by Freddie Sayers, UnHerd
Rowan Williams’s baritone voice emanates from deep behind his white whiskers like a foghorn through the mist. It’s quiet but sonorous, and every word is carefully chosen. The effect is an uncanny mix: three parts affable academic sharing his deep learning over a fireside tutorial, one part seasoned public intellectual unafraid of a fight. Now that he is no longer at the helm of an institution or even a voting peer, he seems determined to follow his own mind — and if that gets him into political hot water, so be it.
The starting point for our discussion is his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, a scholarly work of philosophical history and theology but whose title (a word deeply associated with the labour movement and the political Left) is laced with politics from the start. He is quick to explain what the book is not calling for. True solidarity, per Lord Williams, has nothing to do with cheap gestures of allyship with suffering people of the type found on social media. “I’m aware of the danger of a kind of sentimentality about that; the performativity that just says: Well, this makes me feel better, so never mind if it makes a difference.”