Good afternoon, everyone. Let me say as one of the organizers that I think this is an historic gathering and it’s an honor to share the moment with all of you.
For my talk this afternoon, I’d actually like to spend my minutes responding to our critics. And, yes there will indeed be critics of today’s gathering on various sides. Obviously, I can’t address all the likely criticism. So, I will be somewhat targeted in my response. I will address those critics who oppose organized labor as a matter of course and who, frankly, are suspicious of the virtue of solidarity. My remarks will especially address those critics of today’s gathering who might challenge any emphasis on the principle of solidarity from the perspective of a corollary principle in Catholic social thought – the principle of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity – that’s the special word, and I’ll come back to it in a few minutes.
For now, though, let me reframe the idea of solidarity itself – building on many of the wonderful presentations that we heard this morning.
Solidarity, as we heard from previous speakers, is the ethic of human union, the ethic of community.
By many accounts, solidarity is under much pressure in our age. Scholars like Bob Putnam and Robert Bellah have detailed the many venues where that pressure is evident. Journalists like Alan Ehrenhalt have chronicled the travails of solidarity for decades. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have traced the theoretical origins of the challenges to solidarity in our age. I share with these scholars and analysts the perception that solidarity has been spiraling down in a long retreat in our age. Neighborhoods, families, and all the little communities of our daily lives, examples of everyday solidarity, are struggling in an era that valorizes the self and makes individual choice an absolute. That struggle is evident too in what we see happening to membership in almost all religious communities in the United States. I believe the decline of solidarity is especially evident in the erosion of the kind of citizenship that asks — in the Kennedy language of the Greatest Generation — asks what we can do for our country, what together we can do for all mankind. The spiraling erosion of solidarity, I believe, is also one of the factors that have challenged union organizing and membership in recent decades. Much of the logic of our contemporary world seems to militate against solidarity.
So it is, then, that I’ve always been intrigued by the many theories and groups that actually rejoice in the decline of solidarity – libertarians, devotees of Austrian economics’ methodological individualism, Ayn Rand’s objectivists, and varieties of anarchists. Those who absolutize private choice and who radicalize egoistic independence – those who find something romantic about the storybook character of the rugged individual who subsists without use or need for others. For all of these worldviews that celebrate unencumbered individualism, solidarity is viewed with suspicion, viewed as a sort of weakness at best or (nodding to F. A. Hayek) serfdom at worst.
The arguments against solidarity from its critics take several forms.
Ayn Rand’s novels, for example, depict the basic responsibilities of association with others as corruptions and constraints on the creative authenticity of her protagonists, like John Galt. Solidarity, for Rand, is synonymous with a sort of phoniness; a life lived for the concerns of others is viewed as shameful and cowardly.
Libertarians like Charles Murray, differently, would argue against any emphasis on solidarity for what he perceives as the problem of dependency. The interdependency that is at the heart of solidarity is judged to compromise the autonomy and liberty of the individual. Institutions based on solidarity are imagined to weaken the development of self-sufficiency and self-reliance that are celebrated by libertarians like Murray. Solidarity is suspicious for its alleged coddling of individuals, which is thought to undercut the personal responsibility that libertarians presume is the basis for an effective citizenry.
For those who subscribe to Austrian economics, including such thinkers as Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, the problem with solidarity is its interference with market forces. Theorists of this sort idolize the free competition of the market and associate solidarity with the collusion of interests that can interfere with such competition. Ideally, workers and consumers should be individuals who do not organize collectively in pursuit of their interests. Labor unions, in particular, are derided for compromising the free competition of and for labor in production.
This brings me to Catholic social teaching’s ethic of subsidiarity. In Catholic circles, those who militate against an emphasis on institutions of solidarity often do so with reference to the idea of subsidiarity. As if subsidiarity were in some fashion opposite to solidarity. As if subsidiarity were compatible with Austrian economics, libertarianism, and Ayn Rand.
It’s not. By any fair reading, the Church’s teaching about subsidiarity is not really compatible with such thinking.
Subsidiarity refers to the appropriate balancing of responsibilities and functions among the parts of a social order. It has its origin in the Catholic understanding of community, which perceives a community not as so many individuals connected by contracts, but as a corporate whole—a moral and cultural body that, like any body, is comprised of limbs and parts, the differences of which contribute to the good of the whole. The ethic that pertains to the unity of the body is called solidarity. The ethic that pertains to the role of the parts is subsidiarity. And the good of the whole by which solidarity and subsidiarity are measured is called the common good.
In the complete sense, this understanding is referred to as the Mystical Body of Christ. Romans 12:4-5 puts it this way. “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another.” But, Catholic teachings encourage us to promote such an understanding in all human associations. Hence, the Church argues that subsidiarity (like solidarity and common good) is an ethic to apply even to the hierarchy of any community.
Here’s perhaps the most famous quote in Catholic social teaching regarding subsidiarity, from Pope Pius XI, 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, Section 79.
Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.
I’m sure this sounds like complicated theological stuff. So, let me bring this thinking into a topic that should resonate in this AFL-CIO hall. Unions are perfect examples of subsidiarity in practice. Unions, which are communities of workers, are constitutive parts of the whole of the economic order. Against the macro order of the global economy, unions are critically important – I’m paraphrasing Quadragesimo Anno now – unions are critically important to help the members of the body social not be destroyed or absorbed by the faceless forces of the global throwaway economy.
Subsidiarity, understood correctly then, is not the opposite of solidarity, it is the organizing of solidarity. Labor unions exemplify how that might work.
In closing, let me then return to the critics of solidarity.
Vis-à-vis solidarity all of these critics hold up the ideal of the strong, independent, autonomous, competitive, personally responsible, and authentic individual. Institutions of solidarity would compromise such individuals. Only the pure individual is strong, they insist.
But solidarity’s critics are wrong. In fact, it’s their vaunted solitary individual who is most at risk. Who lacks the strength to be free. It’s the isolated individual who struggles in the contemporary to stand with authenticity vis-à-vis the macro forces of global economics, consumer society, and the modern state.
I grew up in a union household and I can’t count the number of times I heard the age-old union ballad about solidarity. We’ve all heard the lyrics before. I’m not Pete Seeger or Joan Baez, so let me just recite.
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one
For the Union makes us strong – Solidarity Forever
Subsequent verses go on to describe solidarity as a power greater than gold, greater than the might of armies.
Arrayed against the individual in the contemporary world are innumerable forces – many of them faceless dynamics of society and economics – against which the solitary individual has little resistance, no matter how rugged she may be. In the words of the ballad, “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”
Catholic social teaching poses that same rhetorical question. Those same teachings recommend solidarity organized by subsidiarity – an arrangement exemplified by labor unions. It’s so promising, then, today to see unions and the church getting reacquainted. Thank you.