The last two posts in this space have focused on friendship. Why? Because friendship is the chief of Earthly values. 

Not truth. Truth is fickle. You labor and strive to arrive at truth; you find it; you latch on and cleave to it for dear life; you tell yourself IT REALLY IS THE TRUTH! Then some bloke comes along with a different truth. Not only different but incompatible. His truth and your truth cannot both be true. Only one can be true, therefore the other must be false.

Now you’re on the horns of a dilemma. Choose Horn One, and you must gird for battle: work up all the energy, wit, and stamina you possess: wage ideological warfare until long after all the cows are safely tucked in bed. You invest gigawatts of energy just maintaining an unshakable conviction of your truth, not to mention the energy it takes to beat your foe about the head and shoulders with it. At this point, Dear Reader, you’re thinking, “Gosh darn it all, I know what’s true and what’s not, but I didn’t sign up for this!”

Choose Horn Two, and you must cave in; just admit the other guy is right. Whew! What a relief. You avoid all the exertion, as well as the hazard of indefensible wrongness. But if you concede at the outset, why did you spend all that time and energy constructing your truth to begin with?

Entropy is breathing down your neck, Gentle Reader. Truth is fickle. Friendship is not. 

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We are social animals. We live in a web of relationships. To navigate for a week or a lifetime, you need friends. You need folks who treat you with respect and affection, people you in turn like and respect. Friendship is the sine qua non of human existence. 

It’s the most essential essential. 

Making friends is a skill. Keeping friends is a related, yet distinct, skill. 

A bit of humility goes a long way. Have you ever noticed those who need to be right all the time, those who are loudest in their inflexibilty, and those who need to be the star of the show, have few friends? Their skills do not include the friendship ones.

Facebook says I have 914 friends today. “Oh . . . Facebook friends,” you say. Yes, but I’m not promiscuous online. I don’t just friend anybody I see on Facebook. I estimate at least 8/9 of those Facebook friends are people I know in real life. Folks I would recognize on the street. People I like and who presumably like me, at least well enough to be Facebook friends. They’re not all bosom buddies, I grant. Some are mere acquaintances. But a lot of them are real, durable friends. More than a couple dozen of them are really, really close friends. And I have a lot of friends who aren’t even on Facebook.

Friendship is solid. It’s constant. It partakes of those qualities Shakespeare attributed to love:

“It is an ever-fixéd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

Of course friendship can go sour, but I advise going to great lengths to prevent it.

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“So, let me get this straight, O New Favorite Writer. Are you saying friendship is the cardinal virtue?”

Yes.

“Well, what about honor? Isn’t honor greater than friendship?” 

Honor has different definitions. It’s understood in a derivative sense. 

If honor, in your view of things, is a function of truth—if you must be right to be honorable—then honor is just as fickle as truth. 

If honor is what I think it means: Being honest and upright, having integrity, being a mensch—if that’s what it is, then it includes loyalty in the deepest sense; that is, loyalty to a friend’s best self and highest interests.

That’s not something greater than friendship. It is friendship. 

May I tell you a secret? I’ve always been conservative. Even long ago when I was liberal, I was conservative. 

Now, in all honesty, Dear Reader, most of my friends are liberals. I also have lots of conservative friends. 

I don’t talk politics with my friends, nor do I talk politics with my non-friends. There is no point.

I know what I believe to be true; but whatever the truth may be, I’ve still got friends. 

The world keeps getting older. You can’t have too many friends.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer