Friendship in a Time of Politics
I inadvertently glimpsed a bit of news yesterday, reminding me of the New Hampshire primary barrelling towards us on January 23rd, with the Iowa caucuses two weeks prior to that. Yikes! When you see a train wreck approaching, the first order of business is to get as far away from the tracks as possible. So, if I could find a hole in the ground somewhere, crawl in, and pull a rock in behind me for the next year, I would do so. But we are all apparently condemned to slog through this political death-wish: culminating either by quick suicide, or a lingering, drawn-out demise.
No matter the outcome, I can almost guarantee disappointment in the result. No surprises there. On the domestic front, do we continue with smug, self-satisfied ideological totalitarian leadership coupled with juvenile congressional show-boating, or choose inept, retributive ideological totalitarian leadership coupled with the aforesaid juvenile congressional show-boating? On foreign policy, do we want purposeful warmongering, or incoherent, random warmongering? Bombs decorated with or without rainbow flags? You decide. I will vote, I suppose, as there will be any number of third-party choices. But it won’t be pretty, followed by an even nastier two months immediately after the voting, that followed by, I don’t know, le dèluge, I suppose.
Friendships and sanity will be put to the test during this time. The political landscape around here is about 72%/28%, and that first percentage may be a little low. So there is very little in the way of debate and exchange of ideas, just a heaping helping of in-your-face political triumphalism. That’s okay, as long as I do not have to listen to it, or, for that matter, the rantings against it. Neither option is a solution to anything that really matters, really. I will, however, probably save a good deal of money, as I will have to stay away from restaurants and other public places. Recently, the orange glow forming in my corner of a roadside eatery sent me scurrying to one of their outside tables, where I could enjoy my fried grease in solitude.
So, that is why I was so pleased to see a recent article in Local Culture, the bi-yearly journal put out by the Front Porch Republic, entitled “Friendship: The Secret Appointment of Heaven” by Jeff Polet. The title comes from an essay by Montaigne. He has much to say on the nature of friendship, and how it has suffered in our age. Interestingly, he contrasts friendship with marriage.
Friendship alone sits at the junction of our being and our becoming. Friends, unlike spouses, don’t invest in us because of what they hope we might be but because of what we are. This is why a genuine friendship, unlike many a marriage, seldom ends in disappointment.
He finds that in this age of Facebook, friendships are “flattened.” We “calculatingly cultivate an image of ourselves,” and this means that “we will never really be seen or known or understood by another, and thus we must forever remain strangers to ourselves.” Indeed, “a social world built for all, is inhabited by none.”
Polet finds that it is even worse “when our friendships are either generated or ruined by politics.” Like E.M. Forster, Polet states that if he were ever forced to choose between betraying his country or his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. He continues:
Any person willing to sacrifice a friend on the altar of politics has his priorities seriously out of whack. How someone voted in the last presidential election is one of the least interesting things about him [emphasis mine], unless it isn’t, in which case you don’t want to be around him. Life is too short to be around boring people. …Except in the extreme case, friends experience politics as a dull intrusion on their otherwise interesting affairs [emphasis mine].
Finally, I was impressed with his definition of character and the nature of constancy.
Stability is thus one of the essential characteristics of friendship. .. A person constantly adjusting to surroundings is a person incapable of any abiding friendship, because that person has no character–the ability to sustain an identity and pursue what is good across all circumstances. The friend’s constancy, both of character and time, thus anchors our personality…Becoming all things to all people typically results in being very little to very few and nothing to everyone else. The breadth of relationships can never compensate for their depth. The narcissist always stares into a shallow pool.
Indeed.