Our Sociable Sociality, #5–“Louis, I Think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”: Camaraderie-&-Solidarity, Identity, and Utility, & Conclusion.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: How to Go Beyond The Mind-Body Politic

II. They Fuck You Up: Families and Sociality

III. There Is No Love: Intimacy and Sociality

IV. Lonely Are the Brave and the Millennials: Friendships and Sociality

V. “Louis, I Think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”: Camaraderie-&-Solidarity, Identity, and Utility

VI. Conclusion: Our Sociable Sociality, Hammers, and Blue Guitars

The first installment contains section I.

The second installment contains section II.

The third installment contains section III.

The fourth installment contains section IV.

And this installment contains sections V and VI.

But can you can also read or download a .pdf version of the complete essay HERE.

V. “Louis, I Think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship”: Camaraderie-&-Solidarity, Identity, and Utility

Renault: Well, Rick, you’re not only a sentimentalist, but you’ve become a patriot.

Rick: Maybe, but it seemed like a good time to start.

Renault: I think perhaps you’re right.

[he pours the Vichy water into a glass, but then sees its label; with a look of
disgust, he quickly drops the bottle into a trash basket and kicks it over]

It might be a good idea for you to disappear from Casablanca for a while. There’s a Free French garrison over at Brazzaville. I could be induced to arrange a passage.

Rick: My letter of transit? I could use a trip. But it doesn’t make any difference about our bet. You still owe me ten thousand francs.

Renault: And that ten thousand francs should pay our expenses.

Rick: Our expenses?

Renault: Mm-hm.

Rick: [Rick walks off with Renault across the wet runway into the mist] Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.[i]

“As a white man,” Joe begins, prefacing an insight, revelation, objection or confirmation he’s eager to share — but let’s stop him right there. Aside from the fact that he’s white, and a man, what’s his point? What does it signify when people use this now ubiquitous formula (“As a such-and-such, I …”) to affix an identity to an observation? Typically, it’s an assertion of authority: As a member of this or that social group, I have experiences that lend my remarks special weight. The experiences, being representative of that group, might even qualify me to represent that group. Occasionally, the formula is an avowal of humility. It can be both at once. (“As a working-class woman, I’m struggling to understand Virginia Woolf’s blithe assumptions of privilege.”) The incantation seems indispensable. But it can also be—to use another much-loved formula—problematic. The “as a” concept is an inherent feature of identities. For a group label like “white men” to qualify as a social identity, there must be times when the people to whom it applies act as members of that group, and are treated as members of that group. We make lives as men and women, as blacks and whites, as teachers and musicians. Yet the very word “identity” points toward the trouble: It comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” Because members of a given identity group have experiences that depend on a host of other social factors, they’re not the same.[ii]

When one benefits someone not because of the kind of person he is, but only because of the [utility] to oneself, then, Aristotle says, one is not a friend towards the other person, but only towards the profit that comes one’s way ([Nicomachean Ethics] 1157a15–16).[iii]

36. Everyone who’s interested in movies in general, and in romantic movies in particular, has of course seen Casablanca—probably several times—and of course knows the final scene between the character Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, and the character Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains.

If not entire libaries, then at least a great many words have been written about Casablanca, including discussing or at least mentioning that final scene; and not only is the line “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is one of the most famous lines in any movie, but also the phrase “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is a meme of epic proportions—as it were, a megameme.

37. But from the standpoint of political philosophy of mind and the theory of sociality, what interests me here is not either the filmic fame of that line or the megameme character of that phrase, but instead the question:

what precisely are the nature and moral and political implications of the newly-created social relationship between Rick and Louis at the end of Casablanca, their so-called “beautiful friendship”?

Throughout the film they’ve been officially on two sharply different different sides of the three-way global moral and political conflict between

(i) the Nazis and their pro-Nazi lackeys (represented by Louis, a French soldier working with Vichy, the collaborationist government of Nazi-occupied France),

(ii) the international anti-Nazi and more generally anti-fascist Resistance (represented by the Czech Resistance leader, Victor Laszlo/Paul Henreid), and

(iii) those who are cynical, pragmatic, and officially neutral, by virtue of their at least accommodating, if not actually collaborating with, both of the other sides (represented here by Rick, an American expatriate—who also, however, ran guns to Ethiopia during its conflict with fascist Italy, and fought on the side of the anti-fascist Loyalists or Republicans during The Spanish Civil War).

But in the final scene, despite Rick’s and Louis’s explicit and as it were “official” opposition to one another throughout the body of the film, everything seems to have flip-flopped.

Apparently, not only has Rick become a “patriot,” now fully endorsing the famously rousing Laszlo-led group performance of La Marseillaise at Rick’s American Café earlier in the movie, but also Louis is proposing to arrange a “passage” to “the Free French garrison over at Brazzaville,” for ten thousand francs: therefore, seemingly, they’re now together taking the side of the international anti-Nazi Resistance, as born-again French patriots, yet also haggling about the price of arranging their getaway.

We’ll recall that I’ve postulated in the Introduction that all healthy, sane rational human animals possess a set of innate dispositions that naturally manifest themselves as human needs for several distinct basic kinds of social relationships, needs that naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts, amongst which are needs for

(i) relationships involving camaraderie and solidarity,

(ii) identitarian relationships, and

(iii) relationships in the social marketplace, that is, instrumental relationships of all sorts, or what I’ll also call (with Aristotle’s term, “friendships of utility,” as glossed in the third epigraph of this section by Richard Kraut, in mind) relationships of utility.

So from the standpoint of political philosophy of mind and the finegrained theory of our sociable sociality, here are three corresponding questions:

(i) are Rick and Louis now comrades-in-arms, joining together in solidarity with the international resistance movement against the Nazis and other fascists, like Victor Laszlo?, or

(ii) are they now born-again members of the same nationalist identity-group, French patriots—in which case they could both just as easily be pro-Vichy, since the pro-Vichy French under the leadership of Marshal Philippe Pétain are every bit as much “French patriots” as the Free French?, or

(iii) are they now just conveniently using each other in order to escape death at the hands of the Nazis?

In order to make some headway towards answering these questions, we’ll need to get clearer on the nature of relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, identitarian relationships, and relationships in the social marketplace, aka instrumental relationships, aka relationships of utility.

38. First, all healthy, sane rational human animals need relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, insofar as these involve

(i) groups of people collectively organized for the pursuit of non-instrumental ends, that is, ends which have their value intrinsically and are pursued for their own sake, and not extrinsically and for the sake of other ends, especially including egoistic or self-interested ends,

(ii) who share not only these specifically non-instrumental ends in common, but also a larger set of closely-related and mutually-supporting strong value-commitments, strong emotional attitudes (both pro-attitudes and anti-attitudes), and other strong affects (including desires and feelings) in common, that the Brazilians call concordar or “shared heart” (aka “team spirit,” etc.), and

(iii) whose strong value-commitments, strong emotional attitudes, and other strong affects, as members of the these organized collectives, are generally non-egoistic.

It’s important to note that it’s possible to be engaged in non-instrumental, non-egoistic relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity for the pursuit of ends that are non-moral and non-political in character, e.g., purely artistic or aesthetic groups, non-athletic clubs of various sorts (say, for the pursuit of stamp-collecting, playing chess, trainspotting, bird-watching, etc.), athletic clubs and sports teams, etc.

And it’s even more important to note that it’s also possible to be engaged in non-instrumental, non-egoistic relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity for the pursuit of ends that are inherently bad and/or wrong, hence not necessarily ends that are inherently good and/or right.

39. Second, all healthy, sane rational human animals need identitarian relationships, insofar as these involve

(i) our sharing some identity-attributes with people who are otherwise unique individual persons, and correspondingly, who are otherwise different both from us and also from one another, and

(ii) in context, our abstracting away from, tolerating, and/or overlooking, those individual characteristics and differences, so that we are able to cooperate with these people for purposes of our mutual aid and mutual benefit, and more generally, for our collective or public benefit.

Here it is extremely important to remember that identity-attributes are more-or-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social human attributes that pick out various non-essential features of people (non-essential to their rational human agency or human personhood, that is), over whose original possession they had little or no freely-chosen control, e.g., race, biological sex, birth-order, height, weight, body shape, specific abilities/disabilities, living in the same region or neighborhood, common language, nationality, ethnicity, economic class, religious upbringing, and so-on.

Therefore, identitarian relationships are normally based on brute contingent, involuntary, unchosen facts about ourselves and other people: normally, we simply can’t help the facts about our having various identity-attributes and sharing them with others (e.g., I simply can’t help being white, male, and slightly-more-than-60-years-old, with a certain negativity of hair on the top of my head, and also sharing these adventitious, more-or-less involuntary attributes with a great many other guys also called ‘Bob’ who were also born in 1957), so we must just make the best of that for our mutual aid and mutual benefit.

This is sometimes called “making a virtue of necessity,” but that’s an important misnomer: it’s actually making a virtue of brute contingency.

For example, normally we simply can’t help our having the next-door neighbors we do actually have, so we must just make the best of that, and get along with them as well as we can: that what’s called “being neighborly.”

Indeed, being neighborly is a highly everyday and humble, but also—since virtually everyone has next-door neighbors—virtually universal example of identitarian social relationships.

40. One fundamental difference between relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity and identitarian relationships is that because identitarian relationships are entered into for purposes of mutual aid and mutual benefit, and more generally for our collective or public benefit, whereas relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity are entered into for the pursuit of non-instrumental ends that are valuable for their own sake, then even when relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity fail to deliver any collective or public benefits whatsoever, they can still continue unaffected.

E.g., it’s one thing to be a member of a sports team (a relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity) and a sharply different thing to identify with that sports team as a fan (an identitarian relationship).

Normally, when sports teams fail to win—and especially when it’s in a losing-streak—their fans are deeply disappointed and unhappy; but if the members of that sports team are properly committed to their athletic project, then their relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity will continue unaffected by losses and losing-streaks, and in fact their “team spirit” might even be strengthened by their encountering such adversity and working through it together.

41. As the term “identitarian social relationships” indicates, these social relationships are closely related to the doctrine of identitarianism, which says

(i) that people are defined primarily in terms of their falling under a certain social group-type and/or their social group-allegiance (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender-&/or-sex, sexual preference, national origin or citizenship, language, economic class, social roles of all kinds, social institutions of all kinds especially including religions, etc., etc.),

(ii) that special moral virtues and special positive moral value, or goodness, are attributed to all members of that social group and to that social group itself, call it the We, and

(iii) that special moral vices and special negative moral disvalue, or badness, are attributed to members of certain other social groups and to those groups themselves, who are then collectively intensely distrusted, or even excoriated-and-vilified, as the Other.

As everyone knows, identitarianism is a widely-held contemporary psychological, moral, and political theory.[iv]

Moreover, especially in its contemporary liberal-progressive, nationalist, religious, and neo-fascist versions, identitarianism is also a hegemonic ideology.

In that connection, a fundamental pathology of identitarianism occurs when the creation of the Other leads to intense or even obsessive fears that the We will be corrupted, infiltrated, and miscegenated by the Other culture, members of which are then perceived to exist both covertly inside (as carriers of disease, or impurities) and also overtly outside (as invasive threats surrounding the We) Our culture.

42. Relatedly, identitarian social relationships are often originally created, and can also be especially strengthened, by the actions of people belonging to a We-group who systematically discriminate against and oppress innocent people who belong to an Other-group, simply by virtue of the latter’s possessing more-or-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social identity-attributes such as sex, gender, sexual preference, skin pigmentation, ethnicity or national origin, language, religious affiliation, and so-on.

But although such identity-attribute-based discrimination and oppression is always and inherently bad and wrong, and always and inherently a direct violation of sufficient respect for universal human dignity, nevertheless it does not follow that the innocent identitarian victims of such discrimination and oppression possess any special moral value or special moral virtues merely because of their being discriminated against and oppressed—although, of course, not only are they to be pitied by us, but also they fully deserve our moral protection and sufficient respect for their human dignity.

In a contemporary context, this fallacious attribution of special moral value and special moral virtues to innocent identitarian victims of discrimination and oppression, in turn, leads to what Anthony Appiah has correctly identified as a fallacious source of identitarian moral authority,[v] which, again in turn, can easily turn into a coercive moralism that is also a special case of coercive authoritarianism.

43. Third, all healthy, sane rational human animals need relationships of utility, insofar as these involve

(i) various kinds of transactions with others that satisfy various kinds of egoistic or self-interested ends, and

(ii) are freely-chosen, or at least rationally consented-to (whether explicitly or implicitly) by all parties to the transactions.

One crucial point about to recognize about relationships of utility is that because they’re inherently instrumental and therefore inherently egoistic or self-interested, they’re essentially distinct from relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, which are inherently non-instrumental and non-egoistic.

At the same time, however, just because relationships of utility are inherently egoistic or self-interested, it does not follow that they are always morally bad-&-wrong.

Here we can help ourselves to Kant’s profound moral insight that although regarding or treating people as mere means to our egoistic ends is inherently morally bad and wrong (hence it’s morally impermissible), nevertheless there’s nothing inherently morally bad or wrong about our pursuing or satisfying egoistic ends (hence it’s morally permissible) if at the same time they also inherently involve regarding and treating people as ends-in-themselves, i.e., if at the same time they inherently involve sufficiently respecting their human dignity.

Or in other words, there’s nothing inherently morally bad or wrong with intrinsically receiving egoistic or self-interested benefits via our instrumental transactions with other people, provided that these transactions also intrinsically express our sufficiently respecting their human dignity.

E.g., you can intrinsically regard and treat the person you pay to mow your lawn with sufficient respect for his human dignity—but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill in the details as to how that could actually be done in our contemporary world of neoliberal democratic nation-States and oppressive capitalism.[vi]

In a slightly different way, relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity can also be relationships in which we extrinsically receive egoistic or self-interested benefits from our comrades, provided that these relationships also intrinsically express non-egoistic motivations.

Indeed, it’s a necessary condition of such relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity from which we’re extrinsically receiving egoistic benefits, that even if, counterfactually, the egoistic benefits were to stop, then the relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity would still continue unaffected.

Similarly, even if, counterfactually, collective or public benefits yielded by the relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity were to stop, then the relationship would still continue unaffected—as we saw above in the example of the sports team that’s in a losing streak yet fully retains or even strengthens its “team spirit.”

By contrast, in relationships of utility, if the egoistic or self-interested benefits were ever to stop and/or turn into disbenefits, then necessarily either that instrumental relationship in the proper sense would thereby go all pear-shaped and dissolve, fail, or lapse, or at least it would be morally bad-&-wrong.

And if such pseudo-instrumental or messed-up instrumental relationships were to be continued, or compelled to continue, under conditions of actual symmetric or asymmetric non-utility, then they would count as either pathological or morally bad-&-wrong cases under relationships of utility.

A good example of this is the widespread phenomenon of wage-slavery in our contemporary world of neoliberal democratic nation-States and oppressive capitalism.[vii]

Similarly, since identitarian relationships all inherently involve purposes of mutual aid and mutual benefit, then if that mutual aid and those mutual benefits also intrinsically or extrinsically happened to be egoistic in nature, as of course is very often actually the case, whenever such pseudo-identitarian or messed-up identitarian relationships were to be continued, or compelled to continue, under conditions of actual symmetric or asymmetric disutility, then it would be either a pathological case or a morally bad-&-wrong case under identitarian relationships.

For example, if your next door neighbors are constantly making a terrible racket at night, so that you can’t sleep and it’s making you feel sick-unto-death, but you never even ask them politely to stop making all that noise at night, and never even try to improve matters by reasonable negotiation with them, but instead simply suffer, just because they’re your neighbors and you think it’s “neighborly” to put up with their outrageous behavior, or even worse, just because you live in the contemporary USA, and they own semi-automatic weapons, and mass-shootings are happening virtually every single day, all year-around, so you’re scared shitless about how they might react, then those would be pathological or morally bad-&-wrong cases under identitarian relationships.

44. Generalizing now, we can also see that imposing the guiding principles or normative structures of either identitarian relationships or relationships of utility onto relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, will yield pathologies or cases of morally bad-&-wrong social engagement.

45. Now how does all this apply to the problematic case of Rick’s and Louis’s “beautiful friendship” at the end of Casablanca?

It should be quite clear and distinct by now that in order to answer our three questions about it, we would also have to know how Rick and Louis go on in the future from there, in, as it were, Casablanca 2: The Sequel, in order to know whether they’re now being guided by the principles governing relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, by the principles governing identitarian relarionships, or by the principles governing relationships of utility.

E.g., if we were to discover in the sequel that Rick’s or Louis’s motivations in engaging in their newly-initiated relationship are fundamentally instrumental or egoistic, whether identitarian or utility-based, then their “beautiful friendship”would not and could not be a social relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity.

Therefore, from the standpoint of the political philosophy of mind and the theory of sociality, our overall answer to the three questions about Casablanca would be:

We’ll have to see Casablanca 2: The Sequel in order to find out with certainty, but at least we already know what will count as relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, identitarian relationships, and relationships of utility; how to tell them apart from one another; and also what will constitute pathological or morally bad-&-wrong cases under those relationships.

VI. Conclusion: Our Sociable Sociality, Hammers, and Blue Guitars

46. In a recent essay, “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Blue Guitar: Quietism, Activism, and the Mind-Body Politic,” I defended the view that a particular version of philosophical activism—namely, the thesis that philosophy should be engaged with politics—that Maiese and I have called the mind-body politic, is the only rationally justified and morally acceptable version of philosophical activism.

And in that essay, borrowing some apt poetic phraseology from Nietzsche and Wallace Stevens, I also dubbed emancipatory political theory “philosophizing with a hammer and a blue guitar.”

Correspondingly, my conclusion in this essay is that, both by virtue of the liberating potential of the finegrained theory of our sociable sociality for our everyday lives, and also by virtue of its being an exemplar of the currently unorthodox one-sentence = one-paragraph = one-thought presentational format, peppered with literary and film references, replete with a very cool and highly relevant image at the head of the essay, then at the very least, I’ve tried to match my work to my words.[viii]

NOTES

[i] Dialogue between Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), from the final scene of Casablanca (1942, dir. M. Curtiz). See also Wikipedia, “Casablanca (film),” (2019), available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film)>.

[ii] A. Appiah, “Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself,” The New York Times (10 August 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/opinion/sunday/speak-for-yourself.html>.

[iii] R. Kraut, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. E.N. Zalta, section 9, available online at URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/>, at sub-URL= <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/#Frie>.

[iv] For critical analyses of identitarianism, see, e.g., K.A. Appiah, The Lies That Bind. Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (New York: Liveright, 2018); and R. Hanna, “Identity Ad Absurdum: A Critique of the Cultural Appropriation Argument,” Against Professional Philosophy (21 June 2019), available online at URL = <https://againstprofphil.org/2019/06/21/identity-ad-absurdum-a-critique-of-the-cultural-appropriation-argument/>.

[v] A. Appiah, “Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself,” The New York Times (10 August 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/opinion/sunday/speak-for-yourself.html>.

[vi] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Statism, Capitalism, and Beyond,” (August 2019 version), available online, HERE; R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 4) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), available online in preview, HERE, esp. part 3; and M. Maiese and R. Hanna, The Mind-Body Politic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), also available online in preview, HERE.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] I’m grateful to Addison Ellis, Martha Hanna, Michelle Maiese, and Elisabeth Widmer for extremely helpful conversations or correspondence about the topics of this essay.