💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › alnoor-ladha.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:14:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: What is Solidarity? Author: Alnoor Ladha Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: solidarity Source: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/what-is-solidarity/
I was born when all I once feared, I could love.
– Hazrat Bibi Rabia of Basra, 7^(th) century Sufi saint
Survival has become an economizing on life. The civilization of
collective survival increases dead time in individual lives to the point
where the forces of death threaten to overwhelm collective survival
itself. Unless, that is, the passion for destruction is replaced by the
passion for life.
– Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
One of the great crises of our times is the crisis of meaning, which is
both a symptom and a cause of the broader polycrisis – the convergence
of ecological, political, spiritual and social breakdown. Traditionally
held certainties about humanity’s place in the world are crumbling.
Those to whom we have abdicated our power – politicians, academics,
doctors, experts, leaders – reflect back the confused, muddled
buffoonery of a collective emperor with no clothes. Extinction illness
and other psychological collateral effects are deepening both depression
and denial, forcing humility and exacerbating hubris. The Anthropocene
casts a long and convoluted shadow.
As the political adage goes, “we are prisoners of context in the absence
of meaning.” So what then shall we do? A starting place is better
understanding of and relating to the current context – i.e. assessing
the nature and texture of the oxygen we breathe (even when we can’t). We
can also attribute new and ancient meaning to the consequences of our
actions. In this essay I argue that solidarity can play a central role
in triangulating these two practices as a means towards sense-making. We
can re-imagine solidarity as a communal, spiritual act. Solidarity as
becoming.
Etymologically, solidarity comes from the Latin word solidus, a unit of
account in ancient Rome. It then merged into French to become solidaire
referring to interdependence, and then into English, in which its
current definition is an agreement between, and support for, a group, an
individual, an idea. It is essentially a bond of unity or agreement
between people united around common cause. True to its original meaning,
there is the notion of accountability at its core.
Below are some reflections on solidarity within the fast-changing
context of modernity, or more aptly, the Kali Yuga, the dark ages
prophesied by the Vedic traditions of India. I offer these five
interlocking premises in the spirit of wondering aloud and fostering
allyship. I do not claim any special expertise or moral authority. Like
all truths, these are subjective notions anchored in a particular
historical moment, through the medium of a biased individual
(accompanied by a complex of seen and unseen forces such as ancestors),
and an entangled set of antecedents bringing together the past, present
and future simultaneously.
a Citizen of Our Times.
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters
what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots
knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe
descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds,
what worlds make stories.
– Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene
Most of us were not taught moral philosophy outside the constructs of
our institutional religions or educational systems. I would like to
propose a simple, time-tested applied ethic to steer our conversation.
In the troubled times we find ourselves in, our disposition should be to
side with those that have less power. In the context of capitalist
modernity, to borrow Abdullah Öcalan’s language, this means siding with
the oppressed, the exploited, the immiserate, the marginalized, the
poor.
You can examine any situation, in all its complexity, and assess the
following: who has more power over the other? Who is benefitting from
the other’s misery? Who is exerting domination? Where does this power
come from? What are the rights of those involved? From this vantage
point of critical thinking, one can then engage their moral will in
support of balancing power. This can be applied to both the human and
more-than-human realms of other species and animate ecosystems.
This ethic does not mean you are the judge or arbiter of final say;
rather, it is a heuristic, a short-hand assessment for where to pledge
your moral weight and your solidarity. Of course, the difficulty is that
we are subjective beings with pre-existing identities and implicit
biases. And our identities matter and impact who and how we are able to
show up for others in society. Solidarity requires the cultivation of
wisdom and discernment, strategy and compassion.
Sometimes being an ally to those in adverse power dynamics may mean
educating the oppressor by interrupting their consciousness and steering
them towards awareness of equity through relationship and commitment to
their higher being. More often, solidarity requires being an accomplice
rather than an ally; it requires a direct affront to power itself.
Part of our responsibility is to understand the construct of our
identities. Not to transcend or bypass them, but rather, to situate our
beingness (our race, gender, socio-economic status, cognitive biases,
etc.) in the broader context of society in order to be in deeper kinship
with others. By engaging in a perspective outside of our internalized
role-type, we create the ability to disidentify, at least momentarily,
with our social personas in order to be in service to others who are
affected by the cultural constructs imposed on them.
However, our work of seeing and understanding the landscape and internal
ley lines of intersecting identities, and the cultural byproducts they
produce, does not stop here. In addition to our own inner
deconstruction, we must also avail ourselves to perceiving and
understanding the intersecting matrix of others – especially those who
embody different histories and diverse backgrounds.
Perhaps by activating the lens of power, rendering meaning to the plight
of other beings, human and otherwise, and being committed to see whole
selves with multiple, intersecting identities, we can start to develop
the critical capacity of moral judgement and discernment, not as
something to fear, or something that others will do (e.g. activists),
but rather as a requirement of being a citizen of our times.
Part of the reason we are in a crisis of meaning is that we have stopped
exercising our meaning-making sensibilities – our dedication to what we
deem so worthy of care that we would challenge anything, including our
own constructed roles within the social hierarchy.
Impoverishment of Our Times.
I don’t know who discovered water, but I can tell you it wasn’t a fish.
– Marshall McCluhan
We spend inordinate amounts of time consuming “culture”, yet we do not
necessarily have the means to cultivate a critique of culture. Max Weber
believed that the human is an animal suspended in webs of significance
that we ourselves have spun. Indeed, culture is the cumulation of all
those webs of significance. It is only by unveiling the threads that we
can start to grasp the limitations of our perceived reality in the
attempt to expand the horizon of possibility.
For those of us who live within the dominant culture of the West, our
context often prevents us from understanding the consequences of our way
of living. We are infantilized when it comes to basic knowledge like how
money is created, where our waste goes, where our energy and resources
are extracted from, where and how our food is grown, the history of our
nations, and the origins of our sources of wealth.
On one level, this is an artifact of power. Privilege is a constraint.
In fact, privilege is a blinding constraint. We appear to be hapless
fish swimming in the ocean of neoliberal capitalism that impedes our
ability to see selfishness masquerading as efficiency; destruction, war
and violence wrapped in the euphemisms of economic growth and jobs;
colonization masked as “development”; patriarchy obfuscated by pointing
to the exceptions; structural racism occluded by “pull yourself up by
your bootstraps”.
For one to understand power, one has to understand culture. In order to
decode culture, one must develop critical faculties. To be critical, one
must disidentify with the object of critique, in our case, the dominant
culture.
This requires a de-colonization of one’s entire being. It is an ongoing
praxis of deprogramming old constructs of greed, selfishness,
short-termism, extraction, commodification, usury, disconnection,
numbing and other life-denying tendencies. And reprogramming our
mind-soul-heart-body complex with intrinsic values such as
interdependence, altruism, generosity, cooperation, empathy,
non-violence and solidarity with all life.
These are not programs to be swapped out or software upgrades to a
computer. The mechanistic metaphors of Newtonian physics do not easily
transfer to the messy reality of lived experience. These values are
nurtured by entraining new beliefs, enacting new behaviors, contracting
new relationships, activating new neural patterns in the brain,
reordering new somatic responses in the body. And by “new”, I mean new
as a subjective reference. In many ways, these are acts of remembering.
How does this apply to a politics of solidarity in practical terms?
Every time we focus on a single issue that matters to us (e.g. lower
corporate taxes, mandatory vaccinations, elite pedapholia rings, etc.)
without examining the larger machinations of power or the interests we
ally ourselves with (i.e. associational politics), we remove the
possibility of true structural change. Every time we defend capitalism
as a source of innovation or the “best-worst system” we have, we
dishonor the 8000 species that go extinct every year and the majority of
humanity that are suffering under the yoke of growth-based imperialism.
Every time we say that some poverty will always exist, we condemn our
fellow humans because of our own ignorance. Every time we say that we
have the world we have because of human nature, we are amputating human
ingenuity, connection, empathy and possibility.
We first need to understand the cultural waters we are swimming in
before and during the process of forming and reforming our political
perspectives. And we must deeply question any opinions we may hold that
require the world to stay the way it is, especially if we are
benefitting from the current order.
To define another being as an inert or passive object is to deny its
ability to actively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block
our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining
the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our
conscious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing
bodies.
– David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
As we deepen our critique of the dominant culture, we will naturally
start to oppose the values that are rewarded by our current order. By
better understanding what we stand against, we will deepen our
understanding of what we stand for. As we create intimacy with ideas
such as solidarity, empathy, interdependence and other post-capitalist
values, we refine our internal world, the felt experience of what it is
to be a self-reflective, communitarian being in service to life. As we
shift internally, we will find the external world of consensus reality
start to mirror back these values, and in turn, our bodies will reflect
the external changes.
The political transmutates into the somatic whether we are conscious of
it or not. We carry the scars of history in our bodies, physically,
genetically, epi-genetically and memetically. Solidarity requires that
we honor history, that we do not deny or ignore the historical
circumstances that led us to this moment. Techno-utopianism and the New
Optimist agenda of people like Bill Gates and Stephen Pinker require
amnesia and anesthesia, forgetting and numbing, as their starting place.
The somatic realities of historical trauma and current life trauma, as
they relate to different and intersecting social locations, presents an
opportunity to redefine solidarity by engaging in relationships that
actively heal the present while healing the past.
Although identities are political, they are not fixed; rather, they are
emergent and ever-unfolding facets of human nature as a sub-stratum of
cultural evolution. Intersectionality asks us to relate to a matrix of
identities infinite in expression and limitless in nature. Rather than
checking the boxes of understanding and political correctness, we are
instead asked to develop our muscles of multi-faceted perception; we are
asked to become more agile in our relational being and to develop a
multitude of entry points to our empathy. Intersectionality challenges
us to become humble in our orientation to solidarity because it requires
us to question deep assumptions of our socialization. As the feminist
scholar and poet Audre Lorde reminds us “There is no such thing as a
single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” We are
tasked with developing a field of solidarity worthy of the complex forms
humanity is dreaming itself into.
As we start to become practitioners of solidarity, we might find that
our humanity expands as our conceptions of identity expand. We might
find that we are more resilient in the face of the onslaught of
neoliberalism and its seductive forces. We may find ourselves less
susceptible to advertising propaganda or conspiracy theories on the one
hand, or existential angst, despair and ennui on the other. We may find
ourselves more adept at holding multiple simultaneous truths, ambiguity,
apparent chaos and other paradoxes. We may find that solidarity as
embodied practice is where true meaning and integrity comes from.
As we start to see how all oppression is connected, we can also start to
see glimpses of how all healing is connected. And that our own
liberation is not only bound up with that of others but that our
collective future is dependent on it.
Solidarity is not an act of charity, rather it is a means of making us
whole again. Solidarity will ask of us what charity never can.
The world is perfect as it is, including my desire to change it.
– Ram Dass
It is a common belief that there is an oppositional relationship between
inner work and outer work, spirituality and politics. They are separate
domains – politics happens in halls of power or the streets, and
spirituality happens in ashrams, churches, temples, forests, caves and
other places of worship. This separation is often manifested in
statements such as “I have to take care of myself before I can help
others”. Although there is some truth in this sentiment, it overlooks
the possibility that being in service to others is being in service to
one’s self. The act of solidarity for another being or community of
beings feeds the soul and cultivates character in ways that often cannot
happen through traditional spiritual practices.
The binary thinking goes both ways. Political communities often lack
deeper spiritual practices and metaphysical worldviews beyond Cartesian
rationalism. Activists often get burned out because they lack spiritual
resourcing and a sustained depth of purpose. On the other hand,
spiritual communities are often disconnected from reality as they
attempt to bypass the physical plane. Through solidarity, there is the
possibility of a sacred activism that creates lasting structural change.
For example, by engaging in collective prayer as an act of solidarity,
we are exerting our life-force for shared healing, knowing and trusting
that our healing is entangled with the healing of all others. Our
individual healing can be a consequence of our prayer, but to focus our
prayers on simply our own safety, abundance, etc. is to relegate our
relationship with the divine into a selfish monologue.
Often, collective prayer or contemplation can become an entry point into
a more thoughtful, delicate activism. Even for those deeply steeped in
direct action and political organizing, transforming reactionary
impulses such as outrage into intentional prayer opens latent
potentialities. By spending time in contemplation about what another
being may be going through, we access the possibility to live many
lives, to see many perspectives, to hear many tongues, to know many
ancestors, to receive the blessings of many deities. In that sense,
empathy and solidarity are gateways to what quantum physicists call
non-locality.
Generosity is doing justice without requiring justice.
– Imam Junaid of Bhagdad, 9^(th) century Islamic scholar
Among activists, there has historically been a strong culture of
self-flagellation, worldly denial and asceticism. This has partly
contributed to a political climate bereft of pleasure, especially on the
Left. This in turn repels potential allies and diminishes the appeal of
social justice movements. To paraphrase Emma Goldman, a revolution
without joy is not a revolution worth having. Nor will our subconscious
ratify its manifestations. Part of the practice of resistance to
dominant culture is to create and live alternatives of such beauty and
extraordinariness that the so-called “others” are magnetically drawn to
post-capitalist possibilities.
The more we develop our capacity for pleasure, the more we can access
the immediacy of the present moment. The skill of being present with
what is while creating what could be also allows us to access the deep
grief that comes with being a human in the Anthropocene and potentiates
the generosity of spirit that is required to flourish in these times.
As we remain present, as we hold what spiritual traditions call “witness
consciousness” in the face of planetary destruction – of other species,
of cultures and languages we will never know because of our way of
living – we may also access the mythopoetic aspects of our being, the
archetypal realms that can assist us in reshaping the physical world. We
may start to remember that our lives are creative, shamanic acts we are
performing on ourselves.
The practices of tending grief, of being faithful witness, of opening to
pleasure, of deepening generosity, of expanding our circle of concern,
can rewire our identities from atomized individuals having a personal
experience to inter-relational beings taking part in the immensity of a
self-generating cosmos.
As we shed the veils of separation and anthropocentric logic created by
monocultures of the mind, we open ourselves to what the physicist David
Bohm called the implicate order, an omnicentric worldview connected to
the wholeness of every perceived other.
We are being prepared for even deeper complexity, breakdown, tragedy,
renewal and rebirth. This transition calls upon all of us to be vigilant
students of our cultures, to contemplate our entangled destinies, to
abandon our entitlement, to transcend the apparent duality of inner and
outer work, and to reaffirm our responsibility to each other and the
interwoven fabric of our sentient planet and the living universe.
Through solidarity we give more of ourselves over to the divine, to the
collective unfolding, so the future can reflect back who we really are.
Special thanks to Carlin Quinn, Yael Marantz, Martin Kirk, Blessol
Gathoni and Jason Hickel for their contributions. As with all acts of
creation, this article was a communal endeavor.