An iconic image for many National Review fans comes from an early 1990s ad campaign. It’s of man’s best friend delivering an issue of NR. The text line simply read: “Loyalty.” Eric Felten isn’t trying to sell magazines with the word, but a book dedicated to it in all its iterations and complications and benefits. Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue is the book and he talks about it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Is loyalty really “a forgotten, forlorn relic?” Are we that bad off or just in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.?
Eric Felten: I suspect you might indeed have a better chance of finding a loyal friend in the heartland than on the coasts. But I do think that most of us wish loyalty counted for more in our culture. Partly that’s because people in all times and all places have lamented that loyalty isn’t what it once was, and we’re no different. But add to it that ours are fleeting times: We move so often — from place to place and job to job — that we have a hard time maintaining the sort of long-term relationships that foster loyalty. Which means we need loyalty all the more to shore up the relationships we do have.
Lopez: Why is it so vexing?
Felten: Loyalty is vexing because it is both essential and impossible. Loyalty is essential to every relationship we have in life that matters — love, family, community, country, faith. Yet the many different relationships we have mean that we have that many loyalties too, and they have a nasty habit of coming into conflict with one another. The loyalty I owe my family may be at odds with the loyalty I owe a friend. The loyalty I owe a friend may be at odds with the loyalty I owe my country. The loyalty I owe my country may be at odds with the loyalty I owe my family.
Lopez: Why did Benedict Arnold once loom large in the American imagination, but not so much anymore?
Felten: In our day we have been told that those who betray their country are idealists of one sort or another, to be admired even. Benedict Arnold presented a much more realistic portrait of the traitor — selfish, self-pitying, and self-important. His plot — which very well could have spelled doom for the American Revolution — was undone by three modest, everyman soldiers, men who refused to be bribed or bought. The history of Arnold’s betrayal is worth remembering because its failure is a testament to how powerful loyalty can be when it is embraced by average people.
Lopez: Does a general lack of historical knowledge contribute to our issues with loyalty?
Felten: We have a solipsistic tendency to think that the crises we face, both personal and societal, are new and original. But of course the human predicament is pretty enduring. The problems associated with loyalty have been around as long as there have been people. What fascinated me in writing Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue was seeing the many different strategies that have been tried for getting out of the jam of conflicting loyalties, and how many of those strategies have been tried in remarkably different societies separated by thousands of years.
Lopez: Ditto, classics education?
Felten: No one has dealt with the crushing clashes of loyalty more compellingly than the ancient Greeks. Devastating and unsolvable conundrums of loyalty are at the heart of the most powerful tragedies — Agamemnon, Antigone. We can stand to learn from their struggle to deal with loyalties at loggerheads.
Lopez: Do you have favorites for teaching your own children about loyalty?
Felten: It isn’t easy to teach your kids about loyalty. On the one hand, you don’t want your kids sneaking around getting up to no good. And yet what kind of brother is always running to his parents tattling on his sister’s every misstep? We want to encourage our children to be loyal to one another, to be able to trust each other, to rely on each other. But that loyalty they have to one another may be at odds with an obligation to the broader family, or to telling the truth. And yet I think most of us recognize that if siblings are to have robust, lasting relationships, they’ve got to be able to trust that they will stand by one another, even if they’re a little in the wrong. What a tricky, problematic virtue loyalty is that it can lead us into little conspiracies to cover up wrongdoing.
Lopez: Do you have a favorite story about loyalty? Or world historic or personal significance?
Felten: I never tire of one of the great cinematic testaments to loyalty — the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey stands accused of bank fraud. But all the people who know him come running to help. They don’t first ask for proof that he’s innocent. No, their friend is in trouble and that is all they need to know. When George’s wife, Mary, puts out the word that George is in a terrible fix, his friends “scattered all over town collecting money.” And soon they are at the Bailey house, cheerfully piling the money high on a table. As Mary says, weeping with gratitude and amazement, “They didn’t ask any questions — just said, ‘If George is in trouble, count me in.’” Now, that’s the sort of friendship that moves us. That’s the sort of loyalty we christen with sentimental tears.
Lopez: What’s hardest to swallow about loyalty?
Felten: Loyalty can lead us into wrongdoing. What do you do if a friend asks you to stand by him or help him when he’s in the wrong? “The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong,” Mark Twain wrote. “Nearly everybody will side with you when you are in the right.” Moralists as varied as Thomas à Kempis and Mohandas Gandhi have looked at that requirement of loyalty and decided that loyal friendship has to be avoided. “He who would be friends with God,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “must remain alone.” George Orwell thought that was a massive cop-out and made the case that loyal friendship was essential to a life well lived, even with its inherent dangers. “Through loyalty one can be led into wrongdoing,” Orwell wrote in response to Gandhi’s assertion. “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty.” Orwell said this was “the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
Lopez: Did anything surprise you in learning about loyalty?
Felten: I was surprised by how often, over the millennia, loyalty is equated with being stupid, a dupe. Yes, being loyal often means doing exactly the opposite of what self-interest would seem to demand. And yes, being loyal is often exploited. It’s remarkable that a virtue with a reputation for being less than savvy is so widely admired.
Lopez: How essential is religion to loyalty?
Felten: Perhaps we can turn the question around and ask how essential loyalty is to religion. Can there be faith without fidelity?
Lopez: Is it really okay that you insist your mother is the best mother in the world and I insist that mine is?
Felten: I stand by everyone’s right to be wholly convinced that his or her own mother is the best possible mother in the world. Loyalty may well mean having unrealistic opinions about those to whom we are committed. But my point in the book is that one’s mother doesn’t have to be the best for one to love one’s mother. Loyalty is about love and commitment, and that means sticking by your mother even if she stumbles or even if she is a difficult woman. Which doesn’t mean we are indifferent about what sort of lives our mothers live, any more than our commitment to country means that we are indifferent to whether the country is on the right path. G.#K. Chesterton wrote that to say “my country right or wrong” was like saying “my mother drunk or sober.” Yes, your love of country is undiminished either way, just as your love for your mother endures. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try to improve things, whether for your country or for your mother.
Lopez: Is there anything about loyalty that would be helpful to prospective primary candidates?
Felten: Ronald Reagan said that the Eleventh Commandment was that Republicans shouldn’t speak ill of other Republicans. That was a simple, straightforward statement of the importance of loyalty for the success of a political party. He stated it in the context of making the transition from a primary election to a general election. Have out your differences in the primary by all means, but when you enter a primary, whatever your party, you are agreeing to support the winner of the primary in the general election, even if (especially if) it isn’t you. We’ve seen a lot of sore primary losers in the last few years who do everything they can to scuttle the chances of the candidates who beat them in the primaries. That’s a serious loyalty problem.
Lopez: If people think they’re loyal when others don’t — can delude themselves and serve different masters — then what’s a good starting point for being loyal and encouraging others to be?
Felten: It might help to note that the Greeks didn’t have a word for “loyalty” per se. The word they used for the concept was the word for being “trustworthy.” Can a friend count on you? Do you keep your word? Are you reliable? This is what goes into being trustworthy, and it helps us understand why loyalty is such a core virtue. It’s also a great starting point for learning how to be loyal — keep your word, be someone your friends can trust.
Lopez: You’ve penned a drinking column. Doesn’t drinking discourage loyalty?
Felten: Many are the loyal drinkers — loyal to their particular brand of beer or whiskey, even when the old faithful product goes into decline and begins to suffer from shabby manufacture. But as for drinking companions, who would want to share a glass with the disloyal? Do you want to be able to speak your mind with your friends, knowing your confidences will be safe with them? Or do you worry that a word spoken in error (perhaps as one is a little worse for wear from drink) will be tweeted or blasted out on Facebook? The best drinking is drinking with friends, and friends are known by their loyalty.
Lopez: Where are your loyalties to your Loyalty book? What’s your favorite part?
Felten: I am partial to the story of Pete Schoening, a young mountaineer climbing the Himalayan peak K2 in 1953. In a blinding blizzard one member of his team slipped off the side of the mountain, pulling with him a climber he was tied to. Their ropes tangled those of the next three men and they too were yanked off the side of the cliff.
Up above, caring for a climber who had been injured earlier, was Pete Schoening. His end of the rope was tied to an ice axe jammed behind a boulder. As the men below slid off the mountain and into the abyss, the nylon line started whipping past him. Schoening could have let the ice axe bear the violent yank that was coming when the rope went taught. It might even have held. Instead, in an instant he got under the rope, wrapping it over his shoulders and under his arms. He anchored his feet and, heaving up against the tightening rope, stopped their fall. Schoening bore the weight of all five men, the farthest of whom was 150 feet below. He held fast as his teammates climbed up the line to safety.
That’s what loyalty is about — being someone who can be counted on in a crisis. One of the men Schoening saved that day later wrote that the rope connecting the men was “a symbol of men banded together in a common effort of will and strength,” fighting “against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit.”
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is available exclusively through United Media.