Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2016 book.

Patrick Baert writes:

* My underlying thread is that intellectuals, including public intellectuals, are constantly involved in various forms of positioning and, crucially, that new societal conditions encourage novel forms of positioning while discouraging others.

* Authoritative public intellectuals thrive in a very particular setting. They thrive in societies in which a significant section of the population values intellectual life and in which nevertheless the cultural and intellectual capital is concentrated within a small elite. They thrive in a hierarchical educational context, with “hierarchical” referring to a clear distinction not only between elite institutions and other higher education establishments but also between high- and low-status disciplines. They can exist independently of academic appointments because of independent resources, gained from family wealth or successful exploitation of the media of the time (book-writing and print journalism in the first half of the twentieth century, broadcasting in the second half and beyond). They tend to surface when the academic setting is more amorphous, with limited specialization, and especially when the social sciences are poorly professionalized. It is in this very specific context that authoritative public intellectuals like Sartre and Russell have a field day. Steeped in highprofile disciples like philosophy and mathematics and with the confidence of the right habitus and an elite education, they can speak to a wide range of social and political issues without being criticized for dilettantism. The early part of the twentieth century, especially in parts of Europe, fits this ideal type remarkably well. It was the era of the philosopher as public intellectual.

What has changed since? First, philosophy has lost to a certain extent its previous intellectual dominance. This is partly due to the rise, during the latter part of the twentieth century, of various philosophical currents, such as postmodernism and neopragmatism, which questioned, if not undermined, the erstwhile superiority of philosophy over other vocabularies. Within the Anglo-Saxon context, Rorty and Richard Bernstein epitomize this strand, advocating Gadamerian hermeneutics and Dewey’s pragmatism over epistemology.10 But besides the developments within philosophy itself, other factors also came into play. The social sciences have emerged as a significant force and have professionalized, making it more difficult for philosophers or others without appropriate training and expertise in the social sciences to make authoritative claims about the nature of the social and political world without being challenged. Massive expansion of the ranks of professional social scientists means there are now lifelong specialists in the areas that public intellectuals used to comment on who are better placed to contest such “generalist” interventions as uninformed and superficial.

* Second, with high educational levels for larger sections of society, the erstwhile distinction between an intellectual elite and the rest no longer holds to quite the same extent. With higher education also comes a growing skepticism towards epistemic and moral authority, an increasing recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and of the existence of alternative perspectives. Speaking from above and at their audience, as authoritative public intellectuals do, is no longer as acceptable as it used to be. Print and broadcasting media have become less deferential and more willing to challenge the statements of politicians and other public figures a process assisted by the arrival of journalists with higher education and subject specialism.

* If various societal forces have worked against the authoritative public intellectual, then what has emerged in its place? In the first instance, “expert public intellectuals” have come to the forefront. These are public intellectuals who draw on their professional knowledge, derived from their research in the social or natural sciences, to engage with wider societal or political issues that go beyond their narrow expertise.

* Social scientists, on other hand, are much better placed to act as expert public intellectuals, equipped as they are with well-rehearsed methods and specialized as they are in analyzing contemporary social and political phenomena…

* There is, second, the rise of what I would call the dialogical public intellectual. Contrary to both authoritative and expert public intellectuals, dialogical public intellectuals do not assume a superior stance towards their publics. Rather, they present themselves as equals to their publics, learning as much from them as vice versa…

* Philosophy, as practiced in the realm of the academy, has become quite removed from the rough and tumble of contemporary society. It is telling that in the current economic crisis very few philosophers have intervened in ways that have resonated with the wider public. This is, as I pointed out earlier, partly because, in the wake of the collapse of communism as a project with global aspirations, the general public has become more wary of theoretical schemes about what a future society should look like. But it is also partly because the way in which philosophers are being trained, especially within an Anglo-Saxon setting, is not really conducive to a critical and constructive engagement with issues that currently concern the wider public. In this context, philosophers are most likely to be successful in retaining a public profile when dealing with questions for which there is no obvious empirical resolution, including issues of faith or ethical choices.

* As one of the researchers on the new social media points out, the opposition of bloggers to journalism “is
raised largely by channelling the voice of the people” and offering “a more intimate, personal kind of authority in place of the impersonal authority of journalists. . . . What the bloggers asserted through use of readers’ messages was that there was no difference between themselves and their audience.”21 In this new context, a “democratic” form of positioning is more likely to provide intellectuals with the necessary credibility and to help the dissemination of their ideas. This strategic advantage of the dialogical public intellectual in the current constellation explains his or her recent rise in various domains. So the notion of positioning is a significant component of the story.

LAW PROFESSOR PAUL HORWITZ WRITES:

The Blogger as Public Intellectual

* Have the Internet and the blogosphere opened up new vistas for public intellectuals? And, if they have, do public intellectuals acting as bloggers operate any differently than do traditional public intellectuals taking advantage of other conventional communications media?

* Public intellectuals have benefited as much or more from the rise of other communications media, such as radio and television, as other speakers. But the blog, as a medium, offers some more or less unique benefits that those other media do not. Public intellectuals have certainly taken advantage of those benefits to open up “new vistas.”

* I would suggest that the ethic of the blog is made up of three core qualities: immediacy, connectivity, and feedback.

* Blogospheric norms encourage fairly quick reactions to current events—“hot takes,” as current lingo has it whether those events are occurring in one’s own life or across the world. A blogger who sits on an event or an idea risks having that idea or news item become stale. Staleness is especially problematic in a quickly moving environment with countless competitors, all of whom operate at relatively low cost and are equally capable of being accessed instantly by readers. The blogosphere is no place for an idle or contemplative writer. If you have more to say about something, you can always write a new post later. In the meantime, the race goes to the swiftest.

* Immediacy is no guarantee of depth. To the contrary, the faster one’s reactions, the less likely they are to contain any depth at all. Many blog posts, especially in light of the desire to be first to link to a new story, become simple “aggregation” posts: posts that do no more than link to a story or to commentary on other blogs, without adding any content other than the obligatory “Interesting” or “Read the whole thing.” The initial post may promise later posts offering more and deeper analysis, but such promises are often forgotten in the press of events or superseded by other developments.

* First, many public intellectuals blog about events that are not within their expertise, and will enjoy no particular advantage here. Second, although there will be times when genuine experts are quick to respond to an event with valuable analysis, there is no guarantee they will be any faster than an even larger number of nonexperts, who will be happy to bloviate with stunning rapidity on issues about which they know little or nothing. Third, intellectuals, no less than others, are often captive to their own priors and passions, especially when they are responding in real time. Finally, although some expert intellectuals are skilled at communicating to a general educated audience, others are not—and the nonexperts may be more eloquent or provocative, even (especially?) if they lack more than surface knowledge of the subject. The race for the attention of the blog-reading public goes not only to the swiftest but to the most readable. There is no guarantee that the winners will be the most thoughtful or expert writers. If anything, the ongoing academization of expertise makes this less likely to happen…

* Academic work encourages habits of mind, and especially habits of writing, that limit one’s audience to other academics, and generally other specialists within one’s own field. To become an academic is a time-consuming enterprise. It takes years to be credentialed as an academic, and still more to gain an academic reputation. Gaining that reputation generally requires the academic to write specifically for his or her peers, in a format that is not highly accessible, either in terms of style or content or, in straight physical and financial terms, in terms of the forum of publication; even in the Internet age, academic journals are expensive and hard to find for those who are not affiliated with a university. We write on narrow topics and write to be read and understood by the few, not the many.

* In sum, the blogosphere is unquestionably a boon for the would-be public intellectual. It serves as a counterweight to the “academization of intellectual output [that] created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals.” 71 It both offers room to the nonacademic public intellectual and lowers the opportunity costs of engaging in general public intellectual work by academics. It “democratizes the function of public intellectual,”
72 routing around the traditional gatekeepers and allowing a much wider range of people to make genuine contributions to a true dialogue. The narrative of public intellectuals in decline that was so much in vogue a mere decade or so ago is now in need of considerable revision.

* First, public intellectual blogging routinely involves a good deal of illegitimate trading on authority. Many academics are wrongly convinced that they are smart about everything, not just their own corner of their own subject. Although some carefully limit their public writing to their own area of academic specialization, many are eager to write about the same broad political and cultural subjects that all public intellectuals turn to. And in doing so, they are more than happy to flaunt their academic credentials, no matter how irrelevant they are to the subject at hand…

Second, public intellectuals, academic or otherwise, are as capable of being ruled by the passions of the moment as anyone else. The immediacy that is one of the core aspects of the ethic of blogging exacerbates those tendencies by removing even the slightest time for reflection and incentivizing them to write quickly. In the grip of their convictions, they are less likely to write with humility or to second-guess themselves, and more likely to make unnecessary predictions, adopt an unwarranted air of certainty, assume the worst of their opponents, and write with a hot tempered voice.

Third, although blogging public intellectuals are more likely to find a wider audience for their work,74 that audience is not necessarily going to be much more politically diverse…

To this, though, must be added the evanescence of the blogosphere.

* Lawyers possess most of the skills that are key to success in the blogosphere. (And legal academics possess not only lawyers’ skills but also some extra public intellectual chops—and, most importantly, a good deal of free time in which to blog.) Much of human activity and current events intersects with the law, so they never lack for a subject. Legal academics, even more so than social scientists, tend to be intellectual bricoleurs and parasites, borrowing tools and perspectives from whatever field of knowledge seems handy or trendy. The fast turnaround that the blogosphere prefers is made easier for the lawyer by their main skill, which is to engage in skillful, if often half-informed, logic chopping.

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Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (2015)

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Review: “In late 1980, an apparently minor dispute at Cambridge University became headline news. The question was whether or not the young lecturer Colin MacCabe – whose work was heavily influenced by recent developments in structuralist and post-structuralist theory – should be upgraded to a permanent position. And before long, as Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert put it in their short book Conflict in the Academy, the so-called ‘MacCabe Affair’ had ‘swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic significance,’ generating waves that are still felt in English faculties today.”

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book:

* Commonsensically, we tend to view social conflict as a dysfunctional, destructive, even pathological form of social interaction, harming individuals and groups through tearing the cohesive social fabric, and there is of course much to justify understanding disputes in this way. However, it is also clear, as Lewis Coser (1964) argued, that social conflict is able to serve a variety of productive social functions, such as allowing for the
communication of dissatisfactions, defining group boundaries, providing an impetus for more adequate forms of social organisation, and even increasing social integration, especially, of course, for in-group members. There is also evidence that once the ‘MacCabe Affair’ became public, social pressure increased for participants to take sides. In this sense rather than simply revealing pre-existing divisions, the controversy also acted to create and solidify them, strengthening and simplifying antagonistic identities.

* Public disputes, by their nature, garner attention, and as well as generating grist for the journalistic mill, that attention also enables participants to engage in what Norman Mailer called ‘advertisements for myself ’…

* MacCabe’s subsequent career – three years later he was Head of Production at the BFI, the following year, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and a little later, Professor of English at Exeter University – renders the notion of him as ‘victim’ somewhat of a misnomer, as he himself readily admits, the ‘ “MacCabe Affair” … enabled me to leave Cambridge trailing clouds of glory and an overinflated reputation’
(MacCabe, 2010a).

His academic writing also benefited from events; his publishers quickly cottoning on to the commercial value of what was described as ‘Cambridge’s worst academic controversy for a generation’ (Mulhern, 1981). With impressive speed, and only two weeks after the Senate House discussion, his publishers took out an advertisement in the TLS, daring potential customers with the explicitly allusive strapline ‘Controversial and Original: Three books by Colin MacCabe’ (Figure 2.1).

* In spite of this late start, after the Great War it [English Literature] began to develop very rapidly, eclipsing the Classics as the central humanities discipline, with the Cambridge School, characterised by its critical and analytical approach (in distinction to Oxford’s philological and scholarly one) playing a central role. The influential, zealous, bolshie, and highly opinionated F. R. Leavis was key in championing the essential importance of the discipline in Cambridge and beyond, and in establishing what arguably became the orthodox humanistic approach to analysing literature until at least the 1960s…

* In some quarters, the experiences of WWII had provoked suspicion towards this antebellum belief in the humanising forces of an education in English Literature, since, as Steiner pointed out, it was now impossible
to ignore how little humanistic acculturation had done to avert the barbarity of war. ‘We know now’, he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant’ (Steiner, 1967: ix). Forces of pluralism had also slowly battled their way into the study of English literature during the late 1960s and 1970s (Easthope, 1991), especially outside Oxbridge. In part this occurred through the arrival of a more socially diverse student and staff body and a broadening of the gaze of the discipline to include cultural creations that had traditionally been excluded from the narrow version of the canon that Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ (1980 [1948]) came to represent.

* The shift is expressed well by the novelist and literary professor Malcolm Bradbury in his description of his own career through English departments:

“During the 1950s, when I was a student, the dominant mood in the study of English literature was a moral and humane one; literary studies were the essential humanist subject … But with the expansion and hence the increased professionalisation of the subject, the tune changed: there was a hunger for literary science. By the 1960s, a volatile mixture of linguistics, psychoanalysis and semiotics, structuralism, Marxist theory, and reception aesthetics had begun to replace the older moral humanism. The literary text tended to move towards the status of phenomenon: a socio-psycho-culturo-linguistic and ideological event, arising from the offered competencies of language, the available taxonomies of narrative order, the permutations of genre, the sociological options of structural formation, the ideological constraints of the ‘infra-structure’.”

* the emergence of ‘Theory’ in English departments was not merely an import from abroad (most obviously from France), but (with notable exceptions, such as the work of Barthes) also an import from other disciplines,
in particular, the social and human sciences…

* Wider society had begun to turn away from poems, plays, and novels as their primary source of cultural expression and experience, and a certain minority of the Cambridge English Faculty were suggesting that those media to which their attention had increasingly been drawn could themselves be productively analysed in a similar manner to literature (even if the interest in this broader range of media within the Cambridge Faculty more generally extended nowhere near as far as other English departments elsewhere in the country). Heath, for example, was interested in cinema, Williams had been introducing film into his lectures, MacCabe had just published his book on Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group (MacCabe, 1980) and after the affair went on to develop ‘screen theory’
with Heath and others.11 The expansion of the term ‘culture’ to cover practices and creations beyond the more restricted zones of what might here be called ‘high culture’ was of course a characteristically social scientific – and in particular, anthropological – move to make (Tyler, 1891), and one that Williams (e.g. 1958) had been hard at work elaborating.

Leavis, by contrast, had been clear that genuine culture could only ever be the preserve of a gifted ‘tiny minority’ whose role it was to protect against the majority’s philistinism, and where to possible guide the cultural discrimination of the masses (Leavis, 1930; Carey, 1992, for variations on this theme); his, like Richards’s before him, was a vision of modern cultural decline.

* Though far more consequential than the MacCabe Affair as an event, the Watergate scandal was in fact more simplistic in its symbolic dimension. Effectively, the struggle was over whether the facts of the break-in to the Watergate Hotel were to be told at the level of everyday goals and interests (i.e. the level of ‘politics as usual’) as the Nixon administration wished, or, as eventually took place, at the more sacred levels of societal
norms and values, hence signalling systemic crisis and the need for fundamental purification and renewal.

* Since the majority of the actors made their living from the professional analysis and use of the English language they were therefore highly sensitive to the power of drama, oration, and rhetoric, as well as the seduction of linguistic aesthetic, which added both to the quality and clear theatricality of the events, thus rendering them particularly amenable to dramaturgical analysis.1 Furthermore, argumentation, by its very nature, has a tendency towards rhetorical escalation, a process which often triumphs over whatever pacifying intentions actors may start out with.

* One strategic achievement of the pro camp was securing the Senate House as the stage upon which the main debate would be acted out. Whilst Cambridge is more generally a highly ritualistic university, the Senate House in particular holds a privileged place within the university’s ritualistic geography. It is in many ways the university’s main agora, and is considered distinctly hallowed ground.

* The contribution that a stage and its set makes to what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is only successful if the actors collude in playing by the script which accords with the set, and the antis had no intention of doing so. The antis’ counterstrategy therefore involved lowering the tone of the proceedings
so as to desacralise the event, deprive it of its ritual status, expose the performance as mere verisimilitude, and so return it to the level of the profane. One tactic to this end involved employing humour and casual indifference to undermine the pros’ efforts towards ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1990 [1959]). In contrast to the sacred and solemn tone that was, quite literally, set by the austere neo-classical building, the jocular triviality with which many of the antis delivered their own performances signalled to the 600 strong audience not only a sense of security in the knowledge that MacCabe’s supporters had already lost the battle and nothing that happened in the Senate House would reverse the Appointment Committee’s decision, but also that the ‘MacCabe Affair’ had nothing at all of the sacred about it.

* Humour, especially in the affective responses it is able to evoke in the form of collective and contagious laughter, has the advantage in symbolic struggles of encouraging shared ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim, 2001 [1912]),
helping solidify a sense of community amongst those who are ‘in on the joke’. Further, it has the added benefit of avoiding the necessity to employ outright invective, which runs the risk of losing favour with one’s audience. The use of humour, if effective in eliciting amusement, acts as a shield and alibi for degrees of offence that would be unthinkable in its absence… The capacity of humour to draw factions of the audience and performer together in shared amusement was also often combined with a variety of other rhetorical techniques, such as sarcasm, insincere
politeness, pretend sympathy and surrealism, all of which drew their performative power from the dramatically potent realm of play…

* audiences collude in determining a performance’s dramatic success, and that the performers themselves are aware of this fact. In this sense, a successful performance ought properly be understood as always to some extent a co-creation involving necessary input from both actors and audience, an implicit rule that structures all dialogic social interaction.

Both sides of the social interface that constitutes a performance are required to ‘play along’ in order for the symbolic communication inherent within it to come off effectively..

* for the pros’ case to hold any legitimacy, it was crucial that they were able to raise the central issue at
stake – MacCabe’s non-reappointment – to the level of the sacred and demonstrate that his failure to receive a permanent lectureship revealed that the central values of the faculty, and by responsibility and association
the university more generally, were under threat if his dismissal went unanswered. They attempted to achieve this by showing that the events had not only threatened propriety in terms of breaching the meso-level norms regulating proper employment procedure, but even further up the symbolic ladder, that a violation of the higher values of fairness, intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place. Achieving the goals of this strategy would mean a necessary acknowledgement that a crisis had occurred and that ritual purification and renewal was therefore
necessary.

* As a counterstrategy, the antis attempted to disrupt this projected ‘definition of the situation’ and de-sacralise MacCabe’s non-reappointment by claiming that the decision was in actual fact taken at the profane level
of routine appointments considerations.

* Whatever the actual underlying mechanism that had drawn all the attention upon the English Faculty, it is clear that on the performative level, the very fact that so much attention was indeed being paid to the events could be taken as an indication that something untoward must indeed have occurred, or otherwise, why all the fuss? A student in the Senate House, for instance, suggested that ‘[i]f all were well in the English Faculty we would not be here’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360). The very fact that the debate had been called, and the very fact that the national press was still busy printing stories about the events (whether or not these stories were in substance behind the pros’ cause) sustained a performative risk of undermining the antis’ claims that this was simply ‘business as usual’. This placed the antis in somewhat of a ‘Catch 22’ predicament, since their substantive efforts to inform audiences that the scandal had indeed been overblown or orchestrated (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 335) continually
ran the performative risk of simply drawing further attention to an affair which they were invested in claiming was no affair at all.

* a decade following the departure of MacCabe for Strathclyde, another affair exploded in Cambridge, with the
ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deny the university from awarding an honorary doctorate to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

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The Seven Pillars Of Friendship (3-30-22)

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

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The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

From the 2012 book:

* another remarkable fact struck me during the dot.com years – that women were relatively immune to the frenzy surrounding internet and high-tech stocks. In fact, most of the women I knew, both on Wall Street and off, were quite cynical about the excitement, and as a result were often dismissed as ‘not getting it’, or worse, resented as perennial killjoys.

* When traders, most of whom are young males, make money, their testosterone levels rise, increasing their confidence and appetite for risk, until the extended winning streak of a bull market causes them to become every bit as delusional, overconfident and risk-seeking as those animals venturing into the open, oblivious to all danger. The winner effect seemed to me a plausible explanation for the chemical hit traders receive, one that exaggerates a bull market and turns it into a bubble. The role of testosterone could also explain why women seemed relatively unaffected by the bubble, for they have about 10 to 20 per cent of the testosterone levels of men.

* One brilliant and particularly influential description of its effects was written by Andrew Sullivan and published in the New York Times Magazine in April 2000. He vividly described injecting a golden, oily substance about three inches into his hip, every two weeks: ‘I can actually feel its power on almost a daily basis,’ he reported. ‘Within hours, and at most a day, I feel a deep surge of energy. It is less edgy than a double espresso, but just as powerful. My attention span shortens. In the two or three days after my shot, I find it harder to concentrate on writing and feel the need to exercise more. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment is more impulsive. It is not unlike the kind of rush I get before talking in front of a large audience, or going on a first date, or getting on an airplane, but it suffuses me in a less abrupt and more consistent way. In a word, I feel braced. For what? It scarcely seems to matter.’

* hypothesis: testosterone, as predicted by the winner effect, is likely to rise in a bull market, increase risk-taking, and exaggerate the rally, morphing it into a bubble. Cortisol, on the other hand, is likely to rise in a bear market, make traders dramatically and perhaps irrationally risk-averse, and exaggerate the sell-off, morphing it into a crash.

* thoughts are intimately tied to our physiology. Decisions are decisions to do something, so our thoughts come freighted with physical implications. They are accompanied by a rapid shift in our motor, metabolic and cardiovascular systems as these prepare for the movements that may ensue. Thinking about the options open to us at any given moment, scrolling through the possibilities, triggers a rapid series of somatic shifts. You can often see this in a person’s face as they think – eyes widening or squinting, pupils dilating, skin flushing or blanching, facial expressions as labile and fleeting as the weather. All thoughts involving choice of action involve a kaleidoscopic shift from one bodily state to another. Choice is a whole-body experience.

* Hearing is faster and more acute than seeing, about 25 per cent so, and responding to an auditory cue rather than a visual one can save us up to 50 milliseconds. The reason is that sound receptors in the ear are much faster and more sensitive than anything in the eye. Many athletes, such as tennis and table-tennis players, rely on the sound a ball makes on a racket or bat as much as on the sight of its trajectory. A ball hit for speed broadcasts a different sound from one sliced or spun, and this information can save a player the precious few milliseconds that separate winners from losers.

* the higher we rise in the nervous system, moving from the spine to the brain stem to the cortex (where voluntary movement is processed), the more neurons are involved, the longer the distances covered by nervous signals, and the slower the response. To speed our reactions the brain tends therefore to pass control of the movement, once it has been learned, back to lower regions of the brain where programmes for unthinking, automatic and habitual actions are stored. Many of these learned and now-automatic behaviours can be activated in as little as 120 milliseconds.

* The trouble with these reaction times is just that – they are reactions. But good athletes are not in the habit of waiting around for a ball or a fist to appear, or opponents to make their move. Good athletes anticipate. A baseball batter will study a pitcher and narrow down the likely range of his pitches; a cricket infielder will have registered a hundred tiny details of a batsman’s stance and glance and grip even before the ball has left the bowler’s hand; and a boxer, while dancing and parrying jabs, will pre-consciously scan his opponent’s footwork and head movements, and look for the telltale setting of his stabiliser muscles as he plants himself for a knockout blow. Such information allows the receiving athlete to bring online well-rehearsed motor programmes and to prepare large muscle groups so that there is little to do while the ball or fist is in the air but make subtle adjustments based on its flightpath. Skilled anticipation is crucial to lowering reaction times throughout our physiology.

* The financial markets are replete with stories of hunches, instincts and gut feelings. These feelings consist, according to legend, of an inexplicable conviction that an investment is destined to make or lose money, a conviction often accompanied by physical symptoms. The symptoms reported by traders and investors are often quirky, like a coughing fit before the market goes down, an itchy elbow before it goes up. George Soros, founder of the hedge fund Quantum Capital, confessed that he relied a great deal on what he called animal instincts: ‘When I was actively running the fund I suffered from backache. I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio.’

* ‘Everyone knows how panic is increased by flight,’ [William James] wrote, ‘and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we “work ourselves up” to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression.’

* When the world sends us a message it does so through the language of surprise and discrepancy; and our ears have been tuned to its cadences. There is nothing that fascinates us more, little that agitates the body more completely. Information warns us of danger, prepares us for action, helps us survive. And it enables us to perform that most magical of all tricks – predicting the future.

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Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

From this 2021 book by Robin Dunbar:

* we tend to underestimate the significance of psychological wellbeing as the bedrock on which our success in life is founded. If our sense of wellbeing is significantly diminished for any length of time, we are likely to slide into depression, and that leads to a downward spiral into ill health. If our mood is positive and everything is upbeat, we are not only more willing to engage with others socially but we approach everything we do with optimism and enthusiasm. We’ll work harder to get even the most boring tasks done. It isn’t hard to see how happiness, a sense of positivity and a ‘can do’ attitude can spread rapidly through a population…

* So important is it to be part of a social group, that when we find ourselves alone or an outsider we typically feel lonely, even agitated, and will actively work to try and remedy the situation. Few of us could cope with living completely isolated on a desert island with no prospect of rescue. Even the rather disagreeable Scottish seaman Alexander Selkirk (the original on whom the Robinson Crusoe story was based) was overjoyed to be rescued after spending four years alone on what is now officially known as Robinson Crusoe Island. Loneliness takes its toll on us, and we do our best to look for opportunities to meet people. Being part of a group makes us feel properly human. We feel more relaxed when we know we belong. We feel more satisfied with life when we know we are wanted.

* loneliness is actually an evolutionary alarm signal that something is wrong – a prompt that you need to do something about your life, and fast. Even just the perception of being socially isolated can be enough to disrupt your physiology, with adverse consequences for your immune system as well as your psychological wellbeing that, if unchecked, lead to a downward spiral and early death.

* neural connectivity and neural plasticity in rats if they are isolated when young. In particular, it can irretrievably alter the function of the prefrontal cortex (the front part of the brain where all the clever stuff, and especially the clever social stuff, is done), as well as its myelinisation (the laying down of the fatty sheaths around neurons that enable them to transmit signals faster and more efficiently). Once the damage is done, it’s done. In humans, short periods of loneliness rarely have any long-term adverse effects, but persistent loneliness is correlated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, depression and dementia, as well as poor sleeping habits (which in turn often have adverse psychological consequences).

* The important thing about friends is that you need to have them before disaster befalls you. One reason is that, as we shall see later, people are only likely to make the effort to help you if they are already your friend. We are all much less likely to help strangers or people we know only slightly – despite what we sometimes claim. Making friends, however, requires a great deal of effort and time. It is not something you can just magic up over a cup of coffee – not least because everyone else is already embedded in friendship networks of their own, and to make time and room for you as a new friend means that they will have to sacrifice a friendship with someone else.

* younger adults behave like careful shoppers: they are trying to sample as widely as they can among the pool of potential friends available to them in order to find the best set of life partners and friends. As a result, they distribute their time more widely – after all, they have much more time available in which to do so than older adults – and they ought to be happy to sacrifice relationship quality for quantity if it means they can sample a larger proportion of the available population. Into their thirties, people become more selective as they identify the best choices. In part, this is probably forced on them by the demands of parenthood. As every new parent knows, free time is decimated by the early years of childcare, and this in turn impacts on the time (and energy!) available for socialising. We shed our more casual friendships and concentrate what time and mental effort we have on the handful of really important friends.

* The final phase in the human life cycle seems to kick in around the sixties, when we start to lose friends through death. If we lose friends when we are younger, perhaps because they moved away, we simply make a renewed social effort and replace them with new friends. In older age, however, we lack the energy and the motivation (and are less mobile as well) to seek and build new friendships. Moreover, the kinds of places where we found friends when we were younger are now no longer quite so appropriate as places to go. We don’t quite know the right codes of behaviour for the context, are not even sure how to start a conversation with a stranger any more. So we become less inclined to go out in order to replace old friends. As a result, we gradually shed friends – and family – until in very old age we are confined to our house and seldom see anyone from one day’s end to the next. The fact is that we start life with one or two close carers and, if we live long enough, we end life that way too.

* It is as though we all have the same amount of emotional capital (think of this as the time you have for spending with people), but introverts choose to spread this thickly among just a few people whereas extraverts choose to spread it thinly among many people. As a result, extraverts have friendships that, on average, are much weaker than those of introverts. Given that someone’s willingness to support you is directly related to the time you spend socialising with them (and hence their perceived emotional closeness to you), one consequence of this may be that extraverts are less likely to be supported by their friends. It’s as though introverts feel less secure about the social world, so they prefer to invest more heavily in a few people whom they know really well and whom they can really rely on.

* people who had few kin listed in their network had more non-kin friends, and vice versa. I remember someone telling me after a lecture I had given at a science festival that she and her husband were the archetypal examples of just this. She came from a very big family, and all her time was taken up with her many cousins, aunts and uncles, so she actually had very few real friends; in contrast, her husband, who came from a very small family, had a large number of friends…

This seems to be a consequence of the fact that our networks are limited to around 150 slots, and we first slot all our family members in and then, if we have any spare slots left, we set about filling them with unrelated friends. It seems likely that friends in this sense are a relatively recent phenomenon, and are a consequence of the dramatic reduction in family size that has occurred over the last two centuries, especially in Europe and North America.

* none of the six main kinship-naming systems in the world have terms for anyone who is less closely related than cousins. It is as though this is the natural limit for human communities, and everyone beyond that magic circle of cousins is a stranger of no particular importance. In most traditional ethnographic societies, anyone joining the community has to be assigned some kind of fictive (or fictional) kinship, usually by being adopted as a son, or perhaps a brother, by someone; until that happens, they have no place in the community. All their adopter’s kin then become their kin, with the same rights and obligations as real kin. We do much the same with adopted children, and of course we do it with very close friends when we teach our children to address them as ‘Aunty Mary’ or ‘Uncle Jim’ even though they are not biological aunts and uncles. Kinship is so central to small-scale societies that it might legitimately be regarded as one of the main organising principles of the human social world.

* One reflection of this is that, all things being equal, we are much more willing to help relatives than we are friends. This is sometimes known as the kinship premium . Think about what happens if someone contacts you out of the blue and explains that they are your long-lost third cousin, and that you share a great-great-grandmother. You might just ask a few questions to check that this really is so, but once you accept the evidence, you’ll offer them a bed for the night – and would they like to stay longer? But if the person says that they are a friend of a friend of a friend, your response is likely to be very different: after the usual pleasantries, you might suggest they try the Day’s Inn down the road to see if there’s a room available – and perhaps they might like to pop round some time for a cup of tea . . .
The kinship premium seems to derive from one of the most fundamental principles in evolutionary biology, the theory of kin selection – that we are more likely to behave altruistically, and less likely to behave selfishly, towards close relatives than distant relatives, and towards distant relatives than to unrelated folk.

* Another respect in which family and friend relationships differ is that friendships are more costly to maintain than family relationships. Our women’s network data illustrate the general principle: people typically devoted more time to their close family than to their close friends, but they devoted much more time to their less close friends than to their less close family. Distant family relationships need only the occasional reminder to be kept ticking over, but friendships die fast if they are not maintained at the appropriate level of contact for any length of time. The consequences of this were evident in our longitudinal study of high-schoolers going away to university. We found that friends very quickly (within months) slipped down through the list of friends once they weren’t being seen so regularly. It takes only a couple of years for a friend to become just an acquaintance – someone I once knew. Family members, in contrast, required much less work to maintain, and emotional closeness to them hardly budged an inch over the eighteen months of the study. If anything, it actually increased a little – absence really does make the heart grow fonder (but only for family). We can go many years without seeing them, and they still welcome us with open arms, will still come to our aid like the cavalry coming over the hill when we really need it.
One category of people who sit uncomfortably between family and friends are in-laws (otherwise known technically in anthropology as affines, or relatives by marriage).

* in bonded social groups, your friends keep an eye on you and make sure they stay with you even if you decide to wander off. We found that primates and pair-bonded antelope are constantly checking on the whereabouts of their closest friends, whereas herd-forming species (such as the wild goats I studied) hardly ever do.

* loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues, as might be expected, as well as confirming that other psychological factors such as a small social network size, high anxiety and low empathy independently contribute to loneliness.

* The orbitofrontal neocortex is involved in interpreting emotional cues, and it seems that it can act to suppress the amygdala’s panicky responses when it thinks these are misplaced. Since all relationships, and especially those with strangers, are potentially risky (we don’t know quite how they are going to behave), the initial instinct will always be to run away. The orbitofrontal cortex is able to dampen down this tendency when there isn’t any need to run away – something that may be especially important during courtship and mating, for example. This is an important reminder that the different brain regions interact to create a fine-tuned balance that allows us to function effectively in complex situations.

* MaryAnne Noonan, one of my colleagues at Oxford University. She looked at the brain’s white matter and showed that its volume was also correlated with the size of the friendship circle.

* One of the things we had noticed in our various studies of social networks was that women always had slightly more friends than men.

* He found that women who lived in households with more people had a larger amygdala than women who lived with fewer individuals, whereas there was no effect of household size on amygdala size for males. In contrast, men in larger households had larger orbitofrontal cortices, whereas women exhibited no consistent pattern. The reverse was the case for those who had more opportunity to engage with emotionally close relationships. Women who expressed greater satisfaction with their relationships and who said they had more opportunities to confide in others had larger volumes in these two areas than women who did not.

* There is a poignant moment in a BBC television documentary on autism where an eleven-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome turns to his mother and asks: ‘What is a friend, mummy? Can I have one?’ and then, after a pause playing with his toys: ‘How do I get a friend?’ He understood that the children he mixed with called each other friends. But there seemed to be some mysterious process involved that he did not quite fully understand. Just how do you set about getting a friend? He has already tried asking other children to be his friend, but it didn’t seem to work, and he doesn’t really know why. And now he is genuinely stumped.
His perplexity is a reminder that we all have moments of puzzlement when our overtures of friendship are rejected, or a friend lets us down and we don’t understand why. These moments of social anguish are a reminder of an important aspect of friendship: friends are not, in reality, all that easy to acquire and maintain. We have to work at them, and it can take months, sometimes even years, for a real friendship to blossom. More importantly, we all vary in our ability to manage the social world. At one end is the young boy who is completely defeated by the very concept of friendship; at the other is the perfect host who seems to know by effortless intuition what to say to enliven a social occasion, how to bring the best out in everyone, who would hit it off with whom. Most of us lie somewhere in between these two extremes, lurching from one social minefield to another relationship catastrophe, while just about managing to keep ourselves afloat. And then there are the times when circumstances leave us stranded on a social desert island, watching enviously as everyone else seems to be having the social time of their lives.
The human social world is possibly the most complex phenomenon in the observed universe – far more complex than the mysterious processes that create stars and engineer the orbits of the planets. The social skills that make this world possible are astonishingly sophisticated, and the cognitive mechanisms that underpin these skills are a miracle of evolutionary engineering. Yet we take them for granted and hardly ever give them a second thought.

* If you want to know what someone really thinks of you, check out how they touch you. There is an honesty about touch that cannot be matched by any other sense, and certainly a great deal more honesty than can be inferred from the words they may speak to you. A touch is worth a thousand words. That’s because touch is intensely intimate in a way that no other sense is. Words are slippery things. Not only are we good at saying one thing when we really mean another, but even the words we use change their meaning according to how we say them. We are extraordinarily skilled at lying when it suits us, sometimes with the best of intentions (as when we don’t want to offend someone with a brutally honest opinion) and sometimes deliberately for personal gain. In contrast, the way someone puts their hand on your shoulder or strokes your arm says a great deal more about how they view their relationship with you than anything else ever could. In part, that is because there is an intimacy to touch that the other senses lack. Taste and smell, the other two intimate senses, can tell me who you are, but they cannot tell me how you feel about me .
Touch is what makes the world of relationships go round. The very intimacy of touch means that we are very sensitive to who touches us, and how they do it. Being stroked or rocked is calming, creating a sense of both pleasure and relaxation. The cares of the world drop slowly from your shoulders. It’s the business of the masseur in the everyday world. It is why we rock babies, and why rocking calms them. But at the same time, there is an ambivalence about touch, perhaps precisely because it is so intimate. We want to be touched by some people, but shrink from being touched by others. This ambivalence is the bane of our lives, not least because it sometimes makes it difficult for those with whom we interact to know which category they belong to. I am willing to stroke you affectionately, but you are not willing to allow me to do it. So we have to develop rules that help smooth that particular pathway. A handshake is fine between strangers, a stroke on the back or a kiss is not. Learning these rules takes most of our childhood and adolescence, and even then we make mistakes. A yearning to be touched goes unfulfilled; or we blunder in where we are not welcome.

* how emotionally close we feel to someone is directly related to how much time we invest in them.

* we are more likely to laugh at something when we are in a group than when we are alone.

* The more energetic the dance moves and the more synchronised the members of the group were, the greater the change in pain threshold and the more bonded they felt to the group.

* What these two studies revealed is that the number of close friends you have is closely correlated with how engaged you are with your local community, the level of trust you have in those among whom you live, your sense of how worthwhile your life is and how happy you feel. Most of the relationships between these variables work both ways: increase the sense of community engagement and it increases your sense that life is worthwhile; but, equally, increase your sense that life is worthwhile, and it increases how engaged you become with the rest of the community. These are, however, influenced in slightly different ways by whether we eat or drink with other people. Social eating tends to influence the number of close friends we have and our sense of life satisfaction most directly, and then through these the other components, whereas drinking socially influences our sense of engagement with the community and our trust in its members most directly, and then through these the other components. The net outcome, however, is much the same in either case: engaging in these activities with others strengthens our membership of the wider community and elevates our general sense of wellbeing and satisfaction with life – and, through these, our health…

* If there is one behaviour without which both a conversation and a relationship would be deathly dull it is surely a smile. Everyone smiles in the same language, as the saying goes. Smiles express interest, grant permission to continue a conversation, provide encouragement that the interaction is welcome, express apology and sympathy, and a dozen other emotions. Most people assume that smiles and laughter are one and the same thing, that a smile is a laugh that never quite got out. In fact, there is an important difference between laughing and smiling. While laughter, as we have seen, derives from the monkey play face, smiling derives from the monkey submission face. In monkeys, the ‘bared teeth face’ (or snarl) is associated with submission or appeasement. In contrast to the ROM face of a laugh, a smile, like a snarl, has the teeth firmly clamped together and the lips drawn apart to show the teeth. Even though both are about friendship, one is about bonding, the other about subordination. That’s why we smile so much when we are nervous or embarrassed, or when we are introduced to people whom we don’t know or perceive as being superior.

* The limit of four for a conversation is a remarkably robust effect. If a fifth person joins, it will split into two separate conversations within as little as half a minute.

* the evening seems to enhance our social interactions in a very special way, and that the origins of this are probably very ancient.

* You are twice as likely to share genes with a friend as you are with any random person from your local neighbourhood. …friends were more likely to share the same DRD2 dopamine receptor gene (one of the two neurochemicals that allow you to maintain your friendships), and less likely to share the same CYP2A6 gene (a gene that regulates the enzyme responsible for the oxidation of nicotine – an enzyme that, useful as it might be in other contexts, is of no real use for maintaining friendships).

* The seven pillars of friendship:
• having the same language (or dialect)
• growing up in the same location
• having had the same educational and career experiences (notoriously, medical people gravitate together, and lawyers do the same)
• having the same hobbies and interests
• having the same world view (an amalgam of moral views, religious views, and political views)
• having the same sense of humour
• having the same musical tastes

* The more of these boxes you tick with someone, the more time you will be prepared to invest in them, the more emotionally close you will feel towards them, the closer they will lie to you in the layers of your social network, and the more willing you will be to help them out when they need it. And the more likely they are to help you. Birds of a feather really do flock together. You tend to gravitate towards people with whom you have more things in common. You tend to like the people who are most like you. In fact, each layer of your social network is equivalent to a particular number of ‘pillars’ shared – six or seven for the innermost 5-layer, just one or two for the outer 150-layer. It doesn’t seem to matter which ones you actually share in common. These pillars are, as economists put it, substitutable – that is, any one is as good as another, there is no hierarchy of preference. A three-pillar friend is a three-pillar friend irrespective of which three pillars you have in common.

* When you first meet someone new you invest a lot of time in them (in effect, catapult them into one of the innermost circles) so that you can evaluate where they lie on the Seven Pillars. That takes time, but once you know where they stand, you then reduce the time you devote to them to a level appropriate to the number of pillars you have in common. As a result, they quietly slide back down through the layers to settle out in the layer appropriate to that number. In other words, friendships are born and not made. You just have to find them. It may take several goes before you find the right person to be your best friend, or even in your top five friends list, but if you keep searching you will find them eventually.

* Knowing how to recognise a member of your community cuts through the long-winded process of getting to know someone by having to spend half a lifetime with them. I know you are a member of my community because I instantly recognise your dialect the moment you speak. You know the same streets and pubs that I know. You know the same jokes that we used to tell over a pint of beer. You belong to the same religion as I do. Any one of these is a rough and ready guide to a shared history, and any one of them will do to mark you out as someone I can trust – because I know how you think. They point to the fact that we grew up in the same place, we absorbed the same mores, the same attitudes to life and the wider world. I don’t have to explain my joke to you because you get it straight away. In fact, I don’t even have to finish the punch line because you know the same jokes as me, or even just the way a joke is constructed. This harking back to the community we grew up in seems to explain the extraordinary attachment many people feel to ‘home’ – the place where they grew up – even decades after they moved away.

* In fact, we can tell a massive amount about a person from just the first sentence they say. We can identify where they come from, and, at least in Britain, which social class they belong to. Social linguists reckoned that, in the 1970s, you could place a native English-speaker to within 35 km (20 miles) of their birthplace just by their accent and the words they used, so fine-scale were these differences in dialect.

* In societies that are essentially social contracts (as all human societies are), freeloaders who take the benefits of the contract but avoid paying all the costs erode trust in other members of the community and quickly lead to the collapse of society. When that happens, it causes communities to fragment, and we retreat into the little clusters of people we really trust. The question that motivated this model was whether dialect might provide a quick-and-dirty guide to membership of your community, and hence of whether you could trust someone.
We can think of a dialect as a supermarket barcode exhibited on your forehead. Each individual checks out the barcodes of the people they meet, but only agrees to form relationships if their respective barcodes match. Over time, freeloaders can learn to mimic the local dialect, pretending to be good citizens but all the time exploiting those with whom they interact. Left to their own devices, freeloaders will very quickly overwhelm the population, driving the collaborators to extinction in as few as a dozen generations. The interesting finding was that if the population changed its dialect regularly from one generation to the next, it held freeloaders in check because they couldn’t track the changes fast enough.

* Meeting people we don’t know – strangers – is a fact of life. That is how we make new friends. But we don’t really want to waste time checking out how they sit on each of the Seven Pillars of Friendship. If we did that for every new person we met, there wouldn’t be enough time in the day. Ideally, we want some simple rubric for deciding whether it is worth investing further time and effort in getting to know them better. So what’s the best criterion to use when deciding whether someone might be worth investing time in so as to check them out in more detail? Jacques Launay explored this by examining how strangers are judged on the Seven Pillars. The traits that people selected significantly more often than expected were ethnicity, religion, political views, moral views and, strongest of all, musical tastes.

* Kinship probably remains the single best cue for trustworthiness because it is reinforced by the family community, especially in traditional small-scale societies.

* Karl Grammer, perhaps the leading human ethologist, has made a career out of studying human mate-choice behaviour. He suggested that courtship can best be understood as a process of punctuated evaluation: there are a series of decision points, separated by periods of stasis, where we pause to decide whether to move on to the next more intimate level or to pull out now before we have overcommitted ourselves. We begin with distance signals, and slowly but surely circle into ever closer and more intimate forms of evaluation. It begins with what does he/she look like? How well do they move . . . dance . . . play? If they pass this initial test, we arrange to spend more time with them, successively evaluating cues based on speech, smell and taste until, eventually, we commit ourselves to the full monty. At each stage, we pause to evaluate whether we should proceed to the next level.

* Risk-taking and sportiness are other cues to which women seem to pay more than just casual attention. Young males, in particular, are risk-takers: adolescent boys take so many risks (driving too fast, taking drugs, playing dangerous sports) that they have much higher mortality rates in their late teens than girls do. What risk-taking seems to be signalling is gene quality. In effect, they are saying: watch me – I can afford to take risks because my genes are so good I’ll get away with it.

* She found that women much preferred brave, risk-prone males compared with altruistic, risk-averse ones as short-term mating partners. However, they preferred altruistic males as long-term partners… get your genes from males who have proven quality and then rely on a safe pair of hands to see you through the long haul of childcare. The tricky bit, of course, is persuading the second kind of male to take the risk of being cuckolded.

* homophily underpins successful romantic relationships as much as it does successful friendships.

* men dropped their standards of mate choice as the sex ratio became increasingly male-biased (more men than women, so creating more competition for women) and raised their standards (at least for long-term mates) when the sex ratio became more female-biased (i.e. when men were in short supply). More important, it seemed that men switched to more casual sex when they were in the minority – when women were forced to compete for men and, as a result, could exert less power over them. When there were fewer women available and men were forced to compete for women, men became more willing to accept committed relationships.
Although wealth and status tend to place men at an advantage compared with their competitors in the mating market, the decision on whom to choose actually lies with the women. Some surprising evidence of this came from our national mobile phone database. Vasyl Palchykov, a young Ukrainian graduate student in Kimmo Kaski’s statistical physics group at Aalto University, looked at how the two sexes allocate their phone calls to the two people they called most often. He was interested in how likely the best ‘friend’ (the person they phoned most often) was to be male or female at any given age – in effect an index of the relative preference for one sex over the other. The data showed that, in early adolescence, a woman’s best friend (the person she calls most often) is likely to be another female; but after about age eighteen, it switches to become increasingly male, reaching a peak in the early twenties that remains relatively stable until age forty, after which it falls rapidly to become female again at around age fifty-five, remaining consistently female-biased into old age. Males follow a reciprocal, but slightly different pattern: after a male-biased preference during adolescence, a male’s main call partner becomes increasingly female-biased up to the age of thirty, after which it peaks briefly and then declines steadily towards a low level of female bias roughly similar to that exhibited by females.
Two things stood out in these data. One was the fact that the female curve hits its peak about seven years earlier than the male’s does (at age twenty-three versus age thirty). The other was that it remains at this peak for much longer (until age forty-five versus age thirty-five in males). In other words, women maintain a focus on their partner/spouse for about three times longer than men do – for about twenty-one years compared to at most seven years for men. This tells us two things about romantic relationships. One is that women typically make a very early decision on which male to go for and they stick with it, constantly contacting him until even the dullest male finally realises and caves in. It looks like it takes the male around five years to wake up – or, at least, respond reciprocally – to this. This suggests that female choice is the norm in humans, as it is in many other mammals. Whatever men may do by way of display to attract the attention and interest of women, it is the women that ultimately decide whom to go with. Once a relationship has been established, it seems that the men lose interest long before the women do: their focus on the female partner lasts only a few years and then declines steadily down to a token level by middle age.

* the more someone idealised their partner (i.e. switched off their reality check) at the outset of the relationship, the longer they continued to be satisfied with the relationship. And the more this was reciprocated, the more likely the relationship was to last. The moment reality strikes, and you begin to see your partner for what he or she really is, there is a slow but steady erosion in relationship satisfaction that can only ever have one outcome.

* men are more prone to using violence in aggression, are more object-oriented and consistently more sexually oriented than women, women invariably perform better on tests of language competence, are more prosocial and empathic, and are more focused on making careful mate choices. Women are also better at inhibitory and effortful control, especially early in life.

* Friendships die when we do not see the people concerned often enough to maintain the relationship at its former level of emotional intimacy – and especially so when neither side can quite muster the energy to do anything about it. So the tendency is for such relationships to fade quietly, almost by accident rather than design. The road to friendship is paved with good intentions to meet up again, and no doubt a good bit of guilt – we must get together sometime . . . but somehow sometime never comes because too many other priorities intervene. In contrast, family relationships can weather the social equivalent of being becalmed in mid-Atlantic, in part because of the pull of family (the Kinship Premium) and in part because the closely integrated network of family relationships means that people don’t lose track of you completely. The kin-keepers bridge the divide by keeping everyone up to date with everyone else’s doings. You can never quite escape – unless you completely cut yourself off.
Family are more forgiving than friends – not just of those repeated failures to contact them, but also of the trickle of small breaches of trust that inevitably occur along the way.

* They identified six key rules which were essential for maintaining a stable relationship. These were: standing up for the friend in their absence, sharing important news with the friend, providing emotional support when it is needed, trusting and confiding in each other, volunteering help when it is required, and making an effort to make the other person happy. Breaking any of these rules, they suggested, was likely to weaken the relationship, and breaking many was likely to lead to complete relationship breakdown.
They noticed that, when recalling lapsed relationships, people were more likely to attribute negative behaviours to the other person and positive ones to themselves, a classic form of psychological deflection of blame known as the Attribution Error (‘It can’t be me that is wrong, so it must be you’). They also noticed that younger people (i.e. those under twenty years of age) attached more significance to public criticism than older people did, and that women placed most importance on failure to apportion time equally and give positive regard and emotional support, whereas men placed a greater emphasis on negative events like being the target of jokes or public displays of teasing. Men seem to be less able to cope with this kind of taunting than women, perhaps because reputations mean more to them.

* Because women are socially more proactive than men, men often end up with a social network dominated by their wives’ friends simply because the wives arrange the social events and the husbands just go along with it. Wives often try to encourage their husbands to contact old male friends, only to be greeted by a frustrating shrug of the shoulders. Irrespective of the cause, men risk ending up with no social network other than their own family after a divorce or the death of a spouse.

* There was a strong tendency for women’s break-ups to remain unreconciled longer than men’s… It seems that women are less forgiving than men.

* women’s relationships are more fragile than men’s, perhaps because they are much more intimate and emotionally charged

* Sociologists have been aware for some considerable time that social networks decline progressively as we enter old age. At the same time, they have been conscious of the fact that each of us has a core of relationships that remain surprisingly stable across much of the lifespan. These are those very close family and friends that provide us with emotional and social support and who, as it were, accompany us through life rather like a group of devoted servants – always at hand when we need them, always anxious to tend to our needs. There have been two rather different theories about this group of key friends: the socio-emotional theory of friendship (which suggests that we become more and more selective as we grow older to focus on those few emotionally valuable friendships) and the convoy theory (that we are accompanied through life by a relatively stable group of supportive friends).

* Old age brings on a downward spiral in which all the odds are stacked against you. You find it hard to make new friends as your old ones die or move away because you have less in common with the younger folk who now make up the bulk of the population; your declining energy makes you less willing to get out as often, and less able to take part in physical activities; your failing cognition makes it harder to respond so wittily or so engagingly as you once did in conversation, making you less interesting as a social companion; you are not so familiar with the topics that interest people now because you have not kept up with social and political developments – or the jokes of the latest stand-ups. Having an impoverished social life has adverse consequences for your cognitive wellbeing as well as your physical health, increasing the risk of dementia as well as physical illnesses that require hospitalisation. The prospect is not inviting. These are not conditions that physical medicine can cure, but nor are they psychiatric issues. They fall into an in-between limbo where conventional medicine offers few solutions. It makes the provision of social clubs and activities for the elderly all the more important as a way of maintaining their mental and physical health.
It is physical mobility that, as much as anything, causes our withdrawal from social interaction in older age. We just find it harder to get to places where people gather socially. In the limit, of course, we eventually become housebound. In that respect, the arrival of the internet has offered the possibility of a solution unique to our times. So, in the final chapter of this story of friendship, let’s turn to see what opportunities the digital world and social media have to offer, both for the current older generation and for the future prospects of the younger generations that have grown up with the internet.

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