Shared by Penny Lawrence
How is solidarity not solid? Thoughts sparked by Morton’s ‘Human Kindness’ (2017:13) book aiming to ‘reimagine what “to have in common” means’.
This high-octane struggle against anthropocentrism reconfigures consumerism and communism to embrace nonhumans, ‘there are parts of me that also belong to other lifeforms, are common to them, or just are other lifeforms […] We are clouds, not metaphorically solid’ (122). Human existence is seen in mutuality, not privileged, ‘We are all symbiotic communities’ (125), such as when a house is affected by the frogs’, lizards’ and dust’s use of it. Where Taylor’s (2017) rejection of stewardship emphasises entangled life worlds, Morton concentrates on division, “The Severing”. His key solution is the reduction of consumerism, ‘a point that can’t be co-opted or turned into a product at all’ (145). Humans not acting on, for, or profiting from, but living with things. Solidarity, albeit sometimes playful, ‘describes a state of physical and political organization, and it describes a feeling’ (13) that is surely recognisable in Taylor’s call for quotidian worldly relations.
Morton, T. (2017) Humankind: Solidarity with non-human people London: Verso Books
Taylor, A. (2017) Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene, Environmental Education Research 23(10) 1448-1461, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452