The Malaise of America As A Crisis Of Friendship
“Friendship seems…to hold states together.”
This line from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has always haunted me, but in light of the overwhelming evidence that American society is dissolving, it takes on a newer, even more important meaning. In short, if Aristotle’s right, the fundamental problem in American society today is rooted in the failure of the American people to form and keep friendships. And, as Aristotle points out, it should be the concern of everyone in America who cares about the country’s long-term health — government officials included — to encourage, foster, and develop enduring, deep friendships.
For the purpose of this post, then, I’m going to assume Aristotle’s dictum to be true (rather than argue for it), and seek to understand our current social and political condition in its light. An argument to defend the dictum or provide a solution to our condition will be problems for another day and another analyst.
Before you account for all the ways our society is stricken by friendlessness, it’s important first to remember that Aristotle observed not one, but three different kinds of friendship: friendships of virtue (the highest form), friendships of utility, and friendships of pleasure (read book 8 of the Ethics to get the full picture). According to Aristotle, a friend of virtue seeks not just the pleasure or utility or goodness for one person, but both friends seek the Good on behalf of the other. If I am a friend of the highest order (a friend of virtue), I don’t just care what my friend can do for me, but what I can do for my friend. If my friend is sick, I offer him medicine. More importantly, if my friend is neglecting his family in favor of baser pleasures, it’s on me to encourage him to return to a life of virtue. The lower forms of friendship (utility and pleasure) fall short of this ideal, where the “friend” endures the friendship only as long as the other provides something pleasant and useful.
For Aristotle, a political community will hold together the more friendship it has, and it will really hold together the more it possesses friendships of virtue. Friendship acts as the binding agent — the glue — that will hold a society together and keep it from falling apart.
With this basic framework established, how is contemporary America doing? The reports are disheartening, and it seems to be a failure for many of us to develop friendships of any kind, not just ones of virtue. According to a survey from last year, 15% of adult men have no close friends, and for those who have them, the numbers have significantly declined. And while this survey showed the steepest friendship decline to be with men, the malady is affecting everyone. Virtual relationships have increasingly replaced or crowded out physical, face-to-face friendships, and social media in particular have only weakened the bonds we used to have. The number of drug overdose deaths in America has quadrupled since 1999, and while the causes of these are many, the deaths themselves are instances of isolation and friendlessness. Then, according to a recent study, the mental health of young people, especially teenagers, became significantly worse between 2016–2020 (pre-pandemic!), and the researchers see no relief in sight. Finally, as more and more couples marry less, marry later, and bear children later, the friendships between grandparents and grandchildren are only becoming less frequent, shorter, and weaker, further exacerbating the perennial loneliness senior citizens face.
The list could go on and on, but the diagnosis is the same: if friendship (of any kind, not just virtuous ones) holds states together, how could we possibly expect the American state to have any kind of unity with a picture of friendlessness like this? The question answers itself.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Friendlessness affects (or defines) our politics as well. Let’s look at partisan polarization as an example of the deformation of friendship. In a recent interview with Bari Weiss, Yuval Levin argued that partisan polarization in America is NOT when both sides are at the other side’s throats. No. Instead, partisan polarization is when each side huddles together on its own, speaking only to themselves, but speaking very harshly about the other side. The insularity is so complete that when the vitriolic lobbies reach the public square (Twitter, Facebook, cable news), the accused group can’t recognize the accusation as representative of their point of view. Garden variety progressives suddenly become pedophiles and Marxists, while anyone who flirts with conservatism is a racist and misogynist.
If this is what partisan polarization is really like, it reveals a deformation of friendship in at least two ways. First, according to Aristotle, friendship requires that friends know each other in a mutual way. To refuse to speak with (and not just at), to willfully misunderstand, and to demonize the other person, party, or group — this is the opposite of a friendship where the two partners come to a deep, shared, commonly held knowledge of the other. “Love your enemies” is certainly a standard too high for any political community, but even “know your enemies” seems to be difficult or impossible in the polarized world we inhabit. Friendship requires knowledge of the other, and our polarized world makes such knowledge of the other side too arduous a task.
Second, friendship (of the highest kind) demands that partners actually seek the good of the other, and our polarized communities fall far short of this ideal, even within our own tribes. You might think that the two worlds in America, while not friends with the other world, still represent communities of friendship within their own tribe. However, what kind of friend only tells another friend exactly what they want to hear, always stroking their ego, and never pushing them into greater truth and virtue? But is this not the character of our polarized worlds? Social media echo chambers, conferences and churches with only the like-minded, and political rallies led by people who only reinforce what the crowd wants to hear in order to gain more power — if this is how we actually relate to one another within our own communities, we are at best friends of utility, using each other for psychological, social, and political benefit alone and not for coming together to pursue a shared, common good. While we may know our own tribes really well, we fall far short of true friendship when we fail to encourage those we know best to be their best in life and in the world.
Friendlessness therefore abounds, and if Aristotle were with us today, he would wonder how in the world our country could stay glued together much longer. It would take more time and space to both defend Aristotle’s dictum that “friendship seems…to hold states together” and provide the appropriate medicine for the malady just described. However, I think it behooves all Americans who care about the health of the body politic to at least consider the friendlessness that affects us all, how it may be the fundamental feature and cause of our country’s dissolution, and what we might do together to solve it.
