Comment by simpaticoder 13 hours ago
>Things don't deserve loyalty. Your company is a "thing".
A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism". A sports-team or TV show or band is a thing, loyalty to it is called "fandom". Loyalty to an idea or philosophy is called "being principled" or "idealism". Do you believe that things don't deserve loyalty, such that all of these are errors? Or do these examples not capture the sense of your statement?
Strictly speaking, a philosophy can't turn away from values. A person can, but philosophy itself is, to a first order approximation, an immutable bundle of values.
Of course this naive view quickly falls apart when interpretation comes into play, as it always must. In the extreme, one may assert that "philosophy" is encoded in the behavior of it's adherents, and these behaviors may have little or nothing to do with the "canonical" representation of the philosophy as immutable text. Or more precisely the behavior and words can be profoundly decoupled. Many examples of this decoupling occurs to your thought (and mine). So when you say that a philosophy can "turn away" from values, in this sense that is true.
I prefer to think of philosophies as a kind of Platonic ideal, which are then subject to all the foibles of the humans who associate themselves to them. There are some subtle problems with this view, which I'd rather not confront.
Strictly speaking you are right. But words change meanings and philosophies get hijacked, deformed and loaded with barely affiliated concepts or movements.
So the idea as it was might be a value, but what the word means may decay into something frankenstein wouldn't recognise as his handy work .
Are you perhaps confusing loyalty to an incumbent regime with loyalty to a nation or people?
A nation can change, a people can become corrupt, the values stay and if for example a democracy steered by corrupted peoples betrays itself, a democrat with values can just soldier on without getting into any loyalty conflict. A sadness for what has fallen may linger.
A nation? Or a economic zone?
A people? Or a population of foreign guest workers?
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country."
--EM Forster, "What I Believe"
The problem here is that Forster is relativising the good.
I am not betraying my country by refusing to follow laws or decrees that require that I engage in intrinsically evil deeds. I am not loyal to my friend if I do evil things he asks me to do.
Our loyalty is to the objective good of our country and our friend. Otherwise, there is no such thing as loyalty.
There are situations when you genuinely must betray your country to protect your friend, or vice versa.
For example, if your country is a multiethnic empire that is unsustainable as a single entity without compulsion and forced assimilation, and your friend happens to be an ethnic minority in it.
> A country is a thing and loyalty to it is called "patriotism".
That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself. People often see their “external tribes” as an extension of their self much likely they do family/friends, rather than them being part of it like a company. I am a Spillett. I am a Yorkshireman, I am English, I am UKian, I am European, I work for TL. Notice the difference in language in that last one.
This is part of why some get so offended when you poke fun at their town/county/country: if they see it as an extension of their identity more than just somewhere they live then your disrespect is a personal attack. They would not likely defend their employer nearly as passionately.
> That sort of loyalty is not quite the same: protecting your own to indirectly protect yourself.
I would argue that this is a tit-for-tat, and as such, not really an example of loyalty per se. Loyalty would be protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you and yours in any tangible way. And it has all the same problems as corporate loyalty, really.
>protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you
Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.
That's right, they do not deserve loyalty. All of these things hijack our loyalty to people in the name of some higher-order goal. Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more. Loyalty to a country gets us to be reliable cogs in someone else's grand project. Loyalty to a philosophy gets us to be a cult leader's acolyte.
Skip the substitute and go for the real thing: loyalty to people. You can still join grand projects, but do it consciously rather than on instinct.
>Sports team and TV show loyalty is there to get us to consume more.
A less cynical take: there seems to be some research that following sports fosters greater social connectivity and well-being. It may just be that we're hardwired to be tribal. From that context, sports seems to be a relatively benign way to tap into that.
Your examples are bizarre (sports teams are a matter of petty entertainment, not proper objects of loyalty). Philosophy isn't an object of loyalty either.
However, you should acquaint yourself with the principle of subsidiarity. Loyalty, duty, and love radiate outward from those who are owed the most diminishing to those who are owed the least (spouses, then children, then parents, etc., all the way through extended family and then community and nation and finally the human race). The loyalty is to the objective good. How that is expressed will be modified by contingent factors particular to a given person's situation.
Perhaps it should be refined to say that "profit-oriented things" that view existence as purely transactions don't deserve loyalty.
Sports franchises are the ultimate trick, in that they are profit-oriented, yet they somehow play on our tribal nature and fool us into forgetting about the profit part.
I guess you could argue the same for a church.
Thanks to the financialization of everything, perhaps the same can be said of colleges and universities!
Patriotism is mostly just propaganda to make people willing to kill and die for some old cynical geezers' delusions of grandeur. The guy said it right, countries don't deserve loyalty either. Lots of Russians are figuring this out firsthand these days.
Yes, all of these things do not deserve loyalty. There are values i hold dear, if a philosophy or state holds on to the same values, i support them. If they turn away from them, no reason to be loyal.