Historically, friendship was based on shared values. Ayn Rand considered friendship as "the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character." But philosophy has been shunned for efficiency, quantity, and momentary desires. Are we better or worse for it? What does friendship mean to you?

FTA:

We live in an age when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriends and girlfriends. Spouses boast they are best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Teachers, clergy, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. 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. (If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any?) ...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, but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.

How did we come to this pass? The idea of friendship in ancient times could not have been more different. Far from being ordinary and universal, friendship, for the ancients, was rare, precious, and hard-won... Friendship was a high calling, demanding extraordinary qualities of character, rooted in virtue and dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and truth... We are nothing to one another but what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want... Inevitably, the classical ideal has faded. The image of the one true friend, a soul mate rare to find but dearly beloved, has disappeared from our culture. We have our better or lesser friends, even our best friends, but no one in a very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did. That glib neologism bff bespeaks an ironic awareness of the mobility of our connections: Best friends forever may not be on speaking terms by this time next month.

As for the moral content of classical friendship, its commitment to virtue and mutual improvement, that too 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 sociologist Robert N. Bellah's scornful term. 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'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 we all hug privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves... Actual human contact, rendered "unusual" and weighed by the values of a systems engineer. We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines. The face of friendship in the new century.

Faux Friendship - We are connected to everyone. We don't really know anyone.

DISCUSS!

Original posting by Braincrave Second Life staff on Sep 14, 2010 at http://www.braincrave.com/viewblog.php?id=324