Loyalty is a bit of a dirty word. It’s been associated with so many unpleasant ideas, actions, and movements that it’s hard for us to overcome its nauseating baggage. When loyalty is mentioned, we are more likely to remember the Nuremberg trials than the civil rights movement. We’re more likely to imagine lackeys and lickspittles than we are heroes – and even our images of loyal heroes are likely to be re-examined through lenses that reveal their privilege, supremacy and appropriation.

When I came across Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty, I had the same associations. Well may it have been, I thought, to write about the virtues of loyalty in 1907. We’ve had two world wars since then, and a good deal else. But Royce’s conception of loyalty seems to be like few others’ before him, and few after. His ideas keep echoing in my life. In situations faced by people I know, in decisions I make in my own life, and in the raging political arguments that live inside our TV screens and smarphones, Josiah Royce’s voice seems to be distantly audible.

Here I will try to focus and amplify those echoes, and show you how loyalty might be more relevant to your life than you’d have thought. I’m coming to you humbly, I hope: aware of your probable and justified skepticism, but with the eager desire to overcome it.

If I were writing for Buzzfeed, the title of this piece would have been ‘10 Ways Loyalty Can Save Your Life and Western Civilisation’; thankfully, I’m not.

Loyalty

Let’s talk about what loyalty could mean. Ignore, for a moment, that redefining words is a fraught endeavor and usually futile. Suspend, if you will, your inquisitiveness, because I will explain the why of all this presently. Let’s talk about what loyalty should mean.

According to Royce, loyalty was simply this:

The willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion by a person to a cause. A man is loyal when,

• first, he has some cause to which he is loyal;
• when, secondly, he willingly and thoroughly devotes himself to this cause;
• and when, thirdly, he expresses his devotion in some sustained and practical way.

(Apologies to women who are reading this. Royce uses masculine pronouns by default, but he does explicitly include all people in his conception of loyalty.)

Notice first that this definition talks about the cause to which a person is loyal, and hasn’t really defined what that is. We’ll come back to that.

Notice second that this framing of loyalty is quite strong. To live up to it, you must act in sustained and practical ways, not just pay lip service. You can’t be Christmas-and-Easter loyal, and there is no room for that comfortable state of being ‘lapsed’.

But third, I’d like to draw your attention to the second stipulation: you must be willingly devoted to this cause. Royce deftly excludes from his definition the notion of ‘just following orders’. The implication is that if you did not follow orders, something worse would happen to you. But you cannot be coerced into loyalty; it must come from your volition and free will. If ‘loyalty’ is imposed upon you, whether by threat of violence or threat of isolation, then it is no true loyalty at all.

If this sounds conspicuously individualistic to you, then I applaud your instincts. Contrary to what we imagine about loyalty that erases individuals’ wills and enforces blind devition, Royce begins with individualism as his foundation.

Every man inevitably finds himself as apparently occupying the centre of his own universe.

Humans are individuals; that much is evident to each of us, and Royce takes great care to preserve the sanctity of the self. But, he argues, the self is not enough. We are individuals, but we are social creatures and we thrive together. For this reason, Royce argues, loyalty is the only way to guarantee a happy life.

And that’s the boring truth of the story: this letter is really about how to be happy, which is prosaic and trite, I know. But I think there’s a real difference to this idea of being happy in loyalty – Royce-loyalty, not the blissfully oblivious loyalty of a cog in a machine – and real value in exploring it. So please read on, because to unpack why Royce thinks this is, we need to talk about causes.

Oh, I’ll get to the bits about Western Civilisation later. I promise.

Causes

Superpersonal is a word that I think Royce made up. It encapsulates three important aspects of a cause that Royce thinks it is possible for a person to be loyal to. These are, in my poor paraphrasing:

• The cause must have value to you, personally. Thus, it is personal. Royce can conceive of no real loyalty to a cause that the devotee sees as worthless.
• The cause must have value outside your own person. It must be “objective” as he puts it, therefore potentially having value to other people. Why? Because:
• The cause must concern others; it must be social, so that shared loyalty can bind us together with others. The possibility of having “fellow-servants” before, beside and beyond us fulfils a deep need that purely individualistic means of fulfulment cannot.

For example, under this system, ‘my career’ is not an admissable cause. It definitely has value to myself personally, but it doesn’t really have value to anybody else.¹ It’s not something that I can expect any other human to really be loyal to. If they were to be so, you’d probably call it a cult of personality.

But that specific example can lead us to an idea of what is a worthy cause. Say I am passionate about creating films that provoke, inspire and entertain. My career might be a path towards that goal – so ‘my career’ becomes an expression of my loyal devotion to the creation of art. I am to act truly loyally only if the thing of personal value is working towards something of superpersonal value.

Similarly, ‘my relationship with my spouse’ would be an inadmissable cause according to Royce. Even though this valuable thing includes twice as many people as my career, it is not superpersonal yet. Royce doesn’t go into detail about exactly where we can draw the line between things that are personal, interpersonal (which is what I would call the value of a relationship), and superpersonal. I would hazard to guess he would look at it like this: can you walk up to a stranger and plausibly expect they might be interested in your cause? I can’t really imagine any stranger would be invested in the present or future state of my relationship with my girlfriend. But I could very well see them caring and thinking about, for example, faithfulness in exclusive relationships. My conduct in my relationship can express my loyalty to that cause.

Pause and think

What do you think of Royce’s conception of loyalty? Can you identify things you’re loyal to? Things that inspire you to act, things that take up your time and things that invade your thoughts while you’re in the shower or trying to sleep?

I can think of many things that people in my life are loyal to. Veganism, AFL, the preservation of history (familial, pop cultural, aviatic and plenty of other kinds), queer rights, the treatment of diabetes, and the human rights of refugees are just some of them. You (that’s you, plural) pursue these things earnestly, actively, and in companionship or communication with others.

Happiness

Okay, so after all this: what’s the point of these ideas about loyalty? Royce had several goals in mind for his original series of lectures, and I have my own reasons for wanting to pass on what I think I’ve learned. The one I want to talk about right now is this: according to Royce, loyalty is not just the most reliable, but the only way to live a satisfied life.

It’s a bold claim, and it’s extraordinary to think that any general principle could reliably lead to a satisfying life for each specific person. I myself am not totally convinced. But Royce’s words have persistently resurfaced in my head when people talk about their ideas of happiness. It appears that many ideas of the good life, expressed by so many different people, are expressions of Royceian loyalty.

Before I dig into some examples of this, let’s look at Royce’s own explanation of why loyalty is so great at making us happy. In short: only loyalty satisfies both our individualistic and our social needs, and does so despite the random fortune of life.

When I talked about the definition of loyalty above, I described how individualism was the foundation of the idea: how your choice of loyalty must be rooted in your individuual desires. Royce goes further in describing how loyalty interacts with individualism.

• plan of life (but not a literal plan, because that can fail)

• escape from default options society presents to you/expects of you

• social needs

• random fortune

What cements loyalty as the reliable method of living your life is its robustness in the face of chance. It is perfectly possible, even easy, to come up with a plan of life that is both an expression of your individualism, and includes plenty of social outcomes. Here’s one I prepared earlier: “I will run a successful, profitable company that employs more than a handful of people and has a net positive impact on the world.” It’s a fine ambition for many reasons. It fulfils one’s desire to be striking out on a course of one’s choosing. It binds one together with many others - employees, customers, cofounders, and mentors.

But it can very quickly come apart. Entrepreneurship (in this example) is famous for its high rates of failure. I have known people who have failed for many reasons. Funding wasn’t there when it was needed. Their market validation was weaker than it first seemed. They were acquired. They weren’t acquired. Stress and depression overcame them. Cofounders left, or employees lost faith. One big client fell through.

This obviously doesn’t just apply to businesses. Our lives are governed by chance in more ways then we feel comfortable admitting. Even if luck is not random, and only appears so because it is directed by the will of God beyond our understanding, the things we want don’t always come to be.

But: loyalty is resilient to failure. It is resilient because it directs one’s attention towards enterprises that are not bound up in the fate of one person, or even one moment in history. You might fail to create a successful business that, for example, revolutionises the rental market and solves the housing affordability crisis. But if your life’s goal is acting loyally towards that cause, then your failure doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because you will keep trying. And it doesn’t matter because the cause does not depend on you alone. You are in community with thousands of others who believe in the same cause, and will strive just as hard as you do towards realising it. The cause is bigger than you alone, and it will outlive you.

Seabin

“What does success look like for you?” “…” “Seabin’s not going to save the world, is it?” “It’s definitely not going to save the world. But it’s a start, it’s a step in the right direction of saving the world.”

Disloyalty

Lack and longing

Some people aren’t loyal to any causes in particular. Maybe you’re choosing to pursue things Royce would not count as causes; or maybe you’d love to, but haven’t found any causes for one reason or another. And of course, some of you are loyal to many things but still feel lost, because those things don’t seem significant or satisfying enough: not enough to fill a life with.

Nazis

Let’s talk about Nazis. They were bound to come up at some point.

Contrary to the views of some later thinkers, Royce would be perfectly willing to accept that there are loyal Nazis. Nazism, as both a political party and an ideology, has all the qualities of a superpersonal cause that binds many individuals together. Many Nazis, unfortunately, act with ‘practical and thoroughgoing devotion’. And I’m sure that while many were radicalised through peer pressure, social pressure or outright coercion, I cannot imagine that all of them did.

Loyalty ²

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Things I would like to express

• Explain Royce’s definition of loyalty, why it’s different to how we typically understand it, and why it matters
• Put these ideas in the context of Royce’s time period and question whether they hold up in the face of two world wars
• Tie loyalty into discussions of politics and changes that are happening in the world
• Tie loyalty into my personal life goals?

snippet 1

We usually imagine that we can be loyal to, for example, a friend, a parent, or even a pet. Royce insists instead that true loyalty, and the benefits it brings, must be to a cause. It must be expressed in our actions towards other people, but the loyalty itself is to the cause. My relationship with my best friend is not superpersonal; it’s merely interpersonal between them and myself.

We don’t usually say that someone is loyal to their career, or to the pursuit of wealth or fame or influence. But many people act with “willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion” to these things. Royce would warn us away from striving for goals like these; he would think them unlikely to lead to a satisfied life, for starters.

Now, none of what I’ve said is to suggest that acting with practical devotion to our friends, family, pets or jobs is a bad thing. It is just that Royce suggests doing so without knowledge of loyalty will be insufficient to reliably satisfy us. We must, he argues, be aware of and appeal to higher ideals, even in our private pursuits and relationships. If this is starting to sound religious, well – remember the “grand philosophical exception”! But suspend your “amusement, and notable impatience” and let me explain why Royce thought we should live this way.

snippet 2

Our hedonistic individual selves have passions and desires, which at any moment might pull us in one direction or another. Royce believes that satiating these desires, while possible in the short term, cannot make us happy in the long term. As well as these hedonistic individual desires, we also have an intense need for relationships and social interaction. Society provides us with many pre-determined paths to follow which bind us together with others – whether through, public service, marriage and family life, career advancement TODO. But these social programs of life can be insensitive to individual differences and needs. They tend to average out human experiences, rather than catering to each of us uniquely.

Loyalty, Royce maintains, is a ‘best of both worlds’ that satisfies both needs: the need to be an individual and satisfy individualistic desires, and the need to be part of society. Through one’s choice of causes, one expresses their individual tastes, values, principles and desires. But it is through association and thoroughgoing action in service of a cause that is superpersonal that we will join together with others and create lasting significance.

snippet 3

At times, writing this article has felt uncomfortably close to an apologia for nationalism.

If you’ll permit me to generalise for a minute: I believe this is because movements like nationalism tap into all the things that really do make loyalty good for the loyal. The problem, of course, is that these causes can divide us, making open the secret chasms of disagreement and alienation that lie between people. When we selfishly pursue our causes to extremes, the conflicts create suffering.

As I hinted in my overview of Royce’s philosophy, he is very aware of this. (TODO: “a man has a cause, but I do not yet say he has a good cause”) The test of which causes are good becomes nearly self-referential: a good cause is one that does not prevent anyone else from pursing loyalty to their own good cause.

Broadly, then, killing others cannot be a good cause, because it takes away their ability to pursue their own loyal lives. However, wars do become possible between armies of willing participants, where all involved believe truly in their cause, and are willing to die for it [^war]. Imprisonment of criminals is a tricky case – it takes away the ability of criminals to pursue their own bad causes, but also good ones.

And so on. The arguments on all sides, about many issues, become complex. But at the core of them all is the right of every human to pursue loyalty to their causes, freely chosen. I think that’s worth supporting.

[war]: If this sounds like a dangerously romantic view of war, well, it probably is. I doubt that many if any wars in the world’s history have truly been as innocent as an idealised loyal war. But Royce’s ideas can be applied to improve the state of disloyal warfare for as long as it must exist (for example, by promoting the principles of limited war).