[0:00]The Hobbits knew it, the Stoics knew it, but somewhere along the way, we lost it. I'm talking about fellowship. The kind of deep, loyal friendships that we see in Lord of the Rings, and Band of Brothers, not just your water cooler buddies at work, but real friendship. Today we're diving into Tolkien and the philosophy of fellowship. You know, the idea of friendship, of fellowship, it's been something of a controversy here on the channel, and by far our recent and most popular video is on the corruption of friendship. If you haven't watched it, make sure you check it out here, but today I wanted to be specific about the things that we've lost as a society. So I've been reading this book, it's called Hobbit Virtues by Dr. Christopher Snyder. It explores a series of virtues that we find in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings that we should aspire to. So the virtue we're focusing on today is indeed fellowship. So yeah, our most popular video ever is about friendship, specifically the importance of preserving and recognizing deep platonic friendship. And the harm that is caused when people project sexual attraction onto clearly platonic fictional friendship. The classic example where we, where we've seen this is, is Sam and Frodo. We don't have to put a label on it, do we, Sam? But today we're going to go deeper into the actual philosophy behind friendship and why it matters in the first place. Because right now, I would posit to you that the very institution of friendship in society is under attack. And when I say friendship, I'm talking about the basic human connection, the things we saw in the stories we watched and read growing up. We're talking about Ron and Harry and Hermione, Anakin and Obi-Wan, Sam and Frodo. If I were to be honest, like growing up, I didn't have a lot of close friends. I moved around a lot, I, I never lived anywhere for more than a few years at a time, and this made it difficult to strike up like deep, healthy, meaningful friendships. The kind that I saw in the stories that I loved. Here's the thing, superficial friendship is, is super easy. You know, it's often like a matter of convenience, it's the people you see every day, it's your co-workers. But like a deeper bond, like caring for people who share your values, like that's rare. And I think it's becoming even more rare in modern society. We live in this strange world where the technology we have was supposed to connect us. Like Facebook's original motto was all about making the world more connected. And yet, I would argue that we are more socially disconnected than ever. So this ideal, this, this idea of fellowship, of a deep friendship, it can seem, practically speaking, kind of ethereal, kind of something that's hard to grasp onto, something that's, it's just something you read about in books. But I want to actually, I want to peel back, peel back the onion a little bit and, and talk about this concept, this idea of friendship, of fellowship through the lens of Western philosophy. And I think the best place I can think of to start, let me grab it. It's from this movie, it's a wonderful life. It's a movie I grew up watching every Christmas. And in it, the angel Clarence tells George Bailey something very important. The ultimate lesson of the movie, and that is, remember no man is a failure who has friends.
[3:17]It is this beautiful story about a man who didn't realize the impact of his own friendship within his community. And, and this is, this is a biblical concept. The book of Proverbs literally says, "One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother." Jesus himself said, "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." This is the ideal that is found in the HBO series Band of Brothers. If, if you've seen it, you know it's, it's about the bonds of brotherhood that are formed through war. And really, that's like that's the strongest, like common bond that you can think of. You see it play out in the show. If I'm being honest, it's, it's one of the reasons I joined the Air Force. I wanted to find that kind of brotherhood, I wanted that connection to something that was bigger than myself. But, and here's the thing about ideals, they're very difficult to live up to, particularly in real life. For me, if I'm, if I'm being honest, the, the reality of military culture today doesn't come close to the war movies that I grew up watching. And that might seem, and that might seem kind of naive, of course it doesn't, but, but to me it's been something very real and difficult that I've had to grapple with throughout my whole career. That's the reality check, that's the disappointment I think we have to face when we look at the cultural decline of friendship. But before we can really mourn what's been lost, I've, I've talked about it a few times, but we do have to be able to understand the, the ideal. That thing that's worth striving for, like what, when we talk about friendship on a philosophical level, what does that actually mean? I would argue, this guy got it. Tolkien understood the ideal. Fellowship is literally in the title of the first Lord of the Rings book. And one of the most tragic moments in the film and the book is the final chapter, the breaking of the fellowship. So for this I want to jump back into Dr. Snyder's thoughts and, and he describes it really well. He basically points out that Tolkien's view of friendship was shaped by his own experience at school in Birmingham and later as a student and professor at Oxford University. He saw fellowship as something beyond individual, surface level friendship. It's this thing rooted in the ideal, in virtue, it's where there's a higher calling that brings people together. This is where the Western philosophy piece comes in because Tolkien would have studied this. In Plato's time, Philia is the Greek word for friendship. Whereas Koinonia, which I'm, which I'm definitely pronouncing these Greek words wrong, uh, I'm sorry Dr. Snyder, but he's the one who pointed them out and I, and I think it really does enlighten our own understanding of Tolkien's view of this philosophy. So yeah, Koinonia is, is the is the word for fellowship. Plato and then later Aristotle would, would define, would define these philosophical terms as, as something that was a virtuous ideal, a thing worth striving for. Girl worth fighting for. So it kind of makes perfect sense that these philosophical foundations inform the new and burgeoning philosophy several hundred years later, which is Stoicism. The best example of, of the philosophy of friendship, the value and virtue of friendship from a stoic perspective comes from Seneca. So Seneca wrote 124 letters to his friend Lucilius. These letters kind of serve as a, for lack of a better term, a philosophical handbook or a guide book for, for living a virtuous life. So in letter number nine, Seneca says this, "Let us now return to the question. The wise man, I say, self-sufficient though he be, nevertheless desires friends if only for the purpose of practicing friendship."
[7:11]I'm going to paraphrase, but Seneca goes on to basically describe the difference between relationships of convenience and the ideal of friendship for friendship's sake. Friendship for practicing the virtue, like, if nothing else, it is a, it is a distinctly human opportunity to practice the other virtues and build up your fellow man with the virtues that you care about, with the, the things that you value, your values. And that's the thing, like, if I may, on a, like a brief, as a brief aside, that's like one of the few things that we as humans can do. We have this remarkable ability that, that the rest in the animal kingdom does not have. So regardless of your religious or spiritual or philosophical view, I, I think that humanity's ability to reason, and humanity's ability to relate just for the sake of the relationship. We have the ability to form bonds of fellowship with our fellow men that are not centered on any kind of transaction. It's kind of perplexing and unusual when you compare it to the social structures of other species on this planet. It is this strangely unique thing, a human is like the only creature that will change its environment, or change its relationships for reasons of pure personal preference. Birds and fish migrate every year following the same patterns, chimpanzees have the, have biologically driven communal norms, but like we humans have this strange ability to reason, to like, to think about our thoughts, and also this strange ability to form relationships with one another in a way that no one else in the entire animal kingdom can do. This is a precursor, because, like, if you think about the timeline from platonic philosophy to Stoicism, like, this precedes modern theological Judeo-Christian philosophy. But there's an interesting link, like there's a, the twelve disciples, who is this, this fellowship built on a central shared mission that certainly wasn't about biology or convenience, coming from all different walks of life to follow this crazy Jesus guy. But those are just examples that you could find in the New Testament. Snyder goes on to point out the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, he viewed friendship as not this inevitable thing. It is distinct, it is beautiful, it is unusual, and therefore it is a virtue to be, to be cultivated. So this theological perspective on of Western philosophy and Stoicism and platonic ideas and platonic, I mean, by the Plato, you, you get the idea. Gay. This serves as, as, I think, the example for Tolkien, which is his experience with the Inklings. So Tolkien literally formed this fellowship of, of academics, of authors, of fellow thinkers. It was him, C.S. Lewis, and a few others, that they would gather every week at the Eagle and Child Pub, where it was called it the Bird and the Baby. Interestingly enough, uh, Stephen literally just visited there for the first time on a recent trip. But it wasn't like a overly complicated philosophical rhetoric formal gathering. It was literally a couple of dudes who gathered in a pub, who would drink beer by the fire, for long country walks, they debate literature, politics, current events, philosophy, theology. Like they didn't agree on a lot of this stuff, but they were literally walking the walk and talking the talk. Before, he said, dramatically grabbing a prop to emphasize his point, before they were literally writing the books that would embody these principles that they lived out. The Hobbit starts off with a, a deeply comfortable and fairly isolated Bilbo Baggins, who's very reluctant to join any sort of new adventure and form any kind of new friendships with these strange dwarven folk from a far away land that he felt he had nothing in common with. But he came to believe in this shared cause, reclaiming Thorin Oakenshield's homeland, and, and defeating the dragon Smaug. At the end of The Hobbit, there's this moment where he's faced with this moral quandary of what's the right thing to do with the Arkenstone, and that's the moment that he, he must, despite his friendship with Thorin, in a way betray his friendship with Thorin and the company to do the higher right thing. But it nearly breaks him, it's heartbreaking. The stone is real. I gave it to them. But in the end, I think Tolkien really beautifully shows a healed relationship that like, it wasn't just that the dragon was defeated, but maybe more importantly, Thorin's dying words, he calls Bilbo in sorrow and regret and asks to restore that friendship. I wish to part from you in friendship. And like I mentioned a few minutes ago, like the theme carries through the Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, they already have their small little fellowship of Hobbits in the Shire, before they join the larger one. Like they share meals, songs, drinking together, taking long country walks. I mean it, it really does mimic what the Inklings themselves practiced. The final chapter is heartbreaking. The fellowship breaks, Gandalf falls in Moria, Boromir betrays the company and tries to take the ring from Frodo. And here's the interesting thing, even after Boromir's death, Aragorn, Aragorn, help Merry and Frodo. No. Aragorn actually chooses to rescue Merry and Pippin rather than pursue Frodo and Sam, which, like the destruction of the Ring is the whole point of the quest in the first place. But for Aragorn, the virtue of friendship, the right choice in the moment, is to save the friends that he know are in mortal danger. We will not abandon Merry and Pippin to torment and death. He knows Merry and Pippin are kidnapped by the Orc, and that is something that he and Legolas and Gimli cannot live with. You know, interestingly, it's, this is kind of like virtue ethics in, in action. Like, you have the consequentialist view, which would have been like, whatever the maximum good for the most people, which if you'd made that decision, Aragorn would have maybe taken the remaining company to try to go chase down Frodo and, and protect him so that they would have the biggest chance of getting to Mount Doom. Instead, it's more of a virtue ethics perspective, where Aragorn is doing the right thing for the right thing's sake. And that tension plays out a lot in Lord of the Rings. I think Tolkien really plays with that notion very well, because in a strange sense, a lot of moments of fate, of maybe intervention of some form of higher power, a will that is against the Ring, not just the evil will of the Ring. You could make the argument that that's what plays into the fact that, you know, leads Aragorn and the company to rescue Merry and Pippin, to encounter Theoden, and the Rohirrim and take them to fight the battle at Minas Tirith, and like, in the end, that did actually directly contribute that one precious chance he needed to destroy the Ring on Mount Doom. But I digress, I kind of nerded out there for a minute. Sorry, not sorry. Let's end on a downer, shall we? Uh, not really, maybe kind of. Um, let's talk about the reality check. In real life, most of us don't have a Sam. Deep friendships are, are tough to build, even when they form, they're, they're difficult to hold onto, like life sweeps us along. I'll speak from my experience, and in my Air Force career, like, I move every few years. I go from assignment to assignment, I've been in South Carolina, in Korea, in Alabama, Georgia, basically like, the other side of the world, or the Southeast. But point is, like I, it's difficult to maintain any kind of friendship, surface level or otherwise, just based on not being in the same community. And even if that weren't the case, the things that I hoped and dreamed for, like I talked about earlier in the video, my, like, looking for the major, the real life Major Winters, they're by far the exception, they're not the rule. In fact, I've, some of the best leaders I've met in the military, and some of the worst leaders and worst people that I've ever met, have been in the military. It's this strange disconnect and, and disappointment, it's, it's when, I don't know if you've experienced this, but the, the best way I can describe it is that truly believing, I'm a true blue all-American, I love philosophy, I love theology, but I also, like, actually really believe this. And so, there have been these times where I've clawed at the ideal that I, that I so desperately desired, the wanting that brotherhood, that's any kind of support system, like connection of shared mission. And there have been times where it seemed no matter what I did, it was never good enough. There was no one there. And that sucks, like, it really sucks. And that's the reality that I, and I'm willing to bet, and it makes me a little depressed to think of, but I'm willing to bet that I'm not the only one. I think the, the honest truth is our, our culture is fractured. And there may not be a lot of true believers left. I don't mean like in the traditional Christian theological sense, I mean like true believers in the, in the virtues that are found in the very foundation of Western philosophy. You know, I'm rewatching Game of Thrones right now, and it's almost strangely connecting more in season one, because Sean Bean's character, speaking of Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir, aka Ned Stark, like Ned Stark is the rare man, the man of honor. It makes him a fish out of water, he is, he is the exception. I don't think we even know what we believe anymore. Politics continues to divide us, identitarian division seems to only grow. I, I feel like communities are more and more torn apart. We've forgotten about the big important things that we should all believe in that can bring us together and help us overcome the stupid stuff that we fight over all the time that you see in your Facebook feed. Or that your mom sees in her Facebook feed, but you get the idea. I think fellowship, that one virtue, it's the, it's a thing that's worth being reclaimed. And if I'm honest, I don't know how we even begin to change that in modern society. But I do think we can change that for ourselves. It's, it's not easy, it's something that you have to seek, and I'm, I'm kind of preaching this to myself, because I there've been far too many times in my life where I've it's, it's hard, and I just, it's just easier to give up. But I think friendship, fellowship, that is a, that is a good, it is a virtue. It is, as Sam would say, it is a good that is worth fighting for.
