Comment by ashoeafoot 19 hours ago
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.
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?
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.