Arguably, like everyone else, I’ve been interested in friendship for as long as there has been a me. That’s why, at first blush, there’s not much of interest to be said about friendship. For most of us (there are exceptions, some of which are due to pathology) friendship just happens in childhood. We don’t particularly plan it or reflect on it, it’s just a part of life. But, as with much else, friendship soon becomes a bit more complicated. So complicated in fact that it has long been the subject of scholarly effort and debate, stretching all the way from Aristotle’s “Ethics”, to rather more recent brain scanning experiments. So on the one hand it would seem that friendship is a fairly basic and widespread aspect of human experience, but on the other that it’s more complicated than just a fact of our experience. And with complication comes a degree of controversy.
Writing in a column entitled “Why you don’t need friends” (Psychology Today, 2019), Daniel Marston argued that while “[S]ocial interactions are important” this was mainly so that we could meet our basic needs (by which he meant basic biological and practical needs). Beyond this is was “not essential that the social relationships move beyond that point” to what we might recognise as friendship. As it happens, Aristotle classified precisely this sort of utilitarian relationship as a form of friendship, although of a fairly inferior type. But Marston is not alone in thinking friendship might not be necessary, and even that it might not be helpful. It turns out that Christians, or at least the theologically minded among them, have historically had something of an ambivalent “relationship” with friendship. Strangely this is because of the importance of love.
Friendship in the ancient world, or at least the higher forms of friendship, always had an exclusive air. One could be real friends with only a relatively small and select (and ideally selected) group. There was considerable discussion of exactly how many friends it was wise to have. Aristotle thought that the highest form of friendship (the friendship of virtue) was very rare and would only be found a few times in one’s life. Actually, it was rarer than that because in Aristotle's world only educated (which meant rich), connected, virtuous men were capable of such friendships. Cicero (who mainly channelled Aristotle to the Roman world) agreed that real friends of the highest quality were rare. Plutarch, who wrote slightly later in time, noticed that in antiquity what stood out was friendship between pairs (of men) and that perhaps we should aim to have just one, true, friend (our “bestie” in modern parlance). More than this was likely to be tricky and would probably only serve to dilute the quality of friendship enjoyed. But all of this talk of exclusivity is in stark contrast (so it was argued) to the love for even enemies that was said to mark the Gospel. Hence the tension.
Much more recently Robin Dunbar argued that we can probably maintain some sort of friendly relationship with up to about 150 individuals. He arrived at this number just over 30 years ago while “pondering a graph of primate group sizes plotted against the size of their brains” and this has since become known as Dunbar’s Number. Again, how friendship is defined matters. Dunbar was talking about the number of individuals one might recognise well enough to pass 15 minutes with while sitting in a station waiting room. Within this larger number he reckoned that 3-5 was the number of close friendships that were maintainable. It turns out this does seem to be roughly how the numbers shake out in actual surveys. But what is really interesting is that Dunbar’s work implied that friendship was about more than culture or education. The patterns that he observed were argued to persist through time and across cultures. It’s was almost as though the need to have and the ability to form friendships was designed into to us.
Then again, I would argue that it is. More heat than light has been generated over the years over the meaning of the opening chapters of the Bible. My view (for what it’s worth) is that, as has long been taught, these chapters tell us in outline, and in the absence of the biological (or cosmological) nuts and bolts, how we came to be and what we are basically like. And interestingly we were created by a community, to be a community. We are created by an “us” to be a “them”. While it is true that such community is partly achieved by marriage and family (and beyond that clan, tribe and nation), we miss something if we don’t see friendship as playing a role in expressing this aspect of our constitution. A culture in which the importance of the individual is constantly elevated and stressed, and more collective expressions of our humanity are downplayed or even suppressed, is likely to be one in which cracks eventually appear.
Others have charted the rise of narcissistic individualism and diagnosed it as a current and acute problem (see Carl Truman's “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self”). But more recently A.N. Wilson lamented (in his column in the Times) the demise of male friendship in particular, and beyond that the absence of friendships from the lives of those who only really know relationship in the form of the nuclear family. Both the US and UK governments have expressed concern at the impact of loneliness on the health and flourishing of communities on their respective jurisdictions. And such concerns are manifest beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere. Friendship is not the whole answer to the problems thus identified, but it is probably part of the answer. In general we need to reverse the remorseless focus on I and me, and rediscover we (in all its various forms), but particular in the form of friendships.
Perhaps the biggest problem we have with friendship is simply a lack of those we can truly call friends.
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