Social media utterances aren’t enough. Burke’s stand against colonial injustice shows we must confront our own complicity
Solidarity – the word is in the air. Yet what exactly does it mean? Solidarity once meant that different groups – each facing distinct injustices – laboured together for social, political and economic reforms on each other’s behalf. Supporting the cause of one group – let’s say, Black Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s – was not only the right thing to do but a powerful way of affirming a shared sense of humanity through common struggle. Somewhere along the way, solidarity lost this element of labour. It became a matter of declarations. Social media utterances – offered in the name of empathy – came to substitute for the grinding work of political commitment. Digital affirmations work well enough in the performative world of social media, where private lives must partake in public acts of ritual exposure, but they fail to wrestle with the complex moral emotions that shape our real-world responses to injustice.
Today, solidarity appears to be more about the person declaring it than the afflicted stranger they claim to be standing beside. When one declares solidarity – I stand with X, or I stand with Y – the statement, however well intentioned, inevitably works as a piece of theatre. That’s not to say such expressions are disingenuous or ineffective. To the contrary, they can be sincere and memorable instances of identification with suffering. But I want to suggest that there is a deeper, more morally demanding form of solidarity that has largely been abandoned in the 21st century – one that explains why people sometimes commit themselves, even at great personal cost, to the causes of strangers.
This form of solidarity can be found in an unexpected source: the political thinker Edmund Burke (1729-97).
Detail from a portrait of Edmund Burke (c1769) by the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London
Burke is commonly remembered as the father of modern conservatism for his opposition to the French Revolution and its forces of violence. What is forgotten is Burke the ‘badly suppressed rebel’ (as Conor Cruise O’Brien remembered him), whose anger at British abuses of power abroad in India ignited his own visceral experiences of injustice as an Irish-born man. Burke – a member of the UK Parliament practically involved with these questions – thought solidarity was not merely about empathy, about feeling as another feels. Solidarity, he thought, required confronting a deeper, more unsettling emotion within oneself: what Burke called ‘sympathetic revenge’ – a moral emotion that fuses anger with justice; a human retribution against the agents of injustice, compelled by a sense of the full humanity of their victims.
Burke became angry at his own nation on behalf of the Indians
Sympathetic revenge hinges on a powerful insight: that the final spark driving people to take personal and collective action against an injustice is not simply outrage but the recognition that they, themselves, are implicated in the wrong. This sense of self-betrayal arises when people recognise that they are enabling wrongdoing contrary to their own self-declared values, and returns to strangers the moral agency they otherwise lack, protecting their consignment to their own victimhood. More than anything, this anger gets people (seriously) involved in the causes of others.
For nearly 15 years, Burke tried to reform the East India Company, the private corporation that ruled colonial India with arbitrary power throughout the 18th century. His most infamous stand came in his impeachment of Warren Hastings – the head of the East India Company and the British governor of Bengal – whom Burke accused of violating the rights of Indians and betraying Britain’s constitutional ideals. Addressing the Lords and assembled public in a packed Westminster Hall in London, Burke kick-started a moral crisis in the British psyche: If you sympathise with Hastings’s victims, must you hold him accountable for his crimes? And if you credit my account but can’t summon the sympathy for the Indians, what does that say about you?
Burke sought to cultivate a special kind of guilt within Englishmen: not a paralysing shame, but a righteous anger that turned inward, forcing individuals to come face to face with their own complicity. His anger at the British mimicked the possible or potential anger of the Indians as would-be victims, in a kind of mirroring process. Through sympathising with those who would be understandably angry at what the British had done to them, Burke became angry at his own nation on behalf of the Indians, so joining their angers in mutual protest at the broken relationship they share. Paradoxically, Burke thought this mutual anger could be the first step towards justice.
Today, we are living through our own age of injustice, with blood spattered across our screens daily. Gaza. Ukraine. Beirut. The Be’eri kibbutz. Sexual violence at home. Racial violence on our streets. These crises demand more than distant expressions of solidarity; they require us to wrestle with our own entanglements. Burke’s idea of sympathetic revenge is a potent means of thinking about solidarity in cases where leaders act on our behalf in ways we find reprehensible. Burke hoped a more capacious kind of solidarity would emerge from Englishmen as part of the British Empire’s response to India – an empire he believed owed Indians more. I have the same hope for many today: for Israelis appalled by the murderous actions of their government in Gaza; for all of us in the West who are complicit in those crimes while reckoning with a vile and recrudescent antisemitism; for men reflecting on how they have failed to be part of the solution to gender inequality; to those who would flagrantly abuse democratic constitutions in the name of popular government.
What makes sympathetic revenge a morally imaginative form of solidarity is its ability to navigate the complex, often contradictory emotions surrounding political and social injustices. Contemporary understandings of solidarity risk reducing these emotions into a simple binary: one is either an oppressor or the oppressed. And yet the reality of emotional life is far more complex – guilt, rage, sympathy, loss, suffering and shame often coexist within us in ways that defy forceful categorisation and easy taming. Sympathetic revenge gathers all these emotions into a ball and rolls them towards a more meaningful form of introspection. If solidarity has traditionally been seen as being about adding one’s voice to the voiceless in their cause, sympathetic revenge mirrors that silent stranger’s anger, keeping this anger real, visible and alive. Burke was aware that such solidarity came with little reward; in a speech to the House of Commons in 1783, he said: ‘In such an attempt you hurt those who are able to return kindness or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot so much as give you thanks.’
In an age of digital activism, where expressions of solidarity often remain abstract and performative, Burke’s example compels us to confront violence in a more immediate, personal way. He insists that solidarity cannot be an art practised at arm’s length. It must be a prompt towards self-reflection – one that, if it leads to self-knowledge, renders contemporary expressions of solidarity comparatively weightless.
