Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue - Hardcover

Felten, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439176868 ISBN 13: 9781439176863

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2011

Synopsis

A witty, provocative, story-filled inquiry into the indispensable virtue of loyalty—a tricky ideal that gets tangled and compromised when loyalties collide (as they inevitably do), but a virtue the author, a prizewinning columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says is as essential as it is impossible. Felten illustrates the push and pull of loyalties— from the ancient Greeks to Facebook—with stories and scenarios in which conflicting would-be moral trump cards trap the unlucky in painful ethical dilemmas. The foundation of our greatest satisfactions in life, loyalty also proves to be the root of much misery. Can we escape the excruciating predicaments when loyalties are at loggerheads? Can we avoid betraying and being betrayed?

When looking for love and friendship—the things that make life worthwhile—we are looking for loyalty. Who can we count on? And who can count on us? These are the essential (and uncomfortable) questions loyalty poses.

Loyalty and betrayal are the stuff of the great stories that move us: Agamemnon, Huck Finn, Brutus, Antigone, Judas. When is loyalty right, and when does the virtue become a vice?

As Felten writes in his thoughtful and entertaining book, loyalty is vexing. It forces us to choose who and what counts most in our lives—from siding with one friend over another to favoring our own children over others. It forces us to confront the conflicting claims of fidelity to country, community, company, church, and even ourselves. Loyalty demands we make decisions that define who we are.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Felten writes The Wall Street Journal's well-regarded culture column "Postmodern Times." For four years, he wrote the Journal's celebrated column "How's Your Drink?," which won a James Beard Foundation Award. He is a jazz singer and trombonist, and his TV concert special has been seen on PBS stations nationwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Loyalty 1

The Power of Loyalty

“A steadfast soul shows that Fortune has no power over it.”

—Machiavelli

End up in some dismal hellhole, and you’d better hope you’ve got a buddy at your side. For the survivors of the Bataan Death March loyalties made the difference between living and dying. Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines were packed into miasmic POW camps such as the wretched Cabanatuan compound. Crowded into squalid jungle huts, the men withered on starvation rations of stale rice; slaving in the blazing heat, they were beaten for sport; any offense that piqued the guards got one bound and beheaded. Chances of survival were a little better than fifty-fifty, and those who did make it were the ones who had a pal to lean on. Without someone to watch your back and buck you up, your chances were next to nil.

And yet there was at Cabanatuan a prominent counterexample, an army captain who was one of the most popular men in the camp, friends with everyone, but buddies with no one. A crack bridge player, he taught the game to anyone who wanted a distraction from the miserable tedium; he had a knack for telling mouthwatering tales of the hidden restaurants of San Francisco, transporting his fellow prisoners in delicious reveries of imagined food. He “made those days more endurable, for he was ever an optimist,” recalled his fellow POW Frank Grady. “He had survived Bataan and had endured the Death March. He seemed to be the one man the Japanese couldn’t vanquish.”1

What made the captain remarkable was that he had managed to survive without any particularly close friend among his fellow prisoners. For most of the emaciated men, having a buddy was a matter of life and death. Scuffling to survive, the POWs didn’t always play by Hoyle with one another, especially in the early chaotic days of their confinement. As Grady told it in his account of the Japanese prison camps, Surviving the Day, the men had to compete to stay alive: “This competitive attitude was expressed most often in the theft of food or valuables from a neighbor. But it also displayed itself in fiercely loyal partnerships between prisoners.”2 The man who had a buddy had a competitive advantage: the two of them together had a much better chance of hanging on to what measly scraps of food they could scrounge.

A loyal pair of buddies acted as a unit. The men in these partnerships provided each other something even more important than protection from the predations of fellow prisoners: They gave emotional support essential in an environment where going into a funk was lethal. The men were always sick, plagued with chronic dysentery, lethargic with beriberi, delirious with malaria, and spindly with malnutrition. But for all the manifest afflictions, if a man could somehow keep his spirits up, he could make it another day. Buddies “helped each other through dangerous emotional states,” Grady wrote. Despair meant death. Only the determined lived; and only the loyal stayed determined.

Theirs was hardly a new predicament. During the Civil War, the best chance any Union soldier had of surviving the dreaded Confederate prison camp Andersonville was to have surrendered along with some loyal comrades. “If one was captured alone, put with strangers and became sick,” wrote one Union prisoner of war, Lucius Barber, “it was ten chances to one he would die unattended by any human being.”3

But then, how did the seemingly self-sufficient captain at Cabanatuan hold out and hold on so successfully? It turns out that his “strength came from his relationship with his wife, whom he adored. She was his ‘buddy,’ and no one could replace her.”4 She had been with him in the Philippines when Japan invaded and she had been taken to a women’s prison camp. And then one day the Filipino underground got news to him that his wife had suffered a mental collapse and had been dragged off to a psych ward from which no one returned. The captain crumbled: “His independence worked well enough when his spirits were even,” Grady wrote, “but when he faced an emotional crisis, he had no partner to buoy him up.”5 Two days later, he was semiconscious in the Zero Ward, the halfway hut where dying men waited for their turn with the burial detail. Grady and his buddy, Joe, tried to cheer him up, tried to boost his spirits with happy talk. But it was no use. The unvanquishable captain was dead in days.

Loyalty can be an essential lifeline. We often talk metaphorically about loyalty being a “bond” that ties us together. But metaphorical tethers don’t bind us if we don’t want to be bound. Life is full of Sirens singing, and as Odysseus found, it pays to be tied with something sturdier than good intentions. Mountaineers working as a team are literally tied to one another. It works as more than just a safety net: It changes how everyone thinks about the climb. You can make bolder, more daring efforts knowing you’ll be caught if you fall. And at every step you are more attentive to the predicaments of your teammates, knowing they could drag you off the cliff with them. If good fences make for good neighbors, sturdy rope makes for sturdy friends on a mountainside.

A realization of that point must have gone through the minds of the climbers dangling from Pete Schoening’s rope in a blizzard in August 1953. Eight Americans had been trying to scale the preposterously perilous Himalayan peak K2 when one of them, Art Gilkey, developed a blood clot in his leg. Unless they got him down the mountain, and quick, he was going to die. Saving the incapacitated climber meant terrible risks for the other men, who had to carry him in conditions that were treacherous for a skilled climber carrying nothing but his own pack. As they worked down the Abruzzi Ridge, one man, whose frostbitten fingers were too stiff to maintain his grip, slipped. He seemed to cartwheel down the luge-slick forty-five-degree slope, his gloves flying off his flailing hands, his shredded pack tearing loose, until in a second he was over the cliff and gone. That would have been the end for the unlucky climber but for the nylon rope that connected him to the men above—a rope that nearly killed them all. As the first man plummeted, he pulled another climber over with him. The weight of those two yanked a third, fourth, and fifth off the side of the mountain, sending them careening in a mad jumble down the icy slope to the precipice.

Up above, holding on to Gilkey, was Schoening. His end of the rope was tied to an ice axe jammed behind a boulder. As the others slid off the mountain, the nylon line started whipping past him. Schoening could have let the ice axe bear the violent yank that was coming when the rope went taut. It might even have held. Instead, in an instant he got under the rope, wrapping it over his shoulders and under his arms. He anchored his feet and, heaving up against the tightening rope, stopped their fall. Without letting go of Gilkey, Schoening bore the weight of all five men, the farthest of whom was 150 feet below. In a blinding snowstorm, he held fast as the battered men tangled far below came to their senses, realized they weren’t dead after all, and scrambled up the line to safety. Schoening’s remarkable rescue is known among mountaineers as “The Belay.” And the climber’s art of “belaying” is a compelling example of loyalty made concrete.

Some forty-three years later, journalist Jon Krakauer was one of dozens of tourists paying to make a Himalayan climb, this one up Mount Everest. Not only weren’t they a team, they barely knew one another. Each had paid $65,000 to attempt the summit, and each was focused on his or her personal quest. “I felt disconnected from the climbers around me—emotionally, spiritually, physically—to a degree I hadn’t experienced on any previous expedition,” Krakauer wrote of the night before they would begin their final climb to the top. “Although in a few hours we would leave camp as a group, we would ascend as individuals, linked to one another by neither rope nor any deep sense of loyalty.”6

There have been many theories attempting to explain why eight people died on the mountain that next day—the clouds settling over the summit that, together with a fierce pelting snow, reduced visibility to a few feet; a freak weather pattern that caused the already paltry high-altitude oxygen level to drop; the climbers were amateurs, there not because they had earned a spot on an expedition, but because they had paid for the privilege. But any and all of those causes could have been overcome if the climbers had stuck together.

Loyalty is more than just a matter of working together, more than just the obvious observation that people can often achieve greater things by pooling their efforts. Loyalty is about being reliable. Sometimes that helps a group effort, but it can also empower individuals. Sure, we can do more when working together. But I can also accomplish more all by myself if I know I’ve got someone watching my back. Imagine deciding whether to walk a tightrope. You’d be wise not even to try it unless there’s a net underneath. But with the net, you’re willing to give it a go. If you cross to the other side without falling, you could say that the net didn’t, in any direct way, help you walk the tightrope. And yet, though you may not have used the net, it was there if you needed it to save you, and that’s what made it possible to try in the first place. The net is empowering. Loyalty is what makes us hold the net taut for our friends. Even if they never need us to catch them, our friends are empowered by the knowledge that we’re there. That is, as long as we can be trusted to catch them as promised. If we can’t be relied on to keep a tight grip on it, then the net is worse than useless. If people act on the expectation that a net will be there for them, they find out one way or another only when they’ve actually fallen. And so the net can build confidence only if we can have confidence in the men holding the net, which is why we lavish such praise on people who are reliable.

“When men climb on a great mountain together, the rope between them is more than a mere physical aid to the ascent,” wrote Charles Houston, one of the men who had dangled at the end of Pete Schoening’s line. The rope connecting climbers “is a symbol of men banded together in a common effort of will and strength,” fighting “against their only true enemies: inertia, cowardice, greed, ignorance, and all weaknesses of the spirit.”7

LOYALTY IS THE stuff that binds men together when their lives are in the balance. Which is why no one puts more stock in loyalty than men at war.

Armies have long understood that when it comes to steeling soldiers against the temptation to run away, loyalty is the ticket. But what sort of loyalty? It isn’t primarily a matter of fidelity to king, country, or creed. It is the bonds of loyalty soldiers have to their comrades that forge an effective fighting force. Economists Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, doing statistical analysis of what made for successful military units in the Civil War, compared the effect of group loyalty, ideology, and leadership and found that “Group loyalty was more than twice as important as ideology and six times as important as leadership.”8 A unit with a fine officer but in which the men had no commitment to one another was a bust. A platoon made up of pals from some small town could fight effectively, even if burdened with a lousy commander. Emancipatory fervor would help keep Union soldiers from fleeing, and love of Mississippi or Virginia might embolden rebs to heroics, but those big-picture ideological loyalties couldn’t compare with the motivation that came from sticking with the man by your side.

The same held true in World War II, even though the war was one of the world’s great ideological contests, with at least the Western contingent of the Allies fighting for freedom as opposed to the enslavement offered by fascism. Even the patriotic enthusiasms of the Good War turned out to be less compelling for men at arms than their loyalties to one another. According to Costa and Kahn, “during World War II group loyalty was almost three times as important as ideology and fourteen times as important as [the quality of] leadership” in accounting for the success, unit cohesion, and “combat motivation” of soldiers.

Elite army units in ancient Greece and Sparta were built around buddy loyalties. Teenagers would be paired with grizzled veterans, and it is a measure of what these relationships entailed that the grown man was known as an erastes, or “lover,” and the boy an eromenos, or “beloved.” In old Japan, samurai and their apprentices were also bound together by affections not sanctioned by the old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”9

But for a time, modern armies downplayed the loyalties men in battle have for their comrades. Big-picture loyalties to country or king were emphasized, courage and glory were extolled, and the professionalism of the day put a premium on unthinking, unhesitating obedience to orders from one’s superiors. And that worked well enough up through the Napoleonic Wars, when you didn’t have to wonder if your fellow soldiers were with you. The men stood in ranks, shoulder to shoulder. But then a nineteenth-century French colonel, Charles Ardant du Picq, noticed that, as modern battles became less regimented and more chaotic, soldiers could no longer see their comrades for all the smoke and confusion. “Cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation,” Ardant du Picq wrote. How then to overcome the bewildering and enervating sensation that one was fighting on one’s own? Colonel Ardant du Picq made a forceful and influential case that the answer was loyalty—the emboldening confidence that, even if you couldn’t see the men of your platoon, you knew they were there and wouldn’t let you down. Soldier-to-soldier loyalty emerged as the key military virtue, a quality that in modern military terminology would be called a “force multiplier.”

Ardant du Picq argued that without the confidence that came from having loyal men at your side, courage had its limits. “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion,” he wrote. “Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.” Confidence in one’s fellow soldiers trumps fear, making a unit effective. The French colonel was convinced that the moral force, or morale, built on mutual loyalties was so empowering it would help an army overcome bigger and better-armed foes: “In battle, two moral forces, even more than two material forces, are in conflict,” the colonel wrote. “The stronger conquers.”10

Ardant du Picq’s classic 1880 text, Battle Studies, was published posthumously. He was killed in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War when the material force of the Prussian army—in the form of a well-aimed artillery shell—proved to be too much for the colonel’s moral force. The power of loyalty has its limits. Alas, such was not the thinking of the French brass, who in the Great War were in thrall of an unnuanced interpretation of Ardant du Picq’s philosophy. They thought that loyalty to one’s comrades would make men willing to mount bayonet charges across no-man’s-land, and that the sight of such a charge woul...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1439176868
• ISBN 13: 9781439176863
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320