The puzzle of friendship

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.