Friendship in the Time of Coronavirus (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this essay, we explored the evolutionary and psychological foundations of sociality, focusing on how humanity’s instinct toward friendship could have proved useful for generating group cohesion and social capital. In Part 2, we’ll examine the benefits of friendship in contemporary life, especially how it can help us craft an identity that is compatible with the global challenges we all face.

Not just friends, but partners in collective judgment and goal-setting

Let’s recall our definition of friendship: “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to extra-familial social relations.” Honing this skill can increase one’s likelihood of experiencing life’s most rewarding connections. Humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman explains:

When we have a high-quality connection that gets us in tune with another human being — whether it’s confiding a vulnerability to someone, gossiping about a common enemy, or sharing simple moments of laughter and joy — our “calm-and-connect” system comes alive. This system involves a suite of biological responses that work together to intensify a deep connection with another human being. In such moments of “positivity resonance” — as psychologist Barbara Fredrickson puts it — one person’s brain literally syncs up with the other person’s brain, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “neural coupling.” Partners experience an enhanced ability to anticipate the other’s stream of thought and to feel the same emotions, sometimes even physically feeling their pain. As Fredrickson notes, such “micro-moments of connection” are “tiny engines” that can set off upward spirals in your life, helping you to grow and become a better version of yourself. (Transcend, 43)

We all know how good it feels to experience a blissful hour or two of “positivity resonance” and “neural coupling,” but high-quality connections are about much more than simply enjoying the company of our friends. Given the complexity of the natural world and the social ecosystems it contains, individuals can hardly be expected to single-handedly curate an optimal suite of material and social resources to guide us through life’s endless challenges. The cultivation of friendship, therefore, is a highly effective method of building up social capital, “the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation” (Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 292).

Among friendship’s most valuable assets is what communications expert William K. Rawlins calls “judging together”:

Many of life’s most poignant quandaries concern questions of personal and social responsibility. One of the most vital activities of friendship is judging together, consulting with a trusted friend about questions of right and wrong, prudent and imprudent action. Where does my personal responsibility leave off and selfishness begin? Am I being fair to myself in this situation or am I asking for more than I deserve? Conversely, where does my social responsibility stop and selflessness start? Am I treating the other(s) fairly in making this decision or am I meekly accommodating? In situations where much is at stake and choices are not clearcut, people often turn to their friends for empathic counsel. Because of close friendship’s double-agency and compassionate objectivity, caring friends do not necessarily indulge or endorse personal whims in a kneejerk fashion, but neither do they invoke social pieties. Ideally, concerned friends respond in a manner sensitive to the particulars of an individual’s situation while mindful of its broader social consequences. (Friendship Matters, 276)

Strong friendships not only improve our decision-making, but also help us identify and pursue important life goals, which are more expressions of our biological and social milieus than of our private desires. Philosopher Paul Thagard explains:

We do not get autonomously to choose our goals, because some are handed to us by our biological needs and others are transmitted socially, through mechanisms such as attachment-based learning, role modeling, and altruism. From such basic goals, many other subordinate goals naturally arise through acquisition of information about what changes can lead to what outcomes. (The Brain and the Meaning of Life, 132)

When choosing our friends, then, we are choosing not only their capacity for high-quality connection, but also their specific resources, judgments, and goals.

What makes friendship unique?

Let’s turn now to the question of why friendship makes a unique contribution to the regulation of social homeostasis that cannot be mimicked by familial, romantic, or professional relationships. The healthy regulation of social homeostasis requires many different types of relationships, but friendship is among the most important — possibly even the most important. This is because, of all the types of relationships in which we participate, friendships are the most volitional. Confucian philosopher Roger Ames explains:

Friendship serves a definite, sometimes compensatory source of meaning and value. While immediate family relations are usually a matter of birth and blood, developed friendships are contingent, and entail diversity and deliberate choice. (Confucian Role Ethics, 114).

We can form and abandon friendships with much more autonomy and fewer consequences than with romantic partners, family members, or professional colleagues. As Rawlins points out, friendship “has no clear normative status within publicly constituted hierarchies of role relationships” (9). Sadly, friendship’s ambiguous normative status allows us to downplay its importance and treat it as a lesser category of relationship. Humans are often fickle, and one’s friends can disappear when the chips are down. But then, of course, they are not really friends at all, and abandonment can present a salutary opportunity to seek out true and lasting friendships.

The upside here is that friendship is the most protean and self-directed of our social frameworks, and is therefore the top candidate for efficacious adaptation. This may not have mattered much for the majority of history, when most people never met someone outside their small, genetically-entangled band of hunter-gatherers, but in the modern world it matters a great deal. The survival of our species and that of many others now depends on humanity’s ability to ratchet up our capacity for collective action — to extend asabiya across the globe in order to avoid catastrophe and discover new horizons of social homeostasis.

Friendship on a global scale

The activity of friendship contains an implicit commitment to humanism, one that emphasizes the validity of non-biological bonds. In a world of strangers, friendship is our most volitional method of developing what Massimo Pigliucci calls “a distinctive moral preference for a particular person” (Answers for Aristotle, 183, emphasis his). When we identify someone as sharing a common notion of the good (i.e. a shared vision for how people ought to live and seek to improve the world), it makes sense that we develop a moral preference for that person. After all, that person’s continued existence makes the realization of our notion of the good slightly more likely — something we cannot usually assume about strangers.

As we form these relationships, we can find ourselves building “chosen” or “logical” families — intimate groups that prioritize shared values and mutual flourishing over biological inheritance and familial obligations. Befriending someone who was once a complete stranger is a practical way of aligning our moral preferences with our desire to care for humanity as a whole, and constitutes an empirical justification for humanity’s value. Crucially, the moral preferences produced by friendship are the easiest to translate into the language and sentiment of global identity. As Yuval Noah Harari has rightly argued, commitment to a global identity is quickly becoming a nonnegotiable addition to the older loyalties on which modern identities are founded:

Even on a united planet there will be plenty of room for the kind of patriotism that celebrates the uniqueness of my nation and stresses my special obligations toward it. Yet if we want to survive and flourish, humankind has little choice but to complement such loyalties with substantial obligations toward a global community. A person can and should be loyal simultaneously to her family, her neighborhood, her profession, and her nation — so why not add humankind and planet Earth to that list? (21 Lessons for the 21st Century, 125)

It is impossible to say exactly what forms a global identity might take, but there is no doubt that this trail must be blazed in order to mitigate the threats of climate change, global poverty, nuclear proliferation, biological warfare, pandemics — the list goes on. One way to help it along is to treat friendship as a kind of crucible in which our global identity can be forged.

This humanist perspective is accessed via two interrelated phenomena that together constitute the crucible of friendship: the “proxy friend effect” and the recognition of each person’s unique “friend potential.” The proxy friend effect occurs when, due to our history of becoming intellectually and emotionally close to people who used to be strangers, we find it easier to give strangers the benefit of the doubt when they are somehow associated with one or more of our friends. When the proxy friend effect is operant within and between overlapping social groups, expressions of compassion, tolerance, and trust become the norm. As a result, local asabiya increases.

People who experience the proxy friend effect often begin to extend that same benefit of the doubt to humanity in general. In doing this, we recognize each person’s unique friend potential, which can express itself just as profoundly as our own, and probably does in its own special way. The existence of a stranger’s friend potential is not something we can verify or quantify, but rather a logical leap of faith that expands our social mindset to include respect and appreciation for each global citizen. As a result, global asabiya increases.

This mental shift reprograms our atavistic social instincts — the same that usually trap us in forms of myopic tribalism — to serve the greater good. As Peter Singer observes:

If the manner of our evolution has made our feelings for our kin, and for those who have helped us, stronger than our feelings for our fellow humans in general, an ethic that asks each of us to work for the good of all will be cutting against the grain of human nature. The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone’s advantage. (The Expanding Circle, 157)

Friendship is our most diversified method of leveraging our inherited social instincts to render former strangers as important as kin, and sometimes moreso. Here we find precisely the kind of “ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them” for which Singer advocates. By molding ourselves in the crucible of friendship, people can learn to become, as John Steinbeck poignantly puts it, “friends with the whole world in their hearts” (East of Eden, 143).

The politics of friendship

The crucible of friendship fashions not just our social identities, but our political identities as well. Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman explain:

You don’t get to pick your family of origin or the place you grow up. But you do get to choose your friends, and those choices say something about the kind of world you want for yourself. This is one of the many ways friendship is political…The choices that each of us makes every day about who we include in our lives end up shaping the larger world we live in. (Big Friendship, 134)

It’s hard for strong friendships to arise in the absence of common interests and values, but differences are equally important. A shared notion of the good can certainly bring people together, but the reality is that no two individuals — let alone two tribes, towns, cities, nations, etc. — possess an identical vision of what’s best for the world generally or for humanity in particular. Rather than concluding that this feature of social reality makes global harmony unachievable, we should be reminded that our own notion of the good will always be incomplete, requiring modification from our friends in order to become more accurate and actionable. In this way, we can develop a moral preference not just for those who are like us, but for friends who actively and compassionately challenge our notion of the good in order to improve it. Sow and Friedman refer to this process as “stretching”:

Stretching is the best metaphor we’ve come up with to describe all the ways our friends expand our world, challenge us, and inspire us to change. This give-and-take is necessary from the very beginning because no two people are exactly alike. Life inevitably brings changes. And those changes often shift the foundation on which the friendship was built. (Big Friendship, 90)

Stretching, in this sense, is a continuous articulation and reformulation of our social selves, calling us to navigate the ever-present tension between our personal relationships and the political movements in which we participate. Postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida explains:

There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends,’ without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. (The Politics of Friendship, 22)

Derrida characterizes this tension as “tragically irreconcilable,” yet we need not indulge his cynicism. Every individual and friend-group that strikes a healthy balance between personal preferences and political priorities is a testament to humanity’s creativity and commitment to social homeostasis. This aspirational approach is nothing new; in fact, it dates back to the inventors of democracy. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre looks to ancient Athens as a model for how friendship should influence civic life:

Estimates of the population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries vary widely, but the number of adult male citizens clearly ran into some tens of thousands. How can a population of such a size be informed by a shared vision of the good? How can friendship be the bond between them? The answer surely is by being composed of a network of small groups of friends, in Aristotle’s sense of that word. We are to think then of friendship as being the sharing of all in the common project of creating and sustaining the life of the city, a sharing incorporated in the immediacy of an individual’s particular friendships. (156)

In the last sentence of this passage, we need only replace the word “city” with “planet” or “species” to serve the project of global identity formation. Given the magnitude of the endeavor, it would be naive to posit that friendship alone can produce a fully-actualized global identity, but I believe it is our best available starting point. A crucible is not the device itself, but rather the cradle in which the device achieves its final form. Such is the relationship between friendship and incipient global identities around the world.

Friendship, purpose, and a better world

The act of friendship unites our concrete experience of sociality with our abstract desire to live meaningful lives and contribute to the common good. When asked “Why must we live?” and “whether there is some ‘definite purpose’ in life,” Josiah Royce replied:

I must live because my help is needed. There is something that I can do which nobody else can do. That is: I can be friend to my friends, faithful to my own cause, servant of my own chosen task, worker among my needy brethren. I can thus join with the world’s work of trying to make the whole situation better and not worse. (In a letter to Elizabeth Randolph, cited in Loyalty to Loyalty, by Mathew A. Foust, 170, emphasis his).

It is telling that friendship is first in Royce’s list of reasons to live, vital without being dominant. Thus friendship claims its rightful position in a host of worthy undertakings — hardly sufficient to bring about a better world, but absolutely necessary.

In the 21st century, as the confining bonds of blood pass the torch to the volitional bonds of friendship, this method of organizing our social loyalties must be preserved and strengthened. We can do this by utilizing friendship to promote social homeostasis, and by understanding friendship as a crucible in which our global identity can be forged. Friends are a mysterious gift of the universe — chosen, contingent companions who, separate from the obligatory realms of work and family, infuse our social efforts with an unrivaled sense of agency. The simple act of being with our friends is our purest expression of how we want the social world to be, and a window into the better future we hope to build together.

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider visiting my blog, Words&Dirt. You can subscribe here and get updates each time I publish something new.