Rethinking Friendship After A Pandemic

As we emerge from the social distancing habits of the pandemic, the quality and quantity of our friendships will be for many a matter of doubt and anxiety....

As we emerge from the social distancing habits of the pandemic, the quality and quantity of our friendships will be for many a matter of doubt and anxiety. There are any number of articles these days speculating on what comes next for us in the area of friendship. Some are speculative: “What Will Happen to Friendship When We Crawl Out of Our Hidey Holes?” Some offer self-help: “How to Rekindle Friendship After COVID-19?” Some are bleak: “The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friends.”The uncertainty and interest might supply an occasion for us to examine what friendship is and why it matters to us. It’s not that thinking about friendship can guarantee that we will have more or better friends; indeed, talking too much about friendship or seeking out friends too consciously or aggressively can be detrimental to the likelihood we will find friends at all.Although friendships cannot be sustained without effort, there is something of happenstance as to how we come to have the friends we do. One of the best modern writers about friendship, C.S. Lewis astutely observed: “Friendship ... is born at the moment” when one person “says to another ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” Friendships, when they are kindled, surprise us and invite us into a kind of bond whose foundations are often concealed from outsiders.Lewis also noted that while ancient societies prized friendship and devoted a great deal of thought to it, modern societies neglect it. Perhaps that is because modern societies are much more pragmatic and utilitarian. Lewis wrote, “friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself. … It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Friendship, as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once put it, is an indispensable ingredient in the worthwhile or noble life.Yet, a new book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, casts doubt upon Lewis’ thesis that friendship does not contribute to survival. Dunbar’s research, based on extensive surveys and physiological studies, shows that rich friendships align closely with decreased risk of depression and dementia, while loneliness — an “evolutionary alarm signal,” according to Dunbar — correlates to a 30% increased chance of dying.Of course, Lewis himself recognized the utility of friendship: “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” To be human is to have a complex set or order of needs, from survival to flourishing. What Lewis is saying is that we do not consciously cultivate or appreciate friendship primarily because of the extrinsic goods that arise from them.Following Aristotle, Lewis thinks that true friendship, in which we value the friend for his or her own sake, is superior to friendships of pleasure, which predominate among the young, or utility, which characterize adult life.Yet we seem increasingly tempted to invite standards of utility into our most intimate, familial relationships. In his new book, Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, Matt Feeney argues that families need to defend themselves against the culture of incessant competition, in which every activity or human relationship is judged by its contribution to the future success of children, particularly in the form of an acceptance letter from a prestigious university. This threatens to turn the family into a community of self-interested calculating machines, whose decisions are determined by relentless market forces and whose members tend to view others either as helpers on the road to success or competitive obstacles to it. Thus, are we tempted to reduce all human relationships to those of usefulness.As is true of friends, so in the family we see that healthy relationships are those in which profit and loss cease to matter, where help and pleasure are given, indeed assumed, but not because of the expectation of an external payoff. The alternative is at the root of the spectacle, which families now experience to varying degrees, of worried and harried parents raising grim children, lacking joy, and old before their time.(Thomas S. Hibbs is a professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas.)