Friendship

We Americans have fewer and fewer friends. We are socially disconnected and increasingly isolated. Being as we function best in society, the loneliness epidemic is compromising our mental health.

Karol Markowicz isolates and analyzes the problem in a recent New York Post column. She is not the first to do so. And she is not the first to blame it on social media and smart phones. As the reasoning goes, people are too attached to their gadgets; they spend too much time online, and do not have the time to make and keep friends.

 

She writes:

Loneliness is a silent killer. A US surgeon general’s report from 2023 found it as dangerous as smoking, “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death” — while upward of 60% of Americans feel lonely on a regular basis, surveys have found.

Along with the impact on personal well-being, the trend is dangerous for America itself. A nation that lacks interpersonal relationships is a lower-trust society, more prone to crime and unrest.

As for the causes, let us try one unrecognized cause-- therapy culture. As it happens, the great theories in the therapy world have very little use for friendship.

Beginning with Freud, they emphasize family relationships or personal growth and development. Whether Freud’s Oedipus complex or theories of maturation, the therapy world cares mostly for blood ties, familial connections. Even when it recognizes social ties, it tends to see them as a replay of family ties. In many other cases it focuses on the individual, as a self=contained autonomous monad.

We consider this to be normal. And yet, we recall that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, offered two important chapters on friendship. That is, on social ties that had nothing to do with blood ties. Thus, with the kinds of social ties that produced a community.

The difference is clear and stark. If blood ties are all that matter, you are connected to your blood relatives by biology. Only in the most extreme circumstances does one break off blood ties. There are no specific behaviors, no codes of conduct that connect people who are blood relatives.

When there is no blood tie, then good behavior becomes more important. How you conduct your life either connects you to other people or disconnects you. It produces community or dissolves community.

So, making friends requires ethical behavior. So said Aristotle, and we are certainly not going to object. Thus, blaming it on smart phones is insufficient.

True enough, smart phones are the bane of the existence of young people today, but even if they put away their phones, they still do not have an instruction manual for making and keeping friends.