Building Solidarity

Building Solidarity

It was during World War I that Hans Berger was thrown from his horse while serving as a soldier in the Army’s front lines. Moments before being crushed under the wheels of an oncoming horse-drawn artillery carriage, which thankfully stopped just in time, his mind was flooded with thoughts of his likely imminent death. At the same moment, many miles away, his sister, with whom Hans was very, very close, awakened her father to urge him to telegraph her brother, Hans, and ask about his welfare. She sensed he was in mortal danger. Hans was so struck by this moment of “spontaneous telepathy,” as he labeled it, that he spent the remainder of his life researching how and what enables brains to communicate with other brains across distances and beyond language. His work resulted in the invention of the electroencephalogram (EEG), a tool still much-used 100 years later to sneak a peak into the brain’s constantly changing electrical wave activities.

What were the building materials involved in the connection between Hans and his sister? We can’t be fully certain. We can make some educated guesses, however, based on the many discoveries made since then about our brains, their attraction to and need for social connection, and how to create brain states that build lasting and resilient social bonds. In short, how to build true solidarity.

Essential Building Materials

Solidarity involves a feeling of common purpose that unites people and urges a course of action toward a common goal. The original meaning of solidarity reflects our interdependence with each other. While we may act as though we are distinct and separate human beings who act independent of one another much of the time, when situations arise that bring us together, we can appear to reconnect with our underlying commonality: the interconnectedness that unites us.

It seems to me that when we do come together, as many of us are now doing in response to the coronavirus threat, we face a choice, whether we realize it or not. Do the actions we now take in apparent solidarity with one another arise from the recognition (to recognize is re-cognition, or to know again) that we are ultimately brothers and sisters, regardless of our outward appearances and inner beliefs? Or, are we simply coming together out of fear of the immediate threat, already ready to return to our old ways once the threat is passed.

To learn true solidarity from this current global threat is to grow together from it. To build stronger bonds between each other as individuals, communities, and nations who share a common space. To practice a false solidarity of convenience is to learn to see each other as tools or contrivances that enable us to solve an immediate problem without changing ourselves in the process.

Building true solidarity rests, in my view, on these essential steps or “re-cognitions?”

• Recognize that the vulnerability we feel highlights that all of us are interconnected; that none of us is a solitary individual
• Could “others” with whom we disagree be experiencing the same fears and worries, but expressing them differently? What connects us vs. what divides us?
• Recognize that it is through acceptance and appreciation of our vulnerabilities that we come to see the uniqueness and beauty of ourselves and our neighbors
• If none of us has all the answers, share similar struggles, and experience the same doubts and fears, can we perceive the unique vulnerabilities we each express as endless variations on the common human vulnerabilities we all share?
• In seeing the uniqueness of each of us, practice expressing kindness and appreciation of that uniqueness, as each of us in our diversity and difference can be seen as occupying a special niche in the interconnected network of life we all share
• If we all walk different paths in life but seek similar ends — connection, love, and joy — wouldn’t it make a positive difference to the other and to ourselves if we gently, sincerely, and kindly expressed our appreciation for the uniqueness of each person we encounter?

Which form of solidarity shall we seek?