Of all the virtues presumed to have been lost in America, loyalty generally takes pride of place. We are, writes the social critic Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, living in a "divorce" culture, in which loyalty to spouse and children is severely tested by the siren calls of personal self-fulfillment and liberation. The problem with our politics, according to the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt, is that we no longer have political machines or even political parties capable of imposing discipline by rewarding loyalty. And by focusing too much on the bottom line, American companies, business consultant Frederick Reichheld claims, are not taking advantage of what he calls "the loyalty effect," the benefits to be obtained by being faithful to customers, employees, and investors.

In one sense, there can be nothing surprising about this sense of loyalty lost, for critics have been bemoaning the lack of loyalty since the United States was founded. The American philosopher Josiah Royce, a pragmatist, called loyalty "the central duty amongst all duties." It is not hard to understand why that way of thinking would have strong appeal in America, where loyalties have often been severely tested. "My country right or wrong" cannot serve as a moral injunction if, as during the Civil War, the question is "Which country is mine?" Religious pluralism encourages multiple loyalties. Hyphenated Americans have at least two; global capitalists often have none.

America has always had something of a peculiar relationship with loyalty, as manifested in our na•ve belief that professing an oath of loyalty, upon which so many institutions insisted in the 1950s, somehow settles the question of whether one is truly loyal. Beneath our concern with loyalty is a persistent feeling that, as a people, we lack it. Loyalty cannot be a guide to right conduct in a society that worships the market in economics and liberty in politics. As virtues go, loyalty is feudal, not capitalist, in origin, evoking images of knightly chivalry on the one hand and codes of omerta on the other. Not only was the United States created through a singular act of disloyalty, it has been continually replenished by immigrants willing to break the bonds of family, faith, and community. A population does not expand across and fill up an entire continent if one of its most trusted virtues is loyalty to place and person. The American way of making money is premised on weaning people away from whatever they happen to be loyal to at one moment in order to win their loyalty for something else at the next. Loyalty implies a resignation to fate that is inappropriate to an optimistic society.

Americans design institutions that discourage loyalty. Corporations, professional sports teams, and universities reward those most willing to move elsewhere. Young people are encouraged to serve their country through the benefits to be obtained when their tour of duty is over. Term limits give politicians no reason to be loyal to the electorate--and vice versa. Whatever the theory, the practice could not be clearer: the loyal, when not the losers, are the suckers.

From Moral Freedom, © 2001 by Alan Wolfe

Professor of Political Science Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at BC. This article is drawn from his new book, Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now, with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. © 2001 by Alan Wolfe.

Photograph by Constantine Manos/Magnum Photos, Inc.

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