The puzzle of friendship

In the recent fracas over the career of Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson, a journalist knocked on his fellow presenter James May’s door.

Faced with a microphone and camera, May uttered these words:

“I've said many times before, the man is a knob. But I quite like him.”

He may not ever have said more profound words. Because May names in this pair of sentences a very human puzzle. Why is it that we are patient with the flaws of one person, and completely intolerant of the same flaws in someone else? I have friends that are vain, unreliable, dogmatic, ambitious, workaholic, hold political and theological views I think are appalling, not always truthful, moody, bad-tempered, and that drink too much.

But I quite like them.

And I am sure I am many of these things, and I have friends who quite like me anyway.

There are other people who cannot do any right in my eyes , because they are vain, unreliable, etc….

With them, I tend to interpret their actions, which may be trivial in and of themselves, in the light of the negative feelings I have towards them. 

I am at a loss to explain this entirely. But maybe that's the point: we make the decision about who we like not on the basis of a rational evaluation of virtues and vices. We just mysteriously ‘click’ with some people, and not with others, and then find ourselves rationalising our ‘clicking’ in terms of a narrative of their actions that fits with our feelings of either bonhomie or enmity.

A friend of mine, a fellow pastor, suggested a more causal explanation:

“The tendency is to like those who like us, to like those who offer us least harm, and to like those who benefit us. In that order probably.”

Perhaps that explains the May/Clarkson case. James May is prepared to tolerate Jeremy Clarkson’s foibles because he benefitted a great deal from their partnership, even if that is not a conscious (and therefore cynical) calculation on his part.

But the moral complication of this is evident, too. To like someone while at the same time acknowledging their faults is not far from overlooking or excusing their faults. It is a bad habit that human beings have, that we are prepared to excuse great evil on the grounds of ‘mateship’. To be a friend and still say ‘no’ to misbehaviour is tightrope than many of us find too hard to walk.

Which is why the bond of friendship must not become for us a totalising context of virtue. We must seek something outside the friendship as a reference point for us, since we know how easy it is for our affection to blind us. A bully gets away with it time and again, because his friends don’t experience it as bullying and because his bullying actually benefits his friends. 

On the other side: our irritation at the same behaviour in one person that we forgive in another may often arise because they represent a threat or a challenge to us. Which is means that those we dislike may ultimately perform us a real service (unintentionally!), since they are a diagnosis of our fears and insecurities. The person you dislike is mirroring something of your own inner self back to you.  And it is better to ask what that is, than to seek to change the other person.

Jesus of Nazareth urged his disciples to ‘Love your enemies’. This is possible the most irritating and most difficult challenge laid down in the gospels. To love one’s friends, is after all, not especially virtuous, since they love you.

But to love those who bore you, or who annoy you, or even outright hurt you would be to do something remarkable and sadly rare. At the same time, it is a piece of realism, because to say ‘love your enemies’ is to say ‘yes, there’ll be people with whom I am at odds, sometimes deeply. Yet I can still love them.

And the corollary of loving your enemies, despite their faults, is that true friendship is not blind to the faults of the friend, even if it forgives them. A friend tells the truth.

I sincerely hope that James May tells Jeremy Clarkson that he has been a knob, and doesn’t excuse him for his knob-like behaviour, even though he likes him.