The Compass of Friendship

Narratives, Identities, and Dialogues

William K Rawlins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781483342726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Kommunikationswissenschaften

2012 Recipient of the Gerald R. Miller Book Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) 2009 Recipient of the David R. Maines Narrative Research Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) "The book is a valuable addition to the literature on friendship. Faculty who teach relationship development will find useful material for themselves and their students. Relationship researchers will find dozens of possible studies in these pages. Finally, any thoughtful person interested in relationship quality could profit from reading this interesting treatment of one of life's most valuable attributes—our friends." - Phil Backlund, University of Denver Exploring how friends use dialogue and storytelling to construct identities, deal with differences, make choices, and build inclusive communities, The Compass of Friendship examines communication dialectically across private, personal friendships as well as public, political friendships. Author William K. Rawlins uses compelling examples and cases from literature, films, dialogue and storytelling between actual friends, student discussions of cross-sex friendships, and interviews with interracial friends. Throughout the book, he invites readers to consider such questions as: What are the possibilities for enduring, close friendships between men and women? How far can friendship's practices extend into public life to facilitate social justice? What are the predicaments and promises of friendships that bridge racial boundaries? How useful and realistic are the ideals and activities of friendship for serving the well-lived lives of individuals, groups, and larger collectives?

1

Introduction

Living Friendship

Freedom surely lives at the heart of friendships. I hope most of us can identify with Etta Mae’s arrival at her old friend Mattie’s home:

She dumped her load on the sofa and swept off her sun-glasses. She breathed deeply of the freedom she found in Mattie’s presence. Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets. (Naylor, 1991)

We feel comfortable in the presence of our close friends. We earn and jointly create the freedom of our friendships. Time together, straightforward talk, shared stories, and mutual respect produce the “co-knowledge” cradling friendship. I believe that friends do retain some secrets because of needs for privacy and respect for each other’s vulnerabilities (Rawlins, 1983a, 1983c). Yet friends also co-create deep understandings allowing for shared moral visions and rights unique to their friendship. Ann Patchett keenly captures this special private domain with her friend Lucy Grealy:

Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise very dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all. (Patchett, 2004, p. 73)

This book examines the unique spaces, the singular worlds that friends accomplish. I will probe the contingencies of friendships: their vulnerabilities and contributions to the larger social contexts in which they occur, the similarities and differences they recognize and suppress, their storytelling and dialogues, their shared and risked identities. Though offering peace, friendships are seldom completely placid. There is always more to friendship than two persons’ lives.

Around 10 years ago I read a newspaper story that I haven’t been able to forget. It seems a man living in a small town in the midwestern United States, who I’ll call Hank, was about to go bankrupt. However, Hank had come up with a solution to his financial problems that he confided to his best friend, who I’ll call Barry. Hank informed Barry that he had decided to set fire to his own business. He figured that the insurance settlement on the total loss would clear up his debts and put him in pretty good shape to start fresh with another venture. Soon after their conversation, Hank torched his store. Unfortunately, the flames destroyed more than he planned. Before the local fire department could extinguish the blaze, it burned down most of the block of buildings making up the economic center of the small town where they both lived. Due to the circumstances of the fire and some incriminating evidence about its cause, Hank was charged with arson.

As you might imagine, the trial created quite a stir in the little town. Despite the worrying revelation of Hank’s financial straits during the proceedings, townspeople had trouble believing that an upstanding citizen like Hank would do such a thing. Influenced by an effective case for the defense, public opinion began to question the evidence of arson. This swing was occurring even though legally clarifying the fire’s causes would facilitate reparations made to the other destroyed businesses. Monitoring the events closely, Barry was torn. On one hand, he was Hank’s longtime friend whom Hank had entrusted with the guilty secret. Most of us would agree that the loyalty and confidence of friendship is a sacred trust. Close friendship is one of the things that make life worth living. What kind of person would betray his best friend’s trust? On the other hand, what Hank did was wrong. To make matters worse, Hank’s self-serving, premeditated action had caused fellow citizens considerable trauma and economic damage. What kind of citizen would protect such information and turn his back on his home community when it deserves justice? Where did Barry’s true loyalties lie in this situation? Well into the trial, Barry decided to come forward and reveal that Hank had confided his intentions to him. Deeply moved and visibly upset, he told reporters after his testimony that while he cared about his friend like a brother, he felt the results of Hank’s actions went beyond the trust of two friends. Barry felt he would never be able to look the people of his hometown in the eye if he did not tell the truth about the fire’s cause.

What would you have done? For some time I have discussed this story with students and friends and not everyone’s answers are the same. This story raises some of the questions about friendship that I address in this book. For one thing, people want to know more about the friends’ conversation. Did Hank approach Barry for his opinions on the plan, or did he simply declare it as a foregone conclusion? Hank clearly trusted his friend’s confidence, but did he seek Barry’s judgment before making the decision? Did Hank consider the burden he imposed on Barry by confiding this criminal intention? How much thought did Hank give to the position in which he was placing Barry? What about Barry? Did he just passively listen to Hank’s plan? Or did he question his friend, engage him in dialogue, and urge him to consider other scenarios? Did he play out other stories that might influence Hank to think differently about his current situation, his financial options, or the consequences of this drastic action? How these friends went about making choices is an important consideration.

This story also poses larger questions about the relative duties of personal friendships pursued in private versus broader civic friendships conducted in public. Under what conditions does one of these relationships exert the greater claim on us when pitched against each other? Do our duties to our community surpass our duties to our close friends as in the case of Barry and Hank? Or should our loyalties to our close friends trump our duties to our community?

Cross-cutting tensions between duty to the collective and loyalty to specific friends arise in particular circumstances. One famous example involves Brutus and Cassius, supposedly trusted friends of Julius Caesar, assassinating Caesar because they believed their action was for the greater good of Rome. “Et tu, Brute?” bespeaks Caesar’s sorrowful awareness of his personal friend’s betrayal. As a result, in The Inferno, Dante placed Brutus and Cassius in the innermost rings of Hell for their violation of personal friendship. Dante believed they belong in the hottest part of Hell because they betrayed their loyalty to their particular friend out of perceived duty to the impersonal state. In dramatic contrast, Cicero saluted friends who upheld their duties to the Roman state over personal loyalties. He believed there cannot be a viable state if people do not place duty to it above their personal attachments. Indeed, the private moral visions of friends can promote factions and divisiveness within the collective order. In this book I consider further the cross-cutting pressures that can arise between impersonal duties to broader collectives versus caring for the needs of personal friends. Sometimes our friends may act selfishly as in Hank’s case. In other cases, our friends who challenge the impersonal political order may be courageous forerunners of necessary social changes.

What considerations would you find important in choosing between your close friend and the demands of your larger social world? Maybe you presumed that Barry and Hank lived in a homogeneous community. In this case if Barry identified closely with everyone else involved because of their similarity to him, perhaps it was easier for him to act for the greater good of his community. After all, a lot of folks just like him had suffered. But what if he and Hank had always been excluded because of their racial, ethnic, or religious differences, or their sexual orientation? What if they had been oppressed as a devalued minority due to their shared differences from the larger community? What if Hank’s business endeavors took place in a constant struggle against powerful prejudice? Do any of these factors change how you feel about Barry’s choice to testify against him? What if Hank had been systematically denied opportunities by the townspeople because of his differences while Barry was the only person in town who became his friend despite their differences? How do you regard Barry’s decision now?

Instead of these two men, what if the story involved a man and a woman? Hank and Mary are the longtime friends. What differences, if any, would this make in your perceptions of Mary’s decision to testify against Hank? What if Hank was a woman named Hanna? How would you evaluate Barry’s decision to renege on Hanna’s trust? What if both friends were women? How do perceived similarities and differences between the friends and vis-à-vis the larger community interact to shape identities, perceptions of relationships, and responses to others? How do the activities of friends relate to matters of social justice? Who (including you, the reader) identifies with whom in these various scenarios, on what bases, and with what consequences?

Why is friendship positioned at these flashpoints? How does friendship simultaneously relate to our identities as individuals and to our participation in larger groups? How is it that we use the same word “friendship” to describe a gamut of relationships from close dyadic bonds to diverse public connections of varying lengths of time and degrees of involvement? The word “friendship” typically implies benign meanings. How does friendship sustain its benevolent, even moral, connotations? Discussions of friendship as a guide to proper conduct appear in numerous contexts. Authors recommend the values of friendship as a moral model for the relationship between family members (Lindsey, 1981), authors and readers (Booth, 1988), co-authors (Lunsford & Ede, 1987), researchers and participants (Newbold Chinas, 1993; Tillmann-Healy, 2003), teachers and students (Jackson & Hagen, 2001; Rawlins, 2000), academic advisors and students (Rawlins & Rawlins, 2005), lawyers and clients (Fried, 1976), and physicians and patients (D. N. James, 1989). What gives friendship this flexibility of application across contexts? What meanings of the term remain consistent and which ones change? What ethical connotations are implied by describing relationships as friendships?

Aristotle (1980) devotes two books of his Nicomachean Ethics to friendship. He describes two broad forms reflecting different contexts of friendship—true friendship and civic or political friendship. Both forms involve distinctive qualities and demands. Even so, in actual practice the two forms overlap in significant ways to compose evolving intersections of social participation. Aristotle extends his notions of true dyadic friendship in describing civic friendship. Civic friendship is equally important because communities where people demonstrate good will, address common concerns, and dwell in peace as political friends enable the continuing possibility of dyadic friendship (Hutter, 1978). The fates of personal and political friendships interweave in actual human circumstances.

True friendship (which I also call close or personal friendship) involves distinctive characteristics for Aristotle (1980). Personal friendship occurs between specific individuals and involves concern for the other person for his or her own sake. Suttles (1970) terms this the “person-qua-person” orientation of friendship. In close friendship we desire good things to happen to our friend because we care about this particular person. The activities composing personal friendship occur for the most part in private settings out of public eyes and ears. For Aristotle true dyadic friendships also involve mutual well-wishing, which includes reciprocated concern and actions to benefit each friend. They jointly experience the gratifications of their friendship. However, Aristotle holds that true dyadic friendships only occur between persons (he said men) who are alike in virtue. In their purest form such friends duplicate each other’s essential qualities; a friend constitutes “another self.” I consider problems associated with his presumptions of similarity and privilege throughout this book. I give them particular attention in Chapter 7 when considering limitations of Aristotle’s notions of political friendship.

Aristotle (1980) contrasts true dyadic friendships with those of utility and of pleasure. The latter are inferior kinds of friendship in which individuals primarily use each other for personal gain or gratification. Consequently, such friendships end when they expend the bases for utility or pleasure. While true friends also share pleasure and can assist each other, Aristotle notes a different primary motive. It is their pursuit of the good life together in light of their mutual well-wishing as intrinsically worthy persons. Close dyadic friendships are the primary focus of Chapters 3 through 6 of this book and are perhaps what contemporary people typically think of when friendship is mentioned.

By comparison, civic or political friendship describes a stance toward a number of other persons who occupy shared places and times. The practices of civic friendship connect citizens as friends in public settings and discourses. Such friendships are characterized by good will. Political friends wish each other well in their activities as persons occupying commonly held spaces. They actively support each other’s performances as citizens through behaving in ways that sustain a hospitable environment for interaction. Of matching importance, political friends devote themselves to pursuing a common good. They do things together primarily to serve purposes that transcend the specific desires of the individuals or subgroups performing the actions. Acting as political friends, they orient toward something more encompassing than their individual selves—a commonly recognized good. While they do not necessarily share the same interpretations of the common good, they realize that a larger cause and a broader constituency of similarly concerned citizens benefit from their efforts. Although civic friends may personally enjoy the positive results of their cooperative actions, they do so primarily as members of a political community, not as detached individuals.

Neither communicating good will nor pursuing a common good is first and foremost a personal disposition or merely an emotional tendency (Hansot, 2000). Rather, each is a practice that we choose to perform as a consequence of choosing to live in civic or political friendship with others. Importantly, these practices are not devoted restrictively to others as specific individuals who display idiosyncratic attributes or desires. They are activities performed in concert with other community members with an eye toward sustaining a commonly occupied space in ways that recognize and benefit all participating citizens. Living in political friendship with others involves our ongoing efforts to display good will toward our civic friends and to pursue actively common concerns. When conducted properly, civic friendship provides a basis for belonging as citizens but also a basis for responsible freedom.

Despite their obvious differences, both personal and political friendships suggest benevolent, hopeful orientations toward social life. The concern for a specific other person practiced in personal friendship broadens into the generalized sense of good will practiced in civic friendship. Likewise, the mutual well-wishing performed in personal friendship expands to focus on a common good in civic friendship. We purposefully remove ourselves from responses to specific individuals and concentrate on a broader, shared enterprise. Meanwhile, a social context of civic friendship can facilitate the possibility of personal friendships, even though dyadic friendships are not a necessary or desirable consequence across all public circumstances.

The virtues and vexations of friends’ communication have captivated me for 30 years (Rawlins, 2007). In trying to understand the contradictory, situated practices of friends’ interaction, I turned early on to a dialectical perspective. From my first presentation of dialectically informed insights (Rawlins, 1979) through early research reports (Rawlins, 1983b, 1983c) to delineating a theoretical account of the perspective (Rawlins, 1989a) to applying dialectical thinking to friendships across the life course (Rawlins, 1992), I have found it to be an enriching, evolving orientation for inquiry. I briefly review this dialectical perspective below. While I have found these dialectical principles helpful in understanding the predicaments and possibilities of friendships, I consider it unproductive to conceive of any fixed, primary set of dialectical tensions. Indeed, it is quite incompatible with the volatile energies and the changing, contextual understandings of dialectics to do so (Henry, 1965; Rawlins, 1998b). Lured by questions of friendship, I devote much of this book to probing the dialectic of individuation and participation for the first time. Chapter 2 describes individuation as identifying an individually embodied self or a social group as a distinct entity separate from others. Communicating individuation occurs concurrently with participation, identifying self or groups as relational entities necessarily connected with others. In conversation with insights provided by dialectical thinking, I detail in Chapter 3 and exemplify in Chapter 4 the interconnections of storytelling and dialogue characterizing friends’ discourse.

The dialectical perspective employed here involves four basic elements: totality, contradiction, motion, and praxis (Rawlins, 1989a). Totality highlights the vast interrelations constituting social life. All friendships are affected by social and political forces. In turn, friendships influence all areas of society. Contradictions are incompatible yet mutually conditioning aspects producing the dynamic pulse of human relationships. For example, as we noticed in the story of Barry and Hank, the contradictory demands on friends can arise from simultaneous, opposing private and public responsibilities. Motion describes relationships as always changing from barely noticeable to dramatic ways. Stasis is an illusion; communicative life inherently responds to discourses already in play. People grow closer and farther apart, affecting and affected by big and small personal and external events. Praxis describes the private and public world-shaping reflexivity of social action. Constrained by and responding to our circumstances, we make active choices as subjective agents. Our choices create objective conditions that we must then address. We are simultaneously subjects and objects of our own communicative actions. What objective conditions requiring response did Hank and Barry ...