Loyalty

An unwavering loyalty, dense, intense, sticky—to borrow Merleau‑Ponty's image—like thick honey that clings to the spoon. It is that of men and women whom an unshakeable faith (fides), resistant to all criticism, blind, drives toward dogmatism. Yet the human being, born of others and welcomed by others, does not possess within themselves the resources to extract themselves from abandonment, to give meaning and direction to their life. Thus they are called to open themselves to others, to give and receive, to bind themselves to a person, to join a community of persons, to embrace an ideal. "Social" loyalty, if not infected with fanaticism, first carries this meaning: a person is loyal when, primarily, they find a cause to which to dedicate themselves, when they devote themselves voluntarily and completely to it, and when they express their devotion in an effective and constant manner, by acting in favour of that cause. Such loyalty can be neither aroused, nor "demanded", nor coerced: it rests on the values one has made one's own, on the duties one believes morally just to follow, on the "voice of conscience", as was once said. In this sense it is moral realisation and testimony to freedom, if it manages to unite will and reason. It can then first avoid transforming itself into servitude, into that medieval "dedication" which bound vassal to suzerain, placing all obedience on one side and all dominant power on the other; then "verify", so that all fanatical and dogmatic perversions are averted, that the cause to which it has devoted itself continues indeed to defend the values that originally justified devoting itself to it. In the more common and intimate sense, loyalty evokes less attachment to political, religious, sporting, ecological values, and so forth, than loyal and sincere commitment toward a person, with whom a bond of friendship or love has been woven, whether that bond is institutionalised or not. The unfaithful one, in this case, is the one who deceives or betrays. [...] Henceforth, one may estimate that infidelity is no more a vice than loyalty is in itself a virtue. If it bears upon a bond and a memory, loyalty, in itself, does not "create good", but takes care of a relationship that is cemented, within a couple for instance, by love, which is certainly a virtue, a producer of good—but not as love, as a state, but as the act of loving, as an impulse that issues from oneself (in both senses: arising from oneself, carrying one beyond oneself), and for which no one but the subject is "responsible". When a person ceases to love another, for all possible and imaginable reasons, no one declares them "unfaithful". Precisely because infidelity and loyalty are always defined in relation to a bond, a relationship, cemented by a yes, by a promise, by a pact. The fickle person, for example, is neither faithful nor unfaithful, for, flitting according to desires and pleasures, they have promised nothing to anyone nor signed any moral contract. It thus appears that infidelity is scarcely a meanness, in the sense that the unfaithful one would wilfully cause harm and suffering in the other: it is a rupture of contract—the Italian language shows this well, naming fedifrago/a the unfaithful one, the one who breaks (frangere) the pact (foedus)—whose motives will certainly be difficult to explain, a breaking of the alliance that had created the relationship and which, obviously, can arouse, in oneself, self‑contempt, regrets and remorse, for not having kept the promise, and, in the other, who lived in trust and continued to nurture love for the union, the greatest disappointment, infinite sadness, unspeakable pain, despair, all imaginable torments, if not a desire for revenge. Whence it emerges that neither loyalty nor infidelity are decisive, although one reinforces union and cohesion—including the union of scoundrels, if it is loyalty to a harmful sect or to a mafia gang—and the other brutally brings discord, confusion and misery. What matters is to love; what matters is not to harm others, not to despise, not to humiliate, not to wound, not to injure, not to dry up the sources of life.

Robert Maggiori