On Loyalty: The uses and abuses of a complicated virtue

National Review, April 5, 1999 by Roger Scruton

Mr. Scruton, the philosopher, is author most recently of The Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy.

'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." E. M. Forster's notorious words were published in 1951, after the Second World War. But they remind us of the period between the wars, when so many of Forster's upper-class literary friends became agents and fellow-travelers of the Communist party. When people like Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt betrayed their country, their choice was not between their country and their friends, but between their country and its enemy. Nevertheless, it was with romantic images of friendship that they justified their conduct. In the homosexual circle in which they moved-the "homintern," as W. H. Auden aptly described it-the image of "the friend" had a special attraction. The friend was the symbol of the only loyalty that mattered, a loyalty that was private, secret, nurtured in opposition to the world of normal people. All rival obligations-to spouse, parents, family, and country- counted for nothing, being merely the philistine requirements of middle-class bores.

Of course, it may be doubted whether the members of the homintern actually experienced the "higher" loyalty that inspired them. Their homosexual affairs seemed romantic only because they had to be concealed; in reality, the homintern were as fickle as any dealer in second-hand goods.

What mattered to them was not actual friends, but an ideal of friendship, whose charm consisted in the fact that normal society could not live up to it. Measured against this ideal, King and Country lost their claim to obedience. And to show their contempt for King and Country, the homintern threw in their lot with the Communists.

A FALSE ICON

Now one thing above all has been anathema to the Communist party, and that thing is loyalty-especially loyalty of a religious or patriotic kind. The first victims of Stalin's agents in Eastern Europe were those who had actively opposed the Nazis. It was not the collaborators and the traitors whom the Communists hunted down, but those who had fought for their country and who had taken part in its liberation. What the Communists wanted, and what they strove to create during their decades of rule, was a society so atomized by suspicion and fear as to be incapable of uniting against its oppressor. No loyalty was safe from the implacable hostility of the Party, not even loyalty to the Party itself. Those who had joined out of conviction and idealism were the first to go in any purge; for it had been apparent since the beginning of Lenin's experiment that the Party could trust only those who feared it, and not those who believed in it.

The story of the homintern is the story of objective loyalties sacrificed to subjective ideals. A false icon of loyalty helped to create a world in which real loyalty was treated as a crime. By playing with loyalty in private, the Cambridge spies helped to destroy it in public. Their Communism was really an anti-patriotism, just as their adulation of friendship was really a contempt for family life. The Communist party was able to conscript these essentially negative feelings, so helping the "outsiders" of bourgeois society to become its destroyers. We are still suffering, and perhaps will always be suffering, from the damage they caused.

The anti-patriotic and anti-bourgeois sentiments exploited by the Communists did not disappear with the death of socialism. On the contrary, they remain fundamental components of the left-wing outlook. Ordinary people understand loyalty as a natural condition, which binds them first and foremost to family and country. For the leftist, family and country are oppressive structures, whose claim to loyalty is at best provisional. The rival source of loyalty is now not the friend but the cause, and the cause may change from year to year. In E. M. Forster's day, the cause was International Socialism; in the Sixties, liberation; today it is the normalization of homosexuality; tomorrow it could well be the normalization of pedophilia. But in all these changes, one thing remains: the belief in an oppressive power structure, built into the state and its institutions, and animated by ignorant people defending the middle-class life. Hence the loyalties of ordinary people are the prime suspect.

E. M. Forster's ideal of friendship is a product of the English public-school system, with its Hellenistic culture and its romantic love of boys. By adopting it, the homintern made the cause less important than the people who pursued it. Their act of rebellion had a distinctly aristocratic air; it was a gesture of contempt for the middle classes, delivered from on high by an exclusive club of queens. Today's leftists are not would-be aristocrats but over-ardent democrats, who believe that power should belong to the victims. They treat their friends more as comrades in arms than as romantic idols. The friend is not the justifying icon of a creed, but the power needed to impose that creed on others. If he defects or hesitates, he is at once discarded. It is not for his sake, but for the sake of the cause, that you stand with him side by side against the enemy.from friend to enemy