Value for Monday of Week 44 in the season of Assessing

Belonging; Cultivating Friendships

The need to belong is “a fundamental human motivation”. “Everyone likes to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves– a friend group, a house, a college, or even a country. These affiliations can define how others perceive us, as well as how we perceive ourselves.” “The sense of belonging is fundamental to the way humankind organizes itself. If it was unimportant, we would live solitary lives only coming together for procreation then quickly kicking the children out of our lives as soon as they could walk. We would have no families, communities or organized government.” “. . . a robust sense of belonging may be cultivated to improve human health and resilience for individuals and communities worldwide.”

Through friendships, we keep ourselves healthy. Having friends is conducive to mental and physical health; it leads to greater life satisfaction, and prevents and minimizes depression. Because of our friendships, we live longer. Other benefits include:

A greater sense of connection (see these studies in adolescents, and in adults);
A greater sense of meaning;
A greater sense of purpose;
More happiness;
Less stress;
Improved social skills;
More self-confidence;
More self-esteem;
A greater sense of self-worth (see these studies of friendship in women, early adolescence, middle childhood, middle adolescence, adolescence generally, African American youth, young people with physical disabilities, Dominican women who had been diagnosed with HIV, and adults who were botn with cleft lip or palate).

Friends help each other through hard times, such as domestic violence. “Friendship relationships are important sources of support for chronic condition management.” Good friends can lead others away from unhealthy habits. By giving support, compassion and love, we lift others onto higher ground. These are among life’s vital connections.

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Much of what we believe is a social construct. In other words, we believe what we believe because the people around us tell us, through their words or actions, to believe it.

For thousands of years, human beings have told each other all kinds of things that people know deep down may not be true: that we will not die and that we will see Grandma again, unless you dare to upset the bonds of shared belief. Imagine a world in which belonging to a community was more liberating than it is today.

Imagine what would happen if we told each other the truth. Imagine what would happen if we supported each other not in a fantasy but a in a celebration of reality. Imagine a world in which we could face reality, including the possibility that for each of us, death is the end. Imagine a world in which we celebrated the reality of our Being fully, without need to know what was under the Christmas tree. Imagine people supporting each other in our lives, just as they are. Imagine living in a world in which people really lived the ideal of “justice for all.”

The power of other people – of even one person – to lend support and provide encouragement, is the main subject of social psychology, an important discipline that is too much ignored. We may think that we are autonomous beings – autonomy is one of our values in this model – but autonomy is mainly an experiential distinction, a way of looking at things. The organic heart may beat or cease to function independent of any other heart but the human mind’s operations are a function of other minds. Probably this is what led Jung and others to posit a collective unconsciousness and others to misinterpret him to imply an outside force disconnected from the evolution of the human mind. All the same, we thrive in the supportive company of others. When the community supports a sounds and sustainable vision for life, the bonds among us work for the betterment of all.

Real

True Narratives

Personal belonging:

Adam Sisman, ed., Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters (New York Review Books, 2017): “Fermor’s letters were, among other things, a way to keep up with friends and repay their hospitality.”
Eva Hagberg Fisher, How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019): “For Hagberg Fisher, there is value in reaching out to others, in showing one’s soft belly. It’s dark stuff, but it comes as a relief, too: We’re in this together.”
Jami Attenberg, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (Ecco, 2022), “an account that wends its way through many themes: looking for a place to belong; moving through the world as a woman; what it’s like to build a life without making the expected moves of marrying and having a nuclear family.”

Community and national belonging:

Sisonke Msimang, Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (World Editions, 2018), a memoir about where we feel we belong: “Msimang, a South African writer and political analyst, charts an alternate course to the now familiar conclusion that home is not always a place on a map.”
Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (Pantheon, 2020): “It doesn’t take long for her — an immigrant, woman, Arab and Muslim — to grasp the yawning gap between the ideal taught in civics lessons and reality. In many ways, she argues, she is a 'conditional citizen,' one who soon understands what it is like 'for a country to embrace you with one arm and push you away with the other.'”
Karla Cornejo Villavicenzio, The Undocumented Americans (One World, 2020): “Over about a decade of sporadic reporting, Cornejo Villavicencio traveled the country, gaining access to vigilantly guarded communities whose stories are largely absent from modern journalism and literature.”
Naben Ruthnum, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race (Coach House Books, 2017): “Ruthnum’s explorations of both food and literature include insightful forays into nostalgia, authenticity, belonging, and the sense of in-between worlds in which the children of immigrants live.”

From the dark side:

T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019): “The tribe of fatherless girls that make up T Kira Madden’s titular chapter are three high school friends bonded by loss, lust, recklessness and love. But the tribe extends much further, shape-shifting throughout the memoir from youthful friendships to romantic partners, from a nuclear family to a revision of that family history.”
Louisa Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (Riverhead, 2022): “The engine for this vivid, loving book is Lim’s insistent questioning — her recognition that whatever comes next for Hong Kong will require not only fortitude but also willful acts of imagination. 'We had lost our old city forever, and our old selves along with that,' she writes. 'We had no choice but to reinvent ourselves.'”
Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022): “. . . even the bluntest appeals to the national interest couldn’t get some white Americans to budge. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to desegregate private defense contractors, he would continue to resist desegregating the military.”
Elias Khoury’s trilogy, Children of the Ghetto: I: My Name Is Adam (Archipelago Books, 2019), “ponders the silence of those who stayed in Lydda. To survive in the new state they lived ‘as invisible people.’ Why were they silent — to avoid being killed? Because they had given up hope? Or because what they had gone through was unspeakable, an experience for which ‘silence is more eloquent than words’?”; II: Star of the Sea (Archipelago Books, 2024) is about “a young man switching identities in a society seeking to erase him.”; the third novel is to follow.

Technical and Analytical Readings

On belonging:

John A. Powell & Stephen Menendian, Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World (Stanford University Press, 2024).
James Greenaway, A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, Cosmos (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023).
Lisa M. Nunn, College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life (Rutgers University Press, 2021).
Gloria McCahon Whiting, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945 (Yale University Press, 2010).
Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution (University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
Michelle Jarman, Leila Monaghan & Alison Quaggin Harkin, eds., Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability (Temple University Press, 2017).
Adrián Félix, Specters of Belonging: The Political Life Cycle of Mexican Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Charles Delheim, Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Brandeis University Press, 2021).
Kenneth L. Karst, Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution (Yale University Press, 1989).
Eleana J. Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Duke University Press, 2010).
Joowon Park, Belonging in a House Divided: The Violence of the North Korean Resettlement Process (University of California Press, 2023).
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, Signing and Belonging in Nepal (Gallaudet University Press, 2016).
Chad Bryant, Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Victoria Pedrick, Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Leora Fridman, Bound Up: On Kink, Power, and Belonging (Wayne State University Press, 2024).
Laura Merla & Bérengère Nobels, Belonging and Belongings: Children’s Sense of Home in Shared Custody Arrangements (Bristol University Press, 2025).
Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2007).
Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (Routledge, 2009).
Charlotte Hogg, White Sororities and the Cultural Work of Belonging (Routledge, 2024).
Terrell L. Strayhorn, College Students' Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students (Routledge, 2nd Edition, 2019).
Kelly-Ann Allen & Margaret L. Kern, School Belonging in Adolescents: Theory, Research and Practice (Springer, 2017).
Jennifer L. Jones & Kami L. Gallus, eds., Belonging and Resilience in Individuals with Developmental Disabilities: Community and Family Engagement (Springer, 2021).
Aida Ibričević, Decided Return Migration: Emotions, Citizenship, Home and Belonging in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Springer, 2024).

On friendship:

Diane Jeske, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship (Routledge, 2022).
Michael Jackson, Friendship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
Laurence A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (Routledge, 1980).
Barbara Caine, ed., Friendship: A History (Routledge, 2014).
A.C. Grayling, Friendship (Vices and Virtues) (Yale University Press, 2013).
Niobe Way, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press, 2011).
John S. Garrison, Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England (Routledge, ).
Stephen Aron, Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Richard Kaczynski, Friendship in Doubt: Aleister Crowley, J. F. C. Fuller, Victor B. Neuburg, and British Agnosticism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Sophie Grace Chappell, A Philosopher Looks at Friendship (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Neera Kapur Badhwar, ed., Friendship: A Philosophical Reader (Cornell University Press, 1993).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering. / It is true that their voice was the only one which he could still hear. On this score, the big bell was his beloved. It was she whom he preferred out of all that family of noisy girls which bustled above him, on festival days. This bell was named Marie. She was alone in the southern tower, with her sister Jacqueline, a bell of lesser size, shut up in a smaller cage beside hers. This Jacqueline was so called from the name of the wife of Jean Montagu, who had given it to the church, which had not prevented his going and figuring without his head at Montfaucon. In the second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio; but big Marie was his favorite. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Fourth, Chapter III, “Immanis Pecoris Custos, Immanior Ipse”.]

Personal belonging and friendships: