Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice, Be not dishearten’d, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet, Those who love each other shall become invincible, They shall make Columbia victorious.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Friendship lives uncomfortably in American public life. For one thing, bonds of affection and loyalty among the people threaten the powers that be, even in a democracy full of theoretically sovereign people. Nations are jealous gods.
Suspicion of friendship and enforcement of an alienating loneliness are not limited to nations or governments, of course. Possessive parents do it. Even neurotic, controlling "friends" demand first fealty, destroying bonds among those they would control.
The paranoid style of corporate management is driven in part by an intense fear of employee friendships. Many corporate barons discourage socializing among employees. Some big companies force employees to move frequently so no subversive bonds among neighbors or co-workers can develop.
Authority’s hunger for the absolute and undistracted loyalty of its subjects is never sated. That ugly hunger has as much to do with anti-union zealotry as the monstrous greed that corrupts the hearts of the profiteers.
There’s also a suspicion, shared by many liberal humanists, that democratic politics and friendship don’t mix. Friendship, in this view, is best kept to private life. Democracy depends upon equality. Everyone should be treated the same. But friendship is all about treating one’s friends differently than others. In other words, affection for one can lead to indifference toward others.
Alexander Nehamas recently pointed out that most modern moral theory urges us "to give the same respect and the same consideration to everyone in the world independently of their status, gender, class and everything else." Friendship is different. The values of friendship "are the values that distinguish us from one another, that make us distinct and interesting individuals, the values that differentiate one person from another."
Here is the thing: the pursuit of friendship and the pursuit of equality are not contraries. They are complementary. As Aristotle reminds us, "friendship is said to be equality." Equality of class, income or education is not a prerequisite of friendship, although proximity and chance can make them seem so. Friendship challenges inequalities as it respects difference.
Friendship produces equality. That is, of course, why authoritarians and anti-egalitarians fear it. A person is most free, most unique and distinct, in reciprocal relations of affection with others. And if empathy, affection and friendship are critical to freedom, they cannot, without damaging consequences to our nation and ourselves, be excluded from our political lives. True friendship is much more than a private matter.
"One is neither to claim uniqueness for oneself nor to deny it to others," wrote Stanley Cavell. One day I would like to be able to say I lived up to that advice. It suggests an ethical practice that could rescue friendship from its exile in private life and return it to an important role in our political life.
In her book, Perfecting Friendship, Ivy Schweitzer writes that in the colonial and early national eras in America, friendship was far from a private matter. It was an essential part of American political vitality.
The Industrial Revolution, modern philosophical convention, a nation of immigrants’ paradoxical fear of immigrants, a bloody century of world wars and genocide, the development of a mass audience and a culture of hyper-consumerism changed all that.
Tales of our distance from one another are ubiquitous. In 2006, a study by Duke sociologist Lynn Smith-Lovin (pdf) and others said Americans were becoming ever more isolated from one another. We have fewer friends; the number of people who said they had no close confidants had tripled since 1985.
Many, like social network expert Barry Wellman dispute this finding (pdf). Our connections with others are actually strengthening and increasing in number, he says.
I think both sides are right. How can that be? I have no doubt that the Internet is having a wondrous impact on our abilities to form and maintain friendships. The social networking generation is slowly taking over from the battered and bruised boomers. But I also think that the new friendship phenomenon remains limited. And I think our damaged psyches need more caressing than the Internet alone can give.
I’m going to be writing a lot more about friendship. I believe a truly progressive revolution will, in the end, depend upon a revived role for friendship in public life. As Whitman said, affection will solve the problems of freedom yet.
What this means is we must make the strengthening of our friendships a political priority. We must become what the authoritarians have always been afraid we would become: a world of friends whose self-reliance is fulfilled through one another, not in competition with or in isolation from one another. A people like that can be damned hard to fool, and even harder to oppress.
It is troubling — and strange — that when friendship was exiled to private life, government intrusion into our lives came with it into our homes and bedrooms. By making friendship a public, political priority, we might just bring an end to that authoritarian control of our bodies and our choice of friends and lovers.
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Absolutely, I’m so glad you are going to write more on this. So much food for thought here – as always.
Thank you, friend.
Interesting , something to think about on a lazy Sunday afternoon
Share it with a friend….
One of the things that many churches do is fill that need for connection. There are committees, study groups, and other opportunities for social interaction on a friendship basis, coupled with shared interests.
This works to overcome one of the alienating facts about work. With modern communications many people can’t even be away from work in social settings. When kids come, it seems like maintaining purely social connections, like friendships, competes with family time and the omnipresent demands of work. It is the first thing to go.
Our ancestors fought and died to win the 40 hour week, and we threw that amazing victory away. For what?
You are so right. Interestingly, it was the overwhelming importance place on the new historical phenom of the “nuclear family” in the 18th and 19th centuries that helped shove friendship aside. Friends became only distantly important. Aristotle, Cicero and the Renaissance thinkers (Montaigne) thought friends of great importance — maybe of ultimate importance to the fulfilled, examined, ethical life.
Anyway. as we’ve seen, “families” can be legislated and more easily controlled. Friendships are unpredictable and dangerous to power. That’s why it might be a supreme ethical act of political resistance to once again make time for friends, with the same kind of drive we have to make time for our children. At the same time, we begin to insist on an economic and political structure that recognizes and promotes friendship.
I think it’s a shame that there’s such an emphasis on the nuclear family when our lives are so enriched by our extended family.
*waving to them all in Colorado*
(family reunion)
Friendships are much more difficult to maintain these days – there seems to be a general crankyness in the country – maybe all over the world. Personal friendships are very hard because we move a lot, we grow older and more tired and friends drift. I would be willing to settle if an air of friendship prevailed in DC. There’s so much dislike and distrust that it has become part of us.
Hi, Glenn. Very nice post, as usual.
Outstanding post, Glenn. I will indeed share it.
Crazy uncles!!
Yes, sadly true, and I’m hoping we can decide to do something about it — which first means moving the issue into the public sphere, rescuing it from oblivion in the private. The pressures working against friendship are cultural, economic and political, they aren’t private.
and Crazy Aunts!
Thanks, SouthernDragon.
These ideas are important. I believe that we will rescue ourselves together in our neighborhoods, or we will perish in desperate times. Friendships are key.
Thanks Glenn for another thought-provoking piece.
I look at this from a psychological angle where one compares the difference between intimacy and enmeshment. I found this on the web some years ago:
Now, look at the Bush administration. To them, friendship meant loyalty above all else, which is an authoritarian principle. Were they accepting of differing beliefs within the administration? I think we all know what happened to those folks. They believe enmeshment is friendship, which is a mentally unhealthy and dysfunctional belief system.
The key to healthy support and friendship is that it is offered freely by one person to another. The support could be solicited or unsolicited, as long as the supporter freely decides what they are willing to do. When a person resorts to manipulation of another person to get the support they desire, then it becomes coercion. It ceases to be mentally healthy support.
I think coercion is another weapon the Bush administration and authoritarian leaders like to use on their “friends,” their authoritarian followers. They effectively use toxic shame on their followers, accusing them of not being “good conservatives” if they don’t enmesh and go along with the agenda.
I think if we can get agreement on what real friendship is, that would go a long way to achieving your goal Glenn.
- Tom
Tom, you raise critically important — and true — points. I hope we can continue to explore this issue. Nehamas has some good things to say with regard to reciprocal understanding between friends and its relationship to freedom. The podcasts weren’t downloading well, but they did play.
You are so right.
Again, you are right.. . but. . .it’s funny that the friends of my parents and their kids, are the ones I love like family because friends are the family of affinity and thus, sustain us when needed. Friends (ideally of many or several generations) keep us tied in to a societal web that can withstand the rigors of day to day life. It’s the friends of my mother that help most as we struggle with her dementia and long slow goodbye. The long ago memories are the ones she recalls and so, I am am learning of the girl who grew to be my mom and friend. I’m sure I’m not alone.
Friendship, like sex, is both indispensable and latent with serious abuse. The antidote to corruption in both, as in politics, is open air and sunlight.