Equality makes friendship possible
And friendship is how we come alive
The Book:
On Liberty and The Subjection of Women
By John Stuart Mill
Penguin Classics
First Published 1859, 1869 respectively
The Talk:
It’s easy these days to see liberal society as a kind of stand-off. On any given issue, no side can control all the levers of power. The understanding is that the “other side” would take it all if they could. So we can’t give in, and they won’t give in either.
And so we play for inches—politically, legally, culturally. And if one side gets a big win, just prepare for the backlash. It’s not surprising then that modern society seems to have lost its shine. Is the whole point of civic life only to keep the other side from taking over? Is there anything positively good about liberal society? Or is the best we can hope for that it’s “not as bad as it could be” or that “the alternatives are worse”?
Sometimes it feels like the American system of government is nothing more than a kind of six-way stand-off, between federal branches, between the states and the federal government, between states themselves, between houses of congress, etc. Nothing for, everything against.
In such a light, words like justice, freedom, and equality exist only in the negative. Justice is proving harm. Freedom is not being told what to do. Equality is making sure nobody’s special.
And while there are often good reasons behind these principles, it’s hardly an uplifting vision. Few people identify—in any heart-warming, soul-stirring way—with our liberal society, as something great, something wonderful, something beautiful.
Yet that’s what I started to feel, almost in spite of myself, while reading John Stuart Mill’s polemic 1869 essay The Subjection of Women (famously co-written with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill).
We must be better than our laws
To be clear, the book is not a happy one. Mill is pretty rough on marriage as it was legally framed in his Victorian England. It traps women. It robs them of the happiness of pursuing their desires and interests. It trains men to be cruel. It protects the worst men. It stifles talent. It goes against the modern idea of meritocracy. Marriage is a relic, argues Mill, from another time. It is not fit for modern sensibilities and morality, not aligned with our sense of justice, fairness, merit, and liberty.
Given this, Mill argues both for the legal reform and the moral reform of marriage. And the two are paradoxically intertwined. Mill argues that social institutions are a kind of moral school: They teach, reward, punish, and ignore. Some attitudes flourish, other attitudes find hardly any soil or sunlight or rain.
Thus, legal equality is a prerequisite for social equality. To be seen as equals, we must be equals, Mill’s argument implies. He thinks that women should be able to vote, possess property, and divorce. This at least gets men and women in the ballpark of each other, so to speak. True, people can sometimes be good—might be merciful—despite a bad system, Mill concedes. But until the legal structure recognizes equality, no equality of any practical importance exists.
And yet at the same time, if the laws are ever going to change, his male readers must change their moral values first:
Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than existing laws.
What is marriage good for?
Mill’s chicken-and-egg problem gives the whole text a kind of desperation. He knows he’s up against overwhelming public opinion.
And yet a reader might be forgiven for thinking that Mill’s ulterior motive is to get rid of marriage altogether. It’s possible Mill saw this as a possibility down the road, but a bridge too far for his readers. (Mill was an ardent supporter of contraception, according to the introduction, though he kept this view on the down low.)
It is at least implied, when you put all the pieces together, that if women are free to secure occupations, money, property, and other legal protections, then marriage becomes much more like a business partnership. This is one of the analogies Mill uses to explain what true equality would be like:
It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business: and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every partnership, one shall have entire control over the concern, and the others shall be bound to obey orders.
So if, in Mill’s view, children are optional in marriage, does marriage become just a kind of… empty container? A certain kind of legal contract for whatever kind of project two people want to have, held together by hormones or the fading generational echoes of now-defunct cultural mores?
Maybe. (Mill always leaves the future open-ended.)
But it’s here where it’s worth remembering that Mill is a utilitarian. That means that he’s not interested in equality as a brute moral fact or a good in itself. Equality isn’t for equality’s sake, in his view. It’s the goal of his essay, but it’s not an endpoint in his philosophy. It’s a starting point.
What men want
Near the end of the essay, Mill describes what he sees as the ideal marriage (emphasis mine):
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them - so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and being led in the path of development - I will not attempt to describe. To those can concieve it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest convinction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage…
Elsewhere he says this mutual spurring of development “often happens between two friends of the same sex, who are much associated in their daily life.”
So Mill’s vision of what an egalitarian marriage could become is centered around the idea of friendship.
To contemporary ears, the idea of friendship may seem a rather weak end game. We use the phrase “just friends” as a negation of romantic love. But what Mill describes is different by orders of magnitude—a lifelong intercourse of two fully engaged human beings, much closer to what we mean when we talk about soulmates.
This kind of friendship—unique, lifelong, absorbing, profound—has been seen for centuries as one of the greatest joys of human life, one of the greatest sources of a meaningful life, if one can chance to find it.
Aristotle notably places friendship above justice in the Nicomachean Ethics:
When people are friends there is no need of justice, but when they are just there is still need of friendship.
And elsewhere:
A friend is a second self.
Laelius, in Cicero’s “On Friendship,” eulogizes his friend:
My life has been a good one because I spent it with Scipio.
Both Epicureans and Stoics praised friendship. Seneca writes:
“Why make a friend?” To have someone I can die for, someone I can accompany into exile, someone whose life I can save, even by laying down my own.
Of course, these were friendships between free men. And, like marriage today, friendship was not the sort of thing one could force to work. It was serendipitous and dependent on some alchemy of personalities, character, interests, and circumstances. Who can say exactly how friendship happens, though it happens all the time? But when one found it, it was treasured.
But one of the necessary prerequisites for friendship is equality. Where there is a power difference, that’s the boundary line of friendship. In a world of perfect equality, nobody would have the power to lord themselves over anyone else. But what we would be left with is something precious, perhaps the best kind of relationship at all.
This is how we come alive
So if marriage can become a site for friendship, that is a good thing, obviously. But I think for Mill friendship is even greater still.
For Mill, the goal of humanity (and therefore of society) is the unleashing of human potential. The greatest good for the greatest number of people occurs when every human being is free to develop all parts of themselves. It not only makes that person happy as they flourish, it spills over and causes others to flourish as well. Mill founds his essay on this very purpose:
The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hinderances to human improvement.
Friendship, therefore, matters to Mill as one of the most important sites for human flourishing and maximizing human happiness. It supercharges the growth and development of the individual, bringing them out of their stupor and into their life.
At least that’s what my friends (and my wife) do for me. Perhaps you’ve had this experience yourself: You observe yourself alone in a room, mostly inert, inactive and directionless. But then someone comes in, someone who by their very presence engages you, stirs you, sets you in motion. Pretty soon, your mind is cooking, imagination sparks, projects are under way, the banter is going back and forth. And maybe for a split second you observe yourself in that third-person kind of way, and you see yourself performing, alive, alert, awake. You are, by some magic, fully yourself with this person, in a way that you are not fully yourself alone. And then, get this, you get to be the person that makes them become fully themselves, too!
For all the talk of “self-motivated people,” the honest (science-based) truth is that people are motivated by the presence of others, and especially motivated by friends.
And so, all that to say, maybe Mill thinks marriage ultimately becomes a kind of thin husk, destined for proverbial dustbin of history. But, as a utilitarian, I think he sees the marriage of the future as something useable, as a site for potential friendship, and thus a whole new social pump for human flourishing. Not the only one, but a new one. A new school for friendship.
As a 21st Century person, living 144 years later, in a world much like the one Mill hoped for, it hit me that the possibility of friendship with my spouse is a new thing, a whole new realm of happiness that didn’t exist before, and that exists now because of gender equality.
We need a pro-friendship social policy
The sad irony is that, at a time when men suffer from social isolation and loneliness, the most popular online advice for men promotes asserting social dominance (being an “alpha male” that "holds frame,” maintains “frame control,” uses stoic habits to go “monk mode,” uses high-pressure sales tactics to “close,” and uses psychological hacks to manipulate others and roleplay being a sociopath) as the solution to loneliness.
And yet even here, Mill speaks to our age, recognizing that many people (including women) live quietly miserable lives. And yet inequality only adds to their misery, rather than taking it away:
One feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another.
Here is what I take away from Mill:
Life is hard. And friendship is one of the greatest bulwarks against the misery of life. But it is far too rare. And so we ought to do whatever it takes to increase the odds of friendship. A more equal society increases those possibilities significantly. And modern marriage, for all its flaws and frequent failures, is a site of possible friendship, and that of the profoundest sort.
Beyond marriage, a similar story has the potential to unfold in other relationships, in workplaces, in organizations, in institutions, where equality is structurally realized. Equality offers the hand of friendship where there was no possibility of friendship before. A sharing of thoughts, ideas, talents, interests, hearts, truths. We win together, lose together, try again together. We take turns being the teacher for one another. Most of all, we grow together, into the best versions of ourselves.
Equality requires both institutional changes and inner changes at the same time; neither one can move far without the other. But equality is still worth fighting for, because equality is the kindling of friendship, and friendship is life itself.
Related:
Hypatia of Alexandria: A philosopher for polarized times