This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Edyvane, D. (2007) ‘Multicultural Friendship: Dissociating Discord and Disunity’. Imprints: Egalitarian Theory and Practice, 10(1), pp.14-36.

Multicultural Friendship

Derek Edyvane

1

I begin with a quotation from Gordon Brown’s 2006 speech to the Fabian Society on

‘The Future of Britishness’:

While the British response to the events of July 7th was magnificent, we have

to face uncomfortable facts that there were British citizens, British born,

apparently integrated into our communities, who were prepared to maim and

kill fellow British citizens, irrespective of their religion – and this must lead us

to ask how successful we have been in balancing the need for diversity with

the obvious requirements of integration in our society.1

Multiculturalism is on the defensive. 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings and the

spectre of the British born suicide bomber have forced many people to reconsider the

question of whether it is really possible for us to live together as a multicultural

community. There is a growing concern that multicultural diversity has been

promoted and protected at the expense of social unity and solidarity. Trevor Phillips

remarks that ‘in recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not

enough on the common culture. We’ve emphasized what divides us over what unites

2

us. We have allowed tolerance of diversity to harden into the effective isolation of

communities’.2 Brown suggests that, in order to counter this tendency, we must now

‘rediscover and build from our history and apply in our time the shared values that

bind us together and give us common purpose’.3

The supposition behind the rhetoric here is that cultural diversity, and the

moral disagreement it involves, is undermining of political community. In this paper,

I shall challenge that supposition. I shall argue that we are wrong to think of shared

understandings as being a necessary ingredient of secure and meaningful communal

bonds. The suggestion that moral disagreement poses a threat to political community

has become a very familiar refrain in recent years, but we might well be inclined to

find something quite disturbing in it, for it is widely held among political theorists

that pronounced moral disagreement is an inevitable and permanent feature of any

free society. The key exponent of this view is John Rawls, who argues that

the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral

doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical

condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public

culture of democracy. Under the political and social conditions secured by the

basic rights and liberties of free institutions, a diversity of conflicting and

irreconcilable – and what’s more, reasonable – comprehensive doctrines will

come about and persist if such diversity does not already obtain.4

Rawls indicates that a free society must inevitably lack the sense of common purpose

that Brown deems necessary for us to live together as a community. The disturbing

implication, then, is that political community can be secured only at the expense of

3

our ‘basic rights and liberties’. Needless to say, this sense of tension between the

requirements of freedom and the requirements of solidarity is notorious and has been

the source of a great deal of political dispute and struggle through the ages.

The ‘future of Britishness’ is not looking especially bright. Faced with the

choice between a future of social disintegration and a future of oppressive conformity

many of us, I suspect, would be inclined to despair. In fact, there are to be found in

the theoretical literature all sorts of ingenious attempts to negotiate this tension, but

nevertheless a lingering sense of doubt may well persist.5 When all is said and done,

is it really possible for us to live together as a multicultural community? I believe that

it is, though not because I have up my sleeve yet another ingenious attempt to

negotiate the tension between moral diversity and social unity. Rather, I want to

challenge the supposition that there is really a tension here to be negotiated. I shall

dispute the orthodoxy and argue that moral disagreement is not actually undermining

of community at all.

Before I begin to explain how this might be, I want first to draw an important

distinction which I think is often overlooked and which I hope may help to clarify my

aim. When we talk about the sources of solidarity, we are usually talking about not

one, but two central questions. One is the question of how solidarity can be

established among the members of an antecedently fragmented and disunited group of

individuals. There is another and distinct question, however, of how pre-established

solidarity is sustained and consolidated. The widespread view is both that moral

disagreement frustrates the formation of political community and that moral

disagreement undermines the solidarity of an existing community. My concern is to

challenge the second of these claims and argue that moral disagreement need not be

undermining of (existing) communal solidarity. It is not the aim of my argument here

4

to deny that disagreement frustrates the formation of communal bonds where

previously there were none.6

2

The idea that moral disagreement is undermining of political community runs

exceedingly deep in our political thought. It is clearly discernible in the classical era,7

and persists right in to the contemporary academic discourse. Chandran Kukathas puts

the point succinctly when he suggests that the ‘greater the diversity of cultural groups

with independent moral traditions within a polity, the less the extent of social unity

within that political society’.8 In other words, there is thought to be a fairly strict

inverse relationship here: the more freedom and diversity we enjoy, the less unity we

may expect, and vice-versa.

Why do we think this? We might be tempted to understand the prevailing view

of the relationship between community and disagreement as a fairly straightforward,

logically necessary relation. The ideas of ‘social unity’ and ‘community’ are

notoriously hazy. If we simply define community as agreement about the good, then

of course moral disagreement will pose a threat to it. Rawls suggests something like

this when he simply stipulates that by definition we are to think of political

community as ‘a political society united in affirming the same comprehensive

doctrine’.9 This enables him to deduce that in conditions of reasonable pluralism,

political liberalism must abandon community.10 In this case there can be no argument

about the relation between community and disagreement and the orthodoxy holds.

However, there is usually rather more to the contention that disagreement is

5

undermining of community than this interpretation suggests. Usually, the thought is

not merely that discord frustrates our claim to the label ‘community’. Rather, the idea

is that moral disagreement serves to undermine many of the features we tend to

associate with the life of a community. And so, for instance, William Galston

contends not only that moral diversity denies the sense of our calling ourselves a

community, but also that it threatens to ‘make a decently ordered public life

impossible’.11 Similarly, Kukathas indicates that in the absence of moral unity, we

should not expect citizens to be able to sustain ‘any deep commitment to the other

members’ of their society.12

Evidently, this is no longer a matter of simple definition. There is a far

stronger thesis lurking here which states that the kinds of attachments we need in

order to account for ‘communal’ attitudes of mutual concern and belonging are

attachments that are conditional on moral agreement. The idea seems to be that in

order for me to feel motivated to act for the good of my fellow citizens, I must be able

to recognise some kind of commonality between them and myself. Andrew Mason

suggests that in order for the citizens of a state to feel that they belong together, they

must believe that there is some ‘deep reason why they should associate together, of

the sort which might be provided by the belief that they shared a history, religion,

ethnicity, mother tongue, culture or conception of the good’.13 In the absence of this

sort of commonality, it becomes unclear as to why citizens would see themselves as

bound to each other in any ethically significant manner.

But why should we think that disagreement is undermining of communal

attachment in this way? I mentioned earlier that our ideas of community still seem to

reflect those developed in the classical era. It might be that our understanding of the

relationship between disagreement and social attachment is similarly traceable to

6

classical treatments of social bonding, and particularly of friendship. Consider, for

example, Cicero’s account of friendship. Cicero contends that the mutual love of

friends arises ‘when we find someone with whose character and nature we feel

ourselves in sympathy, because we think we see in him a bright and shining light, so

to speak, of probity and virtue’.14 The idea that morally like is attracted to morally

like in friendship is a notion made familiar by both Plato and Aristotle.15 Cicero

develops a particularly stark interpretation of the idea, reminiscent of his republican

political outlook, suggesting that ‘a complete agreement in aims, ambitions and

attitudes’ is ‘the one element indispensable to friendship’.16 Arguing that ‘we can

have no trust in … the man whose interests are not like ours’, Cicero concludes that

‘when interests become different, friends begin to grow away from each other’.17

While Cicero is not usually cited in modern accounts of political community,

it seems that his understanding of friendship, which itself owes a great deal to Plato

and Aristotle, is in certain respects quite close to the understanding of communal

attachment that prevails in the contemporary literature and in the contemporary public

discourse. Specifically, the common supposition is that the concern of one citizen for

another can only be aroused and sustained against a background of shared

understandings and purposes.

3

Certainly this is a very commonplace conception of the bond of citizenship; but do

our attachments to our fellow citizens really have to be of this form? It seems to me

that if we step back from the theoretical literature, things become rather less clear. Let

7

us remain for a moment with the case of friendship and contrast the Ciceronian

account with a more modern view of the attachment. Modern friendship is an

extremely widespread and ethically significant bond: modern friends are deeply

concerned for each other and they have a profound sense of belonging together. And

yet many such friends also disagree fundamentally on all manner of moral matters.

The evidence for this claim comes both from personal experience and from literature.

Perhaps the archetypal literary friendship is that of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and

Sancho Panza. The two form a notoriously discordant couple. Don Quixote is a

knight-errant preoccupied with his pursuit of elevated moral ideals, whereas Sancho is

far more down-to-earth and concerned above all with finding himself an insula to

govern. At one point in the story, Sancho is accused of showing himself to be ‘more

of a madman and a dimwit than his master’ by his devotion to Don Quixote.18 His

response to the challenge is intriguing:

If I were a clever man, I would have left my master days ago. But this is my

fate and this is my misfortune; I can’t help it; I have to follow him: we’re from

the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, I love him dearly, he’s a grateful man,

he gave me his donkeys, and more than anything else, I’m faithful; and so it’s

impossible for anything to separate us except the man with the pick and

shovel.19

Taken in isolation, Sancho’s declaration that it is ‘impossible for anything’ to separate

him from Don Quixote might be dismissed as sentimental nonsense, but the rest of the

passage precludes any such thought. Sancho’s critical faculties (such as they are) are

securely intact – he is well aware of his companion’s flaws.20 His thought seems

8

rather to be that his attachment to Don Quixote is just not the kind of bond that can be

eroded by their pronounced differences and disagreements. Sancho’s love for his

master is not conditional in that way.

The view of friendship suggested here thus presents a stark contrast to the

Ciceronian conception. On the Ciceronian view, the attachment of Don Quixote and

Sancho is decidedly imperfect. In fact, it is not clear that it constitutes an instance of

friendship at all. Don Quixote and Sancho do not share aims and ambitions and so, in

Cicero’s view, they lack ‘the one element indispensable to friendship’. But surely to

the modern temperament, the conclusion that Don Quixote and Sancho are not friends

is deeply counterintuitive. On the contrary, theirs is generally regarded as a

particularly strong and poignant friendship.

It seems therefore that the kinds of friendships that flourish in modernity may

be quite different from the kinds of friendships that Cicero had in mind. In their

discussion of modern, personal friendship, Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett note

that it ‘seems a matter of common observation that people who are markedly

dissimilar can be very good friends’.21 And this is the view of friendship forcefully

and continually conveyed in our literature. Along with Don Quixote and Sancho

Panza we might also think of George and Lennie (in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men),

Dean Moriaty and Sal Paradise (in Kerouac’s On the Road), Joe Buck and Ratso (in

Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy). The relationship is even given a multicultural twist in

Graham Greene’s pastiche, Monsignor Quixote, which tells of the travels of the

Catholic priest, Father Quixote, and his friend, the communist, Sancho.

Judith Shklar argues that the democratic tradition has inaugurated an entirely

distinctive way of thinking about friendship far removed from the classical view:

9

When one is used to personal freedom and really cherishes it, unity and

oneness do not seem inherently quite so valuable. It is the ability to love

without demanding likeness or agreement, especially on political matters, that

marks the friendship of free women and men.22

In Shklar’s view it is possible to discern a distinct and attractive form of friendship, a

democratic form, to be contrasted, for example, with Cicero’s republican account. The

democratic form of friendship is of interest because it seems to constitute an ethically

significant attachment that is not intrinsically threatened by moral disagreement. In

this way, it appears to contradict the orthodox view that moral diversity and discord

must be undermining of social bonds. By further exploring the phenomenon of

modern friendship, I want to challenge the conventional wisdom that community and

disagreement must stand in an inverse relation to one another.

4

Both life and literature suggest that modern, personal friendship is a bond capable of

surviving, and even of flourishing, in conditions of moral disagreement. But how can

this be? What is it about modern friendship that makes it so durable? I believe that the

mutual concern characteristic of modern friendship is able to endure moral diversity

and disagreement because it is a form of concern that we might describe as ‘basic

concern’. Aristotle suggests that the love and concern of one friend for the other is

aroused and sustained by one of three qualities.23 I am moved to promote the good of

my friend either because I find him good or pleasant or useful.24 The kind of concern

10

embodied in modern friendship seems quite different from this. If I were concerned

for you just because I enjoyed your sense of humour and shared your passion for

social justice (such that my concern for you would fade were you to lose your sense of

humour or your passion for justice), I suspect that you would be inclined to think of

me as rather a bad friend or, quite possibly, no friend at all.

In fact, we generally find that our concern is not directly conditional on the

friend being a certain way or possessing a certain nexus of properties or qualities.

Instead, we find ourselves more directly motivated to promote the friend’s good. For

instance, it might be that I seek to promote the good of my friend, Chris, just because

I care about him, and not because he possesses qualities that I find attractive or

admirable. To be sure, it might be true that I enjoy spending time with him because I

consider him a witty conversationalist and because I admire his political beliefs, but I

might very well want to deny that my concern for him is dependent on his possession

of those qualities. There is no reason to think that my concern for him would

necessarily have to fade were he to become boring, or were he to adopt political views

that were not to my liking (though this is not to deny that friendships often do fade

where interests diverge).

The quality of concern we generally find in attachments of modern friendship

seems much closer to what Harry Frankfurt describes as love, where

the heart of the matter is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional. Loving

something has less to do with what a person believes, or with how he feels,

than with a configuration of the will that consists in a practical concern for

what is good for the beloved. This volitional configuration shapes the

11

dispositions and conduct of the lover with respect to what he loves, by guiding

him in the design and ordering of his relevant purposes and priorities.25

This is what I mean when I suggest that the form of concern characteristic of modern

friendship is basic. Basic concern is concern that is not explicable by reference to

anything further and deeper. Sancho Panza does not love Don Quixote because he

happens to like him, because he admires his qualities or because he shares his beliefs:

he just loves him. As Michel de Montaigne famously puts it in his essay on his

friendship with Etienne de La Boetie, ‘If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel

that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was

I’.26 Friendships like these are able to endure moral disagreement because they

embody a form of concern that is not dependent on shared understanding. Instead, the

disposition to promote the friend’s good is a much more primitive impulse, a

configuration of the will as Frankfurt describes it. While the classical account insists

that the concern of friends must pale when beliefs, aims and interests diverge, the

basic concern of modern friends is structured such that disagreement need pose no

threat.

Note, however, that basic concern is not the same as unconditional concern.

To say that one’s concern does not strictly depend upon the properties or beliefs of the

friend is not to say that one’s concern must be wholly uncritical or that the attachment

must be permanent. Basic concern may be conditional; it resists only the idea that

conditions enter in at a foundational level.27 In other words, basic concern is to be

understood as a necessity of the will that we cannot straightforwardly control.28 It

therefore leaves open the possibility that one might come to regret one’s impulse to

pursue the friend’s interest. This is something like Sancho’s predicament – ‘If I were

12

a clever man I would have left my master days ago. But this is my fate and this is my

misfortune; I can’t help it; I have to follow him’. This feature of the account might

seem to present something of a problem for my claim that modern friendship is a

social bond capable of surviving and flourishing in conditions of moral disagreement:

even if the concern characteristic of modern friendship is not directly undermined by

disagreement (because it is basic), the perception of discord could still cause us to

regret our concern and prompt us to try (if we were clever men) to bring about

circumstances in which the impulse might abate.

Certainly that could happen, and sometimes it probably should happen. But

there is no reason to think that the perception of discord among friends must

necessarily encourage them to strive to bring an end to their concern. On the contrary,

a degree of discord is often welcome in modern friendship. ‘Better a nettle in the side

of your friend than his echo’, wrote Emerson, for some friendships are enriched by

disagreement and impoverished by consensus.29 Earlier I suggested that I enjoyed

spending time with my friend, Chris, for his witty conversation and admirable

political beliefs. Clearly, it would not be ridiculous for me now to add that I also

enjoy his company because I disagree with him passionately on matters of religion

and because I learn a lot from our interminable arguments. Once we allow that moral

disagreement need not be undermining of the concern that friendship embodies, we

can begin to entertain the possibility that in some cases at least disagreement could

actually play a far more positive role in consolidating and perpetuating the

attachment.

In modern, personal friendship we find a form of social relationship that is not

inhospitable to moral disagreement. But still we might wonder what exactly this has

to do with the task of accounting for the social unity of a multicultural society. A

13

tempting answer here is to say that if intimate personal relationships of friendship are

possible in conditions of pronounced moral disagreement, then a fortiori the more

distant, impersonal attachments of a political association should also be able to

flourish in such conditions. But that would surely be too quick. For it might equally

be the case that personal friendship is able to flourish in conditions of disagreement

only because it is such an intimate attachment. Perhaps the impersonal bonds of the

political association are too thin and fragile to survive moral disagreement and

discord. In other words, the political theorist who insists that disagreement is

detrimental to community might quite happily allow that there are many friendships

that possess precisely the form I have outlined; she might well accept that many

friendships are characterised by a basic concern which is not intrinsically inhospitable

to disagreement. But ‘so what?’ she might say: her concern is with the social unity of

the multicultural polity, and that unity has absolutely nothing to do with the intimate

unity of personal friends.

This objection is well taken. My argument to this point has no direct

implications for the way in which we think about political community. All I have tried

to do so far is to describe a form of personal friendship that embodies basic concern

for the other. The interest of this account is that it suggests a model of social unity

capable of accommodating moral diversity and disagreement. If it can be shown that a

relevantly similar model could obtain at the level of a modern, multicultural society,

then serious doubt will have been cast on the prevailing belief that moral

disagreement is necessarily undermining of political community.

5

14

The task, then, is to show that a social bond relevantly similar to personal friendship

could obtain at the political level. Specifically, I will need to show that relations of

basic mutual concern are realisable outside of the private sphere and between the

citizens of a modern, multicultural society. On the face of it, there seems good reason

to doubt that they can be. Modern friendship is a personal relationship which seems

necessarily to involve affection and intimacy. The relation between citizens, by

contrast, is impersonal and rarely involves any affection or intimacy whatsoever. It is

thus rather unclear how the phenomenon of personal friendship could shed any light

at all on the political relationships of a modern democratic society. To think of one’s

fellow citizens as personal friends is to have committed a category error.

But I am not suggesting that we view our fellow citizens as personal friends.

As I have said, I mean only to claim that a bond relevantly similar to personal

friendship is realisable at the political level. We can call this bond ‘political

friendship’ to mark the difference. The political bond must resemble personal

friendship in respect of the quality of concern it embodies; political friends must be

basically concerned for each other. But, beyond that, the private and public forms of

friendship can be expected to differ quite dramatically. We need not expect either

affection or intimacy from our political friends.

However, it may now be objected that the bond of political friendship, so

described, is incoherent. Basic concern, one might suppose, can only persist in

relations characterised by affection and intimacy. It is impossible, the objection

suggests, for us to be basically concerned for those we dislike and for those with

whom we are unacquainted. But I shall deny this.

15

Consider, first, the issue of affection. It seems clear that affection and basic

concern are distinct phenomena. I may not feel a great deal of affection for the

stranded friend who calls at four in the morning in search of a lift home, yet I am

liable to do as she asks just because I care. Nevertheless, one might still suspect that it

is only possible to be basically concerned against a general background of affection.

We need not feel affectionate all of the time towards those for whom we are basically

concerned. But could we really be basically concerned for a person for whom we had

never felt any affection at all? It seems to me that we can. While affection and basic

concern often coincide in the context of personal friendship (we might think that they

must coincide in order for the attachment to count as a personal friendship), they are

in fact entirely independent phenomena. For example, there is no straightforward

inference from the fact that a tutor is concerned for his students that he actually likes

them. I could be directly motivated to devote my time and energy to the promotion of

a student’s success. I could sincerely hope that she achieves a good degree, that she

finds a good job and that she lives happily ever after. And all of this is entirely

compatible with my having disliked her intensely from Day One. The basic

disposition to pursue the good of others can and does obtain even where those others

are the objects of one’s antipathy.

It would also be a mistake to think that attitudes of basic concern are

unrealisable between those who are unacquainted and who lack the intimacy of

personal friends. Frankfurt declares that he loved his children ‘even before they were

born’ and we find nothing strange in that.30 We might also think here of the case of a

father separated from his son or daughter prior to its birth; it is unclear why one could

not be basically concerned for a child one had never met. To explain the bonds of

distant and unacquainted co-nationals, Benedict Anderson introduces the idea of

16

‘imagined community’, a sense of community that is not directly tangible, but that

nevertheless ‘lives in the mind’ of each member.31 It seems to me that we can say

something rather similar here. The bond of political friendship could quite plausibly

be carried not in face-to-face encounters, but rather in the images we form and the

stories we tell about our shared lives. Just as the father separated from his son or

daughter is able to establish in his imagination a bond between himself and the child

he has never met by reference, perhaps, to some narrative of family history or genetic

inheritance, we are in principle able to establish in our thought a bond between

ourselves and the fellow citizens we have never met by reference to a narrative of

association. Of course there is a very significant question here of what sort of

narrative we could possibly tell – evidently, narratives of family history and genetic

inheritance would be of no assistance in this context. I shall address this question in

due course. For now, I just want to emphasise the implausibility of the notion that

non-acquaintance precludes basic concern.

These arguments indicate that some of our main reasons for doubting the

plausibility of political friendship do not in fact hold. It is possible for a person to be

basically concerned for those she neither likes nor knows personally. But the case is

so far negative and the arguments are rather abstract; they do not really confirm that

basic concern is realisable on any significant scale at the level of the modern,

multicultural society. Modern societies are vast, bustling and anonymous places; is it

really plausible to think that political friendship could obtain at this level? I would

suggest that the evidence we need is right in front of us. We know that attitudes of

basic concern are realisable on a significant scale in modern multicultural societies

because such attitudes are realised on a significant scale in the societies we inhabit.

Most of us do exhibit something that looks very much like basic concern for our

17

fellow citizens. This observation might be met with a measure of scepticism. The

vision of modern society as an association of political friends may seem a world away

from the image of rights-based political association to be found in most contemporary

portrayals of society. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, takes a very different view

from me when he declares that ‘modern society is … often, at least in surface

appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers each pursuing his or her own

interests under minimal constraints’.32 And, of course, there are numerous empirical

studies such as Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and Robert Putnam’s Bowling

Alone that lend support to that sort of view.33

There is doubtless a grain of truth in what MacIntyre says. However, we do

not need to contradict the research of either Bellah or Putnam to say that there is also

a considerable degree of distortion in the idea that we are nothing but self-interested

strangers. In fact, most people, most of the time display a measure of basic concern

for those around them. Our daily lives are replete with instances of the kindness of

strangers. We do not normally think it necessary, or even faintly relevant, to check for

shared understandings before we give up our seat on the bus for an elderly person, or

before we go to the aid of a person who has slipped and fallen on an icy patch of the

pavement. Pace MacIntyre, we often pursue the interests of those with whom we

share our society notwithstanding our lack of moral unity.

Particularly instructive here is the practice of blood donation in the UK. Blood

donors receive no reward of any kind for their donations; they pay no penalty of any

kind for failing to donate; and they give in the absence of any specific knowledge

about the recipient of the blood beyond the fact that he or she falls within the ambit of

the National Blood Transfusion Service. The donation of blood can thus be seen, as

Richard Titmuss suggests in his influential study, as a gift to strangers.34 Here we find

18

an image of society quite at odds with the estranged, rights-based association

envisaged by MacIntyre. It seems to me very natural to regard the donation of blood

as an expression of political friendship, an expression of basic concern for the people

with whom we form a society. Of course, it does not have to be an expression of

political friendship, there are lots of other explanations of why a person might give

blood, but the case of blood donation is helpful here because it does render doubtful

some of the potential alternatives. Because there is no reward in any straightforward

sense, it looks rather improbable that blood donation has a strategic motivation. And,

because the recipient is anonymous, it is also rather implausible to suggest that the

willingness to donate is conditional on the existence of some sort of shared

understanding. It is not open to us to insist that our blood is given only to those who

share our religion, our language, our conception of the good, our skin colour. And

very few would want to make that sort of specification in any case. It seems often to

be the case that people donate blood simply because they are basically concerned for

their fellow citizens. The existence of a relatively widespread practice of blood

donation in our society suggests that political friendship is realisable among the

members of a modern multicultural society. Because we care about each other, we

strive together to resist the ills that afflict us all.

I anticipate an objection here. It might be said that the examples I have

discussed are in fact most appropriately conceived as expressions of solidarity with

those with whom one shares a national identity of some kind and do not therefore

constitute a form of basic concern or political friendship as I have characterised it: my

motivation to display concern for my fellow citizens is contingent on the presumption

of shared national identity, a presumption that is destabilised in conditions of

multicultural diversity and moral disagreement. Now I certainly accept that it is

19

reasonable to suppose that some people (some nationalists) do indeed exhibit concern

for their fellow citizens on the presumption that the recipient shares their national

identity; but why must that be the case? In my view, the suggestion that everyday acts

of kindness are motivated by a sense of shared national identity is in most cases

intuitively wide of the mark. It is not the warm glow of national solidarity that

prompts me to surrender my seat on the bus and it is not a sense of national belonging

that encourages me to donate my blood. To be sure, one might retrospectively seek to

rationalise one’s kindness by appeal to common nationality. But the primary impulse

is often much more direct and much simpler: we behave as we do because we care. To

imagine that there must be some further, deeper and more complex motivational story

to be told here could be to over-intellectualise and, in so doing, misunderstand the

nature of the attachment involved. I have been arguing that to demand a justification

for the concern of one citizen for another more basic than the fact of concern itself

might sometimes be to demand, in Bernard Williams’s famous expression, ‘one

thought too many’.35

6

The allusion to rationalisation here raises a final difficulty that I would like to address.

To bring the difficulty into focus, it may be helpful to return to the case of personal

friendship. I am basically concerned for my friend, Chris. This means that I am unable

to formulate a list of qualities that explain my concern for him such that, were he to

lose those qualities, I would cease to care for him. My concern for him is not

contingent on his being a certain way or possessing a certain nexus of properties.

20

However, it would be rather strange and, indeed, disconcerting if, after reflection, I

were unable to offer any sort of account at all to render my commitment to him

intelligible. As it happens, I can offer an account. He is a witty conversationalist, a

devoted and faithful friend. Think here of Sancho’s rationalisation of his concern for

Don Quixote – ‘we’re from the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, … he’s a grateful

man, he gave me his donkeys’. Evidently, none of this is to say that Sancho’s concern

for Don Quixote is conditional on the list of qualities presented; it is ‘impossible for

anything’ to separate the two men. The point is rather that Sancho’s account serves to

vindicate his belief that his basic commitment to Don Quixote is not that of a

‘madman and a dimwit’. Were he unable to formulate such an account, his

commitment might well persist, but he would have to acknowledge the sense of

arbitrariness that seems to attend any attachment that we are unable to render

intelligible by appeal to reasons.

Returning now to the case of political friendship, we can begin to see the

problem. We may be basically concerned for our fellow citizens, but what reason do

we have for thinking that our commitment to them is not groundless? Here of course

we cannot say that they are witty conversationalists, that they are grateful men. In

most cases, we just do not know or, worse, we know it to be false. Certainly, and as I

have emphasised throughout, our concern for them is not negated by our inability to

render it intelligible, but for most reflective people any such inability must surely

present a worry, a worry that could potentially lead to the erosion of the bond.

I said earlier that political friendship is liable to be carried not, for the most

part, in face-to-face encounters, but in the stories we tell about our shared lives. What

sort of story could we possibly tell to render our basic commitment to our political

friends intelligible? We may well not share any of the candidates identified by Mason

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– history, religion, ethnicity, mother tongue, culture or conception of the good. So

how are we to make sense of the bonds between us? I want to take a cue from some of

my earlier examples and suggest that the story we tell is going to have to be a story of

companionship.

The notion of companionship does not figure heavily in the philosophical

literature, but it strikes me as a potentially fertile idea. We can think of

companionship as a particular form of friendship. Literally, companions are those

who eat bread together (from the Late Latin ‘compāniō’). Critically, the emphasis

here is not on shared understandings or shared goals, but on shared activity. While it

would be implausible to contend that the shared life of a morally fragmented,

multicultural society consisted in the shared pursuit of a common goal, or the

common purposes envisaged by Gordon Brown, it is entirely conceivable that the

shared life of such a society might consist in the shared participation in an activity.

Political companions, we might say, are those who share in the activity of politics.

The kind of story I have in mind here reflects an image of modern political

community outlined by Stuart Hampshire:

Alongside conflicting moral traditions within a single society there can at the

same time be a shared political culture within shared institutions. Those who

operate within the various institutions in pursuit of their own particular ends

naturally come to share certain professional attitudes and customs, and a

common professional morality. … It is entirely normal that these moral cross-

currents should be strongly felt: one may dislike a class of persons for their

seeming indifference to social justice and to ordinary fairness as one conceives

22

them, and at the same time share with them a common political culture and a

respect for the procedures that will elaborately manage these hostilities.36

In other words, to say that political companions share in the activity of politics is not

at all to say that they share in the pursuit of common political ends, nor is it even

necessarily to say that they form an overlapping consensus on matters of fundamental

justice. It is simply to say that they recognise each other as sharing in a common,

though probably adversarial, political process under common institutions (institutions

they may not wholeheartedly endorse). We may dislike our fellow citizens intensely

and disagree with them in all sorts of ways, right down to the very fundamentals of

justice, but they are nonetheless our political companions. These are the people with

whom, for better or for worse, we share our political lives, and it is this conviction

that serves to render our basic concern for them intelligible.

Now, one might object that this story of political companionship is far too

slight to render the attitude of basic concern that I have described intelligible. The

mere fact of sharing a political life with one’s fellow citizens is insufficient to show,

for example, that one’s disposition to donate one’s blood to these people is not

groundless. One might hold that there is just not enough commonality between fellow

citizens for us plausibly to rationalise our willingness to make quite significant

sacrifices for each other.

But I see no reason to draw that conclusion. The objection presupposes that

the only way of rationalising concern for another person is by reference to

commonality. But I have denied that. Earlier I noted Emerson’s observation that it

may be better to be a ‘nettle’ in the side of one’s friend than his ‘echo’. Part of the

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account I offer in order to rationalise my basic concern for my friend, Chris, is our

deep disagreement about religion. And that seems a perfectly sensible reason to give.

Perhaps, then, we can apply the same idea to the political case. Why can it not

be that part of the account we offer to render our commitment to our fellow citizens

intelligible is that we disagree with them profoundly on matters of history, religion,

ethnicity, mother tongue, culture or conception of the good? This might seem a rather

peculiar notion, but I think it only seems peculiar because we have become so

accustomed to the idea that disagreement must be undermining of communal bonds.

Perhaps we enjoy the participation in conflict; perhaps we feel that we might learn

something about ourselves in and through the dispute. This is not an uncommon

motivation. Indeed, Hampshire suggests that it may even be a natural impulse,

contending that humans are ‘argumentative and litigious animals, observably taking

delight in the rituals and procedures of argument, advocacy, and negotiation’.37

My aim here is not to provide a comprehensive rationalisation of political

friendship that would be appropriate in each and every case. Rather, I just mean to

show that when challenged to render his basic concern for his fellow citizens

intelligible, there are things that a person might plausibly say. The fact that we

disagree with each other about the good life, that we lack common purposes, need not

constitute a barrier to the rationalisation of our concern for each other. On the

contrary, I have suggested that in some cases at least, the fact of our disagreement

might even provide a part of the rationalisation. It may be that one of the most

important grounds for solidarity in a conflicted, multicultural society is to be found in

the fact of conflict itself.

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7

The question of how the members of multicultural societies are to live together has

taken on a new urgency in the shadow of recent political events. In the contemporary

political discourse, both practical and theoretical, and in the media more generally, it

has almost the status of a truism that a morally and culturally fragmented society must

also be a socially fragmented society; and the advent of ‘home-grown’ suicide

bombers would only seem to confirm that conviction. I have been arguing that in fact

there is no straightforward inference from the fact of moral disagreement to social

disunity. We go badly wrong where we infer from extreme cases like the London

bombings the generalisation that moral discord is necessarily corrosive of social

cohesion. If ours is a community of political friends who stand to one another in

relations of basic mutual concern, then our sense of solidarity and of belonging

together need not be eroded by our lack of moral commonality. On the contrary, it

would be perfectly reasonable for us to defend the intelligibility of our devotion to

each other by appeal to the tensions between us.

The idea that moral discord must be detrimental to social unity is a hangover

from classical treatments of community and friendship like Cicero’s. But, as Michael

Ignatieff writes, ‘modern life has changed the possibilities of civic solidarity’.38 By

striving to project our nostalgic and utopian vision of the past onto our present

circumstances, we blind ourselves to the real possibilities for community in the

modern world. And here there is real danger, for it may well be that the bond of

political friendship will not long endure as a practical possibility where it is not

vividly imagined and actively explored. Ignatieff contends that without a language of

solidarity ‘adequate to this moment we risk losing ourselves in resignation towards

25

the portion of life which has been allotted to us’.39 In a world in which British citizens

are prepared to maim and kill other British citizens, we cannot afford to rest content

with the lazy assumption that discord necessarily spells disunity, for in so doing we

risk making it true.

1 Gordon Brown, ‘The Future of Britishness’ [online]. The Fabian Society. Available from:

http://www.fabian-society.org.uk/press_office/display.asp?id=533&type=news&cat=43 [accessed

29/03/07]. 2 Trevor Phillips, ‘After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation’ [online]. The Commission for Racial

Equality. Available from: http://www.cre.gov.uk/Default.aspx.LocID-0hgnew07s.RefLocID-

0hg00900c002.Lang-EN.htm [accessed 29/03/07]. 3 Gordon Brown, ‘The Future of Britishness’. 4 John Rawls, Political Liberalism paperback edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p.

36. 5 One notable (though not uncontroversial) attempt to negotiate the tension is, of course, Rawls’s

appeal to the idea of an ‘overlapping consensus’ (John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Lecture IV). 6 For further discussion of this point, see my Community and Conflict: The Sources of Liberal

Solidarity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 161-2. 7 In Plato’s view, a political association whose members are at variance with one another ‘is not so

much a community as a great many communities. … It would be quite wrong to treat this plurality as a

unity’ (Plato, Republic, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 422e-423a).

And, while Aristotle is often thought to offer an account of the political community more sensitive than

Plato’s to the realities of disagreement and discord, he nevertheless perpetuates the notion that moral

conflict is detrimental to social unity declaring that ‘every cause of difference makes a breach in a city’

(Aristotle, The Politics, trans. B. Jowett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1303b10-15) 8 Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003), p. 166. 9 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 146. 10 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 146. 11 William Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and

Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 65. 12 Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, p. 210. 13 Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Levels of Community and their Normative

Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 127. 14 Cicero, ‘De Amicitia’, in M. Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1991), VIII, 27-8 (p. 90). 15 See Plato, ‘Lysis’ in T. J. Saunders (ed.) Early Socratic Dialogues (London: Penguin, 1987), 214d

and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (trans.) J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1976), 1156b5-1157a. 16 Cicero, ‘De Amicitia’, IV 15-16 (p. 85). 17 Cicero, ‘De Amicitia’, XVIII 65-6 (p. 103); see also XX 74-5 (p. 106). 18 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (trans.) E .Grossman (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 678. 19 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, pp. 678-9. 20 As Sancho declares, ‘the first thing I’ll say is that I believe my master, Don Quixote, is completely

crazy’ (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 678). 21 Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, ‘Friendship and the Self’, Ethics 1998, 108/3: 502-27, p. 507. 22 Judith Shklar, ‘A Friendship’, in her Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1998), p. 15. 23 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156a5-10. 24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155b19. 25 Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 42-3. 26 Michel de Montaigne ‘Of Friendship’ in M. Pakaluk (ed.) Other Selves, p. 192.

26

27 I discuss this point at much greater length elsewhere in my ‘Against Unconditional Love’, Journal of

Applied Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1 (2003). 28 See Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 44-6. 29 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Friendship’ in his Self-Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover,

1993), p. 47. 30 Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 39. 31 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. 32 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 250-1. 33 Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed (London: Hutchinson, 1985);

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 2000). 34 Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (London: George Allen

& Unwin, 1970). 35 Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’ in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1981), p. 18. 36 Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (London: Duckworth, 1999), pp. 48-9. There are also

resonances here with Michael Oakeshott’s conception of ‘civil association’. See Michael Oakeshott,

On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 37 Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 176. 38 Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), p. 138. 39 Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers, p. 142.