The Neglected Role of Friendship for Human Flourishing
Dylan Pahman is a research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty, where he serves as executive editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality. He is also a PhD candidate in the Institute of Theology and Liberal Arts at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, and author of the book Foundations of a Free & Virtuous Society.
Americans love binaries. Coke vs. Pepsi. Republicans vs. Democrats. Alien vs. Predator. Most sports involve zero-sum competitions between two players or teams. We want to win, as opposed to losing. As the Will Ferrell character, NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, put it, “If you’re not first, you’re last.” We want to be on the “right side” of history, not that single, other, “wrong” side. Silence is violence: tacit support for the inhumanely brutal wrong side of every cultural battle. Voting third party in an election is just a choice for whoever wins. To quote the Canadian prog-rock band Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Now, to be fair to Niel Peart, that song emphasizes the importance and reality of human agency over and against blaming everything on fate. But even so, when we split all the world in two, choosing between one or the other reductionism hardly feels like a choice.
One of the most common of these false dichotomies can be found in the editorial sections of most major news publications, as well as in much of the literature of political and social science: market vs. state.
Those unsatisfied with the market’s ability to provide efficiently and affordably for all social needs and wants, equitably distribute wealth, reduce environmental pollution, and so on—call for the state to intervene. Where the market fails, the state could succeed, if only those “free market fundamentalists” on the “wrong side” of history would get out of the way and let it!
Those unsatisfied with the state, who view it as too overbearing, too bureaucratic, too inefficient, too wasteful, and so on—they know how things could be better: business! Get the heavy hand of the state out of the way, and let the invisible hand of market competition sort everything out. If only all the economically illiterate statists would listen to reason!
To get beyond this binary, we need to better understand where it came from and what was lost in the process: namely, civil society. In particular, we need to understand the nature and importance of friendship, as distinct from mere charity, for a more moral social order. Doing so would get beyond the market-versus-state binary, point the way to more effective poverty alleviation, and steer us away from false solutions to social breakdown today.
A Brief History of the Binary
It wasn’t always this way, and rehearsing how we came to this oversimplification of market vs. state can help point the way to clearer social thinking by reminding us of other important social spaces.
Once upon a time, a different binary dominated society: Church vs. state. This was an improvement for ancient Rome, where beforehand the dominant, if not only, category was the state. Indeed, Lord Acton credits this distinction to the Gospel:
When Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” [Matthew 2:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25] those words . . . gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the force to execute it [i.e., the Church].
The Church so challenged Caesar’s claims to absolute sovereignty that pagan Rome violently persecuted Christians over the course of the next three centuries until Constantine, the first Christian emperor, acknowledged the Church’s own sovereignty, including property rights, canon law, and episcopal courts. That the Church was integrated into the constitution of Christian Roman society, sometimes too closely with the state (including financial support), does not refute Acton’s claim. The Church really did serve as a distinct social sector and authority that, at its best, checked imperial abuses of power.
All the while, the family estate also had held a distinct social space in the Roman Republic, but its sovereignty was progressively curtailed in the Roman Empire as the power of the Roman Senate waned and aristocratic families went from competing to be the best public servants to competing to be the best imperial servants.
Nevertheless, by the modern era, Christian thinking on society generally distinguished between Church, state, and family. As many businesses were still family affairs, they did not think of a distinct market as a social space outside of the state and family.
All that changed in the nineteenth century, when thinkers such as the Anglican Christian socialist F. D. Maurice and the German Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harless built upon this threefold division of society to address new social challenges. The Danish Lutheran bishop Hans Lassen Martensen and the Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper further conceived of society as an organic web of numberless social spheres, including many economic spheres. More social-scientifically, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the uniqueness of American associationism. Where the French would look to the state and the English to aristocratic patrons, Americans organized associations. Last, figures such as Pope Leo XIII emphasized the continuing importance of both the family and civic associations to face the challenges of the new Industrial era.
Following the rise of political economy and the influence of Adam Smith, industrialization transformed the economies of first Britain, then Europe and the United States. The importance of the market grew. Thus, a distinctly economic sector where labor and capital combined to generate new wealth eventually displaced the Church, especially following the dissolution of Christendom. In the twentieth century, the expansion of state social services displaced private initiative more and more. Over time, “Church vs. state” became “market vs. state.”
Beyond the Binary
Nevertheless, more recent theologians and social scientists, in many cases building upon their nineteenth-century forebears, have contributed a significant body of work that goes beyond the reductionist binary of market vs. state.
One of the most influential in the past few decades has been the Roman Catholic theologian and social theorist Michael Novak. The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism remains a classic resource for those of us who want both a free and virtuous society today. In it, Novak breaks the binary by insisting that in addition to needing “a democratic polity” and “an economy based on markets and incentives,” flourishing societies also need “a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal.”
Another term for this pluralistic and liberal “moral-cultural system” is “civil society.” Church of Christ theologian Brent Waters, in his own book Just Capitalism, explains, “Civil society is dependent on, but not reducible to, either the market or the state, in turn playing a crucial role in mediating the relations of individuals to both economic exchange and coercive political power.”
The economist and peace activist Kenneth Boulding contributed a significant, though still under-cited, body of work refining and articulating three similar social dynamics and systems. In terms of material results, he distinguished between the exchange economy and the grants economy.
The exchange economy consists of positive-sum relationships, most notably formal markets. When people buy and sell, they all judge themselves better off for the exchange. Thus, by producing goods to serve other needs and exchanging them for what they need, the result is greater wealth than if they had not exchanged.
The grants economy, by contrast, is zero-sum (in material terms). However, within the grants economy, Boulding distinguished between two systems: threat systems and integrative systems.
In threat systems, resources are coercively extracted from one party and taken by another in order to prevent the receiving party from inflicting some unwanted consequence on the giver. This may sound bad, but it is a necessary part of all societies: Law is a threat system. Either you obey the law, or you face a penalty. The primary institution for making and enforcing the law is the state.
In integrative systems, resources are given freely from one party to another, with no expectation of return or exchange. Families are integrative systems, at least in terms of the parent-child relationship. I provide for my children simply because I love them. They don’t need to “earn” housing, food, or clothing, nor do I give these things to them out of fear that they will penalize me if I don’t.
The Catholic social thought tradition in general has done a great deal to push back against our contemporary social reductionism, too. In his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI lamented, “The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society.” He continues, “The market of gratuitousness does not exist, and attitudes of gratuitousness cannot be established by law. Yet both the market and politics need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift.”
We could again refer to this as “civil society” or “integrative systems,” but the idea of “reciprocal gift” at least implies, if only unintentionally, a positive-sum space that is nevertheless distinct from the market. He even refers to spheres within this social sector as “economic forms,” implying that by Boulding’s categories they would fall within the exchange economy, though the pope explicitly places them “in civil society.” Was Benedict XVI getting at a social sector that somehow fits between the categories of market and civil society? Might we need a fourth category to articulate more clearly and apply the pope’s exhortations?
The Fourth Social Dynamic: Friendship
The economist Paul Heyne cited Boulding in the course of articulating a difference between personal and impersonal social spaces. In this case, Heyne noted that integrative systems are personal while the state and market are impersonal. In his essay “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” he stipulates,
It seems clear to me that we all of us live simultaneously in two kinds of societies, each with its own quite distinct morality. One is the face-to-face society, like the family, in which we can and should directly pursue one another’s welfare. But we also live in large, necessarily impersonal societies in which we cooperate to our mutual advantage with thousands, even millions, of people whom we usually do not even see, but whose welfare we promote most effectively by diligently pursuing our own welfare.
Combined with Boulding’s distinction between positive-sum and zero-sum social spaces, what emerges is not three but four analytically distinct social spaces: personal and zero-sum (e.g., family, religion), impersonal and zero-sum (e.g., the state); impersonal and positive-sum (e.g., the market), and lastly personal and positive-sum, which I propose identifying with friendship as distinct from the more familial aspect of integrative systems.
Friendship is not new. Great thinkers from Aristotle to C. S. Lewis have mused on its nature for millennia now. Even Boulding commented on friendship, but like most he restricted his analysis to two-person relationships, neglecting to expand it into its own social dynamic and system.
I say “dynamic and system,” because Boulding stipulated that his systems were heterogeneous “fuzzy sets.” The state is primarily a threat system, for example, but it needs legitimacy (integrative dynamics) and a social contract and material resources (exchange dynamics) to function properly. Parents want their children to obey them simply out of love, but they know sometimes the promise of rewards and the threats of punishments are necessary to instill a habit of loving obedience. Markets need the support of law (e.g., property rights, enforcement of contracts) as well as a basic level of trust between the parties for an exchange to happen in the first place. So how might understanding friendship as a social dynamic and system similarly broaden our understanding of society and sharpen our moral analysis?
First, we need to get a clear conception of what this friendship dynamic looks like. The classic cartoon Popeye featured a character named Wimpy, a mooch whose catchphrase was “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” The joke here is that no business in the formal economy of impersonal markets would ever agree to this. Either the price must be paid at the moment of the sale, or a legally binding contract must be signed to guarantee that the price will be paid over a course of time. Wimpy’s request, in that context, doesn’t make good business sense, and of course his proposition was often denied.
But if one is friends with a restaurant owner, and that owner knows she can trust you to pay her Tuesday for a hamburger today, then Wimpy’s proposition is perfectly reasonable. The personal connection of friendship adds the marginal degree of trust needed to enable exchange over time without the guarantee of state coercion in contracts, even over an unspecified amount of time. A close enough friend will take “I’ll pay you later” as sufficient.
Boulding’s observations about two-person friendships tracks with this analysis:
Simple friendship is one of the most productive and delightful of human relationships. Here power must be fairly equally divided and perhaps even randomly distributed over time. . . . If two friends decide to go on a walking tour, decisions as to where to go are usually made by consensus; otherwise the friendship may disintegrate. A friendship in which one of the parties is too dominant is apt to deteriorate.
Unlike the parent-child or state-citizen relationship, friendships are egalitarian and productive, like markets. Yet unlike the market or the state, they are personal, like family. The positive-sum aspect of friendship has gained it some of the highest praise in the history of human thought. As the Bible puts it, “there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). Having a personal relationship with one’s congressman heightens the value of limited, representative government. Having a wide network of friends can mean early investors or patrons for a start-up business. And as Boulding continues to note, every marriage needs some degree of friendship between husband and wife and eventually between parents and adult children.
Friendship as a Social System
Granting that friendship exists as a social dynamic in this way, what might it look like in terms of a social system? In economic terms, friendship institutions might be called “informal markets.” This often refers to black markets or under-the-table transactions of questionable moral value, but I don’t think our understanding of the “friendship system,” to coin a phrase, should end there.
While many free associations are charitable one-way transfers, and thus ultimately an expression of the familial sector of integrative systems, others exist for the sake of “reciprocal gift,” to use Pope Benedict’s phrase. Fraternal societies like the Knights of Columbus embody this. One joins the society and perhaps pays dues so that at an unknown and unspecified time, when one needs the help of this collectively organized friendship, it will be there. Many other “non-profit” organizations are nevertheless economically productive, creating and distributing wealth, even though the donor model of financing follows the dynamic of friendship more than market exchange. Casual gaming clubs would qualify as well. One week one person hosts the players, provides the drinks and snacks, and the next another player takes a turn. And so on. All of these need the other dynamics, such as rules of conduct, even if only unwritten; productive resources; and at least short-term gratuity for members unable to contribute materially. Friendship, too, is a “fuzzy set.”
Benedict XVI had economic development in mind when he bemoaned the binary of “market-plus-state,” stating just beforehand, “In order to defeat underdevelopment, action is required not only on improving exchange-based transactions and implanting public welfare structures, but above all on gradually increasing openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion.” Indeed, much of the progress of rethinking poverty alleviation in recent years through books like When Helping Hurts and Toxic Charity has come from incorporating exchange dynamics into previously one-way transfer organizations, recasting the poor from passive receivers to persons with their own productive creativity to contribute not only to their own societies but even to those in the developed world. As the Church Father Clement of Alexandria, commenting on Luke 16:9, put it, “The Lord did not say, Give, or bring, or do good, or help, but make a friend.” So, too, when people fall on hard times, they are far more likely to bounce back quickly when they retain a wealth of social capital through friends, family, and associations.
Determining Social Responsibility
The upshot of this expanded understanding for our overly binary societal conceptions today is that it helps us answer the question, “Who should be responsible for what?” Our answers ought not to be limited to “market or state,” and differentiating between familial integrative and friendship sectors within civil society can help avoid the errors of charities and ministries that unintentionally perpetuated poverty and produced cultures of dependence in poor communities in the past.
Milton Friedman once wrote a much maligned yet rarely read essay entitled, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Those who malign it seem to have only read the title, presuming the worst possible implications. But in an age of out-of-control virtue signaling in the business world, whether among those attempting to be “woke” or those claiming “Christian” or “family” values, I think Friedman’s essay proved prescient. Businesses cannot and should not be social activist organizations, families, or churches. Ethically generating the goods and services needed to live a full and fulfilling life, provide for one’s family, exchange with one’s friends, and pay one’s taxes is itself a social good, one that only the market can provide.
But it isn’t the only social good. There is a social good of the state, a social good of familial integrative institutions like the family and the Church, and a social good of friendship. As Kevin Schmiesing recently noted in this journal, we find ourselves in “a loneliness epidemic and a friendship recession” today. We will never replace the social responsibility of friendship with business, the state, or even the family. But with clear categories of social analysis, we can get beyond the market-versus-state binary and better answer the question, “Who is responsible for what?” not just as an intellectual exercise but for the common good of all.