I've a piece in USA Today. A taster:

Yet we know that less is more when it comes to deeper relationships. It is lonely in the crowd. A connection may only be a click away, but cultivating a good friendship takes more. It seems common sense to conclude that "friending" online nurtures shallow relationships — as the neologism "friending" itself implies.

A piece on The School of Life blog about internet friendships. A taster:

'For the really good friend is the person who can say the really difficult thing to you, and thereby change your life, or at least shatter a delusion or two. But you need to be able to see the compassion in their eyes to accept it, which is why the stab must come from the front: we communicate with our eyes, mouths, posture and presence as well as with words. On the internet, there are plenty of people who would stab you in the back, as they hide behind their anonymity and physical distance from you. But that is not much use to you, or them.'

My written contribution to Citizen Ethics is up on the Guardian site. A taster:

'In short, friendship tells us that we are not billiard balls that collide and rebound. Neither are we like drops in the ocean, which lose their identity as they dissolve. Rather, we are a fine suspension of one another, in each other. We are dependent and independent. The good life, witnessed to by friendship, arises from both principles.'

Heard of Dunbar's number? You're likely to soon, as the evolutionary anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, has a new book out, How Many Friends Does One Person Need? It's 150, and it's the typical size social groups should be, based upon the size of the human neocortex. Moreover, it apparently turns out that the number 150 is about the size of certain social groupings, from medieval villages to Roman cohorts. Maybe - though I note my dictionary says cohorts were between 300-600. Also, Dunbar's number has been defined as a limit on the number of 'stable relationships' any one person can maintain, when here in the UK, at least, I maintain stable relationships with about 60 million others. It's called democracy. One does wonder whether the number means anything at all.

But that aside, it's worth asking this: why is the number so compelling, particularly in relation to friendship?

After all, what would be surprising is if Dunbar's number was, say, 15 or 1500, and yet still groups were around 150. That would require an explanation. But that a bit of the brain seems about the right size for the life we actually lead is like observing that hands are about the right size for writing.

The thing that worries me is the instrumental approach to friendship the number nurtures. From being an evolutionary aside, almost a tautology, it has become a prescription - as the title of the book reveals: you need 150 friends.

Quantity is a perfectly sensible question to ask when buying apples at the supermarket. But we have a different relationship with people. They are I-Thou relationships, as Buber put it, not I-It, as the quantitative assessment makes them. Turn an I-Thou into an I-It, and you kill friendship stone dead. It's love by cost-benefit analysis; agony aunt advice from accountants. My friends are the service providers in my optimized life. Better go out and get them.

I've not actually read the new book as yet, so maybe I should lighten up. Perhaps it comes with a health warning. The trouble is that ostensibly at least, it's treating human beings as machines, the brain as a computer - and that is a pervasive hermeneutic in contemporary culture. As Iain McGilchrist notes, neuroscience has got stuck on the question of what the brain does - a dysfunctional, left-hemisphere-dominant mindset. The worry is that everyone else gets stuck in that mindset too.

For staying with the issue of friendship, it's clearly the case that everyone likes to be useful to their friends. But feeling that you are being used in a friendship is something very different - the first sign of its terminal decline. Perhaps the number should be renamed Dunbar's killing friendship fact.

The Times yesterday ran a feature, 10 tips to improve your friendships. I offered two - take a step back, and honesty is sometimes the best policy.

Sadly, for me at least, the subs took their scissors to my carefully measured words. So now, exclusive to readers of this blog - and at the risk of sounding like I've riffled through Lord Goldsmith's draws - here's the advice in full.

1. Honesty. One of the key joys of close friendship is knowing someone well and being known well by them. That is why friends love to talk, since talking is one of the best ways to get to know someone. However, talking requires honesty, at least some of the time. 'An honest answer is the sign of true friendship,' it says in Proverbs. So sometimes, for the sake of a better friendship, friends have to risk speaking honestly with one another, in spite of the risks.

2. Timing. What is also true of friendship, though, is that there can be a good and a bad time to be honest. To put it another way, you simply have to spend time with others to become good friends with them. That's partly because you need to share experiences. But it is also so you are there when the right moment comes - when you can offer that word of criticism and it can be accepted in the loving way it was meant. 'A true friend stabs you in the front', thought Oscar Wilde, and I don't think he meant it entirely negatively: a stab in the front can change a life, and perhaps for the good.

3. Patience. But honesty and timing require patience too, another key ingredient. 'The desire for friendship comes quickly, friendship does not,' observed Aristotle. So why should we be patient with friends, even when they are annoying? Because we hope that they will be patient with us, when the time comes. Everyone has periods in which they are not very good at being a friend to their friends. So when your friend is not being a good friend to you, remember that the same will apply to you, sooner or later!

There's a great new podcast discussion of friendship at Philosophy Bites with Alexander Nehamas. Three big questions he addresses:

1. Why has philosophy not taken much notice of friendship recently? Because friendship is all about the particular - you love a particular friend as a unique person; whereas philosophy has tended to privilege the general or universal, as in Kant's categorical imperative, or at least it has done recently. So a friend is more like a work of art than a part of an ethical life, and equally as valuable.

2. Why does friendship matter so much in life? Because it is with a friend that you become someone - the idea being that your friends make you who you are, and vice versa. This is why people fall out of friendship too, and why that can be so painful: it is saying I don't like the person you have become and I don't like the person I have become with you.

3. Isn't friendship just selfish? Clearly, in friendship, you receive much, but you can give much too. And anyway, the selfless/selfish distinction tends to dissolve, or at least not become the central question, if you take seriously the idea that we become who we are amidst all the contingencies of friendships, not as autonomous individuals.

Yesterday I went to a joyous civil partnership. (Such ceremonies have been around in the UK for only a couple of years, and for the years before that the idea of them seemed all but impossible. And yet, already they feel like part and parcel of the normal celebration of love and life.)

There was a reading from Cicero's De Amicitia (On Friendship), that I can commend to you. You might even want to use it yourself!

As for myself, I can only exhort you to look on Friendship as the most valuable of all human possessions, no other being equally suited to the moral nature of man, or so applicable to every state and circumstance, whether of prosperity or adversity, in which he can possibly be placed...

Whoever is in possession of a true friend sees the exact counterpart of his own soul. In consequence of this moral resemblance between them, they are so intimately one that no advantage can attend either which does not equally communicate itself to both; they are strong in the strength, rich in the opulence, and powerful in the power of each other. They can scarcely, indeed, be considered in any respect as separate individuals, and wherever the one appears the other is virtually present.

I will venture even a bolder assertion, and affirm that in despite of death they must both continue to exist so long as either of them shall remain alive; for the deceased may, in a certain sense, be said still to live whose memory is preserved with the highest veneration and the most tender regret in the bosom of the survivor, a circumstance which renders the former happy in death, and the latter honoured in life.

The excellent Philosophy Bites - podcasts on bite-sized philosophical subjects - has just posted an episode on friendship with yours truly.

What is friendship? Can Philosophy help us understand friendship? Mark Vernon, author of The Philosophy of Friendship discusses these questions in this episode of Philosophy Bites.

You can listen to it here.

This review of 'Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love' by Liz Carmichael, Continuum (2004), will be in the next issue of the journal Theology and Sexuality.

The debate leading up to the formation, in 2005, of the new institution of civil partnerships in the UK was marked by much of the prejudice that might be expected when the rights of gay men and women are discussed, not least from Christian circles. However, one line of concern was, perhaps, surprising. Roughly, the argument went that formalising same-sex relationships would be a threat to the family because it would put a relationship whose essential natural was one of friendship, namely civil partnerships, on a par with a relationship whose essential natural was one of marriage. The fear seemed to be that friendship is a love characterised by a private intimacy with another individual and no necessary concern for the world at large, whereas marriage is a public institution in which the desires of two people are put to good social use, as it were, in forming families.

The perception that friendship is essentially selfish (being focused solely on the gratification of the friends) and particular (being enjoyed voluntarily by two or more people and implicitly excluding others) is one that runs across the Christian tradition. Kierkegaard caught the heart of the objection when he wrote: ‘Christian love teaches love of all men, unconditionally all.’ The commandment is to love your neighbour, not your friend, neighbour-love being utterly different in kind: it abhors the idea that individuals can be united in a single self ??" the ideal of friendship celebrated by philosophers since Aristotle. God’s love is as unlike friendship as universal care is to favouring intimates and selfless giving is to self-interested give and take.

In a rich study of the Western tradition, that leaves virtually no stone unturned, Liz Carmichael seeks to present a positive theology of friendship that values it as nothing less than the agapeic love of God. She includes discussions of Augustine, Aquinas and Aelred as might be expected, alongside early modern writers and contemporary feminist theologians whose ideas on the subject might be less familiar. Many scholars have argued that Christianity has cast friendship in shadow. But Carmichael offers a take on the tradition that whilst noting its frequent ambivalences on the subject, nonetheless contains the grounds for an uncompromising affirmation. ‘God reveals what friendship is,’ she writes. ‘In Christ our whole being becomes aligned with the universal friendship-love of God. Unity in such friendship is sacramental, an icon of the transcendent presence of God the Trinity.’

Moreover, the teaching of Jesus, particularly as found in the writings of John, led to a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the understanding of friendship that overcame the limitations inherent in ancient Greek and Roman philosophies. Though the ancients put great store on amity, it was, according to Carmichael, essentially limited to a relationship between equals, sharing a love that even great minds like Aristotle could not quite name. Friendship was transfigured by Christ’s actions, named agape, and as Aelred pondered in the medieval period, might now be close to being identified with the love of God.

Honouring friendship is a noble goal. In the modern world, perhaps most people would aspire to call their closest relationships by its name, and many Christians would hope to enjoy a friendship with God. However, I believe that the challenge to friendship that exists in the Christian tradition is more profound than Carmichael allows.

Part of her strategy is subtly but negatively to contrast the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans with that of the Christian period, implying that there is a momentum behind the unequivocal validation of friendship which is still progressively being worked out. However, Christian theologians were not as revolutionary as she suggests, and so it could be argued that the followers of Jesus represent a backward step for friendship rather than a move forward. For example, against the conventions of his day, though along with other ‘axial figures’, Socrates taught that people should not return one wrong with another wrong and that good people will always do good to others regardless of whether they are friend or foe. The commandment to love your enemy, one component in Carmichael’s claim that friendship is enlarged within the Christian frame, is therefore not so innovative a feature of Jesus’ teaching as she hopes.

Alternatively, Carmichael makes much of what she claims was Aristotle’s inability to find a word for friendship; according to her, it only finally came with the Christian adoption of the word agape. This thought would surprise most classical scholars. Aristotle certainly recognised that friendship embraces many different qualities of relationship, from soulmates who regard their friends as nothing less than ‘another self’, to wider relationships in families, business and the city-state. But he had a perfectly good word for it, philia, though it could be used in quite as many different contexts as our word today ??" like our word ‘love’ too, for that matter.

The downgrading of the Greek conceptions of friendship causes Carmichael to overlook insights that would, in fact, serve her main cause well. Consider Aristotle’s idea of the friend as ‘another self’ (heteros autos). The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has drawn attention to the importance of this expression for Aristotle . In short, he believes that Aristotle was arguing that friendship with another was constitutive of an individual’s own subjectivity: someone comes to a full awareness of their existence only as they become aware of the existence of their close friend. Agamben explains, ‘The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in self-ness, a becoming other of the self.’ Such a dynamic puts friendship in primary place in any account of human flourishing.

Having said that, Aristotle was more sceptical about the possibility of friendship with God. But even here, a nuanced reading suggests that the Christian idea of friendship with God is less radically different than it might first seem. For along with Plato, Aristotle affords friendship a core role in the practice of philosophy. This is because the virtues necessary for the pursuit of a philosophical way of life are the same as the virtues cultivated in friendship ??" virtues like honesty and, more importantly, a love of that which is good. The philosopher longs to know the good (know in the sense of ‘I know that feeling’ rather than just ‘I know that tune’); that is, the philosopher’s goal is to share in divine life by becoming good. Friendship for these Greeks could, therefore, be defined as the love that longs to know another and be known by them. When the good is identified with divinity, as it is in Aristotle, friendship with God begins to make more sense. Hence Aristotle concludes towards the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, that a life assimilated to the immortals is the happiest ??" an understanding that Thomas Aquinas adopts when he writes: ‘Charity I call a movement of the soul towards enjoying God for his own sake,’ not forgetting that he saw charity as primarily a movement of God’s grace.

So much for the relationship between ancient Greek and Christian conceptions of friendship. But where does the challenge to friendship lie in the Christian tradition? First, I think that Carmichael minimises the ambivalence that Augustine felt about friendship, even friendship between Christians who should trust each other because they know, first, of the love of God. In The City of God, Augustine argues that friendship can never be free since friends will always let you down, unlike God. For this reason, he goes so far as to rejoice when a friend dies since that stops the risk that the friend will betray him. As his modern biographer, Peter Brown, has put it, friendship became, for Augustine, ‘the silent tragedy’ of his later life. Coming from such a major theologian in the Christian tradition, this cannot but help be a substantial problem for the appreciation of friendship. (That the Pope in his recent encyclical, ‘God is Love’, only mentions friendship a couple of times and then just in passing is, I think, another reflection of this legacy.)

I referred to Kierkegaard’s concerns above. Kant, too, has some that are similar. For him, friendship is always compromised because it is always, to a degree, caught up with selfishness. ‘Friendship develops the minor virtues of life,’ he luke-warmly concludes in a lecture he wrote on the subject, having already said: ‘Friendship is not of heaven but of the earth; the complete moral perfection of heaven must be universal; but friendship is not universal; it is a peculiar association of specific persons; it is man’s refuge in this world from his distrust of his fellows, in which he can reveal his dispositions to another and enter into communion with him.’

‘It is no wonder that friendship has been relegated to private life and thereby weakened in comparison to what it once was,’ muses Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. Kant is not the last word on Christian theology, of course, or even the first. But his attitude towards friendship is derived from the same tradition that Carmichael aims to redeem. Aelred and Aquinas, along with the ancient philosophers I would argue, go a long way towards providing resources for that task. But I suspect it might be a better strategy to argue for the centrality of friendship over and against those parts of the Christian tradition that do not support it, rather than to argue them away.

Returning again to the promise and perils of online social networking, I've penned a piece for the online warm up to the Battle of Ideas weekend, which is in a week's time, 27-28th October.

The philosophical meat, such as it is, is perhaps in these four, central paragraphs:

Think of it this way: at the beginning of the sixteenth century, on the eve of modernity, Copernicus showed some friends a little notebook. In it he had sketched out his reasons for thinking that the Earth was not at the fixed centre of the universe but rather that it revolves around the sun. This heliocentrism sparked a revolution in thought, for which Galileo famously paid the price. Today, this change in thinking is typically taken as emblematic of scientific progress… which it is. But it has another facet too.

After Copernicus, our planetary home had no significant place in the heavens. It moves continually, randomly through space. This freedom of the Earth to move amongst the stars, as it were, can be seen as a model for our own liberation. Thus, being tied to a particular place seems unbearably constraining; being forced to follow an allotted course in life dangerously undemocratic. Instead, the ability to change is synonymous with freedom; individual choice is crucial to being human.

Now consider the internet again. This infinity of virtual space is one where new ‘stuff’ is routinely heralded as ‘liberating’ and ‘freeing’. Never mind that we can no more make sense of the welter of information with which it presents us than we can see into a black hole. This contemporary celebration of de-centredness is a quintessentially post-Copernican response. It would have been inconceivable before the revolution.

What has this to do with online friendship? Well, striking here is how the great modern writers on friendship depicted their soul mates and kindred spirits. Typically, they are presented as a refuge against the alienation that so much freedom may bring; as a consolation in the face of isolation. ‘When the ways of friends converge, the whole world looks like home for an hour’, wrote Hermann Hesse. ‘It is not wrong to want to be happy, but it is wrong to want to be happy all alone’, judged Albert Camus of the modern condition. ‘I hate the prostitutions of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances’, opined Ralph Waldo Emerson on the shallowness of mere networking.

Clearly, the internet can be a great boon to friendship. But don't let that cloud the risks.