Whatever Happened to Friendship?

Whatever happened to friendship? Once it was an esteemed element of myths and in moral education, but today in schools pupils are taught the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not bully”, while emphasis falls on the benign effects of inclusiveness and equality. Certainly a code of martial bonding lives on in films like Lord of the Rings, yet there friendship is equated with “fellowship” and left largely unexplored. More insightful is one of the West’s foundational epics which begins with Achilles brooding in his tent. He is fuming at how Agamemnon has grossly slighted him, and resolved to let the gathered Greek forces be slaughtered on the plains of Troy due to his absence from their ranks. But at the last moment news of the death of his dearest friend, Patroclus, spurs him to action and revenge. Deep ties of friendship, even more compelling than those of kinship, demand nothing less. Solemn vows, loving bonds, and blood call for blood. Hector must die.

Once friendship, according to Homer, could move nations, or at least armies, and Rome “specifically prohibited [marriage] in order to keep recruits bonded to each other” (Peter Francopan, The Silk Roads). By the twentieth century, despite protracted periods of warfare and the mobilisation of millions of individuals, friends on the battle front do not shape the larger course of events.

Take two well-known works to emerge from Germany after the First World War, one praised by Hitler for its depiction of Heldentum (herohood), Ernst Jünger’s Stahlgewitter (usually translated as Storm of Steel), the other banned by the Nazis for its alleged denigration of the warrior ethos, Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, known more widely as All Quiet on the Western Front.

Bravery is not in short supply in Jünger’s classic, but deep friendship is. Uncomplainingly soldiers do their duty again and again, knowing full well that a sniper’s bullet or a lone bomb is likely to efface them ingloriously. Finally, this unheroic fragmentation reaches perhaps its logical conclusion in the final German tactic of replacing long, connected trench-lines with separated, much smaller (but less easily erasable) battle groups of a few men, their fate likely to be hidden from the eyes of others. Jünger gives us no singular heroes, no unerasable, enduring friendships, though English troops do draw praise for being “tough as old leather”.

In stark contrast, Remarque’s classic follows a group of school-mates through military training towards pointless, bloody death. Friendship, along with lives, is ground down and defaced by urgent physical needs, such as a pair of boots no longer required by an amputee, or the need to satisfy empty, growling bellies. Significantly, his book’s German title literally means “In the West Nothing New”. Regimenting, mass conditions have relegated friendship as it was formerly celebrated, along with many other once valued attributes, to the archives of history.

Today friendship is further banalised and commodified. We “befriend” those even only tangentially known to us with the flick of a computer key, admitting them to our universe as projected on Facebook or on rival servers. Our judgments are similarly reduced to another casual click, to a “like” or “dislike”, and the new mentors of future generations have morphed into “influencers”, promoting make-up, meals, and light, warm chatter, followed eagerly by tens of thousands. None of this seems to cause much heartache. Meanwhile invisible algorithms work unsleepingly to marshal and codify our responses, to drive our choices and enclose us in an online web which, while it promises the great empowerment of individuals, toils tirelessly to regiment, guide, and ultimately control them. As Shoghana Zuboff damningly traces in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), the utopian, democratic future supposedly ushered in by unlimited access to the internet has created instead a modern Wild West lacking in controlling legislation, where so-called advances take place in a virtual moral vacuum, and where a new breed of “robber barons”, or modern technological innovators, are free to amass even vaster fortunes than former monopolistic, industrial capitalists. According to Zuboff, we are living through a momentous paradigm shift in which “power is no longer identified with the means of production but with ownership of the means of behavioral modification”.

This “Big Other” works more subtly than it did in Orwell’s dystopian, fictional future, but similarly produces atomisation, erodes life-lines of trust, and distorts human aspirations that once produced the basis for enduring friendship.

In many ways Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) lived during a crucial period when the once dominant heritages of the past, based on the hegemony of classical learning and Christianity, began to change irrevocably to produce ultimately the moral morass of today. Much as the Mediterranean lost its economic pre-eminence to the greater oceans and new trade routes opened up by bold Portuguese and Spanish sailors, so long-taught, agreed moral precepts were destabilised by new physical and intellectual panoramas, as well as by changing social models and interactions. Johnson’s England was in a state of permanent flux. Tories and Whigs vied constantly for power, pro-Catholic Jacobites and Protestant nationalists for the throne. Despite public advocacy of peace, Britain was repeatedly at war. In addition to internal battles in Scotland and Ireland, England fought with Holland to rule the waves, against the dominance sought in successive wars by the France of Louis XIV, but in support of a dubious Prussian annexation by the future Friedrich the Great, only finally to lose many of its American holdings to upstart, rambunctious colonists. Knowledge of, or at least acquaintance with, this historical background is assumed in many of the essays edited by Cousins.

Johnson’s life coincides, too, with decades generally attributed to the Enlightenment, that period of extreme intellectual ferment that saw past shibboleths cast into doubt, science and reason unleashed, and Christian religions seriously questioned. A few decades earlier much had seemed comparatively stable, circumscribed and definitively known, or as La Bruyère put in Les Caractères ou Les Moeurs de ce siècle (1688), a runaway best-seller on “the customs of this century” that went through eight editions in less than six years: “Tout est dit, et l’on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu’il y a des hommes et qui pensent … l’on ne fait que glaner après les anciens et les habiles d’entre les modernes” (“Everything has been said, and one arrives too late after the seven thousand years of men who thought … one is left merely to glean in the wake of the ancients and those skilful among the moderns.”) That is, the main intellectual harvest has been achieved, only the occasional stray ear of wheat remains to be gathered. A century later France and Europe would be in turmoil, intellectually as well as militarily, first thanks to the French Revolution, then the Napoleonic wars. Past harvests were now slashed with the guillotine, or pulverised by roaring cannons at Valmy, a battle which Goethe memorably saw as marking the beginning of a radically new age. He was right. The French national anthem, born among the new armies of the republic, celebrates not friendship but the arms of citizens, which will water the agricultural furrows of the French countryside with the blood of its invading enemies, “les anciens régimes”.

Samuel Johnson and the Powers of Friendship begins with an exemplary introduction written by Cousins, which sidesteps this historical turmoil. Although acknowledging that “full treatment of theories of friendship would be a task for another book or, better, a series of books”, he nonetheless summarises succinctly those of special relevance to Johnson in a handful of lucid paragraphs. His account of key classical concepts and shadings, which embraces Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, and Plutarch, could be thoroughly recommended to anyone with a desire to know the compass of received pagan teachings on friendship, while discussion of revisions, amplifications, and new directions posited by St Augustine, Petrarch, Ficino and later English luminaries enrich the teachings of antiquity. There is much erudition on display here, but always rendered accessible and tempered by common sense. Johnson, as Cousins makes clear, was no narrow pedant. He understood the world and the dark vulnerability of individual hearts: “[T]hey discourse like angels, but they live like men.”

Though Johnson loved to pontificate, he had admirable, less domineering sides. At times he could even display a Whitmanesque self-awareness and humorous acceptance of personal contradictions. The sage who insisted on the need for a common political vantage-point and shared high moral probity between friends could also ignore his own treasured precepts in response to stronger promptings, such as those awakened by the wastrel Harry Hervey: “He was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.” The jocular and the erudite co-exist happily in this introduction, as they did in its subject, Dr Johnson.

Friendship, as the introduction makes clear, was a heavily idealised concept, whatever its variable definition. Frequently and emphatically not similarity but sameness of identity is insisted on between the two parties. They are “one soul dwelling in two bodies”, or the friend “a second self”. Such a profound intermingling makes shared virtue a prerequisite, as well as promotes equality, concord, and “a sharing and extension of the individual self”. Why bond with a blackguard likely to debase you? Instead, let love of the good be a common bedrock. Hence friendship, animated by honour, virtue, and emulation of the highest bond between the individual and deity, is dubbed “the most valuable of human possessions”. Thus “a true friend ‘is born to share in doing what is right and loving what is noble’”, and can generate as well as participate in a process of mutual and “interdependent moral development”. In short, according to Seneca, friendship is born:

when souls are drawn together by identical inclinations into an alliance of honourable desires. [Therefore] … Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual, for men learn while they teach … Cherish some man of high character, and keep him forever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you. And ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.

Hard to argue with this logic, but even harder to achieve in real life. It was one thing for Dr Johnson to hold forth in essays in the Rambler or in sermons, but quite another to navigate the hurly-burly of slithering political alliances and imperfect social intercourse, as other essays curated by Cousins demonstrate.

An important keynote of the collected essays is fittingly struck in the first excellent contribution by Nicholas Hudson. Unlike the somewhat monochromatic store of inherited adages on friendship, Hudson stresses the nuances, complexity, and actuality-informed nature of many of Johnson’s statements. Moreover, he concedes that the views of this man of letters could and did change significantly, and traces a much needed “Journey from Idealism to Realism”, which enables Johnson still to speak to readers today. Many of the “high”, received conceptions of friendship re-emerge, but cast in terms of the recognisable needs and aspirations of mere mortals:

It is necessary … that man, whose wider capacity demands more gratification, and who feels in himself innumerable wants, which a life of solitude cannot supply, and innumerable powers to which it cannot give employment, should be led to suitable companions by particular influence; that among beings of the same nature with himself, he may select some for intimacy and tenderness, and improve the condition of his existence, by superadding friendship to humanity, and the love of individuals to that of the species.

Though orotund in expression to modern ears, Johnson covers a multitude of aspects raised by his subject that merit reflection. First, friendship is played off against the contrary state of solitude, and leaves his auditors to debate their relevant merits. Then he stresses the very particular field afforded by such close bonding for a whole range of otherwise little used capacities, which can impact the individual and through him the community at large. Finally, estimable benefits flow in an archetypal win-win situation. Friendship has potentially a much wider social application—a point little stressed nowadays. Implicitly it is presented as an inalienable manifestation of our basic humanity and as a distinguishing capacity of our species. The one glaring omission is a clear utterance on what brings the two destined close companions together, covered here by the verbal sleight of hand of “by particular influence”. As Johnson learned from experience, this could not be prescribed and friendships were often developed with the most unlikely contemporaries, as Cousins’s contributors document again and again.

It is difficult to fault either the coverage or the quality of the essays in this collection. They embrace politics, biography (diversely), “Friendships with Women” (an important breakthrough essay), the Renaissance colloquy, recast and focused on friendship as solace in the prison-house of the world (Rasselas), travel writing, letters, and an excellent overview of relevant recent Johnson studies. Quite an achievement. Grey areas, however, remain. Though mentioned, the impact of patronage, reputation, and patriotism on friendship could bear further investigation, as could the more casual sites and unlikely generators of friendship produced by such contemporary crazes as coffee houses, speculations and connoisseurship. Also the volume rarely descends into the pulsating streets of the metropolis. There is no detailed discussion of Johnson’s great Juvenal-inspired poem “London”, or even of venomous, corrective satire as a potentially defendable adjunct to friendship. The eighteenth century and its major players still fascinate. It was a period when the weight of tradition, of classical models, continued to enjoy didactic traction, while outside the study and club a largely uncharted, heterogeneous New World was rapidly unsettling them.

Friendship, with hindsight, seemed due to lose much of its relevance as the mental compass of each age expanded exponentially. At heart it is a highly individual, voluntary bond between two persons.

If it served the state, well and good, otherwise it would not provide a pedagogic focus comparable with manliness, team spirit, patriotism, or imperial apprenticeship. The potential significance of the individual was gradually being dethroned by group perspectives, as the changing focus of the English novel suggests. Tom Jones, Moll Flanders, Tristram Shandy, and Roderick Random foreground one character. These lone picaresque adventurers from the eighteenth century were gradually to give way before the expansive social canvases depicted by Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Trollope. Each developed multiple plot lines in response to perceived growing complexities and the inordinate scale of a society in which error and suffering were always “nobody’s fault”, the satiric refrain of Our Mutual Friend. When asked in a Victorian classroom what declining mortality statistics in a town might mean, Sissy Jupe, the aberrant circus brat in Hard Times, fails to answer improvements in, say, sanitation, opining instead that death was still a terrible outcome for the handful of individuals—to the utter horror of her adult mentors Chokumchild and Gradgrind, who may never have heard of Aristotle, Seneca or St Augustine. Friendship and generous human sympathies seemed increasingly matters for the nursery or sacred household hearth; other attributes were required in the ruthlessly competitive outside world.

With the twentieth century mass culture finally assumed centre stage, manipulated in accordance with overarching ideological and consumerist imperatives. Repeatedly mobilisation decimated young manhood and close companions, the egregious trajectories of a Patroclus, a Hector or an Achilles became virtually impossible, unless one operated beyond formal military lines like T.E. Lawrence. During the inter-war years stand-alone demagogues and private armies emerged, whose bloody street clashes showed the extent to which the pitiless violence of the trenches and the colonies had become a feature of the daily home front. Democracies revealed totalitarian underpinnings.

An absence of close friendship became a recognised feature in many fictional national portraits. Take again Germany, this time the politically divided Mann brothers. When Heinrich Mann painted his Wilhelmian everyman, Diederich Hessling, in Der Untertan (The Subject) in 1918, it was of an initiative-bereft individual, who derived his courage, self-conception and ideas from the group, be it the all-embracing curriculum of a German gymnasium or a similarly directive student-duelling fraternity, which met to prove its manhood through fencing scars and alcoholic excesses. Diederich’s chosen world is one of command and obey. “Power, cold power, in which he … participated, was his pride”, what he worships. Similarly devoid of close, lasting friendships, male or female, is Hans Castorp, an engineer-in-the-making derailed by the inexhaustible claims of Western knowledge in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) in 1934. The protagonists of both brothers are lacking in the kind of personal qualities and aspirations that Johnson had insisted were given scope through friendship, while direct moral instruction further confuses Hans Castorp. Finally, he registers himself “demystified, redeemed, freed—not by his own powers, as he had to confess with shame, but returned to the outer air by elementary powers” little concerned with him, so that “his small fate disappeared in the general one”.

First individualism had been replaced by oaths of unswerving allegiance and obedience, later it was subsumed within herd consumerism, while friendship fled to the decentred, no man’s land of the personal computer. In a binary world of 0s and 1s the individual was becoming a nought, the lore of true friendship a bookish memory, and heterosexual, generative bonding what the state applauded. What Samuel Johnson might have said about this state of affairs, I leave to each reader.

Michael Ackland has taught, researched, and published widely on the eighteenth century. His most recent monograph is The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami (Cambria, 2022)