The Homebound Symphony: Rowan Williams on solidarity
…in what is really in many ways the heart of Rowan’s argument, the history of the term “solidarity” that links it with labor movements becomes essential. The solidarity of labor is based on the idea that if we have a common work, then we have a common cause. In a way, Rowan is reversing that: He’s saying that if we have a common problem — the failure to acknowledge the full humanity of others — and if we have all, in one way or another, undergone the discipline of suppressing our instincts for solidarity, then we need to engage in the common labor of restoring those instincts to their proper place. That is, solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense calls for work. So Rowan seeks to conceptualize and formulate the kind of work that we need to do.
Thus much what Rowan does here is the terminological and conceptual excavation that lays the groundwork for this common labor of restoring solidarity.
Naz Hamid: Craft Is Not Culture
Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. It’s always been culture — lived, relational, contextual. The ability to decode what’s happening right now, to encapsulate it, to communicate it through deep experience. Culture can give birth to something that hasn’t been seen, hasn’t been appropriated, hasn’t been followed to death.
LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.
The above two posts were back-to-back in my feed reader this morning and felt linked, one about “solidarity in this broad, moral, philosophical, and theological sense” and the other about the very practical problem with allowing our work to be enclosed and captured by large language models.
This does seem to be in the zeitgeist.
I immediately thought of Good Work Lights Us up, and searched this site for the word “work”, which returned more results than I anticipated–2176 results in 893 files, or put another way, fully 25% of posts on this site contain the term.
There is the Functional Melancholic’s Pathologizing Our Own Humanity and We Spend a Lot of Energy Pretending We Aren’t All Just Tired and Terrified to Varying Degrees, just two I’ve plucked from his regular output about how to survive in a soulless, financialized world.
Also recently was Gravity via Simone Weil, who despite physical limitations insisted in working with laborers. More of her here in the months to come, for sure…
And I’m not sure if the connection to gravity in Pull was as obvious to the reader as it was to me as I wrote it, but yeah…