Friendship in Politics

Theorizing Amity in and between States

Preston King, Graham M. Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138993150
• eBook ISBN: 9781317969679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Previously published as a special issue of the Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, this volume throws light on the place of friendship in politics by connecting theoretical questions to empirical answers.

Today, friendship and politics are most commonly viewed as distinct and mutually opposed concerns. Politics tends to be seen as general and impersonal, to do with power and hierarchy. Friendship, by contrast, is conceived as particular and intimate, relating to equality and fraternity.

Ancient Greek and Roman thought tended to bring the two together, locating friendship as the moral foundation of the political. But is this view sound? Ought not Friendship to be dismissed by moderns as primitive, inefficient, nepotistic (Freud)? Or ought it to be promoted as a vital moral constraint on power and the consuming egotism of rulers (Plutarch and others)?

The contributors seek to answer these questions, directly and indirectly, by supplying:

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• analyses of the concept
• critical reconstructions of some crucial modern accounts (Kierkegaard, Arendt and Schmitt)
• concrete accounts of the actual play of friendship both within and between states.

Friendship in Politics

PRESTON KING

Leadership Center, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Friendship in an Ancient Setting

Friendship means different things. Though we shall find common ground among these differences, we shall also accept that the meanings of terms are not somehow naïve and self-imposed matters of fact. Meaning is attributed by agents, who, in turn, are burdened by purpose. As purpose varies, so do the key terms by which it is communicated. So what we mean by ‘friendship’ will not change willy-nilly, ‘over time’. That is to say: changes of meaning and application do not occur simply because clocks are ticking (chronology). Nor is the mind, in its rococo internal workings, forced to execute an ‘about-face!’ merely due to changes in external material conditions. Nor does it much help to think of ‘context’ imposing change – as distinct from changed thinking itself changing ‘the’ context. New thinking, whatever may trigger it, is itself both precondition and cause of new outcomes.

It may be desirable that a change of circumstance, understood as a change in problem or project, should occasion new thinking. Yet the desirable and the desired are not a happily married number. The acreage between them poses a problem for ordinary folk, but no less for people with power – perhaps especially and increasingly for people in power. Elites, for being elites, tend to have a direct investment in the status quo. They do not readily embrace transformative ideologies. With whatever tolerant reluctance, they are not averse to manipulating supposedly democratic public opinion where that serves their purposes. This may be especially crucial in the increasingly successful pursuit of concentrated ownership and management of the media. So a change of ‘objective’ conditions cannot be counted on to secure, directly or immediately, large shifts of perspective – save of course in the long term (and we know what happens in the long term).

People are disposed to cling to their overviews with admirably religious intensity. Contradictory evidence will not reliably shake the faith. British military leadership did not think to kit out soldiery, seeking to subdue guerrilla colonials in 1770s America, in less conspicuous regalia. The French État-major, in the lead-up to the Second World War, unhappily (again) prepared itself for trench warfare, not Blitzkrieg. The mindset of the generals, we are advised, is always to fight the previous war. The Hoover administration’s best plan for beating back the Great Depression of 1929 lay in even more slavish adherence to failed laissez-faire policies. The calcified thinking of the George W. Bush administration (2000–2008) in the face of global warming is scarcely the most dramatic illustration of our impressive indisposition/incapacity to adapt. A majority of Israelis, infected by a Wild West mentality, and in league with America’s religious right, have long persisted in the thought that they can make a home for themselves in the Middle East by bombing and displacing the Muslims around them. These Muslims, similarly, seem no more flexible in their thinking – though that may be less relevant in face of their inability to bring effective power to bear.

Hence we are to expect, no matter that we deplore, the persistence of settled ways of thinking. Nothing is changed by the fact that it is inept to the point of actual or near-extinction – as among ancient Easter Islander fisher-folk and pre-Columbian Maya farmers. In the end, it is difficult to elicit why thinking changes. At least we know that to account for it in terms of notions like ‘time’, or ‘context’ or the emergence of new ‘material conditions’ is at best simplistic, if not plain false. The mind follows its own route, logical or illogical. It notices what it notices, whether what is noticed is critical or trivial. Minds interact, too often imitatively, since minds tend to confirm what other minds affirm – no matter that the facts seem (often) to protest.

The meanings and applications of a concept like friendship, if we go back as much as two and a half thousand years, significantly diverge from current meanings and applications. And we observe this as a matter of fact, not as a matter of course. All early thinkers were obsessed with notions of friendship far more sustained and intense than ours. The question is how we explain this. The answer is ultimately uncertain, but that is all the more reason to explore their circumstances with a view to clarifying what may be in play for us.

The scale of early states was small, as in ‘town’, with population density low. The basis of production was agriculture, with significant pockets of hunting and fishing. Subsistence was the norm, every man and woman a handyman (on the model of Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur). Work was unremitting, diurnal and hard, done by slave and free, using rough tools, no ‘machinery’, nor even a robot – the oddity of unemployment lurking over an impossibly distant horizon. Commercial exchange was essentially conceived in the mode of ‘home’ economics, as by Aristotle. Trade was occasional (on market days), not ubiquitous; the appetite for it was not insatiable. Travel was animal, as by human foot, or by donkey, camel, or horse – thus slow. Communication was febrile, the volume of interaction with neighbours restricted. Tourism (to adapt the arcane formula of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) would have been an ‘unknown unknown’.

The known world consisted basically of neighbours and kin. Societies were largely self-enclosed, knowledge of the wider world given up (in major part) to fable, in which the alien was truly alien, in the manner of the Cyclops. But then such a monster as this was progeny of the gods, meaning that the alien, even, was touched by divinity. The circle leads back, from bizarre otherness to mundane self, the latter thus infected with some intimation of its own magical possibility. There is tension in the ancient setting, between (a) the imagination of otherness, frightening but exciting and (b) the apparently enclosed community of neighbours and kin, reassuring, if a touch boring.

Socio-political relations were built around the constitutional or ideological theory of the ‘blood’ knot. That does not mean that biological kinship dictated socio-political relationships, only that these were commonly justified in the language of kinship. Viewed purely as a genetic datum, kinship unites no one – for reasons that can only be touched on. On evolutionary theory especially, but as also with most world religions, one is kin to all the world. On that assumption, if kinship imposes obligation, it must be to humanity as a whole – and beyond that to life as such.

The counterargument is that kinship does not obligate to everyone, only to kin who are close. The question this raises is: On what objective grounds do we decide which kin are ‘close’? If kinship only generates obligation in some degree, then what is that degree? Is it to the eldest brother, but not to the second, or third? Is it to the first cousin, but not to the third … or the thirtieth? Does the mother’s side count, or only the father’s, and if both in some degree, then in what degree? The gambit of grounding social obligation in kinship, being unpersuasive, is standardly deflected by a turn into the alley of choice.

The pitch in relation to choice tends to be that parents are obligated to look after babies since it is by parental choice offspring are sprung. But of two things one: either parents are obligated to progeny (a) because they chose them or (b) because they bore them. And if obligation is due to choice, then it is not due to biology. Suppose one chooses to adopt the progeny of others, and suppose it is the choice that binds. In that case, it follows one is just as obligated as if one had oneself engaged in the original coupling (assuming we are not to do with the blander sin of test-tubing).

If now we scan the position from the ascending side – with regard to grounding such an obligation as that to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ – we may conclude that progeny owe fealty either (a) because parents ‘begat’ them (biological), or (b) because parents nurtured them (implicitly contractual). The first type of argument (obedience owed in exchange for procreation) tends to derive its strength from conflation with the second. For where the biological parent is withdrawn (abandonment, adoption) or demonstrably inept (gross neglect, serious maltreatment) the notion that s/he is owed a duty quite shrivels up. Once the notion of filial obligation shifts from dependency upon ‘life’ to dependency upon care, we observe a transition from a biological to a contractual ground. The crucial point about this second type of argument is not so much that it is specifically contractual as that it is inescapably non-biological.

So biological imagery in socio-political argument, whether now or then, is no more than that: imagery, metaphor. Let us then abandon further elaboration. The summary point is that we are not to see emphasis on ‘blood’ ties in the ancient world as a matter of genetic relations (on the order maybe of a ‘selfish’ gene) somehow directly dictating political allegiance. Biological kinship, real though it be, serves as nothing more than a limiting type of constitutional or ideological grid, on which autonomous socio-political relations, rights and duties, are enacted. It is not the genes – the actual biology of kinship – that dictate allegiance. Rather it is the allegiance that finds it convenient to package/present itself as kinship.

The relevance of relatedness by biology, or the theory of such relatedness, is that it does and is designed to heighten the sense of intimacy marking the relationship between the persons involved. For A to remark of B that she is ‘flesh of my flesh’, or ‘bone of my bone’ is a metaphor for proximity; it is the ne plus ultra of an indelible intimacy. It is an appeal to a connection, a demand for affection, a solicitation of loyalty. It does not matter that close relations often detest one another or that the bloodiest conflicts tend to be fratricidal – not least where siblings compete for the supreme power in a royal household.

We noted earlier that spatial and productive intimacy is a feature of the ancient world. Now we may add to this, via the centrality of kinship, both the fact and the ideology of a genetic proximity. In this world, human relations are intimate on every level. That sense of personal (not impersonal) exchange, as in Buber’s ‘I and Thou’, extends to the governance of divinities. For ancient gods were not just plural, they were local. They were not indifferent to locality and particularity, since they were themselves ancestral and exclusive. Gods could be jealous, had favourites, were capable of, and could be moved by, emotion, and were in various ways bound by the human or part-human flotsam and jetsam that they themselves spawned.

On the one hand, intimacy and mutual exposure were untrammelled. On the other, custom was rigid and traditional authority unbridled. Government was limited in terms of its reach. But those who governed could do much as they liked within their remit. Privacy was a near impossibility. Individuality moreover was dangerous. One’s defence lay not in a Weberian bureaucracy, but in a complex of kin and near-kin, of friends and allies. Hence a great emphasis upon observing custom, speaking well and effectively, retaining the loyalty of the extended family, being kind to strangers, and cultivating intense and reliable friendships extending beyond the family. Utterly intense trans-familial bonds offered relief from the cloying web of family. They also offered prospective protection against the perilous ups and downs of command in small states as also against the oppression marking later empires (St Augustine’s ‘great robber bands’).

Certainly, the denizens of early systems were not capable of anomie; they were not diverted by radio, television, mobile phones, video games, nor by much in the way of foreign travel and other such forms of detachment and evasion. They were not cut off from one another by mutual ignorance or what we call privacy and individualism. Intimate, personal friendship was widely promoted as vital in part simply because, in the circumstances described, it was genuinely possible, and enjoyable, and profitable. One could no more do without the loyalty of family and friends then, than most of us can do without a pension or state-funded education now. In settings where virtually all relations are intensely personal, where what matters is who you are, not what you know, a person so cavalier as to dispense with close and intimate ties must appear not a little foolish, perhaps indeed a fool. Friends worth the name require a great deal in the way of time and attention. But moderns either do not have the time, or do not take it. They fall back upon their washing machines, dishwashers, cars, banks, telephones. By such means they are well able to divorce the practicalities of self-maintenance from intimacy and to insulate such intimates as they have from one another. Moderns may well ‘network’, but they (we) do not explore the souls of one another, and usually consider it socially inept (intrusive) to attempt it.

Modernity, so far from representing civilization, would appear – at least from an ancient perspective – to represent a new barbarism. Modernity is nervous in the face of self-revelation. Self is meant among us to be self-subsistent. Thus the probing Other comes to be represented more as peril than prospective ally. Promoters of self-enclosure, we fear self-disclosure. There is an exception to this (at one end) among some of the most ambitious who can make money from declaring what no one else will and (at the other end) among the poor and destitute who may flail and flash uninhibitedly since the space they have fallen into gives no cause to care. But there is a difficulty where those who directly command in modern conditions, cannot know themselves, and have no legitimate means of knowing one another.

The difficulty is, without significant self-disclosure, there can be no real moral development. The self that is hidden is a sustained lie to itself. The virtue of friendship, despite other limitations, is that it may develop in the subject a degree of self-awareness, self-understanding, self-acceptance and – by extension – an abstract empathy that carries wider political implications. The modern’s self-disclosure is perhaps exhausted by confession of catechist to priest in some obscure cubicle. Perhaps it reaches its limit at the quay of the psychiatrist-boatman who purposes, for a substantial fee, to navigate one through stream of consciousness into self-awareness. But otherwise such revelations may be taken as a sign of weakness, as also dangerous.

If modernity is more concerned with liberty than friendship, and with liberty indeed as the flip side of power (devolved), then self-disclosure may be precisely what moderns are compelled to avoid. All who would exercise power over others require a degree of distance from them. The modern politician, in a democratic state, may wish to appear an ordinary person, and even accessible in a populist way, but cannot afford to give too much away. How relevant is friendship to politics in modernity? How much genuine disclosure and intimate but politicized bonding can we and ought we to sustain? If the friendships of the ancients cannot be our own, what can we learn from them that may be of value in our own time?

Ten Aspects of Friendship for Modernity

In what follows, friendship of some sort (its varieties are not properly attended to) is assumed to be irretrievably linked to politics. If one says (at the extreme) that politics is merely about obtaining and maintaining power, and that it turns round recognizing and creating enemies, it remains that even this process dictate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Theorizing Friendship in Politics
• Part II: Thinkers on Friendship
• Part III: Friendship Within States
• Part IV. International Friendship
• Index