Loyal to a Fault

The older I get, the more fascinated I am by the concept of loyalty. I used to think of it in unambiguously glowing terms. Now, though, I see it as a double edged sword. To be more specific, loyalty is like any classical virtue: it only has value in moderation.

All children first learn about loyalty through their role as a family member. I, for example, come from a stable, successful Jewish family – meaning that my parents fought all the time but stayed together anyway. To be loyal entailed being committed to the family unit above all else. My parents could have taken up chair throwing, sword fighting, pistol dueling, ticket splitting, anything. It wouldn’t matter. Despite their differences, they always had to be loyal to the Spiro household. They had to vow that nothing could ever end our voyage together, for in a very deep sense we were all extensions of each other’s selves. A divorce wouldn’t simply be disloyal; it would be a mild form of suicide.

I still value loyalty inside a family. A decent human being must be loyal to his parents, spouse, and children. We must also be loyal to our dogs, for God knows we demand infinite loyalty in return. But what about outside the family? How much loyalty should we extend to our friends? Or our bosses/subordinates in the office? Or our nation? Or our community of faith? At what point does loyalty turn into an Achilles Heel, one that prevents us from following the voice of reason? Surely, we can imagine that inner voice whispering to us that our friends are misguided, our nation is embarrassing itself, and our religion is hooked on antiquated ideas that no longer speak to the modern intellect.

Consider our present leaders. We’ve spent the last 3 ½ years engaged in a war that by all measures has gone poorly. People debate whether it made sense to get into the war in the first place, but nobody debates that it was executed horribly. And yet how many heads have rolled? Has anyone been held accountable for this huge boil on the butt of our nation’s reputation? The answer, of course, is no. And the explanation is that the President, by every account, is completely loyal. Loyal to his family. Loyal to his friends. He’s so loyal, in fact, that he would no more consider dismissing his Secretary of Defense than my leftist mother would have considered leaving my dad for Joseph McCarthy.

In the case of my parents, their loyalty had the consequence of 58 years of relentless disputes. In the case of the President, his loyalty has the consequence of several years of relentless questioning by his own electorate. They want to know that he recognizes his mistakes, learns from them, and won’t let them happen again. But he has responded, in essence, that loyal people don’t “cut and run” -- they “stay the course” and they sure don’t get rid of true friends who serve at their sides. If that means that their approval ratings drop faster than a hooker’s panties, so be it. Loyalty uber ralles!

For him, maybe. But not for me. With each passing decade, the pathos of excessive loyalty becomes clearer and clearer. Loyalty might be the characteristic virtue of a dog or a besieged politician, but for a student of philosophy, it is a noose. And I’m sick of it.

Or at least I’d like to be man enough to be a little less loyal, and a little more open. That’s where enlightenment lies.

Plato said it best. The businessmen and politicians whose lives are obsessed with minutia are like troglodytes analyzing shadows on a cave wall. With every waking minute, they show loyalty to their own cave, and to all their contemporaries and ancestors who have mastered the analysis of their own cave wall. Plato’s philosophers, by contrast, left the cave and looked at the trees and the sky on a bright sunny day. They knew not where they were headed or what they would see; for all they knew, they’d be blinded. Their loyalties would be of little use to them, as they were in uncharted territory. Then again, that was the only territory fit for a free, intelligent human being.

The words I heard in an Israeli yeshiva still ring in my ears: “If you open your mind too much, your brains will fall out.” Such is the refrain of any traditional, organized religion. You can walk outside the cave and look at the sun, they might say, but every night – or at least every Shabbat – you must return to the cave, and that is where you will find your ultimate nourishment. You must be loyal to your ancestors (it’s their miracles that you must accept, not the gentiles’ miracles), to the teachings you have learned about since childhood, and most importantly, to the Great Fabricator – the Heavenly God who created us lovingly and wisely in the same way that Rembrandt painted the Night Watch.

Funny, but the older I get, the more I have come to find Patriarchs who weren’t mentioned in the Bible. People like Spinoza, Jefferson, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Einstein all came from the same heretical tradition. None accepted the Biblical conception of God. And yet none were willing to dispense with the need to exalt in spiritual bliss. All of these thinkers venerated life and its unity. All of them maintained an appreciation for the holiness of planet earth. And it was precisely this earth, rather than some theoretical “heaven” that they lived to see perfected and beautified by the fruits of their own powerful minds.

Call them followers of a religion. A religion of immanence. Not one focused primarily on transcendence. Not one that talks about God in heaven who arbitrarily decides when to honor the laws of nature and when to cast them aside for “His” own inscrutable purposes.

Can a Jew join such thinkers and still remain loyal to his own faith? Can a Christian? How people answer these questions will say much about the durability of these religions in upcoming centuries. For surely, our philosophies will evolve, just as our scientific ideas evolve, but what about our religions? I’m optimistic that the great religions are flexible enough to indeed change with the times. But that assumes that when our children enter houses of worship, they’re encouraged to check their loyalties at the door.