- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Social Affairs Unit; 1st edition (2 Nov 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0907631940
- ISBN-13: 978-0907631941
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 16.8 x 1.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 522,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Book Description
From the book's cover. Does True Friendship Have Any Future?
'One loyal friend is worth 10,000 relatives', said Euripides. Aristotle thought friendship the best thing in the world. Saint Augustine was devastated by the death of a friend, 'All that we had done together was now a grim ordeal without him'. For men as different as Dr Johnson, Coleridge, and Cardinal Newman friendship was a great, moral love. For Cicero it was a foundation of social order. For Burke 'good men [must] cultivate friendships'. To try to lead a good lifeon one's own is arrogant and dangerous. In past ages business thrived on the trust of friends; armies won battleson the loyalty of men to their comrades and people were attracted to and schooled in medicine, law and academe by friendship. This friendship of the past was high friendship, a friendship of pleasure but also of a shared moral life.
Losing Friends contrasts this high friendship with the 'pathetic affairs' which pass for friendship today. Friendship is in trouble. An institution once as important as the family, has been 'diluted to mere recreation...passing an odd evening together...sharing the odd confidence'. It is being ousted from business through fear of cronyism and squeezed between the demands of work and the increasingly jealous family. Fathers neglect their obligations to their friends in the club or pub to bath their children. Many of us will have no friends in illness, in need or at our funerals. Bewildered letters to agony aunts ask how to make friends. Schools are absurdly introducing classes on how to do so. Our society has no public recognition of friendship and cannot even discuss it articulately. When it does it sentimentalizes it. Modern society is wealthy, healthy and long lived. Aristotle would ask what the point of such a life is if lived without friends.
About the Author
Dr Digby Anderson is founder Director of the Social Affairs Unit. He is author/contributing editor to a number of books including "The Dictionary of Dangerous Words" (SAU 2000); "Faking It" (SAU 1998); Gentility Recalled (SAU/Acton Institute 1996); and "The Loss of Virtue" (SAU/National Review 1993). He also contributes regular articles to newspapers and periodicals.
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