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.
