Friendship and the Seeds of Distrust

Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured the meaning of friendship in his poem Der Freundî. "A friend" he mused "is a gift..." It is a most precious thing to have a friend, a reliable, loyal, understanding friend. This German pastor stood up to Nazism at the cost of his own life. He saw the subtlety of friendship. "A friend is a gift," he mused "to a friend." It is a gift we receive, but it is also a gift we give. It is a reciprocal thing; something with deep and long-lasting consequences.

A friend should be the person we are to the person who has given, or is giving, the same gift to us. In friendship we learn that we are not who we are, or who we want to be, without others.

Our complex networks of social relations - at home, work, school, church, in public life, at play - are always strengthened and enriched by the gift-giving of friendship. Friendship is finding another person with whom one can be oneself. But our relationships can be also be weakened, impoverished and ruined when some friendship "goes wrong".

Friendship involves risk and a framework of trust. Friendship needs trust and it also nurtures trust. Trust extends to all society so that when it is broken our networks of friendship are placed under strain.

If we don't see friendship flourishing these days it may have something to do with the fact that we no longer believe that all our relationships are entrusted to us by God. Friendship just doesn't happen; it is part of our life before God. Lose sight of that and things go haywire; friendship will then seem to be a result of our urge for satisfaction.

So, for example, an obsession with sex takes over. Can the constant barrage of eroticism be good for our friendships? Can it help the weak overcome their sexual addictions and build good friendships? Obviously not. Self-oriented lust mixed with the cocktail of adultery and fornication explodes mutually enriching friendships in all directions. And inappropriate mutual sexploitation wrecks havoc? As the President and the intern know full well.

Sexuality is a way of revealing oneself, the uncovering which is marital God-blessed love. So when it becomes merely sex (like toothpaste), to be used to make oneself feel and look better, to shore up the uncertainty of one's own identity, it easily turns into a means of covering up, of hiding oneself, of keeping one's friendship to oneself. What should be trust becomes an unreliable and secretive tryst. This is dangerous, because of the personal effort required to keep the 'friendship' secret. At the point where sex takes over the potential for friendship is wrecked and those who were becoming friends take a road of great bitterness.

The application of all this to the Congressional crisis needs no elaboration. The destruction of this 'friendship' between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is something that challenges us all because the 'friendship thing' is a part of all of our lives. And that is also where the President's ability to make or unmake 'friends' with his 'first lady', and other men and women, comes into the picture.

If we cover up about our friends, if we are embarrassed about the friendships we have, we are also failing to squarely face up to ourselves, and we fail to squarely face up to our friends, even the one with whom we are beginning to have the embarrassing affair. Friendship simply cannot be contained in a private nook, not even to satisfy our own fantasies. Good friendship may be shy by it isn't embarrassed. And it doesn't have anything in common with furtive secretivity.

The one who is embarrassed about a relationship, is really the one who is embarrassed about a former friendship. An embarrassed person is not facing up to something, has something to hide. This why there will be intense scrutiny of the entire record, of all the comings and goings, of any leader who cheats on a friend, whose obvious attempt to keep a smooth exterior gives a whiff of unreliability and untrustworthiness. The appearance of such, manufactured by a calculated lack of candor, may be successful in some ways, but it then becomes a defining characteristic of a person's public life as it has in this previous long-drawn out sorry affair.

When friends are left in the lurch, friendship proves unsustainable. Those we say are 'friends' become former allies and former allies will, without forgiveness, become ex-friends, even enemies.

The examination of what was hidden, and what else could have been hidden, takes on a life of its own. Social life becomes a surreal and intense incredulity. When people lose faith in each other it becomes difficult to know exactly who one's friends are and why. We experience this in our political leaders, among ourselves as citizens, in our churches, parties, associations, schools, organizations, and particularly in our friendships. Sometimes it takes a long process for the unease to be resolved and explained. Friendship may be a tender plant but if it is broken the bitter aroma spreads far and wide.

So good friendship should nurture candor and frank honesty. When we say sorry we need to know that those we have wronged know we mean it. When we say sorry to a friend we need to know that that friend knows we mean it, and that we are still accepted. But when these regrets and apologies are played out in public, anything less than transparent candour, sends our legislatures, church courts and family conferences into a spin. We stop talking openly and frankly with those who could become our good friends.

Public life is enhanced by good friendships - between women and men, men and men, women and women, older with younger, junior with senior. Friendship is also good for Presidents and interns, also for married people with other people of the opposite sex. It is a sign that we are an open and friendly society on the way to maturity. But for friendship to do its work we need to discover the basis of our friendship, the God-given laws of love in terms of which we can truly be ourselves, and accept our friends for who they are.

Christ Himself calls us to avoid the nonsense which would turn one good thing into something else for the purpose of keeping ourselves hidden.

11 December 1998AD

Trowel and Sword June 2000, 12-13

Friendship And The Public-Legal Order

Friendship grows in many places. It can be nested in a household. It can be formed in the market-place. It can come to expression in the dynamics of public life. How we define and differentiate between friendships are important questions. They have decisive sociological and jurisprudential implications for our interpretation of social activity.

How do we differentiate between a genuine friendship and an alliance for conveniently pursuing one's own interests? Analytically, it is not so easy. Sometimes friends live next door to each other. Sometimes people who live next door to each other also become friends. A police detective might have a grass in the local area; two colleagues may develop friendly relations for the purpose of protecting their jobs. Two tourists may travel together because they have nothing better to do; because it is convenient.

In a sociological sense we need to be able to distinguish between friendship and friendliness. How is this to be done? It is only possible, if we consider such human relations against the background of the plural social structure of institutions, organisations and relationships in which our human vocation comes to expression. Our underlying view of the structure and purpose of our social vocation is therefore decisive for how we understand the place, character and task of friendship.

A married man may have a genuine and long-lasting friendship with a woman who is not his wife. Such a friendship develops a character of its own. Others might say that they are too friendly, by which they mean it seems to be more than a mere friendship. But on the other hand it would be a strange criticism to observe that they had too much friendship for each other. Yet their friendship may develop a strong and lasting bond, even while the marriage relationship maintains its integrity. If however we were to learn that in the marriage the man and his wife had not developed their friendship then we might suspect that his friendship with the other woman was somewhat strange, if not unwise.

Surely such relationships can and do and should exist. They can also exhibit the highest integrity and do not of themselves indicate any marital unfaithfulness. But how are we to classify them? Surely, this type of friendship is not to be classified with the relationship between the married man and his mistress, or the married man and his frequently visited prostitute. But if such friendships are be classified and distinguished one from the other how is it to be done? We might observe that a husband and wife are also good friends but the meaning of also requires us to do more analysis than simply investigate the terms good and friends.

The question about classification is a theoretical matter, but nevertheless it needs a normative direction. This will involve the social theorist in making distinctions between what is, and is not, valid, normatively speaking, and it is best to work in a way which takes one's own normative stand seriously - say about the immorality of consumerised sexuality, or the homosexual lifestyle - from the outset in an open and frank manner, rather than by trying to smuggle in some kind of moral precept later on. One's world-view shapes one's analysis from the outset. Those who wish to develop social theory from a Christian basis should not hedge the Bible's clear and unequivocal repudiation of homosexuality or prostitution; to do that is to put one's analysis in danger of shifting from a Christian basis to some other confessional, and/or politically-correct, basis.

The debate about sexuality, and with it the status of normal bi-sexual relations, introduces us to an intriguing analytic question. What are we in fact concerned with when we confront the variant empirical forms of friendship. We are concerned here with the place and character of friendship in society.

But if we take on board the notion that all relations are in some ways sexual, or have a sexual component, then such a doctrine will have to make its presence felt in the generalised theory of human society. All relations are thereby re-appropriated, in a theoretical sense. To take this line of approach is to assume that sexuality not only exists in social relations, but that it is basic. It seems quite possible that a systematic explanation of friendship can be developed whereby all relations and types of relations between a man and a woman (if not all relationships per se) are classified in terms of this principle. If Freudian theory has not already developed this general approach, it would seem to be a possible implication of its line of analysis as is evidenced in the recently developed queer theory (see the contributions to Sociological Theory 12:2 July 1994). Relations across the gender lines are thereby defined as sexual relations. But relations within any one gender group can also become viewed in a similar manner. If relations between those of the same gender are viewed in terms similar to relations between those of the opposite sex then the question arises concerning the basis of all relationships. It then becomes a matter of deciding how the basic libidinal impulse, present in all situations, is going to come to expression. The question of classification becomes fused with the question of how any individual decides upon a strategy to form the social milieu in which s/he is located. Is libido going to be suppressed or expressed? How this basic impulse shapes any particular friendship is afterall viewed as a matter of degree, and all a matter of the form which social participation in any one instance partakes.

In my view such a classification ideologically and mythically over-rides the empirical reality of friendships, in and between all age groups, between and among men and women, which we confront regularly. Such a classification, based on the assumption that the libido is a reality sui generis, has been important in the analysis of sexuality since Freud and Havelock Ellis. And it is also by reference to this philosophic assumption that all kinds of alternative lifestyle options are proposed - not only gay and lesbian relations, but attempts to normalise paedophilia and pederasty, transexuality and even, perhaps, other activities like incest. Normal sexual relations are viewed as no more, and also no less, than the behavioural/cultural results of human construction, de-construction and re-construction of convention. Recent talk, for example, wrestling with the problem of gender in a post-de-constructionist society, also raises the possibility of male lesbians. And I suppose, given the assumptions about the non-essential, de-constructed character of gendered identity, such discussion has to be viewed as a logical outcome of the anti-essentialist ethic.

These are important intellectual movements which also have important implications for the administration of public justice. They coincide with social movements which aim to deconstruct conventional understanding of ourselves, human sexuality and gender. How we answer these questions will have an impact upon the way we understand the normative task of building and re-building, forming and reforming, the network of social interdependence from which friendship emerges. It is for this reason that such views are not able to be confined to one or other social sphere (ie a supposed friendship sphere) or to one or other group (ie the so-called gay community). Such views are indeed radical; they propose to go to the root of our understanding of all social relationships - those relationships conventionally understood as having a sexual component and relationships which we view as non-sexual.

To be effective and just, new policies require social impact assessments prior to implementation, and such assessments will also involve us in conceptually defining, classifying and differentiating between the different types of social relations and the different life-styles that are promoted. The issues are complex, they require careful analysis and discussion. Most of all theoretical discussion about friendship needs a clear and unequivocal espousal of the normative basis upon which marriage, family, extended family, neighbourhood is formed. Social theory needs a re-formed understanding of institutions, organisations and relationships as social expressions of our creatureliness.

We will also need to come to terms with the task of the State. To legalise prostitution does not, of itself, mean that the incumbents of political office are in moral agreement with consumerised sex. But prostitution is only one such example - gambling might be another. Likewise the de-criminalising of certain activities might not mean that the Government is advocating the activities themselves, nor that the Government officials are moral advocates of such behaviour. Legalising and de-criminalising certain activities, which may or may not be morally condemned by the wider society, may simply be the result of a more just recognition of the exact task and the limited competence of the State authorities with respect to such activities. Sado-masochism is another matter in which legal definition is very difficult and courts have found it very difficult to make judgements about the shape which a marriage should take if the marriage partners decide upon a particular expression of the sexual bond internal to their own marriage.

But the analytical task for social theory remains nevertheless. Social life is not just a seamless web of opportunity for need gratification, with civilized hurdles, conventionally erected, to prevent outright chaos. The nation is not without social borders of its own which internally foment a rich and varied fabric of societal inter-dependence. The structure of such inter-dependence is implicitly part of the arguments raised in recent public debate in Australia where legislators have had to legally define the status of the homosexual relationship. Is it a form of marriage and should it receive such entitlements which are ascribed to marriage? If the claim of the Gay Lobby that a homosexual union should be recognised as a marriage is in fact just then the State is being unfair by allowing its policies to be defined by an assumption that marriage is bi-sexual. But is homosexuality a form of marriage? That is the question. And if not, what is it?

Clearly a homosexual relationship is a form of friendship. As a sexually oriented form of friendship between those of the same sex, the homosexual relationship is not just a matter of private conduct, even if the law is framed to treat it in this way. The adoption of the homosexual life-style has the potential to redefine relationships even if the gay or lesbian couple do not worry about whether they are married or not.

When we come to the analytical task of defining marriage, and sexual relationships, we cannot avoid the normative question. How should marriage and sexual relationships come to expression? To define a homosexual union as a form of marital union does not simply define homosexuality; it begins to re-define, or more pertinently to de-construct our concept of marriage and friendship. More than merely giving legitimacy to Gay and Lesbian relationships from within the discourse of social theory, such an approach to social theory avoids the normative question about marriage and sexuality by the untested assumption that norms are merely the technical inventions of an anomic humankind making sense out of a senseless world.

That is why the attempt to treat homosexual union as a marriage in law is also an attempt to do at least two other things in our social theorising: marriage is re-defined as a hetero-sexually-oriented friendship with privileged legal status; human friendship becomes a domain in which a particular gendered world-view comes to expression, gains dominance and excludes alternatives. This seems to be the sociological-jurisprudential line of those who claim that it is unjust for the law to with-hold marital status from gay and lesbian couples who apply for a marriage.

If a homosexual relationship is entitled to special treatment in law, how is the law to consider relationships between adults of the same sex which are not homosexual? Why should they be excluded from consideration? Why should the homosexual friendship be specially privileged by laws defining such as marriage?

The public debate about paid-carer's leave might better be understood as a friendship entitlement. But for homosexuality to be defined as a friend in law means that a homosexual companionship is placed in the same category as a companion of a disabled or handicapped person who does have such special allowances made for their care.

What we need is a genuine public philosophy which can help us ascertain the principial feature of friendship so that we can begin to address these public issues. But such public philosophy, and the debate it requires, are very difficult if not impossible in a situation where one's mindset is shaped by the ethic of political correctness. The cause is our political system, the proliferation of market values to all spheres of life as if all social interaction is simply market behaviour, as if human society is a land without borders. Ideologues who argue in this way need to be confronted with the Christian view that the normative limits of our societal responsibilities are guidelines for our freedom. The great Rabbi taught that love for Him meant obedience to His commands which were not burdensome. A world without borders, in whatever sphere, is a world dominated by the slaveries of idolatry. And the ongoing degeneration of two-party politics into electoral pragmatism orchestrated by electoral machines, from which the citizens are profoundly alienated, cannot adequately defend the institutions of marriage and the family, let alone the social fabric in which State, Church and market are nested.

In our society it has become increasingly difficult to consider any relationship without considering it in terms of its sexual potential. Such a statement may be offensive to some. But with the free market allowing for Brothels to be listed on the stock (sic!) exchange, and the removal of restrictions from the commercial advertising of Gay and Lesbian erotica, the question is raised publicly as to whether any and all friendships are sexual to some degree. This is not just a question to be considered by social theorists in the academy. That it also has to be considered by them goes without saying. But the question cannot be avoided in its impact upon the entire fabric of social life.

Homosexual friendship has become a commonly debated public issue. As a result we not only have to consider the just response of Governments to homosexuality as such; we have to consider the responsibility of Government to the social fabric and any rights that are implicit in all the kinds of friendship that are our social life. The way public debate has been shaped, as much by Government cowardice as by the in-your-face arrogance of Mardi Gras lobbyists, makes it very difficult indeed to defend the integrity and character of any non-sexually oriented friendship. But the question remains: is the integrity of friendship something that can be legally defended?

Gay Rights activists usually fail to reckon with this problem of jurisprudence, at least when they adopt an in your face style of public propagandising. The law recognises contract. All who are subject to the law are free to enter into contracts; and all contracts are not marriage contracts. To treat a gay friendship as marriage in a legal sense is to single out one particular form of friendship for special treatment. Friends can contract particular agreements between themselves which can then be enforceable at law. When such contracts are broken they can take out civil actions against each other.

Moreover, the Government's inability to defend a view of marriage which would positively view it as a healthy and legitimate means for the development of bi-sexual relations between a husband and wife, and allowing them to positively promote such a lifestyle with their children, does more than add a gloss of pseudo-decency to sex before marriage. But ironically the moral cowardice of Governments, Liberal and Socialist, actually puts any and all friendships under strain. They talk romantically of family. But avoid the structural issue of marriage. When this avoidance becomes set then there is an almost public endorsement of the trend toward alternative life-styles.

It is crucial that the Government respect the institutional marital fabric in which human sexuality is played out by a husband and a wife. And that respect cannot be paid without legal protection for the legitimate moral integrity of the non-governmental authority of parents to nurture their own children. But it also needs to respect the legitimate moral integrity of husband and wife to form their own marriage. We will need to better understand this integrity if we are to make headway. After all pressure is mounting upon all Governments for legislation which would allow Gay and Lesbians to have access to adoption and IVF technology. The Government needs to formulate policy in relation to marriages - where husband and wife have to decide together about how their marital life is to be lived; in relation to families - where parents have the duty to care for their children and choose a life-style for the household in which they are located and for which they are responsible; in relation to a church where church authority makes rules about the way the administration of its community life is to be developed. And if the Government fails, and if its policies refuse to respect these non-State authorities with the integrity which is their due, then it will find itself riding rough-shod through the variegated and inter-dependent web of social responsibility. As the Welfare State winds down and grinds to a halt, Governmental power is wielded in a chaotic and anarchic manner. Such chaos and anarchy will be destructive of the full range of genuine friendship. Instead Government should make an indispensable contribution to the national moral ethos which allows and encourages friendships to develop, prosper and be maintained.

The evidence is irrefutable; a good family life is based upon a good marriage. The protection of the family, through a policy which gives positive support to marriage as an insurance for strong, effective and affective community ties, is not a mere pandering to some "family lobby". It is a just requirement for a just public-legal order. All Government policies have either a direct, or an indirect, impact upon marriage and family. As well as environmental impact reports, there should also be institutional impact reports for all major Government policy. Rhetoric is not enough. Careful sociological analysis as a basis for informed and insightful policy is required. Not just by Government but also by them.

But the question of Government support for the rights of marriage and the family now also confronts the public lobby in favour of gay rights. To say that the Gay life-style is offensive reads as a limitation of the public right of those who would promote the homosexual ideology. There is a view that says that since sexual life-style is a matter of personal choice then the Government should not come down in favour of one market product to the detriment of the other market options. Clearly, this view invites debate on a number of levels. The debate is actually the concatenation of various debates. There is the debate about homosexuality as a moral option. There is the debate about the rights of homosexuals. There is the debate about the meaning of sexuality. There is the debate about the task of Government in relation to sexual life-style. There is the debate about the meaning and extent of the free market. There is the debate about why marriage should be viewed legally as a bi-sexual male-female union.

The principles which guarantee the right to practise homosexuality in private must be two-edged in application in the following sense. Some Government benefits might be conferred because in industrial law a special category of friend of a worker with whom the worker is living is conferred. But such a category must include friends of the same sex who live together in a non-sexually oriented friendship, and not be limited to those who publicly profess to being in a homosexual relationship. The former should be able to continue to live together and apply for the benefits without having to deal with innuendo about any implied deviant sexuality, just as those who do not want to come out of the closet should not be harassed into doing so. It is in this way that Government regulation about offensiveness must cut both ways if it is to be just. Though some might imply that to say it cuts both ways is itself offensive - that is, that they are offended that homosexuality could be an offence to some - nevertheless legal practise should not privilege one group of offended people over against another group. The moral debate here implies a civil sphere, administered by the State, which encourages the duty of all to respect the rights of all genuine contributors to public debate, no matter from which side they may come.

The word choice is ambiguous - politicians eager to protect their own electoral image are well known for the use of terms which have such double entendre. In this case there is a lingual smoothing over of the difference between market choice and moral choice. And it unjustly favours the real market prospects of those who profit from such a Governmentally-backed moral ambiguity. If Moody's says nothing then it must be OK! We now witness the remarkable phenomenon of Governments engaged in promoting gambling and gaming.

But we also need to keep in mind that Government policy which promotes the view that sexual life-style is a matter of choice is not only confusing, and unjust, it is cause and consequence of the great moral cowardice manifested by Ministers of the Crown, even if they do loudly proclaim their Republican virtues.

Such a pragmatic and post-modern orientation to choice in life-style and the sex industry can not be isolated from the entire fabric of a Government's policy. How then can Government develop a family policy? Those who take the hetero-sexual - or traditional family - market option are morally undermined if Government policy simply implies that they are participants in another market choice which at this point is not being unambiguously supported by Government in the way that Government policy ambiguity does lend support to the Gay Lobby's propagandising and the sex industry's self-promotion.

Just as the right to privacy for homosexuality is hotly debated, so is the question of sexual harassment. But the harassment does not only occur in social settings where one person makes improper overtures, or inappropriate requests. It is also true that people of all ages are sexually harassed by in your face advertising, the titillating sensuousness of soap operas, and Sunday magazines of respectable newspapers exploring the down-sides of celibacy and a non-adulterous life-style. Whereas an impolite remark or gesture may become subject to legal proceedings, nevertheless media offensiveness seems to be promoted with gay (sic!) abandon. The advertising is fully participant in the debate about sexuality, its definition and purpose. It is an implicit contributor on many levels, especially with respect to the nature of adolescent sexuality. But as a participant it is not so easy to call it to task. It needs stronger self-regulation and Government should insist upon it.

Strong commercial interests are engaged in concerted sexual harassment with their post-modern mode of advertising, and as with the debate about homosexuality and sexual harassment, there is a strong implication that all friendships are in some way or other sexual in character.

The policy vacuum for Government, and the gap in public debate, concerns the character of non-sexually oriented friendships which are little talked about, but which play an indispensable role in the social web of inter-dependent responsibility. But is Government policy about the sex industry simply to be a reflex of its advocacy of the free market? Is it failing to publicly defend a normative definition of marriage as a life-long contract between a man and a woman based upon a solemn vow because it is suffering from policy cowardice in the face of the Gay-Lesbian lobby, or what is more likely, the numbers of divorced and re-married among its own party ranks? Is Government simply avoiding facing up to the fact that there is a market-generated covert sexual harassment of the population at large at a basic level. The Government participates in this, and no amount of sophistry about our post-modern condition will alter that.

Though sociological and psychological research has begun serious and concerted investigation of these important social issues, there are still many important conceptual and methodological issues to be faced.

15 February 1996

Nuances Edition 5,1 1997

Edited September 20, 2004