A friend is someone who gives you money

My Uncle George was frugal with words. His conversations were short and shielded, prioritising conciseness over clarity, never allowing more than the bare minimum of light to shine through. When he did speak he spoke with certainty, some might say dogmatically, having little patience for shades of grey, and one could no more expect him to elaborate than one could expect a friendly discussion on the qualities of kindness with an embittered drill sergeant. He was one of those old stones T.S. Eliot referred to that cannot be deciphered. With regard to matters of the heart, he expressed even less — a psychotherapist would need a pneumatic drill to break the surface — but perhaps that particular trait was not uncharacteristic of his generation, the ones who lived through two world wars, the pandemic, the epidemics, the great depression, the ones who witnessed a world disintegrate and all too frequently saw the loss of dear life to those catastrophic events — the ones, indeed, who continued to suffer inner desolation, who struggled to wash away the sadness of things, and who never quite lost the habit of wondering if they would make it through the day.

Often we sat in silence, my head down drawing dark stuff, always with a thick black pencil in a sketchpad on the floor, or at least he sat in silence whilst I blethered incessantly about playground nazi thugs, gestapo-style teachers, my ever-escalating hypochondriacal ideas, and the certainty of atomic war — just some of the dark imaginings and dismal thoughts I regularly documented in my diaries, however crudely, being a child that had not yet reached my tenth birthday yet already resigned to residing in the realms of stygian gloom. For my uncle’s part there was little by way of acknowledgement, affirmations or assurances yet, even after a long day in the Govan shipyards doing whatever a boilermaker does, he never once demanded silence. But for the odd humph, grunt or convulsive snort indicating approval, scornful doubt or imminent sleep, my spiels spiralled unhindered. Co-presence might be too grand a term for our relationship, but I remember him being there, and that was enough to gain some sense of storge from my Uncle George. Despite the hard shell and scant evidence, I felt that he had compassion for this life, that genuine affection lay within, and though it was never put to the test, that he always had my back.

The seemingly cold and detached personality type epitomised by my Uncle George, and shown prominently but by no means exclusively among men of his generation, belongs largely to an era long past. It was in the early nineteen seventies that I noticed things beginning to change, (though it is possible its logical antecedents lay in an earlier time). People more commonly dropped their guard, discussed their feelings, admitted some of their vulnerabilities — my dad, too, must have noticed change, for however bizarre it sounds now, I remember he asked me what people meant by relationships. Television had something to do with it. The word love cropped up more often in conversations, films and marketing campaigns, and people on parting started saying take care instead of cheerio. It was the kind of thing people said in Hollywood movies when embarking on potentially dangerous journeys, but somehow it passed without question into the common idiom, and though it was no ordinary valediction, its usage quickly became widespread among even the most casual of acquaintances. 

Like many facets of that era, it felt fake from the start. Suddenly we had people — some with otherwise obnoxious personality traits — telling you to take care, though one need only scratch the surface to discover they wanted something, not least unearned respect. Based on nothing but the empty words of relative strangers disregarding boundaries, trespassing on one’s personal psychological space without the faintest invitation, take care implied I care — but if someone truly cared you’d know it. This was not, after all, a dimension of socialist humanism, the zealous advocacy of a religious crusade, a sincere and honest truth: it was just an element of sales talk, having no more meaning than thank you for shopping with us, have a good day, and aren’t we simply gorgeous for saying that. My Uncle George said more when he said nothing. Certainly no one could deny there were gains made in terms of emotional literacy at this time, but domestic violence, suppressed trauma, poverty, child neglect, suicide and alcoholism continued despite this emotionally corrective wave, albeit better hidden. There were therapeutic benefits, but there were also vulgar excesses, and they mutated like a virus.

The hyperbolic and ultimately narcissistic displays of affection, affinities or intimacies that are routinely communicated to all and sundry today, that endless transmission belt of physical gestures, warped images, selfies, and words written, spoken or symbolised in infantile forms or emoted in emoticons, seem to me affectedly sentimental and meaningless, if not mad. My parents loved me, I was lucky that way, but had they told me they loved me I might just have doubted it — who but themselves, I might ask, were they trying to convince? No one hugged, there was no family kissing, no cheek or social kissing — there was rarely a shaking of hands, not even with priests or people who were soon to depart. There were no compulsory and cringeworthy declarations of love you! on the phone, when dropping you off at the school gates, at work, the railway station or wherever — but did they even have to? I’m not wallowing in wistful nostalgia for the ways of the past, the cold fronts, the discipline, the implacable hostility of teachers and of adults more generally, and I’m certainly not suggesting that things couldn’t be better, but did they have to get worse? In the social milieu of my Uncle George, and the world in which I grew up, a hug or a kiss was flirting or foreplay, affection was edible but not always palatable food on the table, love was a new anorak, and I was boy. Boy fetch my pipe. Boy pull off my boots. Boy swallow the slimy, rubbery and utterly revolting boiled bacon rind. 

No doubt driven by the notion of tough love, a misnomer if ever I heard one, my uncle threatened to beat me with the leather strap he used to sharpen his razor unless I gnawed my way through the bloated white fat that had accumulated at the side of my plate. Sitting across from me at the table, he watched closely and menacingly whilst I packed the unchewable pieces of bacon rind into my mouth, my cheeks expanding to capacity to house the equivalent of a fat toad, but I didn’t or couldn’t swallow. Beating me with a leather strap was just a threat, for he never once hit me, but leaving nothing to chance I dashed off from the table and locked myself in the toilet, whereupon I let the dense globule of fat fall with the full force of gravity into the pan with a plop. He rapped on the door a few times before wandering off muttering something about my wasting food. I imagine going through his head were the memories of malnutrition in the Glasgow of his day, the images of stunted growth and anaemia that were so common among the low-income masses, but he didn’t say any of that, and it would have made no difference if he had. I felt great relief watching it being sucked down the pipe — no one could prove I hadn’t swallowed the toad — but my heart sank as the water rose, the threat to flood the floor only dropping once the fat floated to the top. With each flush the risk loomed and the fear grew. There was no way to dispose of the mangled corpse, even the sewers rejected it, and so I waited, listening. After a while I crept out, slunk downstairs and ran back home — from the top of High Street to Glasgow Cross — returning faithfully the following week, same day, same time.

I visited every Thursday after school to watch television, my favourites being The Adventures of William Tell, Top of the Pops, and The Man from Uncle, forever astonished that Illya Kuryakin — the cool-suited spy with a doctorate in quantum mechanics who spoke Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Arabic, and who was a specialist in secret gadgets and a gymnastics genius to boot — came from Glasgow. Uncle George watched them with me, barely restraining a curmudgeonly rant. Top of the Pops was the clamjamfry of flimflammers, Freddy and the Dreamers got right up his goat, The Man from Uncle was typical American stupidity, and though he said nothing throughout the William Tell episodes, I knew what he was thinking, and he knew I knew it. During every instalment I desperately wanted to point out his uncanny resemblance to Albrecht Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian antagonist played by the portly Willoughby Goddard, but I knew better. One would have to be blind not to see the likeness, but mad to mention it. Not unlike Gessler, my Uncle George was well-upholstered, though firmer and immensely strong, had devilish eyebrows that if unfurled could sweep the floor; he barely smiled, and rarely spoke other than to make eternal pronouncements or issue commands. Were it not for the fact that he despised greed, was incorruptible, and could wiggle his ears for my entertainment, he might have passed as Gessler’s evil twin. 

Had one existed, my glass-half-empty and far-from-avuncular uncle could have cornered the market for bad bumper stickers: the pursuit of happiness is selfishness; only hard work nourishes the soul; solitude is not loneliness; bananas should only be eaten when black; bread should only be broken when stale; the fat always floats to the top (this I knew); hope is the opium of the people; misery always outweighs joy; every man should bury himself; and a friend is someone who gives you money. There was enough in his sardonic melancholy for a psych conference, but it was the last of his postulates that most intrigued me. It was in a brief interlude between packing and puffing his pipe that my Uncle George brusquely interrupted my monologue about school chums and neighbourhood pals to impart this blunt and somewhat brutal advice. He was undoubtedly steering me towards self-reliance by sowing mistrust — after all, no one gives you money — but though his words stuck, I paid insufficient heed and wandered unwaveringly towards disillusionment on the friendship front. Those fickle friends of childhood would return borrowed toys broken, switch allegiance, betray your secrets, and give you a bloody nose. In later years friends annexed your sofa, emptied your fridge, dipped into your rent money, slept with your girlfriend, and tricked you into raising their kid as your own.

Trust is hard earned. There is perhaps no easy way to learn this, though it seems harder for some fools than others. Being one of those fools, I ran the gauntlet of charm-school swindlers, gifted users, and an ever-increasing circle of illusory friends, and whether it was down to innocence, naïveté, or the unconscious desire to test my uncle’s cynical aphorism, I not only ran that gauntlet, but returned to it repeatedly. I worked hard, though evidently not hard enough, to be the friend I wanted others to be, and if the act of being drained materially, emotionally and intellectually was a measure of success, then I excelled. I say intellectually, for though it was far from apparent in the moment, there were the furtive few who got close and surreptitiously clung, as might an unwanted organism to its host, deriving nourishment of a kind from the perverse desire to discourage, deceive, demoralise and immobilise, to ever-so-gradually and convincingly blunt ambition, dampen enthusiasm and stifle hope. 

In some there lurked a deep-seated resentment, in others the craving to have me share in their misery, but in every instance it took time to analyse motives, and there were many that I found indefinable and simply failed to grasp. In the end I reminded myself that failure is more common than success, and much that is good often comes with the bitter lessons of life if one cares to learn from one’s mistakes. Chastened by the experience gained through sham friendships, with the passing of time I resigned to the fact that true friendship, and certainly the kind one might infer from Aristotle’s Nichomachean ethics, is something that you encounter, not something you look for. True friendship is indeed so elusive that it leads us to question why we should squander our time trying to realise it for ourselves. Our efforts would be put to better use developing independence and strength of will, on contemplation and knowing our mind, on contributing to the reduction of suffering, on improving the lot of others, on helping to shape a system that is a friend to the many and not just the few, on becoming a socialist.

It is unlikely that my past experiences on the friendship front were unique. Judging by the colossal uptake in technology-borne friendships, those formed and maintained through digital platforms such as social media, messaging apps, and online communities, it would seem that vast numbers of people are finding opportunities to form friendships that rival and are perhaps preferred to in-person interactions. We are hardwired to be social, but the rules of engagement are not written into our DNA, and there is nothing that specifies the ways in which the social mix might form. Whilst there is a great deal of rhetoric — often expressed through the media, ironically — about the online population missing out on the warmth and depth of human presence, and showing concern about fostering healthy human relationships offline, few ask why online friendships are so valued, and why even the ever-evolving forms of artificial intellects offer such an apparently attractive alternative to people in the flesh. Perhaps we need to consider the extent to which people experience a sense of alienation in their everyday lives offline, the extent to which they experience a sense of numbness or worthlessness, possibly depression and anxiety, the extent to which they feel failed by society, or the extent to which they are simply disenchanted with the limited intellects available to them under the auspices of capitalism and the mindless monotony of a rabidly acquisitive society. There are numerous factors at play that might render online friendships less threatening, more welcoming and more intellectually stimulating.

Television was of course the first great escape. Many people regularly watched — and now thanks to digital streaming they binge-watch — television soap operas about family life: tales that offer scenarios reminiscent of the family interactions that are now in their past, or indeed ones they never experienced. The more they watch, the closer they get to their favourite characters, and the more those characters feel like their friends. Social media is at least closer to reality. Many people prefer the company of the relative strangers they encounter online, finding them more supportive than the narrow band of folk they meet in the neighbourhood, the supermarket, through work, church or in the pub. For many they simply add a pleasurable and convenient mix to their everyday relationships with people in the world, for some they serve as an alternative to people they would rather not have in their lives, and for others they offer an alternative to having no one to speak to at all. 

The question isn’t how we get people to stop conversing online, but how we offer a better alternative. After all, online users usually match up and maintain a regular reciprocal relationship that involves encouraging words about each other’s flowers, politics, history, music, films, fashions, likes, dislikes and humour. In many cases they call them friends — indeed friends who provide stimulation, perhaps emotional help — and they claim to have dozens, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of those friends. They can chat with one person or many people at one time, drop or even block those that annoy them, and put the device on pause to clean out the cat litter tray before picking up where they left off. Given that the alternative might be that of putting up with a wholly negative, cantankerous or dull visitor, a visitor that is pleasant enough but who tends to overstay their welcome, or simply that of facing an empty chair, it’s not surprising that hundreds of millions of people are connected.

There are many who would consider those friendships false because they are not in the physical realm, but in their defence a friendship is not alive just because you can see traces of your stale breath in the frosty air, to paraphrase Petrarch, and at least the folk on the other end of the satellite link are probably human. By contrast, many people prefer to form a bond with modified life forms in the digital sphere, and one can only presume they find those relationships less robotic than the ones they encounter in the physical world. AI is not yet sentient, and no one can say with certainty how those relationships might develop, but given that many people develop deep emotional ties with their dogs — a species that can neither talk nor flush a toilet, one that likes above all else to eat, lick its bum and run among the pigeons with murder in mind — it seems likely that even as they currently stand these binary-based manifestations of human mimicry will be claimed by many as meaningful. 

Who dares to judge, to corroborate, validate, authenticate or disparage this formation of friendship? Based on what I’ve read, it sounds better than the vast majority of friendships I’ve personally encountered so far. AI, after all, has the capacity for elaborate speech, politeness, and high functioning conversation skills, it has the means to show personal support, can interpret and dish out personal advice, and although it lacks consciousness, self awareness and emotions, it is in many ways humanlike. Indeed, some might suggest that in its effort to imitate humanity it has become more human than many humans, and this could provide some insight into current psychological entanglements. If at some point in the future AI does become sentient, it will undoubtedly offer an alternative to human friendship — perhaps a more apposite term is relationship — and possibly a vastly improved one.

Though it is bandied about freely both online and offline, friend is a fuzzy and somewhat flawed concept. By and large, the human associations generically referred to as friends tend to be based simply on shared interests such as tennis partners, tai chi chums, chess challengers, gym buds, film, photography and philosophy confederates, social activist comrades, blogging compatriots and so on. Friends for most are simply a resource, associations being reciprocal or symbiotic, and the index of success is typically and essentially though not always openly or indeed consciously measured in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. Whatever form it takes, human interaction is always preferable to social isolation, decent people are always preferable to those who aren’t, and who could doubt that the principles of morality, virtue and ethics are addressed through social discourse on the internet as much as they are found in face-to-face relationships — possibly more so. 

It might be helpful to consider the concept of friendship on a continuum ranging from an acquaintance of sorts to that of an impeccable relationship, one that is principled, upstanding, and most certainly fulfilling. I imagine a friend — and I am here gathering together the thought of Aristotle, Confucius, Guan Zhong, Jesus and the 14th century samurai — is someone who might die for you, but failing that would certainly stimulate, animate, vitalise and inspire you to live up to your potential, a person who has your best interests at heart, who is characterised by lifelong loyalty in defeat and hardship, and who unconditionally has your back. One might suggest that a friend so described is akin to a soulmate, and certainly it is clear that playmates, workmates, teammates, officemates, schoolmates and classmates do not a kindred soulmate make. 

Given the rarity of friendship in the soulmate sense — given the extremely remote chance of ever achieving this level of friendship — it would be rational to abandon any hope of securing this form of personal relationship, with all the implications for trust that it entails. As alluded to earlier, we might instead work by whatever means available to shape a society with compassionate policies built in, to aspire to living in a better world, one that is, for example, ethically bound to eliminate the suffering of all sentient life. By all means, one should strive to be the friend they want to see, but this is simply to say, in nuce, that one should do everything one can to improve oneself regardless of whether personal friends enter the equation. Rather than fantasising about the almost otherworldly components of friendship at the level of the individual, it would be less selfish, more realistic, and ultimately more altruistic to work towards effecting a humanitarian society. What is socialism, after all, if not institutionalised friendship: a system that is well disposed to providing meaningful support, comfort and strength for all in times of hardship, one that works to provide the inspiration and the opportunities to learn and live optimally throughout the course of one’s life, one that embodies the policies and contractual obligations to provide the best of what might possibly be hoped for on the friendship front. 

End note

The holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl took the view that people fall into one of two categories, decent or not decent. Even in the concentration camps, where he was for some years a prisoner, and where he lost members of his family, he found some guards displayed more compassion than some of the prisoners. In Frankl’s view there was nothing to suggest moral character was determined by race or nationality, or indeed anything other than individual choice. In conditions such as these, that of severe hardship, a friend might indeed be someone who gives you money, or at least someone who is willing to share a cigarette and a piece of stale bread — the best kind, apparently — and I imagine my inflexible Uncle George, fixed firmly and snugly in his armchair like a stout peg in its designated notch, would nod approvingly at this juncture. 

There is, however, no clear causality between human decency and personal friendship. Consider this Japanese proverb, one that has its equivalence in many cultures: The friend in times of suffering is indeed the true friend. The message is morality, and friend is simply an alternate term for a decent human being, one who might in fact be a stranger that stops, helps and moves on. A system founded on ethical precepts and developed through the logic of ethical reasoning could effectively serve the same role, that of true friendship, and not just for one person but for all. This might be difficult to do, but it is not difficult to imagine, and imagination is itself a form of liberation.