by Walter J. Smith
The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. (Exodus 33:11)
The conception of friendship put forward by Aristotle, elaborated by Cicero, and understood for centuries in the context of the Christian conception of personhood, was well known to Americans in colonial and early republican times…. [T]he traditional idea of friendship had three essential components. Friends must enjoy one another’s company, they must be useful to one another, and they must share a common commitment to the good. (Robert Bellah)
There is an excellent new book gaining readers here in Wallowa County and stimulating some promising conversations. Community: The Structure of Belonging, by Peter Block describes how and why citizens turn, with friends and preferred others, to building the community they want. Who are these “preferred others” and just how are they building the community they want? Indeed, what kind of community do they want?
There are many possible answers to such questions. And shifting the conversations from problem-solving to possibility pursuits is what makes Peter Block’s book so compelling. The most important answers to those or any other questions that arise are presented, one question or sentence at a time, by those inviting themselves to read important book, and/or into the conversations that reading stimulates. The general focus of these conversations is on the question: “What is the best possible community Wallowa County can have?” Every conversation taking up this question delivers surprisingly promising answers.
Reading the book helps bring the conversations into focus. It helps move the conversations into the most promising directions for discovering and creating the community we want. But these are hardly new conversations. However, they’ve not been popular since the Great Depression. This new focus of our conversations is among the richest and most rewarding practices of American citizenship for centuries. There is nothing more American than being an excellent citizen and/or an excellent friend.
The colonists spent nearly two centuries preparing for the American Revolution. Along the way, they found ancient wisdom on citizenship most helpful. By 1776 the ordinary American was a revolutionary citizen. What made their citizenship revolutionary was the citizenship’s classical richness. Classical citizenship was most clearly described by Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher. Aristotle found excellent citizenship beginning with healthy friendships.
Each of the three elements of classical friendship – enjoying one another’s company, being useful to one another, and sharing a common commitment the good -- informs citizenship for a variety of reasons and purposes. Each element deserves exploration and articulation by anyone who wants rich friendships or solid citizenship, or a healthy community.
Friendly attractions are less physical and more metaphysical. While physical attraction can be helpful, metaphysical attraction is essential. ‘Metaphysical’ qualities are the non-physical traits and characteristics of an individual or group. At the top of the list of preferred characteristics of friendship, and of citizenship, are the classical virtues. We all want friends we can trust.
Classical virtues take precedence over popular tastes and passing fads. Courage, honesty, integrity and good humor matter more than knowing which celebrities are the most charming or which national team won the latest game. Virtues inhabited as a matter of course in daily life make possible friendship’s subsequent stages of growth. Friendship, in turn, demands that we cultivate the virtues so we can honor the friendship’s hunger for growth. We are most useful to one another to the extent we can be relied upon when most needed. Friendship always needs help. Citizenship does too.
My neighbors watch over my home and grounds while I am away. Among many other reciprocal relations, we trade stories that educate the character far more than all the books in the world. This is the primary way citizens in my neighborhood build friendships. When someone is away from home, everyone else in the neighborhood knows now is the time to keep the eyes and ears peeled. We are not just protecting one another’s property. We assure neighborhood security.
This habit makes the friendly practices of reciprocal generosity work for us all. Reciprocity has become so rich that whenever one of us encounters a difficulty for which we see no handy resolution, we commonly know this is an excellent time for a neighborly visit. We already enjoy teasing one another past whining about being a victim and into taking responsibility for our errors. All my neighbors are welcome to the use of my tools and skills. Sharing this generosity teaches us to be responsible and accountable to one another. These and other common characteristics are increasingly shared throughout the neighborhood.
Friends seem naturally drawn to story telling. This is healthy. Many sages say things like we “live inside” or “through” our stories. During story telling, which often includes friendly bantering and teasing, several arts of effective, critical teaching come into a life of their own. Story-telling friendships have the promise of achieving greatness for all the friends engaged in the story telling, the bantering, and the teasing. This is why Aristotle saw in great friendships the foundation of great citizenship. Story-telling compels us to see the world anew with each story we hear.
Sooner or later this friendly story telling transforms itself into the best kind – practicing giving the most accurate and artful accounts of experiences with others, but especially our experiences of public service. This is the moment at which citizenship enters the prospect of achieving nobility. For when accurate accounts of public service are habitually given and heard around any community, all that is good and right and just becomes increasingly obvious, and increasingly in demand. What better gifts does anyone bear? Anywhere, anytime?
Where story-telling gets this public-spiritedness, friendships begin the practices of grasping and holding onto political liberty. Political liberty is perhaps the very most difficult of the metaphysical qualities to grasp. Friends bring it to one another in a variety of conversations, not only story-telling in any ordinary sense. These conversations delivering political liberty to one another gain effectiveness to the extent they focus, from any direction, upon the actual shared possibilities we can see before us and inhabit.
We “see” these possibilities for grasping political liberty emerge through the various accounts of public service as exemplified by this or that friend or associate. We also see them through discovering that we ourselves have certain gifts we can offer through our own public service. This is how political liberty becomes understood as shared power and shared respect -- through friendships and throughout the community. Good public service is always a gift; corruptions of public service are always a curse. Friendly, accurate stories about experiences of public service clarify that border between good public service and the corruptions of public service.
Public service includes both official duties and voluntary efforts. Most public service in a democratic republic is the service delivered through voluntary efforts. The most effective volunteer service is delivered through the teamwork of friends and neighbors working in concert to achieve one small possibility at a time. When one neighbor says something like, ‘you know, we probably can make our water cleaner if we spend a little time thinking through what that includes,” a whole new possibility, with community-wide implications, has opened up.
Our water will more likely become cleaner as a result of voluntary citizenly efforts than would result from petitioning city hall with a thousand signatures. Why? As Peter Block demonstrated in his wonderful book describing the structure of belonging: where citizens take ownership of their quality of life, their quality of life grows in the directions these citizens want it to grow. We all need the cleanest water we can get. We all need the cleanest politics. Our friends will help us get both.
Excellent friendship helps us “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves... ,” as the US Constitution’s Preamble says it. Great friendships inspired that most brilliant and most challenging of American political visions, the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence: “[W]ith a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
What is more American than honoring this pledge with our friends?