local, organic systems to adequately care for those in need; and (3) we developed modern state and commercial bureaucracies capable of funding, engineering and providing care. However, in transitioning away from a model of participatory and community care and towards an institutionalized and bureaucratized model of care — one managed by a mix of professional experts and mistreated, low-wage workers — we lost many of the benefits of the old model. If we can develop systems that supplement the current model of care with more opportunities for community members to participate in their neighbors’ care, we could preserve the benefits of our current model while salvaging the benefits of the old. Not only would those being cared for be helped by more organic, neighborly relationships; those doing the caring would also be served by re-engaging in our most human practice: caring for each other. Even more, our anxieties stemming from the “abnormal” elements in our own personal and family lives would lessen as the normal abnormalities of life move out of the managed shadows. The solidarity and understanding of a shared, sacred project replaces the fear and isolation of a universal, shameful secret.