Our world is both transfixed and vexed by borders. All of us are supposed to be something—everyone is supposed to have a political identity, and cultural or racial or religious or ethnic identities as well. Our adjectives are typically taken to give us a determinate self in the world. The worst fate in our world is to be a stateless refugee, or a prefix-less human. Click on the box and scroll through the modifiers: Everybody is supposed to be some particular kind of person. These identities bind us, they are ways for us to organize our worlds, tell ourselves apart from one another, and guarantee our freedom from one another.
But we are also all supposed to be united in a global humanity where these differences don’t ultimately matter. If difference is the underlying metaphysics of “liberty,” an insistence on sameness underpins and explains the logic of “equality,” which often pushes us toward a dogmatic affirmation of our fundamental community. Certainly, everyone is different and must be respected as such; but everyone is also supposed to recognize those differences are—what? Not fully differences? Overridden by a common human nature? So, borders, boundaries, absolutely trouble us as well.
Here is a paradox. To survive and flourish, every society needs to cultivate solidarity among its members; on this the right and left agree. But once we affirm the freedom of each to be irreducibly individual and also affirm the equality of all to be the same, how ought we balance these two to permit solidarity?
A new book, Charity After Augustine, by Jonathan Teubner—theologian, contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review, and research associate at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program—means to help us address this problem by appealing to history. He argues that one of the deepest and most powerful streams feeding into the modern mind—the one flowing to us from ancient and medieval Christendom—provides clues to help us understand “why our attempts to build solidarity or social cohesion, at least in the West, have ended in disaster just as often as they have brought about justice.” Understanding this, he thinks, can help us better cultivate solidarity alongside liberty and equality.