Loyalty and Particularism

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I posted an Amazon review of Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up. He contrasts two quasi-fictional characters. One is an Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivor, Shimen, who is loyal to the community that follows his traditions. The other is a Baby Boomer, Heidi, who feels free to discard traditions. Heidi tries to be a universalist, while Shimen is a particularist. The question of particularism vs. universalism is a major source of tension for many modern Jews.

This provoked me to think about the topic of loyalty.

1. I don’t think that people can live for long without any loyalties. Koppel sees Heidi’s world view as “doomed,” and one way to describe this is that it will fail for lack of loyalties.

2. Loyalty means giving preferential treatment. If I am loyal to you, then when you say “jump” I ask “how high?” When someone else says “jump” I ask “why?” If I am loyal to you, I will give you a gift neither as charity nor because I expect something in return. If I am loyal to you, I will do something unpleasant for you that I would not do for someone else.

3. Loyalty can be misplaced or excessive. It is not always for the best.

4. It is most natural for loyalty to be strongest in our immediate world. Most loyal to your mate and to your children. Beyond that, to your siblings and to your parents. Then to your friends. Then beyond your friends to others in your community. In the army, most loyal to your buddies. Then to the platoon as a whole. Then to the regiment. Then to the service (“beat Navy!”). Finally to the country.

5. In a prehistoric hunter-gatherer band, there would be little need for loyalty beyond the immediate group. If you are only loyal to your band, that is sufficient.

6. A complex society requires some degree of loyalty at scale. Religions helped inspire this. So do other institutions and rituals.

7. Heidi wants to avoid treating anyone preferentially. But that would mean having no loyalty. Or being loyal in a very abstract sense, to principles. There is something to be said for this stance, if it could only work.

8. Your judgment about loyalty is probably much better in your immediate world than in the remote world. I can pick out an admirable person among the people I know with greater accuracy than I can among politicians or celebrities.

9. The world of smart phones and Internet may lead me to believe that I know enough about people in the remote world to be able to rely on my judgment of them. That could produce some very poor choices of loyalty.

10. It looks as though the social justice movement is very hung up on loyalty. In Koppel’s book, Heidi’s daughter becomes devoted to social justice, which means that she wants to give preferential treatment to people she classifies as oppressed and to people who agree with the daughter about political beliefs. So loyalty is coming back, but it is not Shimen’s loyalty to a community that he knows that shares his traditions.

22 thoughts on “Loyalty and Particularism”

  1. Sounds like a summary of Steve Sailers concentric circles of loyalty.

    My own view at this point in life is that principal based community building is almost impossible. Even when it works well, it tends to fall apart as people exit certain life stages and geographic areas. By contrast, blood is always blood.

    • Hello Dr. asdf,

      Blood is probably at its lowest point ever. Outside of my immediate family, I’m not particularly concerned about any of our shared DNA.

      Without exaggerating, I’ve communicated more with you over the last 9 months than any of my extended DNA clan.

      Thanks,

      Dr. Hans

      • By blood I meant family, though specifically bloodline family. Cases of adoption I’ve known have all seem to go poorly.

        I don’t know how much communication we’ve done. I’ve posted a lot while bored at work. I doubt you or I will ever do anything meaningful for each other, nor communicate whenever one or both of us have anything better to do with our time.

  2. ASK: it might be useful to comment on your own religious journey. You described your parents as secular Jews. Yet, you appear to attend religious services even though you have significant ideological differences with your congregation.

    My reason for asking: I grew up in a religious conservative household in the SF Bay Area (yes, it was possible in the 1980s). In the Christian tradition, people will readily exit church A for church B, whenever the the beliefs start to diverge in any significant manner. Example: the mass exodus from the official Presbyterian Church USA even at a significant buy-out cost.

  3. It probably is relevant here that loyalty is one of the moral foundations that Haidt says is most disproportionately valued by conservatives. Liberals are more likely to emphasize the times it goes wrong in ways that you list.

    One of the things I love about the secular Jewish intellectual tradition– and I think we have been around long enough now to qualify as having bona fide traditions– is the use of curmudgeonliness, humor, and reflexive skepticism as defenses against the dangers of fanatical loyalty, whether to ancient or modern religions.

    • This is a really good description of lots of my secular Jewish friends: curmudgeonliness, humor, and reflexive skepticism, tho one of my best has little sense of humor (his birthday is next week).

      There’s a bad side of loyalty which this avoids.

      I’d also be interested in Arnold’s current religiousness. I’m planning to convert to Catholicism from my now-too-liberal Episcopalian.

    • Liberals absolutely value group loyalties. First, they demand political loyalty, as most competitive political coalitions do. The political left also emphasizes group loyalties to universities, the poor, immigrants, LGBT, non-white racial groups, etc.

  4. Heidi wants to avoid treating anyone preferentially. But that would mean having no loyalty. Or being loyal in a very abstract sense, to principles. There is something to be said for this stance, if it could only work.

    This is a good post. I would add that Heidi’s odds of success would improve greatly in this regard if Heidi would be loyal to principles or ideas that weren’t terrible or imbecilic, like equality of outcome, a “right” to healthcare (ie, a right to other people’s labor and resources), intersectionality, safetyism, subjectivism, warmed over Marxism, etc.

    Speaking of which, it’s instructive, I think, how often Marxist movements deteriorated into personality cults in the 20th century, rather than ideas. Stalin, Mao, Castro, the Kims in North Korea, etc. Perhaps the story here might be that “loyalty to ideas” is something that only works with nerds and intellectuals who really care about ideas, and are thus, as an organizing principle, politically impotent, and so you instead get cults of personality to animate the masses, or instead you get hypocritical movements like our current “social justice” types, who, say, think it’s perfectly normal for people to act on the basis of ethno-religious loyalty, but only if their ancestors did not come from Europe and weren’t Christian; ie, tribal loyalty for me but not for thee.

    • Maybe it’s just not possible to be loyal to “ideas”. Perhaps no idea of the human condition is good enough to be loyal to. If you think it is, you are probably mistaken.

      One huge advantage of being loyal to people rather than ideas is you can actually understand the complex needs of people in your Dunbar number (hopefully) versus “society” which you can never understand.

      • I think it’s perfectly possible for some people: the disagreeable, the misanthropic, etc., but typically not enough people to build a mass movement around, would be my supposition.

        • I posted on this in the other thread on this topic, but I just have a hard time believing in any philosophical system where the adherents seem to do really bad at forming and keeping families. Maybe this universalist stuff is great for motivating loners and the childless to sign up for some cause, but it seems poison for personal relationships.

      • When the “idea” is a worldview that includes support for families (as mentioned above), it can induce loyalty.

        Religions do this.
        Successful religions support family relations.

        Whenever the idea is “too universalistic”, it becomes a cult with the followers understanding the implementation of the “ideal idea” as being determined by the (cult) leader. I’m thinking gurus, but also Ayn Rand, and Werner Erhard (of Est).

  5. “ So loyalty is coming back…”

    Is it? Remember this is the religion that persecutes heretics: one deviation and you are excommunicated and silenced. Let’s not confuse loyalty with conformism.

    The religion that persecutes heretics seems to be part of a larger evolutionary movement towards a post-human eusocial strain of hominids. Vast swaths of humanity already have increasingly tenuous ties to human emotions. The increasing proportion of the population on the spectrum, sexual self mutilation, the prevalence of Prozac and other SSRI emotion blockers, the popularity of masking and suppression of individualism, classical economics worship of the bee hive ideal, falling birth rates and wide spread birth control and abortion, suppression of dissent, and re-emergence of caste society. Eusociality worked well for some insect species, it should not be surprising evolution of human populations would follow similar paths.

    • “Loyalty” is the title of the only pinned thread in my world.

      How many of us ask one question, who would upload the marriage vows in a traditional christian marriage?

      My wife did. I do. I wouldn’t trust any of these universalist to. When you are that up in your head, rationalizing defection from those vows it too damn easy.

    • “Sexual self-mutilation” and “falling birth rates” are pretty strong signs that evolution is actually moving in the opposite direction. The people you’re talking about don’t have many biological kids. Viewed through an evolutionary lens, the questions “Who’s having the most kids?” and “What are we becoming?” are really the same question.

  6. #7 “avoid treating anyone preferentially” – immediately thinking of Ghandi and how, as I heard from a few sources, he loved his wife and children no more than any others. (And possibly less than a few?)

    Non-married Catholic priests are more likely to treat other people more equally without the burden of an earthly marriage – many Protestant pastor wives are unhappy, and many minister’s kids have problems. [Still I think it would be better for the Church to allow more priests to marry, as is done among Greek Catholics.]

    Loyalty is one of the Boy Scout principles. Loyalty to good principles is good; it’s often easier to be loyal to some principal person.

    To have a happy family, the mother and father have to be loyal to the family. Praise in public, chastize in private. Even family loyalty with some limits.

    A person’s meaning in life is often self-judged by the criteria of loyalty to the chosen principles. Mine is. Now I’m not so sure about a lot of others.

  7. Professional loyalties lie somewhere between particularism and universalism. In good cultures, nurses are loyal to their patients, teachers to their students, attorneys to their clients, athletes to fans, and so on.

  8. Is Heidi’s daughter eating well? How’s her blood pressure?

    People who experience a lot of anxiety and neuroticism try to self-medicate with very rigid and definite ideas about the way things ought to be.

    They want to see a set of train tracks stretching off in front of them. They think they’ve found their one true authoritarian solution to what they don’t notice is indigestion or insomnia. “Politics as the crow flies.” Except the treatment is worse than the disease.

    And another thing they never notice is how they keep bending their principles and falling short. They really just don’t want the stress of having to read bad news about their team. Heidi’s daughter wants the bad news kept out of her feed because it upsets her stomach.

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