True solidarity requires Burke's 'sympathetic revenge'

[Celerity]

Social media utterances aren’t enough. Burke’s stand against colonial injustice shows we must confront our own complicity

https://psyche.co/ideas/true-solidarity-requires-burkes-sympathetic-revenge


A military officer of the East India Company (c1765-70), painted by an unknown Indian artist in the style of the late Mughal Murshidabad school of painting. Courtesy the V&A Collection, London



Solidarity – the word is in the air. Yet what exactly does it mean? Solidarity once meant that different groups – each facing distinct injustices – laboured together for social, political and economic reforms on each other’s behalf. Supporting the cause of one group – let’s say, Black Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s – was not only the right thing to do but a powerful way of affirming a shared sense of humanity through common struggle. Somewhere along the way, solidarity lost this element of labour. It became a matter of declarations. Social media utterances – offered in the name of empathy – came to substitute for the grinding work of political commitment. Digital affirmations work well enough in the performative world of social media, where private lives must partake in public acts of ritual exposure, but they fail to wrestle with the complex moral emotions that shape our real-world responses to injustice.

Today, solidarity appears to be more about the person declaring it than the afflicted stranger they claim to be standing beside. When one declares solidarity – I stand with X, or I stand with Y – the statement, however well intentioned, inevitably works as a piece of theatre. That’s not to say such expressions are disingenuous or ineffective. To the contrary, they can be sincere and memorable instances of identification with suffering. But I want to suggest that there is a deeper, more morally demanding form of solidarity that has largely been abandoned in the 21st century – one that explains why people sometimes commit themselves, even at great personal cost, to the causes of strangers. This form of solidarity can be found in an unexpected source: the political thinker Edmund Burke (1729-97).


Detail from a portrait of Edmund Burke (c1769) by the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Burke is commonly remembered as the father of modern conservatism for his opposition to the French Revolution and its forces of violence. What is forgotten is Burke the ‘badly suppressed rebel’ (as Conor Cruise O’Brien remembered him), whose anger at British abuses of power abroad in India ignited his own visceral experiences of injustice as an Irish-born man. Burke – a member of the UK Parliament practically involved with these questions – thought solidarity was not merely about empathy, about feeling as another feels. Solidarity, he thought, required confronting a deeper, more unsettling emotion within oneself: what Burke called ‘sympathetic revenge’ – a moral emotion that fuses anger with justice; a human retribution against the agents of injustice, compelled by a sense of the full humanity of their victims.

Sympathetic revenge hinges on a powerful insight: that the final spark driving people to take personal and collective action against an injustice is not simply outrage but the recognition that they, themselves, are implicated in the wrong. This sense of self-betrayal arises when people recognise that they are enabling wrongdoing contrary to their own self-declared values, and returns to strangers the moral agency they otherwise lack, protecting their consignment to their own victimhood. More than anything, this anger gets people (seriously) involved in the causes of others.

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