On the value of friendship

In the Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst writes about the importance of friendship and the fact that modern distractions are seducing Americans into failing to appreciate or maintain valuable friendships. He defines friendship as "a state of strong mutual affection in which sex or kinship isn't primary." What are the important things that friends do?

It's available to everyone, offering concord and even intimacy without aspiring to be all-consuming. Friends do things for us that hardly anybody else can, yet ask nothing more than friendship in return (though this can be a steep price if we take friendship as seriously as we should).
Here are the disturbing statistics. Half of American adults are unmarried and more than a quarter live alone. A recent survey shows that Americans had one third fewer friends than we did two decades earlier. "A quarter of us had no such confidants at all." None of this is surprising given that so many of us find ourselves rushing around working so that we can afford things we don't really need. Akst also cites to the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, who suggest that we fail to develop friendships like we used to because it takes too much of an investment. She blames the "cult of conspicuous busyness" which we pursue to attain "status and perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another." Stir in children, spouses and our all too willingness to move in search of jobs that pay more, and we have a social environment that is downright hostile to friendships. None of this is mitigated by the 130 "friends" that the average Facebook user has. What are we doing in search of this mutual affection in the absence of friends? We have lots of talk therapists, of course. As Akst notes, Americans also own immense numbers of non-human pets, and these seem to be serving as substitutes for friends. Akst has written a thoughtful piece on friendship in which he stirs in psychology, sociology, philosophy and this conclusion:
[Friendship is] one of life's highest pleasures… It's time for us to ease up on friending, re-think our downgrade of ex-lovers to "just" friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know barely because it rains less elsewhere.

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Effective people

I think that this useful article is misnamed. It's called "10 ways you know you're with smart people," but I don't think of people as "smart" unless they are hard-working, they have kind hearts and they know how to work well with those around them. I've repeatedly learned over the years to simply being "smart" doesn't cut it. Ever. Further, I don't think that the items in the list ways to necessarily know you're with "smart" people. What it does seem to be is a good collection of some of the important characteristics of highly functional people. I haven't always worked with highly functional people, but I've noticed the characteristics of the article's list in the people I currently work with (I'm fortunate to work with a highly regarded law firm in St. Louis). Every day is an exciting and rewarding (sometimes exhausting) experience, and we have a lot to show for our efforts. But very little of this could have happened simply by having "smart" people around. It takes much more to have a functional workplace. Many people are "smart" in the sense that they know a lot of things, but this article contains a list of some of the important things that "smart" people do in order to truly get the job done. Some of the main things they do is to keep their focus, think innovatively, be ready to risk failure and work hard to draw the best performances out of each other. For those of you who are in highly functional workplaces, I suspect that you see many of these sorts of things in your co-workers too.

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Faith is Evolving, but Toward What?

As Darwin Day approaches (February 12), it is obvious that times are changing. America may be getting ready to face the Enlightenment, only a few centuries after our founders tried to encapsulate its principles in our government. On HuffPo, Paul Pardi recently wrote Religion is Evolving Before Our Eyes, about how American Fundamentalism and even Protestantism in general is suffering from ubiquitous communication. Few kids are exposed to only one point of view any more, so they are more likely to spot the discomforting inconsistencies of any given dogma. Small churches are closing their doors for lack of parishioners, and mega-churches pander to the basest prejudices just to pay the bills. But on NPR, in the wake of Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment, Ursula Goodenough wrote It's Time For A New Narrative; It's Time For 'Big History' as a plea to create a more evocative narrative for science, to better win hearts to engage their minds. This is a real problem, as those best trained to understand an issue are rarely well equipped to explain it from the ground up. We need Sagans and Tysons for every school district; those who can evoke the excitement of understanding the universe. More and more people are turning away from their ancestral religions. Too many toward New Age woo, and some toward rationality. So the marketing arms of the churches work feverishly. They know that rational families tend to stay that way, but woo begets woo, and can be won back to the fold. They tirelessly try to pass laws to insert a religious wedge in science and history classes. Several states currently have bills pending to make it harder to teach 19th and 20th century biology or geology by inserting stories from ancient texts that contradict every discovery of the last 200 years. Here is a link with a list of current bills to establish anti-evolution state laws. Missouri, Kentucky, New Mexico, and other states all have at-risk public school syllabi. This may be a desperate last gasp of Fundamentalist anti-intellectualism. Or their fast grasp of schools could succeed, and leave America behind as other nations quickly accept the progressive mantle we are letting slide from our shoulders. One could see this as the epic battle of the end times. But it is not the world ending, but an ancient and arguably obsolete world view. But the battle may be a messy one. The forces of ignorance are tireless and prolific. After all, an unreasoning populace is easier to lead.

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