On Dual, and Multiple, Loyalties

I realize that accusations of 'dual loyalty' have a fraught history for the Jewish community especially, and thus that the remarks earlier this week around 'disloyalty' were upsetting to many. Acknowledging that, however, I want to frame a principle in political philosophy in universal terms: not for Jews, or Jewish-Americans, but for all of us everywhere.

The principle is as follows: It is the mark of a healthy political system that it accepts that its members have many other claims on their loyalty, and can negotiate such claims insofar as they are natural or otherwise legitimate. It is the totalitarian system that demands that children turn in their parents to the state for disloyal thoughts, not the healthy system. It is the totalitarian system that demands that religious orders direly violate their conscience, as informed by centuries of theological arguments and developed doctrine, in order to conform to some new fashion in law.

A natural loyalty to one's parents, as well as to those who have taken special interest in one and helped one along, is right and proper. A healthy state neither needs nor ought to command disloyalty to such things in preference to itself. Loyalty to friends, to community organizations, to principles, these things are not undesirable. It is Mussolini who said that the ideal should be 'everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.' The system he was describing literally was fascism; other systems that aim at the same ideal, to include the recently-mentioned People's Republic of China, are actively evil rather than healthy modes of human politics.

To return to the specific case, it is also true that loyalty is a two-way street. I think it is only natural to feel a kind of loyalty -- a degree of loyalty -- to a state that declares itself to exist for the specific purpose of providing you and your kin a safe haven if all else fails; to welcome you whenever you come, and even to welcome you home if you choose; and that has shown a willingness to risk lives in the defense of those like yourself who have fallen into danger. It would be a strange sort of character that did not respond to such a display of loyalty in at least some reciprocal way. I do not suggest that anyone has so responded, and certainly do not name anyone as having such feelings, but I would certainly understand if someone from that particular community did feel that way.

To speak again to the universal, I would say that this is a fit principle for judging the validity of any human state. If it cannot accept natural and otherwise legitimate loyalties that may contravene its designs, the state is overweening. Such a state is suffering from a kind of hubris, which produces tragedy and sometimes a great fall. It is unworthy in spite of whatever other claims it has to glory, as the great Greek tragic heroes were found unworthy in this way in spite of being heroes.

Negotiation may sometimes be necessary in the hardest cases: it is one thing to say that a parent who discovers a beloved child engaged in a great crime might ought to inform the authorities; it is another to say that the parent should not, in that process, hire lawyers to protect the child's interests against the state, or that the parent must disown the child and disavow all sense of natural loyalty to them. These concerns may arise in the hardest cases, I agree. Nevertheless, the principle holds true.