On Avoiding True Friends

One thing I receive periodically in the mail that I have grown to appreciate is a print edition of Sword & Spade, a publication of Fraternus, a Catholic apostolate dedicated to mentoring boys into virtuous Catholic men. Fraternus was founded by Jason Craig, who runs father/son retreats at his St. Joseph's Farm in South Carolina. My son is a couple years too young for the retreats, but I've connected with Jason a few times on the phone and he's a genuine guy who much prefers real life encounters and getting dirt under his finger nails to the mirage of social media presence.  

One of the articles in the magazine this month was "Talking At Each Other" by Tommy Killackey, who  touches on something important on the topic of friendship:

"Friendships of virtue, by contrast, require a much deeper commitment and investment than those of utility of pleasure. The facade of the screen might not just limit things like physical encounter, but it also helps us avoid the vulnerability required of true friendship. [Roger] Scruton [in Confessions of a Heretic] again helps us here:

"By placing a screen between yourself and the friend, while retaining ultimate control over what appears on that screen, you also hide from the real encounter--forbidding to the other the power and freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature and to call on you here and now to take responsibility for yourself and for him" (Scruton, 96).

Put simply, intimacy and control cannot coexist. Social media always renders us in complete control, and whether we choose to click, scroll, watch, reply, like, or close our tab, we individually always have the power within our fingertips. Scruton goes on to say, 

"Risk avoidance in human relations means the avoidance of accountability, the refusal to stand judged in another's eyes, to come face to face with another person, to live yourself in whatever measure to him or her, and so to run the risk of rejection" (Ibid, 108). 

We might call this Scruton's warning against the risk of avoiding risk. The "risky" friendships that "call us out of ourselves [to] take up our crosses" were not built online, nor could they exist there exclusively. We may still interact online, but the soul of virtuous friendship where we risk encountering another can only occur offline. 

Friendships of utility may exist on LinkedIn, friendships of pleasure may exist in double-tapping our friend's latest post on Instagram, but as long as we maintain perfect control over the encounter, we cannot truly share life, encounter, risk, accompany, and be with anyone behind a screen, full stop."

I think this is what I find social media so offensive: I value friendship so much, and online "friendships" are a kind of counterfeit for the reasons outlined above (that we may not even be cognizant of). Even in high school (before social media existed), before my conversion, I had such high regard for true friendships that never seemed to hit the mark, and always left me disappointed and disillusioned. As the author notes, "intimacy and control cannot coexist [and] social media always renders us in complete control." What we are left with, then, is utility but a lack of intimacy. And we wonder why we are such a lonely society.