Searching for Solidarity in an Atomized Society

How can we continue to behave ethically within a wider culture in which so many forces prod us to use others for our own satisfaction or self-advancement? It's an always-vexing question that Aryeh Cohen's essay on "Justice in the City" raises in a fresh way.

There have always been unscrupulous individuals who operate in this way, seeking out others' vulnerabilities in order to exploit them. But now we have entire industries devoted, in essence, to harvesting heretofore personal information for the sake of prompting particular consumer and political choices. We have people on the left, not just on the right, who "network" systematically with an intent that is flagrantly self-interested.

My point is the obvious one, that the wider society grows ever more oblivious to the problem of instrumental relationships: relationships based on what good I can get out of the Other rather than what good I can provide to benefit the Other. For many of our contemporaries, whether we should be using other human beings to our personal advantage is not even a question — it's just the way things are.

A Drought of Lovingkindness

There is, of course, the issue of compassion fatigue in a situation of information overload, but I think an even more troubling issue is the question of why and how to persist in doing good — acting out of generosity and goodwill — within a wider culture in which the old idea of doing good anonymously and as daily practice, of doing good routinely, has been supplanted by the idea of "doing good" as a means of enhancing one's celebrity through the occasional act of very public kindness.

"We desperately need to build up an ethic of accompaniment," the author writes. "We should commit to creating a counterculture of resistance and celebration." Detail from Envisioning Racial Fairness (see caption on page 30 for more details).

I may well be exaggerating the degree of ethical coarsening that we have been undergoing (and I speak here only of the U.S. situation — I cannot address the state of play elsewhere). If I am exaggerating, I trust readers will correct me. But these days I see very little genuine (i.e., disinterested) public charity taking place, let alone the kinds of practices that exemplify what we in our faith traditions understand to be public justice. Accordingly, I believe we are already in a new and unprecedented moment, one with extremely troubling parameters whose full measure we have yet to take.

Politically, all of our democratic institutions have been draped with giant "for sale" signs. Economically, nearly all of our major business enterprises appear to have dispensed with the quaint idea that employee well-being matters, except inasmuch as it boosts the bottom line. Religiously, most Americans continue to gravitate toward a fear-based religiosity or a success-based religiosity (or some combination: the two are obviously related), whereas the market share for an unapologetic prophetic faith continues to slide. And, as bad as they are, all of these other warning signs pale in relation to the ever-rising tide of social fragmentation and atomization. There is a fearsome public price for this growing alienation, as underscored in Sherry Turkle's Alone Together.

To resist the atomization of capitalist society, we need to build a counterculture of generosity, compassion, truth-telling, and joy, the author writes. Detail from Envisioning Racial Fairness.

For all of these reasons, we desperately need to build up an ethic of accompaniment. But we must do it while consciously understanding ourselves to be operating in a profoundly countercultural context. This is not our grandparents' America, where there was certainly no shortage of rapacious capitalists but where rapaciousness was commonly understood to constitute antisocial behavior, deserving only of contempt. Today, the wielding of the sharpest possible elbows is socially accepted and sometimes even celebrated. Audiences jeered Frank Capra's Mr. Potter; today they cheer Donald Trump.

Building a Counterculture of "Accompaniment"

Becoming appropriately countercultural means, at a minimum, that we ourselves, in our communities...