Page 3 of 6
Friendliness
Another form of kindness is friendliness, the attribute of being favorably disposed toward others, particularly strangers. We are exhorted to be friendly by the writer of Hebrews when he says, "Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it" (Heb.13:2). Friendliness is also commended by Jesus, when he says to one of the Pharisees, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed" (Luke 14:12-14).
Like gentleness, friendliness is a quality we admire in others but which we do not always make a point of displaying ourselves. In our culture, it sometimes really takes work to be friendly. Suspicion toward strangers seems increasingly common. This suspicion derives from at least three cultural tendencies that militate against friendliness. One of these is growing violence in public places. We regularly hear reports of some random shooting or gross injustice, then we follow the stories of the sad aftermath for the victims or family members as they grieve their loss. We know that we could be the next victim, and this makes us wary Public trust has been displaced by fear and suspicion. Such a mindset naturally leads to a presumption of distrust of our neighbors, making a favorable disposition toward strangers difficult.
Second, our culture's mobility contributes to increasing public alienation. We are a transient society, always on the move, whether it be our long commutes to work or in our jobs themselves, as we relocate every few years to take new positions on the corporate ladder. But even as we improve ourselves professionally, we damage ourselves socially and culturally. We lose our sense of public connectedness, the feeling—or even the fact—of belonging to a particular community with a distinct and stable identity. Consequently, our sense of community responsibility is also forfeited. People are naturally more inclined to reach out to those with whom they have common history or some other bond of unity, the most significant of these being religious, political, ethnic, and even geographic. We are less inclined to be favorably disposed to our neighbors, because we are less sure of who our neighbors are.
Thirdly, and more insidiously, those who would be friendly are handicapped by the culture-wars mindset. Because of rampant media attention to sharply divergent segments of society and the disproportional attention to the extremes within different social groups (e.g., liberals vs. conservatives, the religious vs. the secularists) we feel less identity with others. This exacerbates our sense of public alienation and disconnectedness. It might even foster a sense of enmity and defensiveness, feeding the warrior mentality as the "culture wars" metaphor suggests. Mass media encourage us to focus on our differences because stories about conflict, especially between those on the extremes, are more dramatic and interesting (and therefore more profitable). Consequently, we forget that we have unity simply because we're fellow human beings. We allow ourselves to see our differences as primary, rather than as secondary. Yes, we differ over religion and politics, even over very fundamental moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But even these differences do not justify the public animosity that is so prevalent today in our culture. Our shared humanity should be enough to favorably dispose us toward our neighbors, however different from us they might be.
