On Loyalty: The uses and abuses of a complicated virtue

National Review, April 5, 1999 by Roger Scruton

The unconditional nature of patriotic sentiment is one reason that the Left rejects it. It seems like an act of oppression, to require me to fight and die for my country, when its cause is not mine. But that, when all is said and done, is the essence of loyalty: that the cause espoused by the other is your cause, whether or not you understand it or approve of it. It is thus in lasting marriages, and it is thus in successful nations. This does not mean that your country's cause is always right, or that you should not protest against it. It means rather that, if you go against your country in a true emergency, this should not be a casual choice of yours, but the first step towards a lasting separation.

Loyalty to one's king or chieftain was the principal virtue among Anglo-Saxon tribes. Our earliest literature abounds in tragic battles, which are redeemed from their futility by the fact that every warrior willingly gave up his life for his chieftain. (See, for example, the Battle of Malden.) That is what loyalty consisted in. There was no such choice as the one envisaged by E. M. Forster: To betray one's country was to betray one's friends, and both required, in an emergency, the supreme act of sacrifice. There was no real division between private and public attachments, and the affections of private life- towards spouse, family, neighbors, and friends-fed into the patriotic sentiment that held everything together. Such unquestioning loyalty may seem irrational and absurd to a modern cynic; but it was functional. The triumph of Greece over Persia was due to the willingness of the Greek citizen to die for his city; and the rapid collapse of the great Arab armies in our time is explained by the total absence of loyalty to the tyrants who conscripted them.

In retrospect we can understand the Sixties as a collective revolt against loyalty, in behalf of transient and self-interested deals. That, more or less, is what "liberation" amounts to. In the Clinton saga we see the long-term effect of this. It is not edifying, but it is profoundly instructive. In this web of petty treacheries we discover the real meaning of Forster's remark. Those who think that friendship is more important than the love of country are jeopardizing both. By taking the friend, rather than spouse, or family, or country, as their paradigm, they take the first step towards replacing loyalty with something more transient. They bring loyalty to earth, and so disenchant it. In a democratic society, friendship is cheap: You can have many friends, and each of them dispensable. True loyalties are not like that: Traditionally, you could have only one wife, only one family, only one king or country. By taking these as your paradigm, you made loyalty into a real social force; you prepared the way for sacrifice, and made treachery as repulsive to yourself as it would be to others. Americans used to understand this. Some of them still do. But no one involved in the White House soap opera has an inkling of it.