The Decline of Loyalty
Reality Check (November 23, 2007)
Not to long ago, I sent a letter to a number of people I know. Some of them write. All of them think. I was looking for answers. Here is what I wrote:
It occurs to me how little I have read on loyalty. It has disappeared as a topic. It has disappeared as a social force.The response was minimal. A few people had suggestions for why this or that loss of loyalty has taken place. A few thought that in some areas, there are still traces of loyalty. But as for anything on how to revive this once-powerful social force, there was nothing concrete.
Church? Church-hopping has undermined it.
Family? No-fault divorce has undermined it.
Regions? TV and the interstate highway system have undermined it. But radio and trains did it by 1940.
States? Nationalism has undermined it
Nationalism: Empire and centralization have undermined it.
Military? Think "Michael New." He was court martialed and received a bad conduct discharge because he refused to wear the United Nations' blue cap as his uniform.
Confession? In an age of democracy? Ha!
Ideology? No institutional structure. No loyalty to people.
Race? Yes.
Gangs? Yes.
Have you read anything of value on loyalty? I think of MacArthur's "Duty, Honor, Country" speech. Forgotten. It faded with him: the old soldier.
I have been re-reading the works of my teacher, Robert Nisbet. The continuing theme of his entire career was the loss of legitimacy of the intermediary social institutions that once united people in communities. The nation-state overwhelmed these organizations, absorbed them, rendered them legally marginal, and replaced their functions. This has left the individual with few allies to resist the State's encroachment in every area of his life. He once saw the State as liberation. Now, the individual sees it as a safety net that extracts permanent streams of money from him, and maintains permanent supervision over him. In private circles, this is called a protection racket.
I do not see any great reversal until the checks stop coming or the money they convey ceases to buy much. The State can maintain its image of healer only for as long as it can extract wealth from productive people. This requires widespread fear, not loyalty.
I look around me and ask this question: "In a major crisis, which non-coercive institutions would intervene to take up the obligations that the State has commandeered in the name of social justice?" These institutions do exist. They used to bear great responsibility for people with handicaps of many kinds. But they have been happy to allow the State to absorb these obligations, which has left money in their coffers for other projects. Their leaders are in no rush to recapture these areas of responsibility, nor are their donors.
Families are the first line of defense. Only in families are there deep reservoirs of loyalty and duty to members. But these reservoirs have been drained: by mortgage debt, by the structure of the nuclear family, by divorce, by the social welfare bureaucracy, by geographical mobility, by distance, and by the age-old desire to escape personal responsibility.
This is not a new problem. It began no later than 1815 in North America above the Rio Grande. The open spaces of the American landscape were the best cheap land in recorded history. Young families moved west in covered wagons. The parents waved goodbye, knowing they would never see their children or grandchildren again until their last days, and probably not even then. That was the social cost of fertile land at $1.25 an acre with a mortgage paid to land speculators over decades. From all over Europe, families came. Then, after 1840, the railroads speeded up movement to the heartland. Then, after 1870, steamboats brought masses from central Europe and Russia. Nothing like this migration had been seen in recorded history.
People voted with their feet. Now they vote with U-Hauls. When parents wave goodbye today, the degree of 1830's finality is no longer present. But the bonds have been weakened. When a daughter goes off to an out-of-state university, she may not return home, ever. She may marry someone from a distant state. The grandparent-grandchild link will never be what it was for families that remain within an hour's drive of each other. Then comes divorce, which has also shattered the grandparent link, especially for paternal grandparents.
This did not happen yesterday. My grandfather moved from Nebraska to California in the 1920s, never to return, I think -- not even for a visit. All I know of my paternal great- grandfather is his name, his immigrant status (recent), and his occupation: printer. I know not even this much about my maternal great grandfather. Of their wives I know precisely nothing. Neither do my parents. This process is accelerating. It is so cheap to move away. Phone calls are so cheap. They are weak substitutes for the shared communal bonds that once reinforced family loyalty.
Is a parent suffering from a physical malady? There is the Medicare-funded clinic nearby. Just phone the parent occasionally. Is a parent no longer able to care for herself? Write a check. Hire a part-time woman, who probably does not speak English as her first language. (And where are her grandparents? Far, far away in a hovel. She sends them a few paper dollars every month, for which they are grateful.)
The cash nexus has taken over. But where is loyalty?
It has crossed my mind that there is hardly any loyalty left in this country. It's not just that Fourth of July parades are a dim memory. It's that Americans no longer live in face-to-face communities where people are bound together by a sense of loyalty, a sense of loyalty so strong that they are willing to suffer financial losses on behalf of the community or local institutions.
Americans no longer define themselves as members of a community. If you think I'm wrong, think "Amish." Americans have never been Amish-like in their degree of loyalty, but they were closer to the Amish in 1945 than they are today.
Loyalty is highly personal. It is directed toward personal institutions: families, fraternal organizations, and churches. Only during wartime is it directed toward the State, and then only in wars that are perceived as threatening to the country's survival. Korea, Vietnam, and the miniwars since 1950 have undermined loyalty toward the country.
AGE AND DEPENDENCY
When we are very young and very old, dependency is basic to our survival. First, dependency creates trust when we are young. People whom you trust during times of dependency can command loyalty from you. Trust is the foundation of loyalty. Second, when we are old, trust relates to future dependency. So, loyalty is inescapably linked to trust and dependence.
If I am correct about the decline of loyalty in our generation, then we should look at the decline of trust.
As I grow older, I make mental preparations for the physical adjustments that are inevitable with old age. This is not easy to do. Yet it is necessary for anyone who does not want to become a burden on his heirs. (I don't mean taxpayers.)
As we think about aging, we think about money. "Who will take care of me if I become incapacitated?" The answer in this era, all over the West, is this: "the government." Therein lies the major economic problem of the next 30 years. It is likely to become the most important political problem, too.
When government gets involved in any area of life, it politicizes it. Today, this means just about everything. But because of the ever-growing percentage of the Federal budget that is devoted to Medicare (14%), Social Security (21%), and Medicaid (7%), we are politicizing old age.
The West has historically evaluated societies as either just or unjust by how they treat the aged, incapacitated people, and the very young. Underlying this treatment is a sense of loyalty, which involves duty. Duty is a socially enforceable obligation, though not always a legally enforceable obligation.
What bothers me and ought to bother Congress is the fact that the sense of duty is being shifted from moral to legal categories. Congress is at the heart of this shift. Voters have decided that what for millennia were moral obligations supported by a sense of duty and personal loyalty should become legal obligations supported by the fear of the State.
Fear of legal sanctions is being substituted for fear of social sanctions. Obedience to the political order is being substituted for feelings of loyalty to persons. This disturbs me, for a lot of reasons. I see that there will be serious consequences of Congress's future fear of political sanctions: a tax revolt by taxpaying workers.
Today, Congress fears political consequences from the well- organized aged. This is going to change at some point. One of these consequences of that change will be monetary inflation: covering up the deficit by fiat money. Another will be the sense of betrayal among old people who made the mistake of trusting the politicians to deliver on their promises and assurances. The social fabric that makes possible the division of labor will be undermined by either or both of these consequences.
There will inevitably be a loss of trust: in the Federal government, in the monetary system, and in voters who are part of rival voting blocs. The question of questions is this: At some point, will political controls undermine people's trust in the private property social order that has made us all rich? Or will people finally abandon confidence in the competence of the State and substitute faith in private property? I am more confident today than I was 40 years ago that the second option is more likely. In this sense, I have become optimistic. But in between now and then, there is going to be a crisis in confidence.
FAITH, TRUST, DEPENDENCE, AND LOYALTY
The once-Christian West saw society in terms of this sequence: faith, trust, dependence, and loyalty. Faith is more than an intellectual matter. It is a matter of confidence in the way the world works. Citizens believe that the world works morally, that right makes might, that honesty is the best policy. In every culture, faith in the social order begins with faith in God. People believe that the world is neither random nor malevolent.
Faith moves from God to social institutions. People believe that these institutions represent the best interests of the people because they in some way reflect God, and God is not malevolent. They see these institutions as God-given. The main three are church, family, and state. (In our day, the state has become capitalized, for it seeks the status of divinity, i.e., beyond which there is no valid appeal. It is messianic.)
The family is the primary institution of welfare. Parents sacrifice for their children, and later the children sacrifice for their parents. The process of mortality imposes this transition on every society. So does the concept of inheritance. Family membership is tight and nearly permanent. In contrast, the church is far less an agency of welfare than the family. Its membership is less binding. Its bonds are less personal and more confessional. It commands less loyalty.
The State is an agency of justice. But, in every era, the State also is perceived as an agency of welfare. This poses a great threat to justice. The States must rob Peter in order to pay Paul. Because the modern welfare State extracts more wealth from the private sector, it de-funds rival social institutions. This is most obvious in the fields of social services to the poor and education. In this sense, the State has gained the public's trust by default. "Would you just sit there and let people [die, stay sick, remain uneducated, etc?]." The official answer is: "Of course not. But if you don't let the State tax others and yourself, these people will [die, stay sick, remain uneducated, etc.]."
The politicians have used guilt manipulation to secure their power over the voters. They have accused voters of being individually heartless and uncaring. Only through the coercive power of the State, we are told, will we do our duty. Otherwise, we are a nation of slackers. Conclusion: We must compel our neighbors to do their duty. Then, project by project, boondoggle by boondoggle, well-organized special-interest groups use political influence to allocate public funds in their direction: the politics of plunder.
We are asked to place our trust in our social institutions. In the final analysis, the issue of trust becomes the issue of loyalty. We trust someone or something. We become dependent on this person or agency. We therefore at some point will be called upon to defend and support that person or agency. We move from trust to dependence to loyalty.
Yet there is a problem here: how to establish bonds of loyalty. Loyalty is highly personal. It cannot be purchased directly, at least not with money. It is outside what Marx called the cash nexus. An example: The difference between prostitution and marriage can be defined in terms of loyalty. I have yet to see any economist argue that prostitution is the same as marriage except for the terms of the contract: rental vs. capitalization. It is not the cash nexus that defines marriage. It is loyalty. Loyalty reinforces trust and dependence.
The strongest sense of loyalty has always been family-based. When sociologists study the institutional question of who will care for infirm old people apart from the cash nexus or political coercion, only one social institution is considered reliable: the family. Anyone who counts on any other unit of society to care for him in old age, other than for money's sake or coercion's sake, had better re-thing his plan. Only the family is trustworthy. It begins with a child's trust in his parents.
For over two centuries, observers have commented on the breakdown of loyalty in Western industrial societies. So, what I am going to discuss in this report is nothing new. But, as we get closer to the day when Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt, we had better pay attention to the issue of loyalty.
I am making this assumption: All over the West, societies have substituted political coercion for personal loyalty. All over the West, entire populations have bet their future on the ability of future generations to produce an economic surplus that will be handed over to bureaucrats and spent on behalf of the aged. Every country has bought into this, including Japan.
The results are now becoming clear to a small minority: the destruction of currencies, the pauperization of the aged, and an enormous and unplanned-for shift of responsibility. But to what institutions? Not to churches. Not to clans. Not to fraternal societies. Then to whom? Only one institution can step in: the family. This is going to change the lifetime plans of the majority of families.
CONCLUSION
I suggest that you give a lot of thought to this. In a time of economic crisis, who will show loyalty to you? Why? And to whom will you show loyalty? Why?