Proximity and social friendship

The traditional message Urbi et Orbi of Pope Francis for Easter, in 2024, he once again responds to a call to fraternity, in an environment in which enmity is worsening, just as he did in his third encyclical Frattelli Tutti about social friendship. His message calls for solidarity with all the victims of conflicts in the world, cites a long list of human dramas and urges everyone to look at so many people on the planet who suffer in the midst of war and indifference. It will be possible to meditate on what helps us create bonds of social friendship and fraternity? How can we contribute from our smallness to the harmony of the world?

Friendship has been a topic of broad interest for philosophy and, perhaps, one of the most everyday bonds for human beings. From the moment we meet the other, our nature is torn between fear, vulnerability and distrust -especially with those who are unknown to us-; and, at the same time, the imminent need to expand, to become close and loved by that other, which implies conquest and emotion.

It could be said that the love of friendship is a cordial love, from heart to heart. It is a symbolic coexistence in which we are able to surrender our vulnerability and where proximity does not require physical closeness. We love our friends, even at the greatest distance, thanks to a close bond of affection without expectations, an encounter that happens to us and embraces us.

The big question is how to make that endearing and intimate human bond called friendship a social phenomenon that provokes brotherhood or, what we can call, social friendship. With the concept of proportion, Aristotle offers a valuable idea in this regard, expressing balance and justice in the relationship. For a friendship to be virtuous it requires mutual appreciation, as well as two-way reciprocity, respect and trust. Without a doubt, all of them elements that allow balance for life in society, something closer to civil friendshipto the lives of citizens in balance.

What is there then in friendship that transcends the civil relationship and is established in a common anthropological code, which is that of being human? This relationship is more similar to brotherly love, the recognition of feeling part of the same existential status due to the fact of being human in coexistence with the world. And this is tremendously problematic because it contains natural difficulties typical, precisely, of our human condition, which also has that of an animal. Two key notions appear here for reflection and, above all, for education: learning about vulnerability and proximity.

From the moment we are born we are a vulnerable being. Furthermore, basic emotions arise in our development, and there is one in particular that we talk little about and that is disgust (we don't even like to recognize it), that feeling of rejection and repudiation of what is contaminated, what is dirty, first in our own body and then towards others on whom we project rejection. It is a way of hating in others what we do not want in ourselves, their vulnerability, their contamination. This leads to us developing gaps in relationships from an early age. In this sense, education is key because learning about basic human weakness, as Rousseau said in his treatise on education, Emilio, is fundamental to recognize ourselves as social beings. A society that rewards strength and invulnerability becomes a field of war, needing to create differences and stigmas on various groups. And when we interact with a group of people that generates shame and/or disgust in us, it is difficult for us to see the world from their perspective.

This binary tendency to divide the world between one another, to create distance between the known and the unknown, must be addressed to cultivate greater proximity. People are naturally empathetic, we are capable of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, imagining their thoughts and feeling them; The limitation is that we achieve it with those who are close to us. The task is to amplify the scope of the next, its universalization, that which makes us part of the same body; and here conversation, as a creator of meaning and closeness, allows us to expand the power of seeing the other who no longer seems so different to us.

The call then is to translate this philosophy of vulnerability and proximity into our daily lives, through encounters with others, where we all know ourselves to be fragile beings and recognize our precarious and needy nature. Also to enable the faculty of imagining what offers us interiority and, at the same time, the possibility of understanding the history of the other, no matter how distant it may be from us, to put ourselves in their shoes. The strength of a social friendship is the fabric of trust when we feel part of a world that we share and that is a common good.

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