A friend is a companion with whom one shares a social relationship and a personal bond based upon bilateral affection, while an acquaintance is someone with whom one sees or interacts with but does not share a friendship. One could easily have far more acquaintances than friends! You may see the same acquaintances for years, decades even, without ever actually bonding with them personally and coming to love them as friends. But actual friendships can prove very rewarding and empowering. Friendships can provide great emotional, spiritual, and intellectual support that offers stability to life. A friendship with someone whom I have become intimately attached to is one of the greatest pleasures I could hope for in terrestrial life! Even so, some have suggested to me that ideology does not or should not shape friendships, and this suggestion is a very shortsighted one.
Sometimes a person will tell me that dissolving friendships over ideological differences is pointless or that initiating them over ideological similarities is shallow. First of all, anyone who actively does not want to be friends with a pro-Nazi individual or someone who is extremely sexist or racist does build friendships, to at least some degree, on ideology. I know I do not want an intimate social relationship with someone who is anti-intellectual, sexist, racist, hedonistic, or a number of other things. I have also never seen someone who, despite his or her words, truly lived as if shared ideologies do not matter in a friendship. Second, how could basing a significant part of a friendship around ideologies that both parties share and that are demonstrably true be a pointless thing? Since truth, reality, and knowledge are the only things that may turn out to have meaning in the end, framing a friendship around these issues is not a shallow thing, but a sign of intellectual or spiritual soberness and maturity. To base a friendship on these things is to found a relationship on the only things that could prove to actual be meaningful.
In the past few months I have had two friendships of mine dissipate, to a great extent in the first case and perhaps a lesser extent in the second, because of ideological splits. Not only is it objectively pointless (whether or not reality turns out to be meaningful, apathy about worldview matters could never be anything but objectively without a point) to not share discoveries about reality with one's close friends, but I have no subjective desire to shackle myself into draining friendships with those who offer no intellectual or spiritual stimulation whatsoever. In the first terminated friendship in my recent life (the past year), the split encompassed practically everything--epistemology, theology, priorities, methodology, ethics, and so on. This friend scarcely ever clarified his actual worldview but eventually opposed mine at almost every possible opportunity. It was clear that this person was thoroughly irrational, deluded by his arbitrary beliefs and multitude of assumptions, and I thus was not surprised when we relationally drifted apart. In the case of the second person, I realized that this "friend" not only did not truly behave like a committed friend towards me but also that she admits outright that she has little to no concern to be in alignment with any existing rational or moral truths. In both cases, I am content to now count these former friends among my intellectual opponents, and I cannot bring myself to desire to maintain friendships with intellectual opponents. It is with great sincerity that I call them enemies of truth and enemies of my own self.
I currently have only a small handful of friendships. And I am very content with that. It is not an easy thing to find the type of friend I desire--someone who shares my commitment to reason, truth, and Christianity and someone whom I want to develop an intense relational connection with. I would rather have no friends at all than have shallow "friends" who have committed intellectual treason against reality and who do not reciprocate behavior and attitudes that I grant to them. Even though I am extremely extroverted I cannot bring myself to want to be in the presence of most people I have met, much less develop actual friendships with them. In my experience people at large are stepped in irrationality and varying degrees of apathy towards ultimate matters.
Severing myself from those who frustrate me with their fallacies and gratuitous errors is one of the most subjectively fulfilling things I have ever done in my life. One of the greatest blessings a lover of truth can have is a friend or number of friends who share that love, and I deeply, wholeheartedly, inarticulably cherish all of those who are my friends.
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