Why We Need Close Friends

good friendship is a matrix out of which the attainment of truth and the attainment of goodness uh arise and so it's it's essential to human flourishing welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vaught the host and the senior publishing director here we are in episode 300 300 i can't believe it uh of course we're joined by bishop robert baron in our santa barbara studio bishop baron 300 episodes pretty crazy hey brandon good morning yeah it is crazy because i remember the very first one we did right i just come out here to california i was still down at the cathedral i hadn't moved in up here yet and you and i did a you know a conversation about an article i'd written or something and no i i it does seem impossible that it's 300 episodes you know we also hit another big milestone at word on fire this week and that's that your word on fire youtube channel has now reached a thousand videos and i meant to go look up the analytics before this i forgot to but i last time i looked at it projecting forward to a thousand i'm pretty sure that's like dozens of years worth of watch time that people have spent on your youtube channel but a thousand videos did you ever think that when you guys uploaded your first one that you would ever reach that milestone it was a pure experiment this is years ago we had gotten a donation and the person said uh maybe try something you know creative with this and so youtube had just started this was 2007 and i believe youtube if you check was 2006. so i had just heard of this thing and i said well you know i guess we could put some videos up on youtube and i'll just comment on you know what's going on i think in the early days i remember the talk is about having someone like a young person interview me or talk about something and then it just evolved the way that it did but no no if you told me back in 2007 that we'd have a thousand videos up over all these years no and i was actually surprised i was delighted and surprised when i saw that graphic i think went up yesterday about the thousand videos so you know praise god i don't remember if this is an actual true story or part of the mythic word on fire origins but if i remember correctly when you first started at you making youtube videos somebody like some outside media consultant or something to you and was like look if you want to be popular like we're going to need bishop baron on a skateboard we're going to need rock music we're going to need all cool stuff and you're like no no i'm just going to sit behind a camera and offer high-level intellectual thoughts on movies film culture and your views seem to work i think if you were on a skateboard we probably wouldn't have reached a thousand videos he said get rid of the bookshelves you got to lose the roman collar you know that it's it's all very off-putting to young people uh and then yeah why don't you come in on a skateboard for example and then start telling you so i've always um stood against that sort of uh i mean i lived through it look my generation we lived through all that attempt to patronize young people and all that so i think it has proved that's an important uh consequence it has proved i think that if you do something that is smart uh it doesn't condescend to young people and you know actually brandon i say young people i didn't think of in the beginning as i'm going out to young people i thought i'm commenting on the culture just yesterday i was at a parish anniversary mass in my region and i had several high school teachers come up to me and talk about how they use the videos and they talk about the seniors and one teacher said i also teach freshmen and they're often a little too difficult for them but i i tell them what some of the words mean i kind of tell them you know where you're going and they said they they love watching you and i thought see good why are we always condescending to children and say well let's make it as simple and stupid as possible how about present them something that's rich and then draw them up toward it you know so my point there is i didn't design these for young people i designed them for anybody but heck i'm delighted if teachers find a way to use them youth groups adults old people i don't care i i just did them i think in an intelligent way i hope a compelling way and speaking out of the catholic tradition and i the fact that he found an audience is worth thinking about for those who said oh no no dumb it down no no no pander to you know young people make it as pop culture as you can i think our own success and if i could be allowed to you know crow a little bit shows that that's nonsense that those assumptions were were wrong-headed well tell us about another exciting thing that happened this past week and that was a trip to baltimore maryland tell us what you were there for and how it went i love that trip i was there for the bicentennial of the dedication of the great baltimore basilica so not the cathedral of baltimore but this was the original cathedral that was conceived by john carroll himself the first bishop of the united states it was finally dedicated in 1821 so 200 years ago it was designed by the same man um latrobe who designed the u.s capitol who was a friend of thomas jefferson carroll of course was a friend of benjamin franklin and george washington and it was done this this basilica in the classical style that was typical of that time think washington jefferson you know madison all those people a gothic design had been proposed and carol said no no no i want a church that is is american in style so it was done in this beautiful way and when it was finished a lot of commentators said it's the most beautiful building in america in my judgment i said this uh when i preached on on this sunday to my mind it's the most beautiful church in the united states period so i was there for the dedic this bicentennial cardinal dolan spoke on saturday night about the historical importance of the building and then i preached the next day and archbishop laurie of baltimore who's a marvelous guy celebrated the mass and i had the privilege to preach in the wonderful pulpit there so it was it was a fun visit it was a quick you know i flew out and flew back basically but it was a privilege to be there whenever i think of that church i think of the famous baltimore catechism that's where it came into being and i remember you telling me after your trip that you were surprised when you went into the actual room where these bishops met at how small it was it was just like a little classroom almost yes and i didn't actually know that till this past visit i assumed all the deliberations were in the basilica which is not a giant building but i thought they were but i was corrected that actually it's in the residence of the archbishop which is right behind the basilica that's where i stayed that night there's a parlor i'd call it and not a not a giant room by any means but that's where the deliberations evidently took place so we're talking about a relative handful of bishops who made these very important decisions for the life of the american church and then they voted on the propositions in the basilica they told me so it's a very historic place and it was a privilege to be there all right well let's turn to the main focus of our discussion today which is friendship friendship and especially why we need close friends not just any type of friend but the friends that you consider your deepest and and closest there was a recent poll from the survey center on american life that revealed people are rapidly losing their close friends and especially men here's just a few statistics from the poll it found that the number of american men who viewed themselves as having no close friends zero the number of those men has quintupled over the last 30 years in the year 1990 not that long ago 1990 only three percent of men said they had no close friends today it's 15 it's gone from 3 to 15 10 of women say they have no close friends so not as much as men but still a significant number um 15 of men only 15 percent said that they have 10 or more close friends which is a steep drop from 1990 when that number was at 40 percent so 40 in 1990 15 today similar drop among women as well uh what's your initial take on this survey data have you noticed a decline in friendships among your circles i must say branded i was when i got these stats from you i was surprised and chagrined did i notice it i'm not sure i have but but having seen those numbers i thought first of all it's bad news it's bad news for our culture it's bad news for us individually and our psychological health and spiritual health uh reasons why you know i suppose there are a thousand reasons why you don't jump to my mind as i thought about it these iphones and the social media culture that i do think with all its advantages i'm always i always feel it's important to point that out i'm not demonizing social media i'm using it right now but there's something about these phones and the social media that have distantiated us from one another uh a facebook friendship is not a real friendship you know i got hey i got 10 000 facebook friends well those aren't friends in any really meaningful sense um and then just the way the social media has kind of locked us into rival camps it so polarized us politically and interpersonally that that has to militate against friendship even the fact that so many younger people communicate through text messaging that's a privileged way of communicating i mean how that undermines even even what you could do on a telephone think for a telephone how you're able to establish more of a personal rapport than you ever can with the little text messages so anyway i'm probably oversimplifying but my first reaction was it's sad my second reaction was if you do 1990 to now what's happened in that period well the rise precisely of these new forms of media and i wonder if that's at least one of the important causes you know facebook popularized the term friending you know like you make a friend on facebook when you friend them but as you say that the people we're connected with online are more like acquaintances that'd be a better description at best right usually you kind of know what's going on in their life they share pictures they share videos but you don't have deep discussions with them you're not talking about big serious topics with them so there's something different between that type of relationship and what we mean by friendship so maybe let's start there what what is friendship and how does it differ from other types of relationships aristotle who's my great model here you know when i was a kid back at catholic u it was the great robert sokolowski who taught us the nicomachean ethics and it's in book eight of the ethics if you want to check it go there and this marvelous discussion of of friendship aristotle says the friend is a second self which is a lovely definition it's like looking in a mirror in a way that i can see myself in the friend the friend sees himself in me and there's a mirroring that goes on um friendship in the most authentic sense is born of and is fed by and leads to virtue so for aristotle you're really a friend only with someone who shares with you a commitment to virtue and in whom you recognize the very virtue that you want to embody in your own life there's the second self idea but here's an interesting distinction it was again sokolowski that would have first taught me this years ago it's from aristotle aristotle talks about a friendship of pleasure now what's that well it's a it's someone a friend from whom you derive good feelings it's the person you like to hang out with they're fun to be with you want to go to the ball game with them they got a good sense of humor you you derive pleasure from the relationship with them now there's nothing wrong with that but it's friendship in a very mitigated way there's also he says the friendship of utility and i remember sokolowski always used the example of his barber he said i have a barber who's very good cuts my hair well and we're friendly he said i always greet him and we we chit-chat we talk but he said it's a friendship of utility he's useful to me i i get a good haircut from him okay again nothing wrong with that i mean i'm friends with the people that work on my car etc etc but that's a friendship of utility but the real mccoy if you want the real friendship is what aristotle calls this friendship of virtue and i just described it that means together we're in love with the life of virtue we recognize the goodness of one another and we desire not our own good but the good of the friend so in a friendship of utility yeah what i'm desiring ultimately is a good haircut you know so i i'll chat in a friendly way with my barber but i'm not there for the chit chat i'm there to get a haircut with a friendship of pleasure great you know i but i'm i'm deriving from that relationship you know good feelings or a sense of fun or something and fine but in a real friendship a friendship of virtue i want what's best for the friend i rejoice in the friend's success i rejoice in my friend attaining virtue and he rejoices in my attainment of virtue that's the real mccoy that's the real thing and i think that is suffering in our culture i mean look by by means of facebook can you ever reach that kind of friendship i don't think so i mean you might get friendships of utility or friendships of pleasure you know some very mitigated low-level kind of relationship but the real thing that takes what time dedication personal presence here's something brandon and i again i apologize i look at things philosophically you know um how disembodied the social media allow us to be so i'm in dialogue with someone but they don't see me they don't hear my voice i'm not personally present in an embodied way to them it's a very very abstract form of relationship well real friendship with a second self where you're in a mirroring relationship where you're cultivating virtue together you can't do that through the social media you can't do that at second and third hand there has to be a a real embodied presence to one another so anyway that's a a long rambling answer to your question but but by means of aristotle look at book eight of the ethics to find out what it is and it's this love for the other for the sake of virtue i would say is real friendship so we start with aristotle but then how does christianity elevate this idea of friendship you know christ comes and says i call you friends so what difference does jesus make when it comes to friendship well i'll tell you it's extraordinary brandon and it caused a certain problem for the uh the medieval philosophers because aristotle as i've been suggesting would say you can't really be friends with a social inferior you know because a friend's a second self and you're sharing this common love for virtue aristotle would have seen people at a lower level you know in the kind of economic and psychological order they really wouldn't be worthy of friendship or capable of real friendship so one of the problems is well how can you be friends with god because god is infinite i'm just this little finite you know nobody i could be god's servant okay everyone would say that i could be god's devotee or god's slave or whatever but when jesus says that i no longer call you mere servants but friends what makes that possible i think the short answer is the incarnation makes that possible that god becomes one of us so that god can be in a personal embodied relationship with us not that god ceases to be god but god takes to himself a human nature so that he can enter into this dialogue of friendship moreover we are called beyond ourselves simply a capacity for giving service to god to real intimacy with god to share in god's own inner life god wants our excellence he wants our goodness and virtue so that's an extraordinary move to take everything that's true and good in aristotle but then apply it to god in a very fresh way in light of the incarnation would you say that we were made for friendship as if friendship was a critical piece of human flourishing absolutely and i think all the great philosophers recognize that here's something brandon i find really intriguing um go back to the beginnings of philosophy in the west go back to plato let's say how is truth discovered truth is discovered not through a kind of private interior meditation but it's discovered precisely in dialogue with friends re-read i know we all read them in philosophy 101 but re-read some of those platonic dialogues where socrates is engaging friends in a lively conversation and in the process they come to greater and greater truth now go forward through that platonic tradition to someone like augustine you read the great confessions and you say oh that sounds like someone just musing by himself no no no no on the contrary the confessions is a 500 page prayer it's augustine speaking dialogically with his friend the creator of the world and we're given the privilege through augustine's great literary gift to overhear the prayer so it's in dialogue that truth emerges now go forward to my hero thomas aquinas you say well there's someone just sitting in his cell musing no no the the great texts of aquinas are literary distillations of those medieval disputed questions right where someone raises an objection from the floor and then the master has to answer it then a further objection comes and the answer comes back and in the dialogic back and forth among friends the truth begins to emerge flourishing all the great philosophers will say that human flourishing has something to do with this the seeking and finding of truth well where does that happen from aristotle to plato to thomas aquinas it happens in a friendly dialogue within the context of a of a conversation of friendship now if i might press this point and you know i'm never the biggest fan of modern philosophy look at a major shift that happened when rene descartes the founder of modern philosophy does indeed bracket the whole world outside of himself does indeed bracket a dialogue with others and retreats into his own interiority and discovers the famous kojito ergo sum which is the foundation of his philosophy modern philosophy followed that much more introverted path classical thought medieval thought is truth-seeking in the context of friendship and that matters enormously let's jump back to the survey here for a second i mentioned at the beginning one of the most striking findings was how close friendships have declined in men especially we haven't talked about that uh that much why do you suspect it's had such a decline among men way more than women i was struck by that brandon and you know again i'm speculating here and there's things are always caused by multiple causes so i want to be clear about that here's a here's a suspicion i have i think men's friendships are largely based on a shared sense of purpose a shared sense of mission so again i'm generalizing so please i know there are exceptions all across the board but i'm generalizing i think legitimately men tend to bond not so much around the sharing of intimate feelings and experiences they bond around a common mission let's do this together let's attain this goal let's defend these people let's you know men tend to look outward together to a common goal i think and in that they find their bonding okay what's maybe gone wrong with that if we live in a society which indeed we do increasingly where objective moral and epistemic value is doubted oh it's got my truth got your truth i got my values you got your values there's really no common commonly accepted value what that will undermine is precisely this sense of shared mission that we're in this together because we all agree this is worth fighting for if it's simply no i got my point of view got your point of view and let's tolerate each other that takes i would argue a lot of energy out of men again i'm generalizing they're exceptions i'm generalizing but i think it takes energy out of men when you reassert the realm of objective value i think that energizes men to a common mission and therefore to a deeper bonding with one another that's one one bit of speculation i would share let's spend the last few minutes here talking about how to find and develop close friendships i know that's probably the practical question many listeners here are wondering maybe they find themselves in one of these statistical declines they say look i don't have any close friends or you know i wish i had more close friends than i do so let's talk about how that might happen what would be your first bit of advice someone comes to you says look i want to broaden my capacity for close friendship what do i do to start work at it you know it's like aquinas to his sister what must i do to be a saint and he said will it i think part of it is is will it work at it uh resist i mean here's the practical advice get off of social media you're spending too much time on social media go out and meet people you know in a very embodied way find people maybe that share the values you do so let's bracket the grand question of you know are there objective values just find people on the ground they say yeah they seem to be you know about the same things i'm about okay hang around with them and i think chances are you'll find someone that you can bond with in your common purpose but work at it you know one thing we talked about brandon before we went on here how many of the great figures both in history and around today do we notice this capacity for friendship you'll say boy that guy he just had a great capacity for friendship and i think that's one of the signs of real psychological and spiritual maturity that you have a gift for friendship and whether it's gk chesterton and his friendship with george bernard shaw or let's say william f buckley maybe some are old enough to remember him a famous conservative political commentator but was great friends across the political spectrum with a slew of people maybe most famously with john kenneth galbraith who was hard left in his politics very different from buckley and yet the two of them were very intimate friends maybe look in our present time uh robert george whom i just spoke to and his famous friendship with cornell west right who their polls apart from each other on many issues i think that's a wonderful sign of spiritual maturity so another bit of recommendation is get over this social media inspired obsession with my own little tribe and my own little political cast in fact brandon wasn't it in the survey something about the number of people that said hey you know if you're for trump you simply cannot be my friend or hey if you're not supporting president trump you can't be my friend i hate that that's a terrible attitude to have what if chesterton had that he would never become friends with george bernard shaw what if what if robert george felt that way he'd never be friends with cornell west so that's a terrible thing so get off of social media get out of these little tribal things find people that that share values and i think you'll find uh some friends i think behind that desire not to befriend people who think differently than us is the assumption that if if we do enter into a close friendship with people who have very different world views political cultural religious than us that it's going to challenge us and there might be some friction and i think we naturally want to avoid that but what all the great men you highlighted show is that no no it's actually a positive benefit to the friendship that that's what makes the friendship enlivening and enlightening because you have these arguments bouncing back and forth against each other yeah and let's go back to um let's say robert george and cornell west they would certainly have a lot of those aristotelian features that they together feel that seeking the truth is a good thing they're both you know christian gentlemen so they they believe in jesus christ they believe in god they believe in the transformation of society you know toward the kingdom of god and they'd have plenty of values in common but then i think you're right brandon that their differences provide a kind of you know lively friction or they they stir up a little energy in the relationship and that's not a bad thing well we need to find more friends and we need to become closer friends uh bishop any any closing words on this survey here on why we need closer friends well i would just say as you suggest it is really essential to human flourishing in our quest for truth but also our quest for moral goodness that you don't do these things on your own i think that's a bad instinct of some of of modern uh philosophy and modern culture you know like like nietzsche's the ubermensch with his will to power i mean a plague on that i have zero sympathy for that uh we're in this together and um good friendship is a matrix out of which the attainment of truth and the attainment of goodness uh arise and so it's it's essential to human flourishing and i finally say get out or find it online the nicomachean ethics of aristotle uh robert sokolowski told us when we were kids read that book every year of your life which i haven't followed that advice but i've read it a lot um get out book eight and you'll find the discussion of friendship actually might not be a bad idea to find someone to read that with maybe a versioning friendship yeah good good well it's time now for our question from one of our listeners every episode we pick one question from listeners like you today we have a great one from neil he lives in dublin ireland so an international listener here's his question [Music] hello my name is neil i'm from dublin in ireland first i'd like to thank you bishop for your ministry i've learned so much in the last year joined this virus it's incredible my question is why does god love us thank you i love that question when i taught theology years ago i used to tell the students don't be impressed by questions with you know million-dollar words and that would would be at home in a graduate seminar the most important questions the best questions are always the most fundamental ones like like this one um why does god love us because his nature is to love that's all god is that's all god knows how to do love is not something that god occasionally engages in it's not an option among many it's god's very nature and that's tied to his trinitarian nature because god is made up of a lover we call the father a beloved we call the son and the shared love that we call the holy spirit that love is so intense that it spilled over as it were into creation god made the world not out of need god needs nothing but precisely out of the intensity of the love that he is so here's the interesting thing it's not like oh god loves us because we're good no no we're good because god loves us god doesn't love us because oh boy look at those things aren't they impressive no whatever we have is because of the love of god god's love comes first and so in a way the question's so interesting because i can say well i mean why do you like brandon i say well because brandon's got this this and that quality okay that's the way it works with us you know my knowledge of brandon and my affection for brandon are derivative they they follow from something i've learned about him but not for god see god's knowledge and love aren't derivative they're rather creative so i have whatever lovely qualities i have because i've already been loved god loves us because that's his nature it's all he's got in the bag that's all he is and that's that's the best answer we can give to i think that very penetrating question well as we come to a close here i want to send out one last reminder to check out our new film and study program it's titled the creed it features six talks from bishop baron lengthy talks i think these are roughly 45 to 60 minutes each so they're way more substantial than our usual study programs in the past beautifully filmed at some of the most gorgeous missions across california we also have a book that goes along with this course titled light from light theological reflections on the nicene creed also by bishop baron you can learn more about both of those resources at the website wordonfire.org creed and again here's a suggestion this could be something to use with a friend so maybe email somebody find someone on social media and say hey let's let's go through this together and talk about it perhaps that's the start of a much closer friendship well thanks so much for listening and watching we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021