EIGHT
Conclusion
Close friendship provides an alternative to neoliberal influence and can
offer several tools that might be utilized in resisting it: the theme of
equality (and to a lesser extent the willingness to challenge social norms),
the training in trust, and the motivation to preserve meaningful aspects
of our lives. All of this makes friendship a fruitful area for reflection in
considering how to conduct our lives in the social, political, and econom­
ic' context in which we find ourselves.
Regarding resistance, it is easy to misunderstand what I have claimed
on its behalf. I have not claimed that deep friendships lead naturally to
forms of political resistance. As we saw at the outset of this section,
friendship can be an exclusive relationship, and in any case it is impos­
sible to be close friends with everyone in a movement of solidarity. It is
entirely possible, although not at all necessary, that the cultivation of
deep friendships would turn one away from the involvement in more
public concerns.
I have not claimed that having close friendships makes us better peo­
ple. I suspect that the ability to have a close friendship has elements that
might lend themselves to this, but I have not argued this. And to argue it
would require separating out those elements from other ones, since it is
clear to me, as I have argued, that close friendships can occur among
deeply flawed or wounded individuals.
Finally, I have not claimed that friendship is the only route to resis­
tance to the influence of neoliberalism. It is simply one route, a route that
is often ignored as well as one whose themes can be implicit in other
routes. One can imagine a solidarity movement of people who either
have no close friends or, more likely, whose close friendships do not
inform or train them in their participation. I think this is improbable.
145
146
Chapter 8
since I don't believe we easily cordon off important aspects of our lives
from others. But it seems at least possible.
In short, the relation of friendship to political resistance in general and
resistance to neoliberalism in particular is doubly contingent. Friendship
is not necessary for resistance, and it does not necessarily lead there.
Why bring the two together then?
There are two reasons for this. First, although there are difficulties and
tensions between friendship and solidarity, although it is not a clean or
seamless relationship, nevertheless friendship can offer themes, training,
and motivation for solidarity in general and resistance to neoliberalism in
particular. In an age where it is often difficult for people to see their way
to solidarity, even when—as many do—they agree that there is much to
be resisted in our world, finding sources of solidarity is an important
task. Moreover, although the relationship between friendship and soli­
darity is not straightforward, deep friendship does constitute a straight­
forward alternative to neoliberal relationships. In reflecting on our friend­
ships, then, we might be motivated to resistance by that aspect of friend­
ship alone. This is especially true if we feel the atmosphere in which we
can cultivate those friendships to be threatened.
Second, friendship is not far to seek. Almost all of us have deep
friendships of one kind or another. Inasmuch as these deep friendships
provide a source for solidarity, we do not have to look far in our world to
discover a site from which we can draw nourishment. As I mentioned a
couple of times in this book, I have many students who recognize that
there is something profoundly awry in the way the world is currently
arranged, but who feel helpless to do something about it. They have a
sense neither of hope nor of vision. Deep friendships can assist in provid­
ing both. They provide vision because they encompass elements of the
kinds of relationships one would like to see in a world more just. They
provide hope in the fact that neoliberalism has not overtaken all that is
worthy in human relationships. When I discuss friendship in the context
of resistance with my students, they recognize it as a source at least for
reflection on conceptions of a better world.
All of this is more difficult, however, if we fail to recognize the role
deep friendship plays in our lives and the possibilities it offers to resist
what is inimical to our flourishing together. What I have sought to ac­
complish here is to place that role and those possibilities in front of us.
We cannot aspire to, much less intend, a better world when we carmot see
beyond the throes of this one. Friendship, we can come to realize, is a
wellspring for that aspiration. Not the only one, to be sure, but one that is
rooted in what is among the most meaningful aspects of our lives.
Appendix: Virtual Friendships
In the December 11, 2009, issue of The Chronicle Review, the writer
William Deresiewicz published an article entitled "Faux Friendship,"
which decried the effect of social networking sites, especially Facebook,
on friendship. "Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relation­
ship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us
hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rear­
ranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls." ^
He traces a history of friendship that recounts the heroic friendships of
the pre-modern period to the democratic friendships and then group
friendships of the modern period to the virtual friendships of the past
several years. The advent of MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004
seems to betray the character of friendship. It substitutes a personal shar­
ing of information for interpersonal cormection. The shared time and
conversation necessary for friendship has been replaced by the posting of
quirks about oneself and the commenting on one another's walls. "We
have given our hearts to machines," he concludes, "and now we are
turning into machines." ^
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, in their book Connected, offer a
very different perspective. They see the technology of communication as
bringing people closer together. Taking a historical perspective, they
argue that the same worries that are currently being expressed about
virtual connections were once expressed about the telephone. "Many
worried that domestic life would be constantly interrupted... There were
also concerns about loss of privacy. . . Others thought that rushed tele­
phone conversations would be socially dangerous, as 'speakers cannot
prepare for or reflect upon the discussion as they can in letters'. . . and
observers worried about the ways in which the telephone would change
courtship rituals, leading to inappropriate sexual contact." ^ These wor­
ries seem anachronistic to us now, as the authors feel the worries about
the Internet will seem in the future.
In support of their view, they cite a study in the late 1990s of a suburb
of Toronto where free broadband technology was offered to all residents,
and where 60 percent of the residents chose to utilize it. The study re­
vealed that, "Residents who had access to these services developed deep­
er and broader connections to other residents, with more neighborhood
ties."'' Not only were there more connections among the residents who
used the technology, those residents were also more involved in the civic
147
148
Appendix: Virtual Friendships
life of the community than those who forsook the technology. There are,
of course, other explanations for these results than the technology. Per­
haps, for instance, many of those who declined the services were people
who did not want as much connection with others as those who accepted
it. However, it seems at least that the virtual connections among the
residents did not result in a decline of interpersonal interaction.
This study was conducted before the rise of MySpace and Facebook,
and one might wonder what effects, if any, their existence would have
had. However, the debate between Deresiewicz and Christakis and Fowl­
er as to the effects of virtual communication media on friendships reflects
a larger divide between those who think that virtual communication is
deleterious for friendship and healthy social interaction generally and
those who think it fosters and enhances them.
The rise of Facebook and other virtual social media is likely to have
significant effects on friendship. I don't think we know what those effects
are yet, though. As I write this, Facebook is only seven years old. I sus­
pect as well that part of the explanation for the strong reactions pro and
contra virtual connections lies precisely in the fact that we don't know
their effects. There is a sense that these media will have a significant
impact on our cultural and interpersonal lives, but we do not yet under­
stand what those effects are or will be. As a result, many people either
rush to embrace or to reject these media.
At this point, I do not feel prepared to add very much to this discus­
sion. It seems to me premature to pronounce on phenomena like Facebook, or upon the general consequences of virtual social media on friend­
ships. This is why I have left this theme to this short appendix. Given our
discussion of friendship, there are perhaps a few things we can say to
frame thought about virtual social media. But an understanding of what
happens in the frame will have to await another book and probably an­
other author.
Deep friendships are rooted in shared activities and conversation. As
we have seen, close friends accrete time together in which they develop
(or emerge from) common interests, and in which they deepen their rela­
tionship through interpersonal discussion and mutual growth. This does
not seem to preclude virtual interaction, but does raise questions about
interaction that is solely virtual. For an example of the former, we can take
email. Deresiewicz is leery of email interaction. "E-mail," he writes, "with
its rapid-fire etiquette and scrolling format, already trimmed a letter
down to a certain acceptable maximum, perhaps a thousand words." ^
The comparison of email to letters, however, may be misleading.
It is certainly true that letters are more reflective, usually considered
and written at a leisurely pace and often longer than email. However, it
may be that the role of email in a friendship is different from that of
letters. Rather than being central to the development of a friendship,
email can serve to sustain it during periods of geographic distance. It can
Appendix: Virtual Friendships
149
be more like a series of quick phone conversations, where people keep up
with what one another is doing rather than communicating in Little's
sense or developing evaluative outlooks. (Of course, email serves a num­
ber of purposes, many of them professional. Those are not our concern
here.) In this way, email is less an impoverished form of a letter and more
like a postcard. And it has several advantages over postcards: it doesn't
take very long to get to its recipient, it is easy to send more of them than
of postcards, and if s cheaper. In a world in which friends are often living
in different cities, email offers a sense of regular connection that can help
nourish a friendship during those periods (often long ones) of forced
physical separation.
Seen this way, email is a supplement to the central elements of a deep
friendship. It rarely plays the role of developing the themes of such
friendships discussed above. This leaves open the question of whether
virtual communication can indeed serve as a medium through which
close friendships can develop. Can email or social media websites do
more than subsidize or fortify an already existing friendship? Can the
virtual world provide something that can substitute for the shared actual
time that friends spend together?
Again, it is too early to know. If the approach offered to deep friend­
ship here is right, however, there are at least two hurdles that need to be
cleared in order for virtual friendships to be able to substitute for offline
friendships. The first is shared activity. Dereisiewicz complains that, with
Facebook, "information replaces experience, as it has throughout our cul­
ture."^ Rather than undergo experiences with friends, Facebook, in his
view, is nothing more than posting information about oneself. If this is
true, it would reflect the individualism characteristic of the two figures of
neoliberalism. It would likely tilt the relationships formed on social net­
working sites either to the consumerist as a form of entertainment or the
entrepreneurial as people sought out others as a means of forming useful
connections. Is this true, however? Are social networking sites devoid of
shared experience?
There are legitimate worries here. In shared face-to-face experience,
people do something together. They engage in a common activity, wheth­
er it be athletic, conversational, political, or otherwise. They build a
shared life. Moreover, by building that shared life in each other's or one
another's presence they engage in what might be called the eroticism of
their bodies. By this I don't mean anything particularly sexual. The eroti­
cism of friends' bodies is the enjoyment of being around friends, seeing
their facial expressions, hearing their voices, perhaps occasionally hug­
ging them or touching their arm. One enjoys the corporeal presence of
friends. The question that arises for friendships that are exclusively virtu­
al is whether the kinds of activities that occur online are robust enough
for sustaining a deep friendship, and whether the lack of physical pres-
150
Appendix: Virtual Friendships
ence constitutes a bar to forming a bond of the type that distinguishes
those kinds of friendships.
Related to this, we have seen that close friendships are rooted in the
history of time shared together. It is not merely the present in its occur­
rence or the future in its prospect that defines such a friendship. The past
as it is sedimented in the relationship both orients and gives heft to the
relationship among good friends. The question this raises for virtual
friendship is whether there is something capable of playing this role in
virtual relationships. Deresiewicz writes that, "Facebook holds out a Uto­
pian possibility: What once was lost will now be found. But the heaven of
the past is a promised land destroyed in the reaching. Facebook, here,
becomes the anti-madeleine, an eraser of memory."^
Deresiewicz is right to point to the importance of the past in constitut­
ing deep friendships. And he is right to insist that the past is not simply a
matter of bringing forward images or memories that have no vital con­
nection with the present. But it seems too early to declare virtual social
networks as incapable of a more robust integration of past and present.
There are difficulties, to be sure, among them the obstacle of shared activ­
ities that could constitute a common past. Whether, in the end, these
difficulties will be overcome in the evolution of Facebook or other social
websites is a matter for the future (and our reflective vigilance) to decide.
It is worth recognizing the requirements of a deep friendship, in order
that we not sacrifice some of our most meaningful relations on the altar of
technology. By the same token, however, it seems premature to pro­
nounce upon technology as incapable of sustaining those relationships. It
is probably uncontroversial to say that recent communication technolo­
gies can assist in the maintenance of previously existing friendships, es­
pecially in a world in which people often find themselves further flung
from one another than they would choose to be. Whether and to what
degree those same technologies can actually create such friendships is, I
believe, a matter about which we do not have the answer. And, lacking
the answer, we should be at once open to the possibilities for friendship
that they might offer and wary about the dangers they present.
NOTES
1. Deresiewicz, William, "Faux Friendship," The Chronicle Review, December 11,
2009, p. B9.
2. Deresiewicz, "Faux Friendship," p. BIO.
3. Christakis, Nicholas A. and Fowler, James H., Connected: The Surprising Power of
Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Co.,
2009), p. 267.
4. Christakis and Fowler, Connected, p. 269.
5. Deresiewicz, "Faux Friends," p. BIO.
6. Deresiewicz, "Faux Friends," p. BIO.
7. Deresiewicz, "Faux Friends," p. BIO.
Bibliography
Adams, Rebecca G., and Allan, Graham. "Contextualizing Friendship," in Adams,
Rebecca G., and Allan, Graham, Placing Friendship in Context. Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 1998.
Allen, Danielle. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of
Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Arendt, Hannah. "Socrates," in The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Books,
2005 [1990].
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Martin Oswald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
Barber, Benjamin. Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swal­
low Citizens Whole. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
Becker, Gary. "An Economic Analysis of Fertility," in The Economic Approach to Human
Behavior Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
. "The Economic Way of Looking at Life," http://home.uchicago.edu/gbecker/
Nobel/nobellecture.pdf, 1992.
. Human Capital, Third edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
. "A Theory of the Allocation of Time," The Economic Journal, Vol. 75, No. 299,
September 1965.
Becker, Gary. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981
Bhagwati, Jagdish. In Defense of Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004
Brewer, Talbot. The Retrieval of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
Bronner, Ethan. "College Students Aiming for High Marks in Income," New York
Times, January 12, 1998,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
9901E3DE1539F931A25752C0A96E958260&scp=2&sq=
college%20students%20%22meaningful%20philosophy%20of%201ife%22&st=cse
(accessed December 6,2010)
Brown, Wendy "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," in Edgework: Criti­
cal Essays on Knowledge and Politics Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Burge, Tyler. "Individualism and the Mental," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 4,
No. 1,1979.
Cassidy, John. "What Good is Wall Street?" The New Yorker, November 29,2010.
Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capital­
ism. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
Christakis, Nicholas A. and Fowler, James H. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our
Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Co.,
2009).
Cicero. "On Friendship," in Pakaluk, Michael (ed.). Other Selves: Philosophers on Friend­
ship Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso Press, 2006.
Deresiewicz, William. "Faux Friendship," The Chronicle Review, December 11,2009.
Derrida, Jacques. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: Univer­
sity of Chicago Press, 1992 [1991].
. Politics of Friendship, tr. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997 [1994].
. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, tr. Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Nass, Michael. Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2003].
151