Allies and Alliances
Published on 10.9.2023 at garyborjesson.substack.com
Meno: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is taught? Or is it not taught but acquired by practice? Or is it neither acquired by practice nor learnt, but present in humans by nature?
Socrates: …. So far am I from knowing whether it’s taught, I don’t even know what it is at all.
— Plato’s Meno
One of the things I have always loved about philosophy is how it makes familiar things strange again. Take virtue, the definition of which is apparently so obvious that Meno doesn’t think to ask about it. Well, count on Socrates to make it strange and curious again. I hope this note begins to do the same for our thinking about allies and alliances. Let’s start philosophically, by locating our subject in the big picture.
In the first of these notes about How We Help, I wrote that “for philosophical and psychological reasons” I wanted to start not with who we are when our aim is to be helpful, but with where we are. Where we are is in the interpersonal field. Moreover, we’ve all have been unceremoniously thrown there—thrown without our consent into a solar system and ecological system, a genotype and phenotype, a culture and time, a community and family.
To recognize these circumstances feelingly is to know a lot about who we are. Not least, we know we need others to survive and flourish. Given our ontological interdependence, it’s to our benefit (and to the benefit of all beings, as Buddhism reminds us) to make good connections. This brings us to our subject, the ally—or who we are when we’re being helpful.
The name ally is used in many different ways. That’s why I want to follow Socrates’s lead and begin our exploration by making sure we know what we’re talking about, before we start talking about it! Here I offer a broad definition of the ally. In notes to come we will refine and deepen our thinking about what’s involved in being an ally.
Carl Jung identifies the ally or caregiver as a central human archetype whose unifying principle is the mindset of service. This resonates with our word “therapy”, from the Greek therapeia, which means to care for, tend to, minister to, counsel—to be of service.
So an ally is a person whose mindset is one of helping, and an alliance is the relationship through which this help is offered. This help may take many forms. You may be a veterinarian consulting with a long-term client deciding the fate of their beloved dog; a lawyer helping your client make the best case for herself in the face of an awful divorce; a mentor or teacher helping someone learn to the best of their ability; a physician or nurse caring for your patient. The list goes on.
To be an ally, it’s not enough to be in these roles, since many can play these parts while conspicuously lacking the mindset of service. For example, a surgeon who does technically competent work in the service of their status or wealth is not an ally to their patient, except (as we say in philosophy) by accident. For the ally, being of service is no accident, but belongs to our essence. (To help make this distinction clear, consider how being “black” or “white” or “tall” or “short” are accidents, not of the essence of being human.)
The ally is also neither saint nor slave, which is to say that having a mindset of service does not mean we are selfless. This needs saying because the helping professions attract many people who imagine that service means putting others first. I’ll have more to say about why this is fundamentally mistaken. Here it’s enough to note that being helpful is a collaborative achievement, since in an interdependent world you cannot neglect yourself without neglecting others.
A big takeaway here is that we become better allies by becoming better friends to ourselves, and we become better friends to ourselves by becoming better allies to others. Among others, the German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) described this as a dialectical to-and-fro, out to others and back to self again. Through this dance of connection we live and flourish.
There is a further quality that’s of the essence of the alliances we’re exploring in these notes: The relationship itself is integral to the help offered. This is obvious in the case of psychotherapy, where research shows that the quality of the relationship is the best predictor of how effective treatment is. But the same is true, more or less, for many professions. In the examples above, the quality of a veterinarian or nurse or lawyer or mentor’s way of relating plays an essential part in how effective they are. You can be knowledgeable and technically competent, but if you don’t know how to connect you won’t be much of an ally.
Not that the quality of the relationship always matters much. My plumber excels at his work, and I’m the grateful beneficiary. But his art serves the plumbing, not me, so he is only accidentally an ally. But the more central human interaction becomes to our work, the more the relationship matters.