Friendship could be so much better

Lessons from the Mongol Empire

Credit: Kinokompaniya CTB

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Have you ever wished we had a better version of friendship?

I started this blog with the idea that people need a village, or network of close relations — and that the weakness of our networks today is unusual. When I first started writing, I think some of my friends were excited because they assumed I’d be talking mostly about friendship. Traditional family, their thinking went, had run its course and the day of friend-villages had arrived.

But I very quickly moved away from this idea for one simple reason: Friendship is a weak institution. That’s not to say it isn’t good, because it is, or that there aren’t individual cases of very strong friendships. But for a lot of us, friends just aren’t high on the priority list.

For me, this idea manifest as I and most of my friends moved to different states for jobs; we all cherished our relationships, but at least for me it never even crossed my mind that I’d forgo the best job opportunities solely to remain in close proximity to friends. That may not be your experience, but consider how many people move closer to friends after having kids, or pay for their friends’ kids’ college, or leave those kids an inheritance. That’s all fairly common family stuff, but rare among friends.

As a result, I’ve focused on arguing here that family is the foundation of the village.

But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there’s a better and stronger conception of friendship, something that formalizes casual relationships and turns them into something closer to family. And maybe we can find an example of that idea way back in the Mongol Empire.

What I’m talking about is the Mongolian concept of “anda,” which is a kind of sworn or blood brotherhood between two men¹. The most famous example of this comes to us from Genghis Khan, who as a child named Temüjin met and befriended a young noble kid names Jamukha. As boys, Temüjin and Jamukha had pledged to be anda forever, exchanging gifts to solidify this bond.

They renewed the pledge later, again as kids, and then once more as adults. The 13th century book The Secret History of the Mongols states that this third renewal involved an elaborate ceremony that included feasting, exchanging of clothing and horses, and spending more than a year together.

Having a big party and riding horses through the steppe for a year with my bros sounds appealing on its own, but the anda relationship was not just for fun. When Temüjin’s wife was kidnapped, for example, it was Jamukha and his forces who came to assist in her retrieval.

Later, the two men became political rivals and went to war. But their bond did not necessarily end. Jamukha lost the war — hence Genghis Khan is a household name in history books but Jamukha is not — and chose to be executed by his anda. Temüjin obliged him, but carried out the execution without spilling Jamukha’s blood, which for medieval Mongols was a noble way to die.

I am certainly not an expert on the Mongolian Empire, and only recently learned about the anda concept. But I bring it up for two reasons. First, it represents a type of relationship that most of us modern westerners don’t have access to today. Temüjin was married, had kids, parents, and assorted other family members, but he also had this other relationship. And that relationship was formalized through ceremony and rites, after which it carried a sense of duty and obligation that could not be broken even by war.

I don’t expect modern Americans to suddenly revive this somewhat obscure idea from long ago, but I do think it offers lessons in what makes chosen relationships resilient. In an anda relationship there were real stakes. This is something quite a bit more formal, and with more explicit obligations, than the relatively loose idea of chosen family that’s increasingly popular today.

Thankfully, most of us don’t have to collect our warriors and ride out to attack our friends’ enemies. But it’s an interesting thought experiment to ponder if we’d be willing to do so if the need arose. Or maybe that’s just too far fetched an idea. But in The WEIRDest People in the World, Harvard researcher Joseph Henrich offers perhaps a more realistic scenario, saying that different cultures prioritize relationships differently. In the West, if a loved one revealed that he or she had committed a crime, we might feel obligated to turn that person into the police. But outside the West, turning someone in might be considered the wrong thing to do, because relationships have a higher priority than the law.

As usual, I will include the caveat that I’m not suggesting anyone break the law. But I like this point from Henrich’s book because it captures the idea that relationships in non-western cultures often involve taking on risk, obligation, and sacrifice. Relationships extend well beyond the point at which they are no longer convenient — and that seems to be especially true for the Mongolian concept of anda.

The other reason I’m bringing up this concept is because it is far from unique. As I read up on it, I also came across many other examples of formalized relationships — blood brotherhoods, etc. — that are not just marriage. I will perhaps dive into some of these in future posts following further study, but the point is that we’re not just unique for having weak villages today. We’re also unique for having very few flavors of formalized relationships.

I’m not sure what we can do about this, because it’s hard to invent ritualized relationships out of nothing. A modern equivalent might be financial relationships, where by investing in something with a friend — a restaurant, a startup, a rental property, etc. — we’ve consented to share some risk and have a contractual obligation not to renege on our agreements. There’s even a sort of ritual in some financial agreements when you go to the office of a lawyer or title company to sign paper work. This feels relatively shallow compared to what was historically available for elevating friendships, but it is something — and for that reason it’s also why I find modern experiments in community-building most interesting when they involve some sort of legally shared property.

The other example that comes to mind, and which is still relatively common in the West, is godparents, which I previously wrote about here. My point at that time was that we need more godparent-like relationships, which is to say relationships that carry duties and which are formalized in rites and ceremonies. And maybe, too, we need something more like the anda of ancient Mongolia.

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1. Here is a downloadable paper on the anda for further reading. I will also give a hat tip to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast, which did two long episodes (almost 7 hours!) on the Mongolian Empire, and which is where I first heard of the anda concept.