Friendship in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 1)
The COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t have many upsides, but one of them is that many of us are taking stock of our social relationships. Due to disruption of our normal habits and heightened health concerns, we are reaching out to family and friends more often than we used to. Physical distancing reminds us of the importance of intimacy, and we long for a time when we can once again embrace our loved ones with abandon. Many of us are focusing on friendships more than ever, salvaging rusty ones and burnishing those that already shine. Caught up in the modern bustle, perhaps it takes a global crisis to remind us that meaningful friendships are central to our personal stability and growth.
It’s a good time to ask: What role does friendship play our lives, and what role would we like it to play? Do our friendships nurture us in the way they ought to, and does our culture support those connections or make them harder to maintain? Where does the instinct toward friendship come from, anyway?
In their recent book, Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman explore these questions and others. Their work signifies an encouraging trend for those seeking to place friendship front and center as we make our way through these troubling times. “At a cultural level,” they write, “there is a lot of lip service about friendship being wonderful and important, but not a lot of social support for protecting what’s precious about it” (xviii). This predicament arises, at least in part, because we don’t clearly examine, articulate, and celebrate friendship’s inimitable role in human life. This is a considerable and worrisome oversight — one that this essay will attempt to correct. But first, let’s define friendship.
What is friendship?
Setting aside the important contributions of Aristotle, I believe friendship is best understood as humanity’s primary method of organizing our extra-familial social loyalties. This approach stems from the work of American philosopher Josiah Royce. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce defines loyalty as “The willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause” (9, emphasis his). Since this language begs to be hijacked, I will hereafter refer to friendship as “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to extra-familial social relations.”
Though less elegant than Royce’s original formulation, this definition accomplishes for friendship what Royce does so successfully for loyalty, which is to establish it not as a thing but rather an activity. Or, as psychologist Steve Duck puts it, we should view “relationshipping” as a skill “that can be improved, refined, polished (even coached and practised) like any other skill, trained like any other, and made more fluent” (Friends, for Life, 3).
Although improving our personal relationships is motivation enough for most people to care about friendship, the activity of friendship carries much deeper significance for human survival and flourishing. To see why, we can look to science. Since the Enlightenment, we have seen a tectonic shift in the way humans understand our nature as social animals — including the relatively new idea that we are, in fact, social animals. Areas of inquiry once categorized as philosophy, metaphysics, or religion have become colonized by the findings of modern science. I use the term “colonized” intentionally to denote that this process has not been uniformly rational or just.
Taking the long view, it’s important to acknowledge that bringing science into fields of study where it was once unwelcome has been a primary driver of progress and flourishing around the world. This case has been made most recently by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now:
Many people are willing to credit science with giving us handy drugs and gadgets and even with explaining how physical stuff works. But they draw the line at what truly matters to us as human beings: the deep questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives…But this entente unravels as soon as you begin to examine it…The worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of a knowledgeable person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities…The scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today. (393–5)
This perspective implies that an inquiry into the nature of friendship ought to include scientific evidence for why friendship exists, as well as its possible evolutionary benefits. This essay will focus, therefore, on how our evolutionary heritage and psychological makeup not only “hem in the possibilities” of friendship, but also enable us to form and sustain strong friendships and, by extension, stronger societies.
What are friendships for?
Friendships comprise the bedrock of what I call “social homeostasis.” My understanding of homeostasis is derived from the work of renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Throughout his career, Damasio has used homeostasis to ground his understanding of how the biological world is organized:
Homeostasis refers to the fundamental set of operations at the core of life, from the earliest and long-vanished point of its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative, whose discharge implies, for every living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing. The part of the homeostatic imperative that concerns “enduring” is transparent: it produces survival and is taken for granted without any specific reference or reverence whenever the evolution of any organism or species is considered. The part of homeostasis that concerns “prevailing” is more subtle and rarely acknowledged. It ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species. (The Strange Order of Things, 25, emphasis his)
In this passage, Damasio deftly links a core scientific phenomenon to Pinker’s “deep questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives.” I take this a small step further, suggesting that humans should seek to protect and promote not just biological, but also “social homeostasis.” Damasio himself has hinted at this:
The imagined, dreamed-of, anticipated well-being has become an active motivator of human action. Sociocultural homeostasis was added on as a new functional layer of life management, but biological homeostasis remained. (Self Comes to Mind, 293)
Borrowing Damasio’s language, I define “social homeostasis” as “the means by which social life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing.” And since friendship is one of the primary methods by which social homeostasis is regulated, it is here that friendship finds its biological imperative.
The evolutionary roots of friendship
To drill down on this point, we should explore just how deeply we are wired for sociality by our evolutionary and psychological architecture. This has perhaps been best explicated by acclaimed entomologist Edward O. Wilson, whose achievements include the invention of sociobiology and being one of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology. Late in his career, Wilson became a champion of an evolutionary model called multilevel selection, which argues that groups of organisms are a legitimate selective mechanism, along with genes, cells, and individuals. In some species, including humans and social insects, “eusociality” (or hypersociality) allows groups of organisms to outcompete other groups, conferring an otherwise-unavailable selective advantage on the individuals in the victorious group. It is this dynamic, Wilson explains, that made both intelligence and sociality keystone features of the human animal:
The pathway to eusociality was charted by a contest between selection based on the relative success of individuals within groups versus relative success among groups. The strategies of this game were written as a complicated mix of closely calibrated altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity, defection, and deceit. To play the game the human way, it was necessary for the evolving populations to acquire an ever higher degree of intelligence. They had to feel empathy for others, to measure the emotions of friend and enemy alike, to judge the intentions of all of them, and to plan a strategy for personal social interactions. As a result, the human brain became simultaneously highly intelligent and intensely social. It had to build mental scenarios of personal relationships rapidly, both short-term and long-term. Its memories had to travel far into the past to summon old scenarios and far into the future to imagine the consequences of every relationship. (The Social Conquest of Earth, 17)
If we accept Wilson’s portrait of our evolutionary past and its implications for the present, it becomes clear that social cohesion in general — not just gene-driven familial bonding — can make or break a tribe, ethnic group, city-state, nation, or even the entire human species. Such a factor cannot be ignored by those seeking to promote social homeostasis.
It’s important to note here that I’m not a biologist, and also that the theory of multilevel selection is hotly contested by professional scientists. In these circumstances, interested laypeople are left with no choice but to examine the evidence to the extent they can and appeal to the authority they find most persuasive. I have done this, and have found Wilson’s point of view to be the one that makes the most sense to me. This is primarily because multilevel selection does not attempt to refute the validity or downplay the importance of selection at levels other than the group, but rather attempts to fill a gap in our understanding by injecting group competition into the evolutionary narrative.
There are two other thinkers who can shore up our understanding of the social roots of human nature: Jonathan Haidt and Peter Turchin. Haidt, an expert in moral psychology, asserts that the pressures of multilevel selection rendered humans “10% bee”:
Human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I’m calling the hive switch…The hive switch is an adaptation for making groups more cohesive, and therefore more successful in competition with other groups. (The Righteous Mind, 223, emphasis his)
Haidt’s “hive switch” helps explain a variety of human experiences that can be generally categorized as “ego-dissolution,” and which are otherwise difficult to justify in evolutionary terms. Examples include religious ecstasy, extreme selflessness in war or crisis, awe in the face of nature, live concert culture, and the effects of certain drugs. Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland called this the “Oceanic Feeling” — my preferred way of referencing this beautiful and enigmatic aspect of the human condition. Although familial connections can certainly help trigger the hive switch, the switch is perfectly viable in the absence of kin relationships.
Peter Turchin tackles history with an interdisciplinary mindset, synthesizing research from fields such as evolutionary theory, economics, statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, geopolitics, social psychology, demography, chaos theory, and physics. In the context of social homeostasis, two of his insights are worth examining. The first is his revitalization of an old concept called “asabiya,” which was originally coined in the 14th century by Arab thinker Ibn Khaldoun:
Different groups have different degrees of cooperation among their members, and therefore different degrees of cohesiveness and solidarity…Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quality; it can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but it can be measured from observable consequences. (War and Peace and War, 5–6)
If multilevel selection establishes the legitimacy of social groups as an evolutionary force, then asabiya provides the analytical schema for tracking how a social group’s ability to overcome collective challenges waxes and wanes over time. Groups with superior tools of social cohesion usually prevail, even when confronted with superior technology and numbers. Turchin’s work presents numerous examples of how this drama has repeated itself throughout various historical eras, geographical circumstances, and diverse cultures.
Turchin’s second germane insight is how the need to increase and sustain asabiya influenced the development of our moral systems and use of symbolic markers:
Two key adaptations enabled the evolution of ultrasociality. The first one was the moralist strategy: Cooperate when enough members in the group are also cooperating, and punish those who do not cooperate. A band that had enough moralists to tip its collective behavior to the cooperative equilibrium outcompeted, or even exterminated, bands that failed to cooperate. The second adaptation, the human ability to use symbolic markers for defining cooperating groups, allowed evolution of sociality to break through the limits of face-to-face interactions. The scale of human societies increased in a series of steps, from the village to the clan to the tribe and tribal confederation, then the state, empire, and civilization. (War and Peace and War, 136)
Every human society is replete with symbolic markers that enable members of an in-group to rapidly communicate an impressive array of messages, ranging from food preferences, moral or religious associations, availability for sexual encounters, and much more. These same symbols also serve as signposts for out-group members who, while they may not be able to decipher the in-group’s symbolic code, will at least realize that they are encountering someone who is not “their type” in one or multiple ways. These markers make sociality more efficient, fun, and sometimes more brutal, as when they facilitate marginalization or ostracization. The key takeaway message is this: moral systems that emphasize collective concern and employ symbolic markers to delineate between those worthy and unworthy of receiving that concern have been powerful drivers of success for human groups throughout history. This is one of many reasons why adapting our understanding of human evolution to include multilevel selection, the hive switch, and asabiya makes sense.
We now have a grounding in what friendship is, the role it plays in the creation and maintenance of cohesive social groups, and how its evolutionary and psychological roots render it uniquely beneficial for our collective survival. In Part 2, I will dig deeper into the contemporary role that friendships play in our personal well-being, and posit friendship as a crucible in which humanity’s global identity can be forged.
This is Part 1 of a two-part essay. To continue, please go here.
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