What Are Friends For?
FIRST LORD: Might we but have that happiness, my lord, that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals, we should think ourselves for ever perfect.
TIMON: O, no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you: how had you been my friends else? why have you that charitable title from thousands, did not you chiefly belong to my heart? I have told more of you to myself than you can with modesty speak in your own behalf; and thus far I confirm you. O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? they were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er have use for ‘em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases that keep their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits: and what better or properer can we can our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ‘tis, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes! O joy, e’en made away ere ‘t can be born! Mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks: to forget their faults, I drink to you.
Timon of Athens, by William Shakespeare
Maybe it’s just because I’m working on a screen adaptation of the play, but it seems to me that Timon’s psychology is highly relevant to understanding our receptivity to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that “America has no better friend than Israel,” which Matt Yglesias found so absurd.
Timon is an enormously wealthy Athenian who has spent his adult life dispensing benefits – giving extravagant gifts to everyone he knows, from his servants to his fellow lords. He is, consequently, everybody’s best friend. The arc of the play has him eventually give everything away, leaving him destitute, at which point he – with considerable relief – turns to his friends and beneficiaries for help, and discovers that nobody loves you when you’re down and out.
I’m not interested in drawing an analogy between America’s financial situation and Timon’s (not at this point), but rather between America’s psychological situation and Timon’s at the beginning of the play, when Timon still thinks he is wealthy. Timon has a desperate need to be loved. Not loved by a particular someone – he has no wife, no children – but loved generally. He showers the world with gifts as a way of buying that love, but he knows, deep down, that because he is the giver he is, in terms of love, in the inferior position. If he were the one in need, and others helped him, then he’d know, like George Bailey at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” that he really was the richest man in town. And so he is semi-consciously spending himself into that position of dependency.
On some level, Timon cannot accept the idea of friendship on the basis of mutual and equal recognition – or, rather, he longs for this, but cannot imagine how it would work in practice. He gives, and acquires flatterers and dependents, because he wishes he could be a dependent, be cared for – but so long as he is wealthy, he cannot accept reciprocal return of kindness, but must always make sure that the other fellow is in his debt. There is something scary about the idea of being independent equals. He would rather live out vicariously the experience of being dependent and cared for through his beneficiaries than have a genuinely equal relationship.
The United States’ relationship with the world – for whatever reason – is similarly fraught. We have, from the earliest days of our nationhood, had a problem with the idea of mutual and equal relationships among states. Many, many nations on earth consider themselves to be exceptional in some way or other – the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, all have national myths about possessing a unique spirit that destined them for greatness or dominion. Even smaller nations often have flattering national myths – the Poles and Serbs have a myth of national martyrdom for (respectively) Catholic and Orthodox Christianity; the Swiss have a myth of national superiority to the barbarous foreigners around them; the Jews . . . well, that national myth is probably well-known enough not to need repeating.
But America’s national myth is distinct, I would argue, in that we swing wildly between an idealistic self-conception as entirely separate from the rest of the (fallen) world and an alternate idealistic self-conception that is globally imperialistic – in both conceptions, America is not merely better than the rest or the natural leader of the rest, but somehow is the world, unto itself. Our nation lacks a clear mental conception of its own boundaries. And such a conception is necessary for mutual relations on the basis of equal respect.
How does this play into our relationship with Israel? Israel is useful to America psychologically because it allows us to live vicariously through her, and thereby experience the tender care that we long for ourselves. Being universal is an extraordinary burden for any person or any nation. It is, among other things, a terribly lonely condition. America is not actually alone, but we experience our national existence as lonely precisely because we deny ourselves the experience of fellowship, as that would imply definitive boundaries between ourselves and more or less equal others. Israel experiences an isolation of a different kind, but when we show our friendship for her, the psychic benefit for us is that experience of feeling as if we received that friendship, as if someone else broke through our national loneliness. And that’s a considerable psychic reward.
Yglesias says in his piece that Israel does nothing for America – Israel is a burden, nothing more. This isn’t entirely true – Israel has, for example, proved a useful partner in intelligence-gathering in the past, helped battlefield-test American weapons back when we weren’t fighting so many wars ourselves, and was a useful proxy for undertaking certain unsavory tasks. But against this must be set Israel’s repeated violations of basic rules of friendship – spying on us, re-selling sensitive technology to our rivals without permission, etc. And that’s before you get into the question of whether Israel is a geopolitical asset or a significant liability.
But Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the world wants to subject American power to something resembling a system of laws and norms through institutions like the International Criminal Court. America, for understandable reasons, has resisted this, even when parts of the system were our own creations, designed to legitimate our own supremacy by limiting its absolute scope. We can debate whether our resistance is wise or not, but my point is that Israel has been consistently supportive of our resistance – again for obvious reasons. The psychological component of this comraderie is that we are simultaneously able to maintain our sense of ourselves as boundless and universal, and relieved of some of the burden of our solitude in such a position.
Obviously there’s more to the US-Israel friendship than the psychological dynamic I’ve outlined above. But I do think it’s a vital component of that relationship, a component that talk about the potency of the Israel Lobby on the one hand, or of America’s natural affinity for a fellow democracy on the other hand, doesn’t really capture.
By most objective measures, Israel is not our “best” friend. Myself, I’d bestow that title on the same country Yglesias does: Canada, whose friendship we take almost entirely for granted. But Israel is a unique kind of friend for America, a friend that provides us psychic benefits that we really cannot get from any other country. Asking America’s relationship with Israel to become “normal” is really another way of asking us to reevaluate why we want those psychic benefits, and whether we wouldn’t really be better off without them.
You omit one reason for the US’s friendship with Israel which was Britain’s initial motive in promoting the creation of Israel: the fulfillment of prophecy. There is a large contingent of Americans who are evangelical and take the Bible literally and seriously. The restoration of Israel to the Jewish people is the most potent sign of the Second Coming, the end times, the apocalypse. To be a friend of Israel is to recognize the paramount return of Jesus to Jerusalem. The South, the Midwest, and the Southwest of America are filled with expectant believers.
— LDM · May 27, 02:13 AM · #
But against this must be set Israel’s repeated violations of basic rules of friendship – spying on us, re-selling sensitive technology to our rivals without permission, etc.
Not to mention the U.S.S. Liberty incident.
— Brett · May 30, 05:50 AM · #
LDM, that’s like saying that the average Jewish supporter of Israel is motivated by the desire to raze the Dome of the Rock, rebuild the temple of Solomon, and restore the traditional sacrifices. Doubtless there are some Jews with that goal, but I don’t know any. Similarly, I’d be surprised if you knew large numbers of evangelicals who support Israel as a means to hasten the Second Coming. Tell us, in numbers: (i) how many evangelical Christians do you know (besides me)? and (ii) how many base their views of Mideast policy on a desire to hasten the Lord’s return?
— y81 · May 31, 08:51 PM · #
That’s a good point, y81. I didn’t have time to do more than roll my eyes when I saw that LDM post earlier. The common cultural and religious heritage makes a lot of Christians more sympathetic to Israel than to some other countries, even if most of them stop far short of accepting the particular flavor of millenialism cited by LDM. (Christians have a common religious and cultural heritage with Islam, too, but to a much lesser degree than with Judaism.)
Those of us of a certain age also remember when the mainstream left would scream loudly and play the anti-Semitism card whenever anyone breathed a criticism of Israel-the-political-state. Given what happened with the holocaust, I think we accepted and internalized that viewpoint and came to identify with Israel. In the meantime, the mainstream left has changed its tune and has become reflexively anti-Israel.
Rule of thumb: never believe anything a leftwinger says.
— The Reticulator · May 31, 11:07 PM · #
It is safe to say that there are few evangelicals on the coasts. But the heartland, particularly the Bible Belt, is filled with them. Check out the charismatics, the Baptists, the Pentacostals, the Presbyterians, etc. How many are there? I don’t know. But they mostly vote.
— LDM · May 31, 11:22 PM · #
The trouble with Americans is they like to think of themselves as too good to be on their own side. They have to have been right in killing bin Laden for reasons other than that he was their enemy.
So what happens if part of being on your own side is thinking you’re too good to have done things because you’re on your own side? What happens is that this weird form of self-delusion gets embodied in the very practice of empire. And what happens is debates like this, with people scrabbling to invent an ‘objective’ ethical reason why bin Laden should have been killed, without invoking the political realities which account for the act, or the loyalties that define it, and without recognising that the compulsion to search for such a reason is implicated in the viewpoint from which it looks just and necessary to have gone through with the killing.
The US is not a moral actor of universal validity. It is not privileged to dispense universal justice. It will never convince the world of its righteousness.
— banflaw · Jun 1, 02:09 AM · #
Mr. banflaw seems to be quite the moralist. Perhaps he’s the supreme arbiter and judge.
— The Reticulator · Jun 1, 03:58 AM · #
Check out the charismatics, the Baptists, the Pentacostals, the Presbyterians, etc.
That’s quite an interesting group to put all together in one sentence, separated only by commas. It suggests that the writer did not practice what he preached — that he did not “check out” all four of these groups before making such a statement in this context.
— The Reticulator · Jun 1, 04:05 AM · #
Forget religion! It is all about Science and Technology… Brain power is the only wealth Israel gives to the USA!!!!!!!!!!
— coolhead · Jun 1, 07:08 PM · #