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Questionable Virtues March 11, 2007Rev. Paul BeckelFirst Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org
LIGHTING THE CHALICEThere are countless synonyms for the virtues, whether they be heavenly virtues or the deadly kind. The words overlap. The notions overlap. And at least some of them are a bit ambiguous. Take honor, shame, pride. Depending how they are used, and in what context, you might not know whether to congratulate someone for expressing a virtue or whether to castigate them. Take Loyalty. I’m going to narrow our subject down to “loyalty” today but you’ll still hear overlap with lots of other questionable “virtues.”
Loyalty. Is it the highest of the virtues? Or does it have its limits? Is it one among many competing values or is it nothing but a tool to get you to devote yourself to causes you would do better to abandon? I’d say that loyalty is all of these things, and more, and ultimately it may be inescapable.
We light this loyal lamp today in the spirit of Constancy. Commitment. Reliability. Reverence. Respect. Honor. Dedication. Devotion. Friendship. Integrity. Fidelity. Faithfulness. Even as we ask ourselves, “what the heck do these words mean?”
GATHERING SONG Faith is a Forest #194 MESSAGEWhat is the value of loyalty? Let’s consider 5 approaches to that question beginning with: Loyalty is the essence of virtue. Is there any higher praise that one can give to a friend, or to a dog, (or to a friend’s dog) than that she is “loyal?” Loyalty is the essence of virtue.
It is easy enough to imagine the evolution of loyalty. You can see where the dogs got it (along with other pack animals) who survived better as individuals when they could rely upon the strength and protection of the group. Likewise we can imagine human beings at some point in our ancestry unconsciously sticking together, intimate and mutually dependent -- much more likely to survive if they were loyal to the group and if the group was loyal to them.
Early humans were not very mobile (or at least they were not able to separate from the pack without risk) so they may have found loyalty to be a necessity more than a choice. So at that point loyalty may not have been a virtue. I don’t know if you get to count things as virtuous if you’re just thrown into them.
Today, for a variety of reasons, it may be harder to recognize our inter-dependence. It may be harder to see the value of loyalty. In our earliest history (we might imagine) human beings did not have the ability to negotiate fine distinctions regarding who owed what to whom. So loyalty to the group may have been just a simplified method of accounting. But today, for better or worse, we have the capacity to measure, and exchange, and record, down to the penny, what someone owes us. We can identify all too readily who is and who is not paying their dues. So we have less incentive to give one another the benefit of the doubt and just accept each other as part of the group.
Today instead of manageable clans we’re asked to let EVERYONE into our circle. But how do we grasp a kinship with each and every human being, with all sentient beings, with the whole of creation? What a lofty abstraction, what an insane ideal: to be loyal to THAT?
So we pine nostalgic for a manageable loyalty. And we celebrate the loyal, especially soldiers “willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.” But who has to be loyal to whom? Soldiers to country or country to soldiers? Is it loyalty when we send soldiers into a battle that will not benefit them or their families even indirectly? Is it loyalty when we do not take care of them if they make it home alive? Is loyalty a two-way street? When Scooter Libby lied to protect the team was he assuming that his loyalty would be reciprocated? Or is it enough just to take the fall for the team?
Still, loyalty is the essence of virtue. Just because we sometimes fail to be loyal to one another doesn’t mean loyalty is a bad thing. For example, for the leader of an organization, loyalty means putting the organization’s well-being ahead of personal gain. Just because some CEOs take home astronomical compensation totally disproportionate to their performance doesn’t mean that loyalty is impossible or bad. Because some leaders do make personal sacrifices for the good of the organization. President Bush, for example, says he is sacrificing his popularity to do the right thing with this war. Even if you don’t like that example you’ll admit that that it’s theoretically possible for a business or religious leader, a politician or a parent to sacrifice popularity in order to do the right thing.
So humans love the concept of loyalty. Our music and drama and history and literature are filled with tributes to loyalty. Maybe this reflects our longing to see reciprocity in the natural order of things. We just naturally expect to see some return for our labors, some loyalty from our kids or from anyone or any organization to which we’ve devoted our time or money or energy or even our hopes. We want, we expect loyalty from those with whom we share common interests: family, co-workers, labor unions, professional associations, the teams we play on, our churches, our clubs, our political parties. We even prize our loyalty to the Packers or to our Levis. We love to express our loyalty symbolically, even buying “American” cars when Toyotas may be more American. We want to believe that loyalty is not folly but virtue. Even if it doesn’t pay off for us as individuals, we want to believe that loyalty reflects something higher than individual gain.
Some people have an intense sense of loyalty, and in many cases this seems admirable. Our level of appreciation for loyalty may vary according to our personal experience. Our ethnic and cultural background, how many times we’ve been burned, whether our parents and circumstances have urged us more toward independence or more toward interdependence. Since I’m including loyalty as a “questionable virtue” you can see that I’m ambivalent. I may be less appreciative of loyalty because my ethnic affiliation is weak. This may be a result of my having mixed ethnic heritage; or it may be that my family, like many German families during World War I, tended to distance themselves from their ethnic identity. Identity is tremendously important in determining our loyalties. I’m guessing that the more solidly one clings to an identity the more solidly one believes that loyalty is the essence of virtue.
So now you know my bias, let’s move on to the second possibility: Loyalty should be taken only so far. It’s a good thing but at some point it becomes a vice. On the night before he announced that he would run for president, Barack Obama dis-invited his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from giving an invocation at the event. Ouch! Now here’s a case where I may want to advocate a bit more for loyalty! I attended Wright’s church on the south side of Chicago once, and it was one of the most positive church experiences of my life. I found Rev. Wright to be profoundly gifted and inspirational. He’s actually the keynote speaker at the UU Minister’s Association conference this summer -- which may be an indication of how radical he is… too radical perhaps to be intimately associated with a presidential candidate. So, was that disloyalty for Obama to dis-invite Wright? Or was it loyalty to something higher than another person? Should loyalty only go so far? Like when it interferes with getting elected? Maybe. Clearly we want our presidents to be loyal to something higher than personal relationships. Clearly loyalty to personal relationships has gone too far in the Bush administration. The Marine Corps motto is “Semper Fi” -- in Latin, Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. But is there a limit to “always”? Employees often think of loyalty to their employer as a good thing, and many employers recognize the value of being loyal to their staff. But clearly both sides recognize that there are limits. And sometimes it is the right thing to sever a relationship when both sides are not getting their needs met. But doesn’t loyalty keep us going even when things are not looking bright? Doesn’t it keep us going in a good way – so that we can see the long-term results of our labors? Isn’t the whole point of loyalty that we hang together when things aren’t going the way we hoped they would? To help the relationship endure when one party is unable to keep up their side of the bargain? Isn’t loyalty supposed to protect us when we’re not at our best? Or are there limits to how long people should hang on?
Which brings us to proposition #3: Loyalty is one value among many. It can be a good thing but it all depends on context. Sometimes other values or combinations of values are going to outweigh loyalty’s claim to primacy.
Loyalty to family or ethnic group can be a good thing. But when things are going badly within the family or within the group, loyalty can hinder us. It can prevent us from going outside for help. Loyalty can prevent us from seeing other perspectives. Loyalty can cause isolation, stifle our imagination, limit our solutions. Loyalty to our ethnic heritage can be a good thing. And it can lead us to bigotry. Loyalty is good. But we can’t allow it to trump every other good.
George Washington was not a critic of loyalty per se, but he was a critic of loyalty to political parties. Washington worried that the creation of political parties would be destructive to democratic government. He feared that party loyalty would keep people from criticizing bad policy. Consider the words of Mark Twain: “the citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor."
Loyalty has to be considered as one among competing values when we consider suicide bombers, or soldiers, or terrorists in general. Is their loyal sacrifice a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it depends on the context.
The Daily Herald reported a couple of weeks ago that Hmong refugees would no longer be allowed into the U.S. because, under current definitions, the Hmong qualify as terrorists because of their efforts to overthrow a Southeast Asian government (in collusion with the United States.) So we can’t let them into the country any more -- because they were loyal to us.
Loyalty can get pretty mixed up with other so-called virtues. The way it is described in Tao Te Ching, you might not want to associate yourself with ANY virtues. Consider:
18. Hypocrisy (Peter Merel translation)
When the Way is forgotten Another translation, and just so you can hear that one more time: 18. THE DECAY OF ETHICS (Stan Rosenthal) When the way of the Tao is
forgotten, All too
often in the lives of men,
Which brings us to proposition #4: Loyalty is not a good thing at all, but a tool for manipulation. Consider the loyalty of people who only say yes to their boss. Or consider the leader who surrounds herself with people who affirm her no matter what. Shielding themselves from scrutiny, mistakes are inevitable. But for a long time they can get away with the mutual deceptions through loyalty, with the boss giving the sycophants great perks and not holding them accountable.
Here loyalty is nothing but manipulation. As it is when the boss uses loyalty to drive employees to produce more than is reasonable. Or the spouse who uses loyalty to know that he can get away with abuse.
Loyalty was a tool for manipulation in the McCarthy era when in California church leaders had to sign a loyalty oath or the churches would lose their tax-exempt status. A number of Unitarian Churches refused and brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court where the loyalty oath was declared unconstitutional. Today there are calls for loyalty oaths for Muslims.
The notions of loyalty and patriotism have and always will be tools of nationalism, manipulating people to act contrary to their own best interests out of fear.
Having said all of these derogatory things about loyalty, however, I still conclude that (and this is step 5) loyalty is inevitable.
One of the great moments in the novel, You Can’t Go Home Again is when the main character, George, a writer, realizes that in order to really devote himself to truth he must give up all of his corrupting affiliations. In particular he must give up his connections to the glamorous literary world where people would wine and dine and praise him and probably keep him from writing the truth or even seeing the truth about them.
In his moment of realization, he sees before him a life of endless stretching and suffering. He knows it will be painful but he sees that if he were to remain loyal to anyone he would risk becoming like one of the blind men with the elephant. Grasping only partial truth.
For George this is a peak moment of integrity. And it immediately crashes up against the real world, in which to live is to be related, to be affiliated, to be prejudiced, and to see partial truth. Either way it is painful. To have no loyalty, no connections would strain us to the brink of sanity. To have connections is to be stretched between competing priorities. Either way it isn’t pretty.
So knowing our own imperfection in this regard we look down with bafflement, fury, and regret at the lack of integrity in the world and we fume at the failure of ideals. But we are connected, so we have to make choices about where and how we’re going to be connected.
Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac. God said to Abraham, go sacrifice your son up on the mountain. I’m your god; I’m making you a promise of descendants as numerous as the stars. Show me that you are loyal and obedient. So Abraham did. But was he taking loyalty too far? Should he have been more loyal to his son? Of all the gods that were being worshipped at the time, how did Abraham know which god this was? He could have mis-heard. But this insane story survives. There must be a part of us that likes to think that our choices -- our searingly difficult choices -- can turn out for the best.
We have to choose.
What is the solution? There isn’t one. But there are options. We can give our loyalty to people or to organizations. We can give our loyalty to principles, or if we really don’t want to be betrayed, we can give our loyalty to dogs -- who are pretty likely to reciprocate. We can spread our loyalty around to lots of recipients, we can diversify our bets. Or we can go with Mark Twain, who scoffs at the idea that it is bad to put all your eggs in one basket. That’s the advice of fools, he says. Is it better to scatter your resources and attention? No! “The wiseman saith:(says Twain) put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET!
The gist is that you have to make choices. Give your loyalty to one or to a few or to many people or organizations or principles.
Pack the basket and WATCH THAT BASKET, or roll the dice and let them go. It’s a tough call.
Olympia Brown, one of the first women in America to be ordained, after whom our UU Church in Racine is named, wrote this:
Dear Friends, stand by this faith. Work for it and sacrifice for it. There is nothing in all the world so important to you as to be loyal to this faith which has placed before you the loftiest ideals, which has comforted you in sorrow, strengthened you for noble duty, and made the world beautiful for you. Do not demand immediate results but rejoice that you are worthy to be entrusted with this great message and that you are strong enough to work for a great true principle without counting the cost. Go on finding ever new applications of these truths and new enjoyments in their contemplation.”
This is in our hymnal as a responsive reading. I’ve only used it a couple of times because I’m ambivalent about loyalty. Stand by this faith? What does that mean? Olympia Brown’s faith was set in a very different context. The things to which she gave her life in the years immediately after the American Civil War may be different from what you would want to stand for today. Or maybe not. The institutions have changed and the people have changed. The way we articulate the principles has changed. But what is transient, and what is permanent? To what will you choose to be loyal? |