The Malaise of America as a Crisis of Friendship

“Friendship seems…to hold states together, and when men are friends they have no need of justice.”

This line from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics has always haunted me, and in light of the evidence that American society seems to be dissolving, it takes on an even more important meaning. In short, if Aristotle is right, the failure of the American people to form and keep friendships is not just a problem of friendship – it’s a problem for America as a political community. As he points out, friends don’t need external rules and regulations to keep them in line (justice), since the internal bond of the friendship regulates itself. So if America is experiencing a crisis of friendship, the discord that’s left behind will require an external binding through the law that can only endure for a time. As Aristotle would likely agree, therefore, it should be the concern of everyone in America who cares about the country’s long-term health — government officials included — to encourage, foster, and develop enduring, deep friendships.

For the purpose of this essay, then, I’m going to assume Aristotle’s dictum to be true (rather than argue for it) and seek to understand our current social and political condition in its light. An argument to defend the dictum or provide a solution to our condition will be problems for another day and another analyst.

Before accounting for all the ways our society is stricken by friendlessness, it’s important first to remember that Aristotle observed three different kinds of friendship: friendships of virtue (its highest form), friendships of utility, and friendships of pleasure (read book VIII of the Ethics to get the full picture). A friend of virtue seeks not just the pleasure or utility or goodness for one person, but both friends seek the good on behalf of the other. If I am a friend of the highest order (a friend of virtue), I seek not just the good for myself but also the good of my friend. If my friend is sick, I offer him medicine. More importantly, if my friend is neglecting his family in favor of baser pleasures, it’s on me to encourage him to return to a life of virtue. The lower forms of friendship (utility and pleasure) fall short of this ideal, where the “friend” endures the friendship only as long as the other provides something pleasant and useful. A political community will hold together the more friendships it has, and it will really hold together the more it possesses friendships of virtue. Friendship acts as the binding agent — the glue — that will hold a society together and keep it from falling apart.

With this basic framework established, what is the current state of the culture of American friendship? Well, most of the reports are disheartening, as they seem to reveal a failure by many of us to develop friendships of any kind, not just ones of virtue. According to a survey from 2021, men who happen to possess close friendships have fewer than they once did, and 15% of adult men have no close friends at all. And while this survey showed the steepest friendship decline to be with men, the malady is affecting everyone. Virtual relationships have increasingly replaced or crowded out physical, face-to-face friendships, and social media in particular have only weakened the bonds we used to have. The number of drug overdose deaths in America has quadrupled since 1999, and while the causes of these are many, the deaths themselves reveal lives plagued by isolation and friendlessness. Young people, especially teenagers, seem to be experiencing a crisis of friendship, as revealed by a recent survey. According to this survey, from 2016 to 2020 (before the COVID-19 pandemic), the mental health of America’s youth worsened significantly, and the researchers see no relief in sight. More recent reports lay the blame on smartphones and social media for fueling the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide, particularly among young girls. Finally, as more and more couples marry less, marry later, and bear children later, the friendships between grandparents and grandchildren are only becoming less frequent, shorter, and weaker, further exacerbating the perennial loneliness senior citizens face.

The list could go on and on, but the diagnosis is the same: if friendship (of any kind, not just virtuous ones) holds states together, how could we possibly expect the American state to endure with a picture of friendlessness like this? The question answers itself.

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. Friendlessness affects (or defines) our politics as well. Let’s look at partisan polarization as an example of the deformation of friendship. In a recent interview with Bari Weiss, Yuval Levin argued that partisan polarization in America is not when both sides are at the other side’s throats. Instead, partisan polarization is when each side huddles together on its own, speaking only to itself, but speaking very harshly about the other side. The insularity is so complete that when the vitriolic lobbies reach the public square (X, Facebook, cable news), the accused group can’t recognize the accusation as representative of their point of view. Garden variety progressives suddenly become pedophiles and Marxists, while anyone who flirts with conservatism is a racist and misogynist.

If this is what partisan polarization is really like, it reveals a deformation of friendship in at least two ways. First, according to Aristotle, friendship requires that friends know each other in a mutual way. To refuse to speak with (and not just at), to willfully misunderstand, and to demonize the other person, party, or group — this is the opposite of a friendship where the two partners come to a deep, shared, commonly held knowledge of the other. “Love your enemies” is certainly a standard too high for any political community, but even “know your enemies” seems to be too difficult or impossible in the polarized world we inhabit. Friendship requires knowledge of the other, and our polarized world makes such knowledge too arduous a task.

Second, the highest form of friendship demands that partners actually seek the good of the other, and America’s polarized communities fall short of this ideal, even within the tribes themselves. You might think that the two political worlds in America represent communities of friendship, even if nobody is friends with anyone in the other world. However, what kind of friend only tells his friend exactly what they want to hear, always stroking his ego, and never pushing him into greater truth and virtue? But is this not the character of our polarized worlds? We have social media echo chambers, conferences, and churches with only the like-minded. We have political rallies led by people who only reinforce what the crowd wants to hear in order to gain more power. If this is how we relate to one another within our own communities, we are at best friends of utility, using each other for psychological, social, and political benefit alone and not for coming together to pursue a shared, common good. While we may know our own tribes really well, we fall short of true friendship when we fail to encourage those we know best to be their best in life and in the world.

Friendlessness therefore abounds, and if Aristotle were with us today, he would wonder how our country could stay together much longer. It would take more time and space to both defend Aristotle’s dictum that “friendship seems…to hold states together” and provide the appropriate medicine for the malady just described. However, I think it behooves all Americans who care about the health of the body politic to at least consider the friendlessness that affects us all, how it may be the fundamental feature and cause of our country’s dissolution, and what we might do together to solve it. Moreover, to raise again the example of the devastating effects smartphones and social media have had on the lives of young girls, it’s worth remembering another chilling observation from Aristotle: that a life without friends isn’t worth living at all.

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