Not long before the Nazis murdered him, the Lutheran pastor and resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children”.
That moral challenge is timeless. But with the climate emergency upon us, it has an unsettling new edge, and with that in mind, I’ve been preoccupied lately by the underappreciated power of solidarity.
Because the chances that a child in the next century will feel gentle sunlight against her skin, or hear birdsong, or see native animals in the wild, or even live some part of the year outside of a storm shelter, will depend on the degree to which we can manifest fellow feeling for her now.
To be a moral society, we need to rediscover and restore solidarity – with our Earth, and with its creatures and peoples.
But solidarity is anathema to capitalism, especially the brute version that’s spread and metastasized in the past 40 years. Fellow-feeling has been trained out of us. Two generations have been raised to fight a war of all against all, rendering us competitors and consumers when we could have been citizens and allies.
To face the anguish and chaos of climate breakdown, which is the miserable legacy of fossil capitalism or business-as-usual, we’ll need to skill up again and retrieve the best in ourselves. Only then do we stand a chance of not consigning our descendants to hell.
I have no neat answer for how to revive solidarity. But I’m certain it won’t emerge from the pitiless dog-eat-dog mentality that got us into this crisis. Nor will it spring from those who revere convention, crave respectability and align themselves with the powerful against the weak.
Moments of real human progress – from the abolition of slavery to the advent of workers’ rights and the struggle for women’s suffrage – have always sprung from empathy, vulnerability, imagination and disruption. From new concepts born in adversity. From fresh language that’s honest and calls out injustice, emboldening resistance and inspiring courage. And in deeds that are audacious, selfless and unforeseen, even shocking.
This is the stuff that draws us together and bears us up as one. Such words and deeds will be dangerous to the status quo, and there will be fear and rage in them. But for solidarity to endure, these must, in the end, be expressions of love, not of vengeance.
Love isn’t always gentle, though. For love makes. And it breaks. That’s the price of commitment – for communities as much as for individuals. Positive change is hard. Transformations and transitions are messy, they require sacrifice – not from the weak and oppressed, but from the powerful and prideful. Under capitalism that will feel deeply discordant, but it’s non-negotiable.
Having spent so long insatiably gilding the present by looting the future, transformative change is our only hope.
Naomi Klein says: “If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.” In other words, we will have expelled ourselves from Eden all over again.
Pope Francis says that as a matter of urgency, we need to undergo “an ecological conversion”.
New and unlikely threads of solidarity have been emerging for a while. You may not know about them, but across generations, religions, races, classes and time zones, new alliances are forming every day. The Pope’s “ecological conversion” is afoot.
Thirty years and several popes ago, Thomas Berry was busy laying some of the conceptual groundwork for it. A priest of the Passionist order, Berry described our dependency on fossil fuels as a global addiction.
Addiction is a form of captivity and degradation. Getting off the gear is hard, and recovery is messy, but the allies you find on the way are deeply surprising. And they’re life-changing.
But before you hit rock bottom as an addict, you’re in the grip of denial. There are so many lies you tell yourself and others. And, of course, while you suffer, there’s always someone profiting from your illness.
When you suspect someone has overdosed on an opiate, you find yourself walking them around while you wait for the ambulance. You shout at them, shake them, plead with them to stay awake, to stay with you.
Now, think of all the scientific and activist voices who have been pleading with us over recent years to stay conscious. They’ve done everything in their power to save us from sinking back into our deadly cultural and political stupor. Their efforts have been selfless and heroic. And yet we’ve scorned them. At best, we patronise them.
The American poet Christian Wiman writes that “to attend is to atone”. Think about that.
Because right now, legions of young people are divesting themselves of our sad and lonely captivity to business as usual. And they’re getting organised, networking, skilling up, raising their voices and literally placing their bodies in the path of those who profit from our addiction.
Politicians castigate them. The media vilifies them.
Yes, these young patriots can be awkward to contend with. They feel so vexatious and countercultural. All their banners and slogans. Their blockades slowing our commute. All those difficult questions they ask at shareholder meetings. And of course, the mortifying street theatre they insist on inflicting upon us.
But what else can they do? Many of them can’t even vote yet. They’re trying what they can, snatching whatever fleeting opportunity is available to them in a polity that shuts them out at every point – financially, politically, culturally.
But their voices are prophetic.
Prophets speak truth to power – and we know what happens to prophets. To the mighty and comfortable, the truth is a threat. It must be intimidated, arrested, beaten, shot and, yes, crucified to produce the silence required to maintain business as usual.
Prophets try to shake their communities awake. And that’s all these kids are trying to do.
Yes, they’re right up in our faces, blocking our path, begging us not to sink back into cosy oblivion. Because they know what our junkie habit is doing to creation, to our home and to their future. If things don’t change – and fast – they will be damned for our sins. And their sense of forsakenness is being ignored.
But it’s worse than that. Because now they’re being persecuted on our watch, in our name and on our dime.
By and large, we turn our heads and walk on by. Even those of us steeped in religious teachings urging us to defend the weak, the oppressed and the outcast.
We’re lucky to have young people of conscience and courage. And I suspect that deep down, we know they’re right. We’re just too proud to admit that we’re hooked, in thrall to the pushers and dealers, the drillers and their shills. And few of us are as deeply ensnared as our elected representatives. That’s not a tragedy – it’s a scandal.
But instead of owning our shame and frustration, and the rage we feel against those who make super profits from our misery, we project everything on to those trying to save us from ourselves.
I believe we have the collective juice to break free of what oppresses us. But we’ll need to do this together in new and unlikely alliances.
That work is under way, despite the efforts of the big polluters. But finishing the job will require us to shed some rusted-on beliefs about what and who we value, about how we run our economy and who it’s meant to benefit. Some unholy shibboleths need to be overturned.
French theologian Jacques Ellul said: “Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor’s edge.”
With less than a decade in which to forestall the very worst of climate breakdown, that’s where we are right now.
The razor’s edge is the terrain all morally serious humans must traverse in order to know themselves. Because the rim of oblivion is also the brink of opportunity and potential.
So as we teeter together at the rim of eternity, consider the words of WH Auden: “Eternity is the decision now, action now, one’s neighbour here.”
• This is an edited excerpt from Tim Winton’s 2024 Richard Johnson lecture for the Centre for Public Christianity.
