Turn Every Page: Friendsgiving
For Thanksgiving, my family gathered with several other families as we have done for years now. I’m not sure when our “Friendsgiving” began, but it made me think about the role friendship plays in the intellectual life.
True friendship is worthy in itself. And in the intellectual life, friendship can be a force multiplier. If you have a friend who is equally curious, well-read, and interested in seeking the truth, your own progress increases geometrically rather than arithmetically. Friends challenge your ideas, but they do so from a place of affection. Friends recommend books, podcasts, and ways of thinking that open your mind to new areas you have not considered. Friends provide constructive advice because they seek your good. They want to challenge your ideas not to beat you in an argument, but to help you refine your arguments. Comments ask “Have you ever thought about the question this other way?” rather than stating “That idea will never work.” These friendly challenges strengthen one’s own thinking and, I’ve found, make you a more deliberate and thoughtful person.
At the same time, having a friend who can accompany you in intellectual endeavors is humbling. You quickly realize that other people make your thinking better. Although you can do a lot of things alone—and there’s a time for thinking in solitude—collaboration or discussion refines your thinking.
Leo Damrosch’s The Club looks at the group that Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson founded in 1764. Johnson’s companion Boswell joined in 1773. Over the course of years, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, and Richard Brinsley were all members of the Club. The Club’s members were successful and notable individually, but they were made better as a group. Unfortunately, the book actually focuses on the individual members (with a focus on Boswell and Johnson) far more than the group or the content of their meetings.
I was interested most of all in the Club as a group of intellectually minded men who specifically sought each other’s company to grow as men. Similar groups have existed throughout the years. Ben Franklin famously formed the Junto Club with some friends in 1727 to discuss morals, philosophy, and politics. (A friend who works in my office building actually belongs to a modern-day Junto Club and they each write an essay monthly to present to their group, share ideas, and refine their own thinking.) As the Benjamin Franklin History website states, “Members of the Junto club were avid readers and intellectuals involved in their individual improvement and that of society. The Junto was a launching pad for many public projects. Out of the meetings came proposals for the creation of the first lending library, the Union Fire Company, the University of Pennsylvania, volunteer militia, Pennsylvania Hospital among other public project[s].” Joining together to think as friends can produce some amazing results.
The Inklings are another obvious example. That was a literary group centered around C.S. Lewis in Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s. J.R.R. Tolkien is the most famous other member of the group. The Inklings included both a social component and a Junto- or Club-like sharing of ideas: “When the group was most active, the Inklings held meetings twice a week, with six to eight members typically attending. On Tuesday mornings they convened at the Eagle and Child pub (commonly known as the “Bird and Baby”) in Oxford for beer and wide-ranging conversation. But their most important meetings were Thursday evenings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, when various members read aloud from books or poems they were writing and other members responded with vigorous critiques and suggestions.” (See more here.) “As Warren Lewis recalled, ‘We were no mutual admiration society: praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work—or even not-so-good work—was often brutally frank.’” Imagine having your writing critiqued by Lewis or Tolkien; it would no doubt improve.
Many leaders and intellectuals have used friends and groups to further their own thinking. Franklin Roosevelt, as Governor of New York, “filled the Governor’s Mansion with a steady stream of visitors from all walks of life who joined him at lunch, dinner, and frequently stayed overnight.” These visitors included experts on different policy areas, and “Roosevelt would throw questions to the experts ‘at an exciting and exhausting clip.’ As the night wore on, the questions became ‘meatier, more informed.’” (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times, at 177.) Roosevelt’s thinking became clearer and sharper the more he interacted with others.
I have greatly benefited from similar interactions through the years, and I am deeply indebted to friends who have been a “Club” for me at various times. Jamie, Ed, Becket, Erika, Toni, Greg, and others. They have opened me up to new ideas, or helped me refine my own thinking, or both.
In this season of gratitude, let’s be thankful for friends who challenge us and push us forward.