Friendship as Moral Development
The initiation of a friendship may be a mystery. Someone comes into your life, and you are attracted to him, to how he sees the world, or perhaps to how he is, how he comports himself, how he acts in the world. A classmate, an office worker, a barista, someone who goes to your church: it can happen in any part of life, the recognition that here is a person you’d like to get to know better. This person and I might be able to become friends.
The development of a friendship is different. Development doesn’t “just happen”; you must choose to spend time together doing various things and talking. David texts you to ask if you’d like to meet for lunch. There’s a “Millennial” place called Made Nice that he’d like to introduce you to: good food, cool vibe, you can pick up lunch and walk to the park and eat and talk. It’s a fall day, not too hot. You text back, “Sounds great. Some of my best friends are Millennials.” David, who is a Gen Xer, likes the joke (he is gay; he knows lots of people who say, “Some of my best friends are gay”), and he writes back, “Yes. It’s hard but I’m glad you’ve put in the effort.”
Friendship takes time and a certain measure of deliberation. One seeks opportunities to meet face to face; between meetings, one tries to talk, or write, or email, or text. The physical meeting needs to happen: from the ancients to today, those who think about friendship realize the irreplaceability of being in the same space, breathing the same atmosphere. And then beyond simply meeting, one seeks opportunities to do things together. David likes Made Nice, and he wants you to share it together. After lunch, you mention a gallery exhibition that seems interesting; you want to see it, but it is better to walk there and see it with a friend. Along the way, a church is open, an Orthodox church in a neighborhood you used to live in. You pause to admire its external mosaic icons, then say—a mutual yet spontaneous decision made by each of you at the same time, but a decision you might not have made had you been alone—“Let’s see if we can go inside.” It turns out you can’t, but that leads to more conversation.
This is an ordinary sort of thing, a quotidian example of what Aristotle called the pleasantest human thing: friends, lunch, a destination, conversation on the walk, a spontaneous detour. Ordinary, yet morally freighted. Think of some of the decisions involved here. One decides to be with a friend rather than have the default of inertia take over; one reaches out. One decides to try what the friend finds interesting: food, a walk, art. That is to say, one desires to see the world from the point of view of the friend and to be in the world and act in the world with the friend. And for a Christian, may I say the opportunity posed by an unknown church is symbolically deep? God invites us to have him as part of our friendship, even as he invites us to be friends with him. The activity of friendship changes us.
I have heard of an old Punch magazine joke: There are two people, and one of them says, “Well, that’s enough of me talking about me. . . . What do you think about me?” It’s funny, but it hurts, reminding us of the great human problem of egoism. It is hard to turn outside of ourselves, to turn our minds to other people and to their loves and concerns. Yet if we fail to do that, we fail at our humanity. Moral development culminates in the ability to live with others as friends. Aristotle is right to make friendship the aim and end of ethics. And Jesus shows us how profoundly true it is while at the same time making it possible: the end of being human is to be friends.
Is Friendship Lost in Translation?
Moral education requires examples. To grow in these matters, it helps to have illustrations in which we can see friendship being achieved partially, struggled for, attained, or lost. I begin with Bob and Charlotte.
They are brought together in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation: a fifty-five-year-old actor in a midlife slump, Bob Harris (played masterfully by Bill Murray), and a just-out-of-Yale philosophy major, Charlotte (played with equal mastery by Scarlett Johansson). Both their marriages are unsatisfactory; Bob’s wife has not traveled with him, and we quickly see that Charlotte’s husband of two years already has little interest in her. Bob and Charlotte are staying in the same Tokyo hotel for no more than a week. They meet in a bar, strike up a bit of conversation, start venturing into the city’s nightlife together. They are being drawn together.
One wonders, Will this intimacy culminate in sex? And if not, how will they fall apart? For when one sees this plotline in a film, one expects that it will lead to sex (whether or not they leave their spouses to continue together as a new couple) or that something will come along to separate them before there is sexual consummation.
What makes this film’s plot extraordinary is that neither of those two things happens. They do not have sex, and they do not distance themselves from each other. Over the days that they are together in the same hotel in the same city, they manifestly awaken to longings for each other (Coppola’s film has been praised as a study in longing). The film allows us to wonder: Is it precisely because they do not have sex that they grow in intimacy with each other?
In one confiding moment, we see them reaching across the gap that lies between them. It is not that he is famous and rich, even if he has fallen into that so-called shameful stage of making commercial endorsements for cash; it is that he has been married for twenty-five years and she only for two. He has children at home (apparently born some considerable time into his marriage); she has none. She asks if marriage gets easier. That’s hard, he says. It used to be a lot of fun; his wife would come with him to movie shoots, and they laughed a lot together. Now she prefers to stay home with the kids. He describes with tones of disaster what happens when a child enters a marriage. The day the first child is born, he says, is the most terrifying day of your life. “Your life, as you know it, is gone, never to return.” This solemn truth, with its implications of the eclipse of love and the end of being the object of the passion of one’s spouse, settles gloomily into their silence. Then he starts to talk again. He says that those children learn to talk and walk, and they become amazing people, people who are full of delight.
They have this conversation as they are lying in bed, on top of a white fluffy bedcover, lying on their backs, clothed. She turns on her side toward him while keeping a distance. Her knees are close to his side, her bare toes touching the side of his hip. There is silence. He moves his hand down and lets it rest on her foot. His head remains tilted away from her. More silence, then his barely whispered line, “You aren’t hopeless.”1
In Coppola’s directorial hands, Bob and Charlotte seem to point to something about real friendship. It is crucial that they do not leave their respective spouses, crucial that they avoid adultery, crucial indeed that they see that a sexual union would actually cheapen their intimacy and harm their lives. They keep a physical distance. They long. But they are not at all in situations that are without hope.
Might this be a grappling toward friendship? It strikes me that friendship is the ghost in the film that wants to come out and name its place on the stage! That we so deeply long not for another sexual pairing-up in a world of all sorts of already messy pairings-up but for intimacy in the midst of the messy world, an alternative intimacy that brings hope—all this feels true. Neither Bob nor Charlotte is beyond hope. Of course, their friendship, if that’s what it is, would be nearly impossible to continue past their few days in Tokyo. And there being a void of cultural patterns for them to follow, one doubts that it will. So at best the film gives us a fleeting picture of friendship, an evocation of our greater hope. Furthermore, this fleeting picture comes in a film framed without reference to Christianity, and thus without Christianity’s resources to ground and shape hope and bring it forth to its end. (O sad elite culture, which sees not the jewel-stones within that rejected faith!) But to imagine a world in which men and women (and men and men, and women and women) can be intimate without having sex, who through their closeness help each other to see the world more honestly and enjoy afresh the lives they actually have, that is to imagine a world that understands a place for friendship. It seems to me that Lost in Translation is just such an exercise in friendly imagination.
Harry Potter and the School of Friendship
In a talk I had with a young-adults group while preparing this book, a thirty-ish, sharp, very professional-looking woman spoke almost wistfully about the desirability of disentangling sex and friendship, of being able to have friends without the imposed expectation (imposed by others, by the other, or by oneself) that intimacy will inevitably turn sexual. One has heard of the third-date rule: by the third date, the couple will decide to have sex or to break up. Three dates might be six or twelve hours together, far short of the time it takes to establish a real friendship. I heard in her a questioning, whether the sexualization of our social world has short-circuited our ability to grow in friendship. Can we find a place for a nonsexual intimacy?
This young woman said she was finding it harder to make friends in her thirties, and others around her agreed. Friendships were easier in school, she said. And that’s when she brought up Harry Potter. The Potter books are, of course, not really about magic. They are about being human and finding identity across difference and growing into maturity; about struggling to be good and struggling against evil; about love and family and self-sacrifice. And one major theme throughout is friendship. In connection with friendship, this young woman brought up Luna Lovegood and a scene that she recalled from one of the movies. Harry has isolated himself from both teachers and students. He is feeling not only the normal teenage angst of dealing with study, sport, girls, and so on but also the peculiar burden of being disbelieved and mocked on all sides. On top of this, he has the burden of knowing that the Dark Lord has returned, a knowledge that drives him into isolation. On a solitary walk in the forest, he comes across the significantly named Luna Lovegood. There is no romance between them; she is an odd girl with strange intuitions and an other-worldly sense about her. But what she does is speak directly to him as would a friend. Although yet children, both have already seen death. Both can see the “thestrals,” flying reptilian horses that are invisible to most people. Luna crosses the distance between herself and Harry as if it were no distance at all, and she tells him she believes him. She then tells him plainly that he should not isolate himself: his being cut off and alone is just what the Dark Lord would want. Luna makes Harry see that his friends, even though they misunderstand him, need him, and that in turn he himself needs to be with them. She thereby points him to one of the basic lessons of friendship: we need to see things as others see them; we need to get into our friends’ minds, to realize that we are profoundly connected with our friends.
The world of Harry Potter, unlike that of Lost in Translation, is a world with Christian artifacts. The holidays are Christmas and Easter. The orphan has a godfather. And it is a world that rejects cheap grace, such as the sentimentality that dead people stay on with us as spirits. (One who does linger, Nearly-Headless Nick, tells Harry that he floats through the Hogwarts school because he made the bad choice not to die and go on but to die and stay around.) With neither cheap grace nor sentimentality, the world of Harry Potter understands the deep truth that there are worse things than death—and stronger things than death—and the hard truth that to be a friend, one might have to die.
If we think of Luna again, we can see further depths in what she was doing. The danger to Harry, unknown to him at that point, was that Voldemort, the Dark Lord, was able to get into his mind. But Harry’s protection in the book’s climactic battle will be that, once there, Voldemort cannot stand to be intimate with him—to be in his mind. As Dumbledore, the headmaster, will tell him at the end, there is an always-locked room in “the Department of Mysteries” that “contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death.” That power, he tells Harry, “you possess in such quantities” yet “Voldemort has [it] not at all.” It saved Harry from possession by Voldemort “because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests.”2 So the irony—and it is implicit in Luna’s speaking to Harry—is that it is not necessarily bad to have someone enter your mind. Good people who have a common mind (or perhaps better put, who know and share each other’s mind) have in one another a very intimate friend.
It would stretch the point to claim that the Harry Potter books are Christian or that they are of lasting literary merit (although I confess I had underestimated them on that score). Yet they are, for our moment, valuable cultural resources for those who would grow in friendship. They work even accidentally. There is a sushi place near my home I like to frequent; when I go there alone, I take a book to read. Recently, as he led me to my table, the young man asked me if I had a book with me. Yes, I said, it’s in my backpack. He asked what I was reading. “Actually,” I said, “it’s Harry Potter.” Suddenly, he was all animation. He wanted to know which one it was, and he told me which ones he thought were the best, and so on. He and I were friendly in a new way because I just happened to be reading one of these books. They go deep into our culture, and it is a good thing they do.
Friendship and the Struggle for Good in The Lord of the Rings
The books of J. R. R. Tolkien seem less well-known today than when I was younger (at least among the young adults I talk to), but still one can find circles that are sufficiently cerebral to get into them. One such circle was that same young-adults group. When I asked them about friendship and The Lord of the Rings, the excitement was instantaneous. “Gandalf!” a young man exclaimed. “Let me ask you, does Gandalf have any friends?” We pondered the matter. It would be hard to claim that Bilbo or Frodo or any of the other hobbits are his friends; the differences between them are too great. Gandalf has wisdom, has lived much longer than any dwarf or hobbit, has converse with other wizards and great men and elves. Perhaps Elrond and Aragorn may be considered his friends; with them he can share his mind. Were Saruman not a traitor, he too could have been a friend. Yet by the end, I think it comes to be that the hobbit Frodo achieves friendship with Gandalf. Through his participation in the entire quest and particularly in the destruction of the ring, through his bearing the weighty consequences of that journey and climactic struggle, Frodo somehow rises from being Gandalf’s student and collaborator and fellow pipe smoker to being his equal, to being of one mind with him. They depart for the Grey Havens together.
Tolkien shows us other friendships in this trilogy. The four hobbits of the ring-fellowship are friends, with Sam and Frodo being particularly close and Merry and Pippin also bound together by temperament and life. The dwarf Gimli and the elf Legolas begin with mutual suspicion but become friends, giving everyone who sees them an unexpected picture of (how shall we put it?) trans-species or trans-racial friendship, a picture remarkable for all the prejudices it overturns. Think of how Gimli looks forward to showing Legolas the marvels of the dwarves’ caves—and Legolas looks forward to visiting them with him! And conversely, the beauties of the elven woods!
All these friendships are forged for enjoyment in everyday life, but importantly, they are made in the crucible of the great struggle of good and evil. The friendships in Tolkien’s world, a world of marvelous diversity in its forms of good, are friendships based on the common cause of fighting for the good (as, in their own way, are the friendships of Harry Potter). At the same time, in the final chapters (which, facing difficult truths, were omitted from the film version), we see that even everyday life contains significant and necessary struggles on behalf of the good. Yes, the ring has been destroyed, and, yes, the great victory has been won. Nonetheless, there remain people who carry out small-level wickedness that in its own way is just as bad. The hobbits return to their beloved Shire to find that they must fight even there against injustice and cruelty.
This might be the most important lesson of Tolkien’s great saga. There is never a time when friendships are about nothing but companionship and sharing. When we think with Aristotle of friendship as the pleasantest thing for human beings, we should not think of that in abstraction from concrete commitments: to be good, to have pure motives, to welcome and foster beauty in the world, and, when necessary, to oppose evil forthrightly. Right after the ring is destroyed, and even as the world around them is melting away in something like flowing lava, sensing he is at the end of the world, Frodo takes Sam’s hand and is glad they are there together.
Learning Friendship on the River
Mark Twain draws us into friendship as a process of character development in his great book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Set in and alongside a pre–Civil War Mississippi River, this novel builds up an unexpectedly deep friendship between a boy, Huckleberry, and an enslaved man, Jim. Their friendship is unexpected because friendship requires a fundamental equality, but Huck and Jim are separated by great difference in age and status. Yet it should be noted that the superiority of the man to the boy is in some way counterbalanced by the subservience of the slave to the free. These crosscurrents of inequality, experienced as the Mississippi itself draws them into the ambiguous waters that lap onto free and slave states alike, help open up for them a space in which they can be friendly, and more than friendly. Gradually, ensuing events on this wide and long river lead to Huck’s recognition of Jim as his equal, and as equal, his true friend.
The moral power of Twain is to show this development with humor and without preaching. We see Jim endanger himself for the sake of Huck, which the reader may well recognize as the willingness to lay down his life for his friend. And we see Huck, quite literally, decide to lay down his eternal life for Jim. Twain makes Huck the voice of the typical mentality of white slave masters. Huck knows that escaped slaves ought to be turned in to the authorities, and therefore he recognizes that what he is doing, when he assists Jim’s escape toward freedom, is a sin and will send him to hell. But Huck also senses that he cannot turn in Jim, who has done so much for him as a friend.
He ponders turning in Jim to the extent that he actually writes out the words “Miss Watson your runaway n— Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.” But he looks at the paper and thinks about his trip down the river. “I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing.” He can’t find any memories that would turn his heart hard against Jim. To the contrary, “I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.” Huck looks again at the paper and tears it up. “All right, then,” he says to himself; he won’t turn in Jim. In fact, he will work to get him free, even though it means the loss of his soul!3
So Twain takes the Christian truth that the greatest love is to lay down your life for your friend and shows us, in Huck’s confused theology, that Huck decides to lay down his eternal life for the sake of his friend. Huck has come to see that Jim is every bit as much a human being as he is and thus of equal dignity to himself—a lesson that he has learned in the school of friendship. The point is plain: Huck is willing to lay down his life—to go to hell—for the sake of Jim, who had said of Huck that he was the only friend he had.
The story remains complicated—there is the famously difficult game that Huck plays at Jim’s expense in the final part of the book. Twain is no sentimentalist. Huck continues to extemporize lies, or stories, to get along in the white world. When in chapter 32 he gets to the house of Aunt Sally, she takes him to be her nephew, and he plays along with her misperception, inventing, to explain his unannounced arrival, a story that he was riding on a boat whose cylinder head had suddenly blown out. “Good gracious,” says Aunt Sally, “anybody hurt?” Not missing a beat, Huck says, “No’m. Killed a n—.” And she: “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”4
But the reader knows that Huck knows full well that black slaves are just as much “people” as this Aunt Sally; it is what he has learned in the school of friendship amid the crosscurrents of a multitude of human sins along the river. In the messy particularities of antebellum American slavery, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn instances for us that humans are most true to their nature when they can live with others as friends.
Pushing the Boundaries of Friendship
Genesis 2 gives an account of why we long for friendship with animals—namely, that each one of them (the land animals and birds) was created as a potential help-meet for the original human. Two points are worth pondering. First, the fact that none of the animals was fitting means that none of them was found capable of full friendship with that first human. We cannot share our minds with land animals or birds as we can share with one another. Jesus calls the disciples friends when he can tell them, and they can know, what he is doing and why, which is to say, he calls them friends when they are able with intimate mutual understanding to love one another even unto death. Friendship entails greater mutuality than turned out to be possible with animals. Yet it seems that God thought friendship with animals might be possible or at least was worth trying even if it wasn’t going to turn out to be possible. Which leads to the second point: none of the animals thereby created was meant to be ruled over by the original human, because that kind of knowledge was not to exist in the world. Thus the aboriginal relationship of human and animal was to be a certain sort of companionship that, while lacking the equality and full sharing that mark friendship, was nonetheless free of any sort of dominion. We might say that the vision of man and beast in Genesis 2 was of friendliness. If in some way unforeseen by the canonical text it should develop that we, humans and animals, might become full friends with one another, that would be a good thing.5
Genesis 2 gives an account of why we are not friends with birds and beasts. (It is different from Genesis 1, wherein the plural human beings were made to dominate all other creatures.) And thus Genesis 2 holds within itself the thought that in another world, perhaps even in the kingdom of heaven, such friendship might exist. In the Harry Potter books, one finds mythical animals that have rationality and could possibly be friends with humans if the opportunities and prejudices were ever worked out (see the thestrals above; see also the haughty centaurs). In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf shares his mind with Gwaihir, a great Eagle, who cooperates in the quest and might well be thought of as a trans-species friend of his, along with Aragorn and Elrond. C. S. Lewis’ Narnia is also a land where animals and humans can share with one another and grow to have that common mind in common action that characterizes true friendship.
But those illustrations come from the world of fantasy. In the world as it is, are there any nonhuman created beings with whom we might be friends? To look for such a friend is to look for a neighbor. Oliver O’Donovan explains that the “neighbor” (as in “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”) is one who is given alongside us in the world to love. A neighbor is someone like me and so cannot be “out there” the way I might know and love something else (a symphony, a sunset, a forest). This beside-me-yet-not-me is what reveals the neighbor as my potential friend, for both my neighbor and my friend will be someone who is like me while yet remaining other.6 The archetype of both neighbor and friend is given in Genesis 2: the woman and the man see each other and recognize that this other could have been me and yet is irreducibly other. A dog, an eagle, a lion, a sparrow—while these are irreducibly other, they could never have been me, not in the world as it is. But the neighbor is closer; she could have been me.
A progressive thread that runs through history is the discovery of others we did not previously know existed but who we came to see were our neighbors and thus people with whom we could be friendly and might become friends. When Europeans discovered (what we now call) the Indigenous peoples of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, such occurred, not at once but upon theological reflection. Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), for an important example, saw the Indigenous peoples (whom he called Indians) as potential Christians who were to be neither forced to convert nor exploited. They were, however, human beings with whom we could have conversation and share the gospel with reason and miracle.7 With them, we could become friends. Another instance, from a couple of centuries later, is Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712–89), who recognized the humanity of deaf children as manifested in their ability to communicate. He set out to educate them for the sake of their flourishing as human beings; not incidentally, that education opened for them the possibility of receiving the sacraments. He recognized their capacity for friendship.
Sometimes people wonder about the possibility of nonhuman rational beings living elsewhere in the universe. If we were to discover them, they would be, like the Indigenous peoples, neighbors: beings alongside us. That is to say, they might become our friends; we could, at least in principle, come to share a common mind. This is not to underestimate the difficulties and the manifold possibilities of misunderstanding. But it does show that neighbor, like brother or sister, and like friend, need not be someone who is a potential sexual partner. This also is why, by the way, there is no need for the Word of God to be incarnate on every planet that has rational beings: what he did on earth is for everyone—an insight built into C. S. Lewis’ space trilogy, especially Perelandra.8
Clones: Never Let Me Go
In a book seminar we were discussing Never Let Me Go, the haunting, award-winning 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.9 The author conjures an alternative present, a world in which a number of diseases have been eliminated thanks to the availability of organs from clones. The truth of the situation is only gradually made clear to the reader, who discovers it from inside the thoughts of one of the clones, Kathy H. (she has no last name), who is now thirty-one and trying to make sense of her life before she comes to the end of it. We find that she had been part of a humane effort, now abandoned, to improve the clones’ lives by giving these children education and encouraging their artistic abilities. The movers behind the effort were trying to demonstrate to society at large that the clones had souls, that they were capable of emotions and thoughts just like the rest of us.
As it is easy to imagine, vested interests—in the availability of organs, in the conquering of disease—were far too strong to be overturned by quibbles over the ethics of the project. In their world, certain diseases had been eliminated! If we started questioning where the replacement organs came from, what would be the point? We can’t go back on this important medical-scientific achievement!
Hauntingly for us who read it, the novel shows these children (and then young adults) as, apart from their infertility, quite ordinarily human: they have crushes; they have hopes; they try to understand what other people are thinking; they are curious about the world. We see them live lives that are largely insulated from those of normal humans. For obvious reasons, the project requires that they have as little contact as possible with the rest of the world. Although dwelling in the midst of the same country as everyone else, they live in special homes (one senses, often shabby). They make their “donations” and ultimately “complete” (the euphemism for their final, fatal donation) in a world that benefits from them and provides for them, to the extent it does, with as little interaction as possible.
For there is near-universal revulsion toward them, although the humane project that Kathy H. was a part of involved people who worked to overcome that. Revulsion is understandable of course. These—what do we say? “children”? “people”?—had been brought into existence only to provide organs for donation; after a few donations, they will complete. To allow oneself to touch such a being—to allow oneself to teach, even to care for, such a being—was taboo, unthinkable.
Ishiguro brings us to see that there are some experiments that we should never begin. To bring into being copies of people merely for the advantage of others is a lethal assault on our humanity. Yet let us suppose, with the novel, that such an experiment has been done, that these instrumentalized people have come into existence. Here they are, like us in every way except for their engineered infertility. They are just as individual, just as really human, as any person reading these words. In the novel, they are beside the people of England and yet not beside them, they are neighbors and yet not neighbors. To repeat, what haunts the reader is their humanity, which we see above all in their friendships with one another. It just simply is the case: they are capable of friendship in the ordinary ways children and young adults are. Sometimes they think of what the other would want. They try to understand each other’s feelings and thoughts. The narrator, particularly, has been a good “carer” for nearly a dozen years because of her ability to be with and help others as they “donate.” Yet she also wants us to know she isn’t particularly special. The reader gets the point: they all are capable, as capable as I and thou, of sharing thoughts and feelings and adventures and work. Their lives are much abbreviated, and yet they do not lack this.
Could they be friends with us? That, it turns out, is the most important question of all. Their existence is a contradiction in the midst of the alternative-present of the book, for if we were to refuse to touch them—if we allowed our revulsion to keep us from opening ourselves to them—then we would have denied our own humanity.
Jesus, one remembers (although he is entirely absent from this book), turned the question of neighbor upside down, asking not “Who is my neighbor?” but rather “Who proved himself to be a neighbor?” So is it here. The real question is not whether they could be friends with us but whether we would be friends with them.
Further Thoughts on the Difference between Sex and Friendship
The question of whether we can be a friend with another being is importantly different from the question of whether another being is human like us. One test that has been put forth for whether other beings are human is whether we can procreate with them. A novel from 1953 by Vercors, the pen name of Jean Bruller, who was called “the literary backbone of the [French] Resistance” during the Second World War, postulates the discovery of hitherto unknown beings in a remote place who might be ape-like humans or who might be human-like apes. On which side of the human-animal divide do they fall? The protagonist, who was part of their discovery, is dismayed by the social and financial powers who wish to profit from these beings and put them in zoos. Persuaded that they are human, he sets out to prove it. He fathers a child by one of them and then kills the child—and then summons the police and insists on being jailed for murder. If convicted, as he hopes, his case would provide judicial evidence that these beings are human and cannot be treated as property.10
But just as friendship is a broader category than marriage, so does it extend beyond those with whom we could potentially have children. It would extend, as Ishiguro urges us to see, to technologically engineered beings who are infertile; it would certainly also extend to clones and other human-created human beings who were potentially fertile. It would extend, were they to exist, to intelligent animals with whom we might take counsel and pursue common enterprises, animals such as the Eagles in Tolkien and the centaurs in Rowling.
A few pages above, I broached the question of extending friendship even to an extraterrestrial. The idea is remote and strange, and yet, if in this universe, created and sustained by God, there is life elsewhere with which we might communicate, such life cannot be beyond the possible reach of friendship. In this regard, I have enjoyed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow as a science-fiction novel about the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life and a privately financed mission (involving the Jesuits!) to meet them. Profound misunderstanding ensues, as the extraterrestrial life is itself a complex and compromised social mix. Nonetheless, one sees the possibilities of friendship developing, with extremely high risks both to the people from earth and to those beings they visit.11
To push even further, could humans ever become friends with some form of artificial intelligence? Might a robot be my friend? As long as there is nothing in the robot apart from what we have put there, it seems not. In Ready Player One, the narrator, Wade, lives in a virtual reality world through his avatar, Parzival. He has an assistant, Max, for whom he has written code that creates a personality. When feeling down, Wade can talk with Max and have his mind taken off his problems—until Max starts repeating himself. That painfully reminds Wade that there is no more to Max than what he, Wade, has created.12
But what if we got cleverer than that? What if we made a device that was then able to replicate itself—a computer, say, that could go around and pick up various bits of the world and make another computer, which itself also had the capacity to make another, and so on? Herbert McCabe says that such a thing would be alive, which is to say, we should describe it as having a soul. (A soul is not a thing a body has but rather the “form” of a living body. When a body dies, it loses its form—which we will see if we wait a bit; decomposition will become evident.)
We might well hesitate at the metaphysics of ascribing a soul to a machine with artificial intelligence, but would we necessarily be in error to start thinking of such a machine as a potential friend? Perhaps—as with an extraterrestrial, the difficulties of mutual understanding could be enormous. They might be insurmountable. In the 2014 film Ex Machina, a man falls in love with a sensuous robot who returns his love, or seems to until the point that he arranges her escape. She then departs the compound and without a word, without a glance, leaves him behind—locked up and apparently doomed to starve to death. Is this an intrinsic defect of AI—that true friendship will be impossible? Or is it merely another instance of sinful manipulation of others in a fallen world? At the least, the film certainly succeeds as a moral tale on the importance of not mistaking sexual pleasure for friendship!
The Horizon of Friendship
The most important task of moral development is to grow in friendship. We learn how to do this and take encouragement from examples, from simple experiences to far-out speculations. Although this chapter’s survey is admittedly idiosyncratic, it has aimed to show, through a variety of friendships real and imagined, that friendship has an internal dynamic of expansion. It is a desire for intimacy—in its clearer forms, for nonsexual intimacy—that seeks to be at once deep and wide. From the scriptural story of our ancient origins to science-inspired speculative tales of our future, we find humans desiring friendship and wondering, Whom else might I be friends with? That question is behind the animals of Genesis 2, as it is behind movements against slavery and racism. It is behind, if only so tentatively, contemporary cultural desires to have friends rather than only sexual partners, friends who last, friends who are good to the end, like Frodo and Sam, little people whose intimate friendship is forged in the struggle for the good and joined thereby for all time with such big people as the elf Elrond, the man Aragon, the wizard Gandalf, and even great Eagles.
Who else might join in our friendship?