In the spring, as other trees along our street are awakening, their canopies bursting to blanket our neighborhood in refreshing shade, our poor old tree labors to produce a smattering of leaves, seeming to insist it is alive against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Lurching heavily over our house, it seems most at home in late October, gracing the roads with haunting desolation. And throughout the year, the tree is draped in mistletoe.  

Somehow, mistletoe, a parasitic plant that can threaten a tree’s life, has edged its way into our cultural imaginary as an emblem of love. Lovers are enjoined to kiss under the cover of mistletoe. Yet mistletoe preys on trees like ours, speeding their demise by imbibing the trees’ water and nutrients.  

For interdependence to be recovered as an ethical value, it must be wedded to a notion of responsibility. 

Mysterious though love may be, surely we can say confidently that love is not a parasitic relationship. If the Apostle to the Gentiles in 1 Corinthians is to be believed, love is, on the contrary, “patient” and “kind,” and “does not insist on its own way.” Yet the relationship of the mistletoe to the tree throws into relief the ambiguity of our relational existence. For better and for worse, the patterns of nature are predicated on processes of organisms consuming one another. Life sustains itself through killing. These natural cycles coexist in systems of precarious interdependence. 

The relationship of the mistletoe to the tree, and the troubling conflation of love and parasitism, illustrate the ambiguity of interdependence as a postmodern “deep symbol.” In the 20th century, “interdependence” emerged as a central value for thinkers across a wide cross-section of fields. 

In the last century, processes of globalization drew human communities together in networks of communication, commerce, geopolitics and culture. These developments produced a range of insights across disciplines, and I argue that “interdependence” is the paradigmatic red thread uniting these disparate conversations. From feminist theology to post-Newtonian science; from the ethics of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to engaged Buddhism; from process thought to Black and Chicana feminism; and from the most radical cooperative economics to the standard neoliberal orthodoxy, the term “interdependence” emerged to name the growing awareness that human beings exist within a responsive matrix of actors whose continued existence is predicated on the existence of all the others. 

Theologian Catherine Keller makes the point succinctly in Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement: “Whether primarily ecological, liberationist, or decolonial, feminist or womanist, these relationalisms of the latter half of the twentieth century share the sense and ethic of an inescapable interdependence.” 

Yet as with the mistletoe and the tree, relationships of interdependence are not always equitable. Despite King’s poignant insights in “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” inescapable networks are often precarious spaces. Powerful actors can, and did, exploit growing ties of interdependence to cement existing power differentials. 

Interdependence has been construed as racial “integration,” the purported solution to American white supremacy; as gender “complementarity” in the theology of John Paul II; and as “globalization” in economics and political science, where the two terms are understood as synonymous. In each case, powerful parties identified and laid claim to the value of interdependence; argued for interdependence as the basis of racial/gender/economic equality and justice; and deployed this claim to obscure persistent structural inequalities. 

Given the ambiguity of this value, one might be tempted to reject the ethics of interdependence altogether. Yet, as Jacques Derrida shows in his analyses of ethical values such as hospitality, nonviolence and friendship, there simply is no such thing as a pure moral ideal free from ambivalence. To be immersed in discourse is to be awash in contradiction and hypocrisy; yet to recognize this is not necessarily to retreat into nihilism. Instead, such suspicion enables us to identify potential dangers and mitigate their worst effects. As Derrida says in “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” “It is necessary still to inhabit the metaphor in ruins, to dress oneself in tradition’s shreds and the devil’s patches.” 

For interdependence to be recovered as an ethical value, it must be wedded to a notion of responsibility. Consider Cooperation Jackson, a network of Black-led cooperatives in Mississippi that are working to transform the economy of that city; and the work of Louisville resident Reece Chenault at the local, national and international levels to reimagine the future of labor organizing. I look also at the recent book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, which argues that interdependence is funding the most exciting social movements of the 21st century, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. While interdependence is morally ambiguous, within responsible parameters it remains a necessary value for social ethics and social justice. 

Mistletoe is perhaps not an adequate symbol for loving partnership, even as the mistletoe and the tree are players in a larger ecosystem that indeed maintains itself within responsible limits. The natural world is not a place of unambiguous mutuality and love. And yet, there is a certain loveliness even in a dying old tree. And perhaps it is our capacity for sensitivity to loveliness—a capacity we all too often neglect to cultivate—that makes us human. 

Andrew Stone Porter defended his doctoral dissertation, Interdependence: Its Value and Limits for Social Ethics, in February 2021 and will graduate in May with a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics & Society from Vanderbilt University. He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, a Bachelor of Arts from Bellarmine University, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South America from 2008-10. During the 2020-21 academic year, Andrew has served an “externship” at Bellarmine as part of his doctoral work, teaching two classes in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in both the fall and spring semesters. He lives in Louisville with his wife and three children.