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" than by the silence of the dispassionate routine. Do you want solidarity? If so, face and come to grips with the routine of the mundane; with its logic or its inanity, with the powers of its demands, commands and prohibitions. And measure your strength against the patterns of daily pursuits of those people who shaped history while being shaped by it. Devaluation To put it mildly, at least in our part of the world, the day-to-day drudgery is inhospitable to solidarity. It is this way now, but has not always been like that. For within the society of builders, which formed on the eve of the modern era, there was a veritable factory of solidarity. It was built by the vigour and density of human bonds and the obviousness of human interdependencies. Many aspects of contemporary existence taught us a lesson about the solidarity of human fate and encouraged us to close ranks and march arm in arm: the teeming platoons of workers within factory walls, uniformity of the working routine regulated by the clock and imposed by the production line, omnipresence of intrusive supervision and standardisation of disciplinary demands - but also the conviction of both sides of the class divide, that is the managers and the managed, that their mutual dependence was inevitable and didnt leave any room for evolution, so it was sensible to work out a permanent modus covivendi and self-imposed restraint which this compromise inescapably demanded. The benefits of solidarity were also highlighted by the practice of the trade unions, collective bargaining and negotiations, collective work contracts, cooperatives of producers, consumers or lodgers, various kinds of fraternities and mutual aid societies. Conducive to solidarity was the logic of state-building within the territorially defined sovereignty of national authorities. And finally the slow but sure expansion of the institutions of the welfare state (Sozialstaat, état providence) demonstrated the communal nature of human coexistence, based on the ideal and experience of solidarity. Time after time, stealthily but stubbornly, the spirit of solidarity returns from exile. Our profoundly individualised ("late modern", as it is now often but baselessly called1) society of consumers is the very opposite of a factory of solidarity, namely it produces mutual suspicion and competition. A very common side-effect of the workings of this factory is the devaluation of human solidarity: a refusal or even denial of its utility in the pursuance of personal desires and achieving personal goals. The devaluation of solidarity has its roots in the withering of care for the common good and quality of the society in which the life of the individual takes place. As Ulrich Beck, one of the most perceptive researchers of contemporary cultural transformations, puts it, it is the separate human individual, in his or her distinct nature and lonely struggle for self-determination, rather than a consensual community at any level, that is today burdened with searching for and finding, in an individual way and within the limits defined by the size of its individual resources, "individual" solutions for "socially produced" problems (in its efficiency and absurdity this task is akin to the building of a family bomb-shelter in order to avoid the consequences of nuclear war). In contrast to societies where the dominant attitude was that of a "gamekeeper" (protection of the common heritage of divine creation entrusted to human care) or a "gardener" (assuming responsibility for the shape of social order and its preservation), the attitude of a "hunter" is today relentlessly and insistently recommended; this attitude is mainly or perhaps even exclusively about the number and size of hunting trophies and the capacity of the hunting bag. Caring for the abundance of animals in the hunting area, that is the success of future hunts, remains outside the remit of the huntsman. In a society of consumers treating the world as a repository of potential objects of consumption, the recommended life strategy is to carve out a relatively comfortable and safe niche for exclusively private use within the public space, which is hopelessly, for incurably, inhospitable to people, indifferent to human troubles and misery, riddled with ambushes and booby-traps. In this world, solidarity is of little use. New truths It is difficult to ascertain what the cause is and what the result is here - but going on in parallel to the withering of the interest in the quality of the common good (society itself being the most important among them) and the tendency to exhibit solidarity with the problems and strivings of ones neighbours, is the demise and dismantling of traditional "factories of solidarity": institutions encouraging attitudes of solidarity. The "deregulation of the labour market" and the resultant fluidity of workplace communities characterised by a decreasing - less and less protected by law - stability strongly disfavours for