On Loyalty: The uses and abuses of a complicated virtue

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

Hence, from the Jacobins to the Shining Path, revolutionary movements have been characterized by the constant purging of their innermost supporters. In free countries the fight is less bloody, and largely confined to the pages of highbrow magazines. But it is none the less vitriolic. As with religion, the ideological conflict conceals a more tribal hostility-a competition for territory and space, whether in the real world or in the world of academic sinecures. Historic ruptures-between Jacobin and Girondin, Bolshevik and Menshevik, Stalinist and Trotskyist, structuralist and post-structuralist, and so on-are really power struggles which make little sense outside the personalities engaged in them and the prizes to be won. Viewed in the context of these struggles, the leftist concept of friendship seems tenuous, to say the least. One false move and you change from friend to enemy, to be expelled from the ranks with public declarations of sadness, and regrets that you had changed so lamentably from the person you were. Such was the fate of Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, and Arthur Koestler.

The Left's experience of friendship-both the Forsterian ideal and the fissiparous reality-is brought into focus by the recent scandal involving the English left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens. Sidney Blumenthal, President Clinton's spin-doctor, whom Hitchens refers to as his "old friend," denied to one and all that he had described Monica Lewinsky to the press as a "stalker." In a sworn affidavit, Hitchens implied that Blumenthal was lying. Many people on the left believe that Hitchens volunteered this adverse testimony, or at any rate could have kept the matter to himself. In their eyes, Hitchens not only betrayed his friend. He did it on behalf of them-the reactionary forces of family, country, religion, and law, embodied in the person of Kenneth Starr. True, Hitchens did not betray his friend out of loyalty to his country. But that is only because America is not his country. Given half the chance, his critics no doubt think, he would betray his English friends for the sake of the Queen.

Hence outraged leftists have begun to discover far worse faults in Hitchens than his ditching of Blumenthal. Katha Pollitt, in an open letter published in The Nation, asks, "Why should you, who call yourself a socialist, a man of the Left, help Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Trent Lott? If Clinton is evil, are the forces arrayed against him better, with their 100 percent ratings from the Christian Coalition and their after-dinner speaking engagements at white supremacist clubs?" But her thought is soon ranging more widely. She has long suspected Hitchens of not being a feminist, of opposing abortion, of refusing "to respond to the serious and informed objections of women deeply versed in abortion history, law, politics, practice and experience." This is the sin that lies behind Hitchens's betrayal of Blumenthal-namely, that Hitchens is not a feminist; that he is unsound on abortion; that (horror of horrors) he sneers at the feminist obsessives who have made abortion into a leading academic subject. Betrayal of the friend is merely a sign of a deeper failing-betrayal of the cause.

Looked at from afar, the fracas is no more nor less repulsive than anything else in the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. But it helps to bring into focus the most important casualty of modern life, which is loyalty itself. At every point in the Clinton saga, disloyalty motivates the plot: disloyalty to friend, spouse, and country. No oath is honored, no commitment upheld. All is cunning and calculation. Even Linda Tripp, who blew the whistle, did so by a mind-boggling act of treachery. In this brave new world people don't really count: at best they are instruments in the pursuit of sex or fame or power. And the idea of that higher thing-the country and its institutions-on which all our commitments depend begins to look just as ridiculous as the leftists have always said it is.

It is time, again, to consider the nature of loyalty, and its meaning for people in our condition. The illuminating contrast is not with disloyalty, but with contract. Unlike a contract, loyalty has no conditions. It is ended not by a breach of its terms, but by a slow process of attrition, as its object piles disappointment upon disappointment. The most important example of personal loyalty in our culture has been marriage. Traditionally a marriage is a vow, not a contract. That is, it involves an existential commitment, a joining of one person to another, come what may and till death do them part. Such an unconditional union has a sacramental character: It is a consecration of one's life. Religion therefore stands in the wing, even of the most secular marriage ceremony.

The sign of loyalty is not that you think and feel as the other does, but that you stay with him regardless. Very few modern friendships are like that. They are founded in a community of sentiment and purpose, and evaporate almost at once when sentiments are no longer shared. The same is increasingly true of marriage. The effort is no longer made to stay true to another through times of conflict. Instead marriage is treated like a contract, and every quarrel like a breach of its terms. The result is little short of catastrophic. The moral and cultural capital of society was stored in the institution of marriage, and passed on through the family to the children. Take away loyalty and this capital investment is irretrievably dispersed, and a new generation of lost souls enters the world, without any clear understanding of where they are going or why they are here.

Loyalty to country is likewise unconditional. If Americans have difficulty seeing this, it is because the Constitution makes it seem as though citizenship were a kind of contract-an exchange of promises, in which the citizen undertakes to obey the law and the state to uphold it. But as soon as we recognize that the state's protection is offered unconditionally, we will see that the same is true of the citizen's obedience. Wherever he is, and whatever he has done, the American citizen is entitled to his government's protection. And in times of emergency he can be called upon to lay down his life, whether or not he approves of the cause. (The disloyalty that has come to a head in the Clinton saga did not, of course, begin with Clinton's presidency, nor with his governorship. It was there from the outset of his political career, as a student radical and draft-dodger.)

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.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group