On Loyalty

When the sun shines, we'll shine together.

Told you I'll be here forever.

Said I'll always be a friend.

Took an oath, Ima stick it out till the end.

Now it's raining more than ever.

Know that we'll still have each other.

You can stand under my umbrella.

The point of friendship, even political friendship, is that it endures. Loyalty, a social virtue, is singularly important. I wonder what the implications of our increasingly mobile, unencumbered individualism will be on the political order. Roger Scruton points to geography as the only thing preserving the nation-state. Will we eventually transcend even geography through technology? Clearly loyalty is something that both the church and the state have an interest in promoting. And yet loyalty and the accompanying tendency to prefer what is closest to one easily morph into a scary nationalism. Additionally, loyalty necessarily includes an exclusion--two people under an umbrella implies people outside of it. Politics must be comfortable with this love of the particular, for it is as natural to humans (so John Calhoun tells us, at least) as society is for us.