What we've lost (3): Friendship

When I grew up, politics was not the threat to friendships it is today

The last 10 or 15 years have not been kind to Canada. Along with a decline in prosperity has come an erosion of the things that made our society great, a decline of what held us together and made us the envy of the world: things like resilience, friendship and service. In this series, National Post writers consider What We’ve Lost.

My first vividly-remembered friend was a boy my age, maybe six or thereabouts. Paul’s family cottage adjoined ours in a small summer colony on Lake Simcoe. We must have spent a lot of time together, because we were a source of amusement to both sets of parents, who joked that we’d end up “under the huppa” (getting married). I took the prediction literally. Why not? In my innocence, a forever best friend was an appealing prospect.

That summer colony, as well as the schools and summer camps I attended, had in common a total lack of cultural diversity. All were homogeneously white, upper middle-class and predominantly Jewish. Small fishbowls, to be sure. But socially speaking, those fishbowls provided calm, protected water for learning to swim with confidence and trust. By the time I realized there were diverse social ponds and lakes beyond the fishbowl I felt ready to explore, I was, at least, in no danger of drowning in them.

At university — mine was the university’s expansionist golden era when no expense was spared to bring in the best and the brightest in all departments — friendship grew from the pleasure of intellectual reciprocity and sometimes very fierce debates. In my demanding honours English Literature program, there were no dilettantes or time-servers. Our professors never strayed from their subject matter to offer personal political opinions. Friendships blossomed over books, films, and new ideas from France. Existentialism! We wore black turtleneck sweaters, smoked furiously and worshipped polemical brilliance.

My best friend at the University of Toronto, also an English Lit major, was a lapsed Catholic from Chicago. Politically, she was quite progressive. Having been captured (just for a few years) by Ayn Rand’s extreme anti-Marxist philosophy, I was not. But that was small beer we chose to laugh at. We could, because our political differences were tangential to our friendship, which was based in common cultural values we took for granted.

The Cold War and its risks were at their height. Our generation was struggling to absorb the horrors still emerging from Second World War archives. Neither of us had any doubt about the bright line between depravity and decency. We’d read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” then Boris Pasternak’s freshly published “Doctor Zhivago.” In both, the lesson was clear that for tyrannies to gain control over a population, individuals’ trust in their natural circles of support — family, friends, community — must be severed. Individuals could not be left alone to simply live their lives according to the dictates of human nature. So we felt blessed to be citizens of a free and peaceful country, where the world left us alone to forge private relationships based in private compatibility criteria.

My peers and I “friended” each other through an organic and disinterested process that began with personal chemistry, and then, through constant real-life encounters over time, into a certainty built on mutual trust that these would be lasting relationships.

We graduated in 1964, when political disagreement was ceasing to be a laughing matter, and when nobody was any longer “left alone” to decide whom they wished to befriend. The Cold War eventually ended, but by the time it did, the Culture War, tinctured by extreme civilizational self-loathing, was in full swing, and the bright lines that once converged at the true north of my friends’ and my moral compass were, one by bloody one, plowed under.

Conservatives of my generation — we used to call ourselves “classical liberals,” though our views haven’t changed — find it sad and infuriating that the institutions we trusted to remain politically neutral, no matter what political party was in power — schools, professional associations, courts — have made it impossible for our grandchildren to grow up in any slow or organic way, as we did, and as nature intends. Children today cannot be protected, as we were, from repugnant ideas that degrade scholarly and civic aspiration, while sowing identity-based anxiety in all relationships. Smartphones and social media ensure that there is no respite from the “re-education” sessions that stymie nature’s intellectual and social maturing processes. Unfriendings can occur at the speed of a click, according to the opinion du jour, as many millennial and Gen-Z Jews — but not my generation — found to their shock after the October 7 pogrom.

These reflections should not be interpreted as a social Luddite’s plea, “O Time, turn backward in thy flight.” What is lost is lost. I merely observe that I was infinitely better served by the conditions surrounding my social evolution and the enduring friendships I learned how to make in the placid, clear water of my fishbowl than my grandchildren have been served by the abusive conditions governing their “Brave New World.”