Editor's Note

When was the first time you heard the word “loyal” and really understood it?

I can’t pinpoint the year myself, but the fact that it immediately brings to mind the redcoats in the American Revolution, the loyalists – those loyal to the crown, that is – probably means that it was somewhere around fifth grade. I don’t want to overestimate the significance of my own memory, but I suspect that this word association has larger implications for the way Americans generally view loyalty.

Loyalty has gotten a bad reputation in America: It has come to mean simple blind obedience in many instances. Some might be tempted to say this has been a recent shift occurring in the wake of the war in Iraq, the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, or the Enron debacle. Or it might go back more than one generation, to the period of “loyalty oaths” and investigations into “Americanism” on the part of public officials, teachers, and people in the entertainment industry. They might argue that loyalty to country, to faith, or even to a business is a dangerous thing. And that the real heroes, as Time magazine suggested a couple of years ago with its “People of the Year” issue, are the so-called whistle-blowers.

But this skittishness about loyalty probably isn’t recent at all. This is a country that was formed 230 years ago by a break in allegiance. Though the opposite of loyalty is not independent-mindedness, it is easy to see the friction between these two traits in ourselves.

A recent survey of 2,300 American adults commissioned by In Character showed that there are a wide variety of institutions to which people would consider offering their loyalty, including their schools, their country, and their faith, but the only one for which there was almost universal support was family. It seems perfectly logical that the smaller the institution, the more you know the other people involved, the more likely you are to be willing to tie your fate to theirs. Even amoebae, as frequent New York Times science contributor Carl Zimmer notes in this issue, are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the survival of their extended families – their colonies. Our instincts to protect our parents, children, and siblings appear to be so fundamental that family loyalty seems scarcely worth mentioning.

But family loyalty is not a foregone conclusion in modern times. As sociologist James Q. Wilson points out in his essay, marriage is slowly being replaced in many Western countries by cohabitation, a much less permanent arrangement and one that is detrimental both to the parties involved and to their children. Even people who do go through the ritual of matrimony are more likely to find divorce a viable option today. And, perhaps most disturbingly, 61 percent of respondents to our survey thought “marital infidelity seems to be more acceptable today” than it was in the past.

If this is the state of family loyalty, maybe it’s time for a reexamination of this virtue.

Many of the writers in this issue take up the question of loyalty to principle, something that seems more palatable to our modern sensibilities. Religion writer David Gibson looks at the issue of the skyrocketing rate of religious conversion in America, and asks whether this is a sign of our desire to be true to our own principles, or of the fact that we have become untethered from the beliefs in which we’ve been raised, and are willing to try just about anything.

The subjects of historian Christine Rosen’s article, mostly cabinet secretaries and other presidential aides, make the “loyalty to principle” claim about their own disloyalty. They say that their betrayal of the presidents for whom they worked was all in the service of loyalty to their own high ideals. A cynic might question whether it was the lucrative book deals these bureaucrats received that led to this reordering of their loyalties.

One might also wonder whether, if we took friendship more seriously, these government officials might have hesitated before selling out the leaders who trusted them. In his essay on friendship, social critic Digby Anderson contrasts our modern disregard for long-term friendships with the attitude of the ancients, who thought that friendship was integral to sustaining the moral standards of a community. Friends were there, not to flatter, but to offer honest evaluation and push us onto a higher moral plane

Holding others accountable for their actions and being willing to confront them about their mistakes takes a lot of effort. And it won’t win you any popularity contests. These days, the harsh truths often emerge only at the end of the friendship. But offering criticisms and then walking out is no way to change things, either on a personal level or a national one.

As Wall Street Journal editorialist Bret Stephens notes in his article on what Diaspora Jews owe Israel, “One cannot simultaneously seek its destruction while participating in its discourse, any more than one can renounce one’s citizenship yet maintain the right to vote. The price of disloyalty is the privilege of community.”

Which brings us back to the question of what citizens owe their country. One must be careful in answering this question. As Stuart Anderson, director of the National Foundation for American Policy, writes in his essay on outsourcing, many CEOs have been lately accused of nothing less than treason because they are sending certain aspects of production or customer service abroad. But loyalty to America does not mean that businessmen should make decisions that will send them into bankruptcy and put all their American workers out of business in the process.

Does loyalty to America mean serving in the army? Some would say yes, but only if the war was one you agreed with. That is not, needless to say, how the army trains people. It tries to build cohesion among the troops, not adherence to, say, just war theory. But this returns us to the tension between loyalty to people and loyalty to principle. It is harder to be loyal to people because they are fallible, and once they fail, our instinct may be to discard their friendship. Loyalty to principle seems easier, but it’s not. Principles are too abstract and we – including, probably, even the most noble among us – don’t know enough about our own hearts always to be consistent or to know what that consistency would mean.

In our interview, Josiah Bunting III, former head of the Virginia Military Institute, explains how he balances these two kinds of loyalty: “The friendships one forms, the attachments one makes, the obligations that one normally incurs ... are manifestations of allegiance to principle.” It’s hard to think of a better way to practice everyday loyalty.