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Our task, as was said in the first essay, is to rediscover for today the
practice of friendship. We recognize that there is something lacking in us,
in so far as we hardly think about or appreciate this important, and very
human, phenomenon of friendship. So we look to the ancients as our guide,
not because they are ancient, but because, in contrast, they valued
friendship above almost everything else, and they wrote about it with
subtlety and wisdom. We want to know how they defined friendship, how they
distinguished true friendship from false, and how they thought friendships
are formed and preserved. Aristotle will be our chief guide here, because
his famous discussion of friendship, in his Nicomachean Ethics, represents
the very best which the ancients have to offer on the subject. However,
before we begin to discuss friendship, there is an important preliminary to
be taken care of: we need to distinguish friendship from flattery.
Every human endeavor involves
distinguishing the true from the false; similarly, we cannot have a sound
notion of friendship, unless we have a good concept of false friendship, or
flattery. In every area and discipline, a person who has real expertise is
able to distinguish the real from the merely apparent. The jeweler has to be
able to distinguish diamonds from glass. A banker must be able to spot
counterfeit bills and put them aside. If a doctor cannot distinguish real
cases of a disease from only superficially apparent ones, he’ll be useless.
And we can’t be true friends, or acquire true friends, unless we can detect
a flatterer.
A friend in the true sense is
someone who knows what is really good for his friend, and in a practical way
helps his friend to acquire those things. A flatterer, in contrast, either
does not know, or pretends not to know, what is good for someone else; his
concern, rather, is merely that his friend be satisfied and content. The aim
of a flatterer, above all, is simply to ‘get along’ with you, so that he can
get whatever benefits he thinks will come from associating with you. He
realizes that he can stay on good terms by making you feel good, and, to
this end, he will say whatever he needs to say.
We do not claim that a
flatterer must himself be aware that he is a flatterer. Most people are not
aware of their own faults, and being a flatterer is a fault. A flatter need
not be manipulative and calculating; he need not consciously deliberate
about how to achieve his intended effect. Rather, we might expect that,
typically, flattery is simply an habitual way of acting for him. It is
something he does as a matter of course.
How, then, should we contrast a
friend and a flatterer? Above all, a friend is concerned that you are good,
a flatterer, that you feel good. A friend tells you the truth about
yourself, even if this is painful, whereas a flatterer distorts the truth,
to make it match what you want to hear. A friend takes objective goodness to
be the standard, and he opposes you when you stray from it; a flatterer
takes your wishes to be the standard, and he’ll change what he takes to be
good, to match them. A friend wants to agree with you, because your opinion
is right; a flatterer wants to agree with you, because whatever your opinion
is, is right. A friend thinks it good if you castigate yourself for some
failure or sin; a flatterer will never let you admit that you’ve done
something wrong--unless you persist in thinking so, and then finally he’ll
agree that you’ve done wrong, but only because you feel bad about it, not
because he thinks it so.
Generally, a friend is devoted to the
truth first, and he lets his friendships thrive or fail relative to this. He
is easy to like, precisely because he does not take ‘being liked’ to be the
first thing. He follows Emerson’s maxim that the question definitive of a
friendship is, “Do you see the same truth?” In contrast, a flatterer deals
in appearances and mere opinions. For him, truth is irrelevant, or perhaps
even a stumbling block. The question that is defining for him is “What do
you want me to think is true?”
The ancients despised flatterers for three
reasons. A flatterer is first of all inherently deceptive: he seems to be
good for you, but in fact he is not. For that very reason, he is, secondly,
dangerous: he occupies a place that ought, really, to be filled by someone
who truly cares for you. He’s always the wrong man in the wrong place at the
wrong time. A flatterer lulls you into a false sense of confidence and
causes you to let your guard down. Thirdly, a flatterer is servile and
parasitic, a purely derivative character. He has no ‘core principles’ of his
own; rather he merely responds to the wants and desires of others. He makes
himself into a kind of servant of the illusions and conceits of the people
he aims to please.
Call these, then, the “three D’s” of
a flatterer: deceptive, dangerous, and derivative.
Now someone today who was confronted
with this distinction between a friend and a flatterer might reasonably
raise an objection. “This notion of a flatterer,” he might say, in response,
“has no real application today. Yes, there are some odd characters who fit
the description, but generally most people try to be genuine with others. To
be sure, there is such a thing as ‘flattery’—and everyone engages in it from
time to time--but it’s relatively rare, and it’s easy to spot. On the other
hand, there are not very many people who build their whole identity, their
entire character, around the practice of flattering others. Maybe young
adults need to be careful of fawning and flattering friends, but not mature
adults.”
There is some truth to this
objection. It is true that there are relatively few personality types who
can obviously be set aside and avoided as flatterers. But flattery takes
deceptive forms and is perhaps more common than the objection allows. We can
distinguish in fact four modern types of flatterer: the Chameleon; the Tolerator; the Validator; and the Surface Skater.
The Chameleon, just like the lizard
by that name, changes his appearance to match his environment. Among
liberals, he is a liberal; with conservatives, he voices conservative
opinions. If he happens to be a religious fellow, he will not let this show
among non-believers. Many times in a single day he can change radically the
things he says, and he is not disturbed by the appearance of contradiction.
He is very hard to get to know, and almost impossible to befriend, because
one can hardly determine what he really thinks. Out of a kind of weakness,
or lack of self-assurance, his first impulse is always to agree. If,
therefore, you challenge him as to whether a particular statement really
reflects his own view, he’ll come to doubt it himself, and agree with you
that maybe it does not.
Yet the Chameleon is deceptive,
because in fact he has very strong opinions, which, surging inside him, can
acquire at times an irrational force, because he never brings them out and
tests them in debates with others. The Chameleon is therefore a
passive-aggressive character, superficially agreeable, but deep-down hostile
to many of those who think they are on good terms with him. His hidden
hostility makes him prone to betray or undercut precisely those he has just
agreed with: in fact, he finds himself resenting others for their opinions,
because he cannot help agreeing with them, against his own judgment. The
ancient thinkers would have counted such a character as a flatterer, and
clearly he satisfies the three D’s: his true opinions remain deceptively
hidden; but these lurk dangerously below the surface; and his views are
simply derived from his surroundings.
The Tolerator makes tolerance his
highest principle; his one goal is to tolerate everyone—except, of course,
the intolerant. But “the intolerant” end up being those who believe that
some things are objectively right, and others are objectively wrong. People
like that will of course “intolerantly” reject and dismiss what they regard
as wrong. So, although, the Tolerator thinks of himself as universally
agreeable, in practice he divides up the world into two camps, and he can
get along with members of only the one camp—people who, like himself, won’t
insist on objective goods and bads. Yet these are just those persons who are
incapable of being true friends (since they can neither know nor seek your
real good). So the Tolerator, curiously, is caught in a practical
contradiction: he aims to be friendly only towards those who are incapable
of being real friends with others.
The Tolerator takes a principle
originally meant to be observed in limited political contexts—tolerance
among people who make different claims about revealed religion—and aims to
erect it into a general rule for human relationships. He does so, because he
wants to be on good terms with everyone (and he wonders why some people are
so obtuse as not to do the same). But to aim to be on good terms with
everyone--automatically, without anyone undergoing fundamental change, and
without anyone’s views or commitments being set apart as wrong--is itself a
posture of flattery. His vain hope is to please all of the people, all of
the time. The Tolerator is consequently deceptive, because he cannot sustain
the impartiality he says that he says that he adopts; he is dangerous,
because his intolerance towards people with real principles lacks principled
limits; and he is derivative, too, because in the end he stands for nothing.
We may sum up the Tolerator by saying that he aims, impossibly, to flatter
all other flatterers like himself.
The Validator is yet a third species
of modern flatterer. Whereas the Tolerator takes a political principle and
tries to make it universal, the Validator takes a private way of acting and
makes it the mode of all relationships. He is, above all, affirming, like a
mother who affirms and consoles the hurt feelings of her child. He thinks he
does good for others precisely by affirming whatever they say. His
friendliness is like the warm, gushy embrace of a mom—no questions asked, no
accusations, no judgments. For him, the Worst Offense is to be ‘judgmental’
towards another, which means: thinking badly of something they have said, or
done. Naturally, many times people will say or do things that the Validator,
in advance, would have disagreed with. In that case, he will either change
what he thinks, like the Chameleon, or he will embrace relativism, much like
the Tolerator. “I validate what you say. It is true for you, as the opposite
view is true for someone me.” The Validator, then, clearly has all of the
marks of the flatterer.
But perhaps the most common flatterer of our time is
the Surface Skater. Even in the ancient world, it was recognized that some
of the most effective flatterers worked by subtly changing the subject. Was
an unpleasant thought going to occur to his ‘friend’? Then turn his mind to
something positive. Was he perhaps going to dwell on some disparaging thing
that an enemy had said the other day? Then start talking to him about his
good traits, and the various good things that people had said recently.
The Surface Skater of today is very much like
that. He studiously avoids every important, or ‘heavy’ subject, since these
can bring along with them disagreement, or self-recrimination, or judgments.
He especially wishes to avoid any suggestion that anyone he talks with has
ever done anything wrong. Hence his big contribution to friendship, as he
conceives it, is always to change the conversation to something light: to
shopping instead of justice; movies instead of morality; car maintenance
instead of soul maintenance; sports teams instead of family issues. If every
one leaves a family gathering with full bellies, having talked only about
the most fatuous trivialities, he figures that the very best in human
association has been achieved. He can have lunch or coffee with you every
day for ten years, and he’ll never want to go deeper.
The Surface Skater is a classic
flatterer, because he is concerned that people feel good, not that they are
good. His deceptiveness is like that of a life filled with distractions; his
dangerousness consists in keeping people from serious self-reflection; his
derivativeness comes from his being essentially a creature of the media. The
media, in fact, could hardly exert any bad influence on society, if there
were no Surface Skaters, whose function it was to bring the media
incessantly into private conversations.
So we see, then, that, far from being uncommon, the flatterer represents, perhaps, the standard mode of associating in modern society. Alas, we are generally content with the semblance of friendship, rather than friendship itself. If, then, we aim to revive the practice of friendship, the first thing we must do is to recognize that we live enmeshed in a web of flattery. The first step in coming to acquire knowledge, Socrates once said, is to know that you do not know. The first step in acquiring friends, it would seem, is to recognize that, perhaps, you have no friends. And we can recognize this, once we learn how to tell a flatterer from a friend.
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