In his 1938 essay What I Believe that can be found in the collection Two Cheers for Democracy, E. M. Forster wrote the following:
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy – they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.
…One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract – that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most men possess this warmth, though they often have bad luck and get chilled. Most of them, even when they are politicians, want to keep faith. And one can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend. Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome. Probably one will not be asked to make such an agonizing choice. Still, there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild though it sounds. Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do – down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.
What particularly struck me is when he wrote, “[I]f I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
It is not clear what Forster meant by the word ‘betray’ and it means different things depending on whether it is applied to country or friend. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has several meanings and #2 most closely applies to betraying a country when it says it is “to deliver to an enemy by treachery”. That definition is loaded with the word ‘treachery’ which automatically makes it reprehensible. A more neutral definition might be “to aid an enemy nation at the expense of one’s own”. When it comes to betraying a friend, meaning #3 “to fail or desert especially in time of need” seems most appropriate.
I have been trying to think of what single action might constitute having to make a choice between betraying one’s friend and one’s country and the closest real world example I could think of is the McCarthy era where people were demanded to inform the authorities if their friends, co-workers, and colleagues had Communist sympathies, that it was their patriotic duty to inform on others and to not do so was in effect aiding ‘the enemy’. Those who refused were blacklisted and had their careers ruined.
Back in 2016, I wrote about Dalton Trumbo, an Academy Award winning screen writer, who was blacklisted during that time because he refused to betray his friends. He later wrote:
And if I could take a census of all the Americans I have seen and of all the dead whose graves I have looked on, if I could ask them one simple question: “Would you like a man who told on his friend?” – there would not be one among them who would answer, “Yes.”
Show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have earned before, and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray not just his friends but his country.
For many people, patriotism is valued above all other things, reinforced by the state with the singing of anthems, pledges of allegiance, and veneration of the flag or the monarch. Like Forster and Trumbo, I do not believe in patriotism, seeing it as an artificial construct that has to be manufactured. It makes no sense to me. I have never understood what is meant by that term, except that it is usually interpreted as requiring people to go along with whatever their governments tells them to do. It means ‘my country right or wrong’, a sentiment that is almost always invoked when people are being asked by their governments to do what they feel to be morally and ethically wrong, since people would have no problem doing what is right without such an exhortation.
Unlike patriotism, friendship is a natural human impulse. It is real, precious, and beautiful. The choice between the two should be clear.
A lot of people think Trump is their “friend”.
Trumbo makes the crucial point; “Show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one…”.
I can imagine situations in which I would not turn my friend in. I can also imagine situations in which I would, namely perhaps those in which my friend has caused harm to others. Even then, the amount of harm done might inform my decision.
I imagine everyone who volunteered to join the Confederate Army considered themselves as choosing loyalty to their friends over their country, and those who joined the KKK even more so.
And today’s US conservatives are loyal to neither their friends nor their country, but instead to an ideology of hatred (white supremacy, Christian nationalism, etc.).
@3 moarscienceplz,
I suspect that the people you mention did not consider they were making a such a distinction between loyalty to a friend or their country. To them, they were loyal, exceedingly loyal, to both.
It is only in hindsight, and from our unique perspective, that we see their actions as betraying the ideals of democracy. They at the time, and certain people today, would not agree with us.
I’ve never understood patriotism. I love my country, but I want to change it and make it better. Similarly I love my family but there are some people I no longer have contact with because they are toxic to me. The idea of family, country or friend -- right or wrong is one reason why there are so many things wrong in the world
I never understood or respected the whole “betray my country” idea. It’s not my country, obviously. You owe no loyalty to something you were born into. Unless a nation is something you had a personal part in creating, you’re just a walk-on/walk-off part who made no significant choices.
You choose your friends, and therefore you can choose to be loyal to them, as well. Friends matter more than family.
@#5 flex,
It is not an accident that the southern states seceeded mere weeks after it was known that Lincoln had been elected. They were afraid of federal laws being created that would ban slavery, even though Lincoln had stated that he would not push for such a thing. Look at all their anguish over new states being admitted into the Union prior to the war: The South fought like demons to keep slave states in parity with free states. Why? To stop the possibility of their country banning slavery, PERIOD. Also, remember that at the time of secession they were called ‘rebels’. Since that time, white supremacists have worked hard to sand the rough edges off that word, but it meant ‘traitor’ even at that time. And it was a well deserved word.
For the KKK, the disloyalty is even more obvious. Every rebel (traitor) state had to request readmittence to the Union, as well as most of the prominent men of the rebellion, and they had to swear allegiance to the government of the USA. When many of those same men then joined the KKK and started terrorizing and killing citizens of the USA, many whites as well as Blacks, they weren’t merely repudiating their loyalty to the USA by accident of birth, no, they were repudiating the oaths THEY THEMSELVES had sworn to the country. How in hell can you or anyone call that loyalty?
That choice would be made moot if we had one world government.
“For many people, patriotism is valued above all other things, reinforced by the state with the singing of anthems, pledges of allegiance, and veneration of the flag or the monarch.”
That’s not patriotism, it’s jingoism.
@8 moarscienceplz,
Swearing an oath of allegiance does not create a bond of loyalty. That’s a fictional device. I know oaths have been around for millennia, but the person who still considers an oath binding even if they have changed their mind exists only in fiction. Real people are just too good at rationalization. Real people make excuses like, “they broke it first”, “it was made under duress”, or “it no longer applies because of this detail.” If oaths were any good there would be no need for punishments for perjury.
Loyalty is a personal thing; and it can be to another person, an institution (like a government), it can be to an object, it can be to an idea, and it even can be to oneself.
Now I don’t suggest that the leaders of the CSA were loyal to the federal government, but they were loyal to their ideas, which their friends shared. I think part of their loyalty was to their wealth and standing. Part of their loyalty was to a belief, still strongly present in many areas, that the USA is a collection independent states and it not a single nation. Part of their loyalty was to a belief that slavery was a natural condition of the human race, approved by god and the bible. They were loyal to the idea that the sale of human beings was moral. To even consider that selling people was immoral was an attack on their deeply held beliefs and a restriction of their freedom. That belief is wrong, but there is a lot of loyalty to immoral beliefs throughout history.
To the leaders of the CSA, their oaths no longer applied because the federal government broke faith first. In their opinion they remained loyal to their form of government, a government which interfered with their power as little as possible. As I wrote above, we can call them rebels and traitors, but they didn’t perceive themselves that way. An oath is only as good as the rationalization used to negate it.
But considered in the light of Forster’s essay, the leaders of the CSA were not choosing to betray either their friends or their government. For the most part the people who made the decision to leave the Union, the leaders of the CSA, were already part of the government. They had power, and they perceived the abolition of slavery as a reduction of their power. This has nothing to do with Forster’s essay, which is about the relationship between those who have power and those who have none. But in the eyes of the CSA, their government betrayed them. So they left. There was no choice made between friends or government, they abandoned the part of government they didn’t agree with and remained loyal to a government they could agree with.
I do encourage people to follow the link at the top of the page and read Forster’s entire essay, if you haven’t done so before. It’s only about a ten minute read. Forster was talking about trust, and it’s inverse, betrayal. He was doing so at a time of a rise of authoritarian governments. Governments who were starting to restrict the lives of people based on ethnicity, race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, political affiliation, learning…, anything which made the people in power uneasy. Forster is saying that he places more trust in the powerless than those in power, and hopes he would betray those in power sooner than those who are powerless. Forster is not talking about breaking oaths made to a government, but about choosing to refuse to betray a friend, even if the government, those in power, require it.
Forster’s essay has nothing to do with the struggles between those who have power, like the struggle of the American Revolution, or the American Civil War. Both of those examples, and hundreds of others, are struggles between people with power. Forster is talking about the relationship between a government and the people who live under that rule. He was specifically talking about authoritarian governments, but I would submit that all governments are, to some degree, authoritarian.
@9, John Morales,
Which is not what Forster was saying.
The choice between trusting a person, being loyal to a person, a friend, rather than the government may be even more important if there was a single world government.
flex, I didn’t claim that was what Forster was saying.
The subject at hand is “Betray friends or betray country?”
If all countries share the same government, then one can’t betray one’s country.
(It’s about power politics… as John Lennon put it,
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do”)
John Morales @12:
It’s not hard to extend Mano’s question to “Betray friends or betray planet?” 😎 One world government doesn’t really get rid of the ethical dilemma.
billseymour:
Not hard if you can’t think clearly, I suppose.
But sure. Care to provide an example where the dilemma is either betraying friends or betraying [the] planet?
(How one betrays a planet is open to speculation)
—
This is one of those things where people play language-games to conflate different things by ignoring polysemy.
Thing is, betrayal of friend vs. betrayal of country is incommensurable.
Betray, in this case, refers to a violation of trust from some entity, not to lack of concern for the welfare of some entity.
(And friends are people, whereas countries are an abstraction)
John Morales, you’re right, of course, that the “country” limitation is the immediate problem. Are there intelligent beings on another planet somewhere? We don’t know; and even if we did, it seems unlikely that we’d ever encounter them unless some new understanding of physics gets us past the speed-of-light barrier; so we can probably discount that idea.
But I was headed for a more general ethical principle. How about “Betray friends or betray humanity?”
One can betray actual people, in the sense I mentioned, but how can one betray an abstraction?
John Morales, I think one can make a good case that those who knew of the effects of increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on climate, but not only continued to drill for and pump fossil fuels, but created climate denial groups to reduce and delay the acceptance of the science, can be said to have “betrayed humanity”.
I understand the sentiment, Jazzlet.
I addressed it @15.
(As Led Zep put it, “‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.”)
So for those not following along with the clown car logiks of our resident troll:
So far we have been advised (@ 13 John Morales):
Interesting, I’m sure a rational explanation is forthcoming (@ 15 John Morales)…
Insightful (@ 17 John Morales)…
Okay, so what happened to the necessity for world government? All of a sudden, it’s impossible to betray an abstraction, and countries are abstractions, and yet one can betray them in the absence of world government. But perhaps “in the sense I mentioned” is the ‘get out of logic free card’?
The ‘sense mentioned’ was (@ 15 John Morales):
So putting it all together, if there is a world government, there can only be a lack of concern for that government; but if there is not world government, violation of trust becomes possible. How it’s impossible to violate the trust of a single government in unexplained. (Are we to suppose a McCarthyist world government is somehow impossible?)
And I assure you, dear reader, if you’re confused, it’s because this clown Morales makes no sense whatsoever, and has long since given up any pretence of even trying. It’s just, “please someone argue with me, I don’t care if I’m making any sense, please someone, anyone, argue with me! Please!”.
I especially love when called out, it’s
hey look at that squirrelrandom Led Zeppelin quote. 🙂Silentbob:
A total mystery to you already, and I reckon that, in the mood that you currently exhibit, any explanation will seem both irrational and vacuous and distracting to you. But, let’s see how it goes.
It remains in your imagination.
I wrote nothing about “the necessity for world government”.
Wow. You put all of that together by yourself?
Impressive!
I think that your recent spate of comments denouncing me — looking more and more like an obsession — aren’t really addressed to the peanut gallery, but to me.
I’ve not failed to notice that you often switch from the first to the third person within a single comment.
But sure, readers of these comments would be utterly bamboozled by my malevolent mischief were you not to draw attention to them, and to explain exactly what you think is going on. More correctly, what you claim to think is going on.
If you weren’t so exercised over me, you might perhaps have considered that it might well be perceived as a sort of patronising arrogance when you feel you have to vehemently school comment readers about whether or not I make sense, just in case they can’t see that for themselves.
Random, you think?
Me @15: “This is one of those things where people play language-games to conflate different things by ignoring polysemy.”
Me @19 : “I addressed it @15.
(As Led Zep put it, “‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.”)”
There is a rhetorical technique called “figures of repetition”, which can be done in many ways.
Notice that each of those comments was to a different respondent.
—
Anyway, do carry on with your hobby. And hey, at least you are here to converse, share ideas, and find truth and that sort of thing, no?
You’ve convinced me to try, but (for some reason) you never do hang around for a proper chinwag.
(Not that puzzling, of course)
^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePRYhNNdzwk&t=8s
Also,
==> I’ve noticed…
Holms, it’s not beyond me to be orotund when I choose to be.
[meta + OT]
So, Silentbob. It is only at this point that you live up to your ‘nym.
Can we somehow sort this situation out?
Does this pattern (here and in Pharyngula in particular) have to persist?
Are you so sure your striving to prevent me from somehow disrupting threads is preventing threads from being disrupted?
You interjecting into some comment thread solely to accuse me of trolling and of generally commenting in bad faith, as some sort of crusader.
Me responding, then you leaving until your next pounc and subsequent withdrawal.
Me offering to chat with you, you spurning that.
I mean, so be it, if that’s what you choose.
I can’t dispute that it really is your choice whether to persevere in this exercise in futility.
In this case, you have the power.
==> I can be…
Maybe next you will go with “it has not escaped my notice” for “I noticed”.
John Morales, your fan club is getting weirder.
English is the odd language when it comes to constructing a negative statement. Spanish, French, and all other Germanic languages use nearly identical grammar that requires the word no/not + verb.
Spanish and German simply have the word no, English requires an added dummy verb do/did, have/has.
No sé. = I do not know.
Ich weiß nicht = I know not.
I (have) not failed to notice is perfect Spanish grammar, as well as quite proper English usage.