Friendships of feelings rather than relationships…

Friendship, like family and community, has fallen on hard times in our modern world.  Mobility, busyness, digital technology and numerous other factors have contributed to the thinning—if not the disappearance—of “true friendship.”  Friendship has become “the characteristically modern relationship,” according to William Deresiewicz in an insightful essay entitled “Faux Friendship.”

Deresiewicz describes this “characteristically modern relationship”—this faux or fake friendship—in modernity’s language of freedom, flexibility, and fluidity.

Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want. …

The moral content of friendship, the pursuit of truth and virtue, so crucial to friendship among the ancients, has been lost.

We have ceased to believe that a friend’s highest purpose is to summon us to the good by offering moral advice and correction. We practice, instead, the nonjudgmental friendship of unconditional acceptance and support—”therapeutic” friendship, in Robert N. Bellah’s scornful term. We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side—validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady. We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free. …

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish “community” and the medical “community” and the “community” of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we’re lucky, a “sense” of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have “friends,” just as we belong to “communities.” Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a “sense” of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense. …

In “Faux Friendship,” Deresiewicz helpfully discusses a number of cultural forces that have led to the “devolving” of friendship from “relationship to feeling”:  mobility, impersonal economic relations, the decline of the family, the rise of individualism, technology, social-networking, etc.  He offers no suggestions for restoring the richness of the classical conception of friendship.  Rather, he thinks that “Facebook looks a lot like the future” of contemporary friendship.

We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. … As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we’re friends with everyone now.

Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming? The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction? When they’ve shrunk to the size of a wall post, do they retain any content? If we have 768 “friends,” in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn’t invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it’s not clear that we still even know what it means.

“Faux Friendship” provides considerable food-for-thought for those of us concerned about the thinning of friendship in contemporary culture—and also concerned about the two other elements of that foundational social triad that includes family and community.

William Deresiewicz is a writer and former English professor at Yale University.  He is the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.  “Faux Friendship” was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.