Delphic Maxim 28: Be kind to friends
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
28. Be kind to friends
We’re back in obvious land, you might think, and also reminded of that continuously recurring theme of ‘friendship’. It reminds me, actually, of the tapestry down in the Australian National Museum in Canberra — the crimson thread of kinship. In this beautiful narrative of Australia’s history, there is a single red thread running through all of it — the thread of kinship that ties one person to another, families and friends in the generational journey of life. The thread weaves and ducks through stories and settings which are colourful, different and rich, in order to paint a picture (or weave a tapestry) that captures the complexity and richness of life. I want to follow that thread in a weird loop for today’s maxim, since the point has been made before and I want to make it in a different way today.
On Q&A on the ABC this Monday just gone, Jordan Peterson — the writer of 12 Rules for Life, a book to which this Delphic Maxims project is in part a response — was on the panel. He went through his usual shtick: life is a struggle, we should take more personal responsibility, clean your room, collective action is inappropriate if you haven’t first got your own life in order. The thing about Peterson is that the trivial and obvious observations he makes are often his most penetrating and worthwhile (for example, clean your room, stand up straight, build resilience). When he gets angry, he becomes incoherent and careless with his arguments — either not responding to the nuance and detail of the point put forward by an opponent, or getting sulky, shouty and opinionated.
Now there’s nothing wrong with being opinionated per se, except when those opinions are represented as some kind of fact supported by empirical or logical evidence. Peterson in angry, emotional, insulted flight tends to declare the things that he ‘doesn’t like’, and makes sweeping generalisations about history, rather than focus on detailed arguments and support them with sensible evidence. At his most dangerous, of course, is when he takes his more trivial observations — clean your bedroom — and then broadens them to a baseless political argument. For instance, on Monday he argued that ‘most’ activists going out protesting contemporary issues (climate change, unequal wealth distribution, inter-generational disadvantage, wage/job insecurity, etc) were using these protests to ‘virtue signal’ and ‘feel good about themselves’, and that they were doing it to alleviate their own responsibility for cleaning up their own lives.
This is plainly quite silly. It’s impossible to know the situation en masse of all the people involved in protest movements, or to impute particular personal motivations to hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps some are protesting to avoid their own issues, but there are plenty of ways to do that other than political activism around legitimate concerns. Because there are economic issues facing our society, and particularly younger generations, and to dismiss attempts to redress those systemic issues because people have messy bedrooms is asinine. Or arrogant. Or deeply, deeply cynical.
Peterson explains often that human existence is riven with suffering and struggle, and in many ways he might be right. But here is where I think today’s maxim serves as a corrective. Our collective efforts strengthen us — we draw on friends not only when our interests align, but also for love, support and the pure pleasure of time spent with those we enjoy. For a man so concerned with the Stoic ethic, Peterson downplays the degree to which the Stoics regarded friendship as an important part of life. I don’t doubt that Peterson would also consider friendship important — but an intrinsic part of the notion of friendship is that we are all in this together.
Be kind to your friends, because the support of a community is more powerful for the individual than relying on yourself alone. That doesn’t diminish your personal responsibility — if anything it strengthens it because you are responsible for yourself, and yourself within a broader network of friends. We are bound to each other by that crimson thread of kinship — the thread is strengthened by each of us, and each of us is strengthened by the other.
