BG

The Roots of Our Anti-Solidarity Culture

Susannah Black
Susannah Black received her BA from Amherst College and her MA from Boston University. She is an editor at Mere Orthodoxy, Plough Quarterly, Postliberal Thought and its journal New Polity, and The Davenant Press. Previously, she was an editor at Providence and Fare Forward. She's a co-founder of Solidarity Hall and The Simone Weil Center, and is on the boards of the Distributist Review, The Davenant Institute, and The Simone Weil Center. Her writing has appeared in First Things, The Distributist Review, Solidarity Hall, Providence, Amherst Magazine, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, The Human Life Review, The American Conservative, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, Postliberal Thought, and elsewhere. She blogs at Radio Free Thulcandra and tweets at @suzania. A native Manhattanite, she is now living in Queens.

Dear friends,

We find ourselves, in the United States, at the end of a global pandemic in a society that is increasingly isolating. We’ve all experienced this over the last year: we have been trapped behind our screens in our pods. With that isolation has come increasing alienation between classes: those of us who cannot afford to be trapped in a pod behind a screen have been delivering takeout and Amazon packages. And that alienation—that sense that we are not a “We” but hostile camps, or perhaps just a collection of lonely “I”s—extends to political and cultural division as well.

How did this society of profound anti-solidarity come to be, and how can it be healed—if it can? Carlo Lancellotti addresses these questions in this week’s fascinating and challenging essay, applying the thought of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce to the roots of our anti-solidarity culture.

My best wishes to you all,