What’s in a Word?

I must confess that I wasn’t entirely expecting Conor to go in the direction that he did in his reply to my question for him about l’Affaire Latimer.

In this case, I think the people is a very well-defined concept. It refers to all the citizens of the United States of America. The same group is name-checked in the tenth amendment. Is it possible to be loyal to a group so large? Yes, I think so.

It seems to me like this mode of reasoning does violence to the concept of loyalty, much like the various “lovers of humanity” from Rousseau onwards have done violence to the concept of love. This is a classic example of semantic creep. We start with a word, in this case “loyalty”, that refers to a distinct but complex set of emotions, inclinations, habits of action, and perceived obligations that can exist between one person and another. We then expand the definition to allow it to refer to a different but similar set of the above that can exist between a person and an idea, or a metonymous entity, or a collection of people that he’s never met but who happen to meet some important criterion.

Never in this process do we stop to consider whether the same word used in its two different contexts is referencing the same underlying state of the world — in fact, the very purpose of this kind of semantic creep is to obliterate such distinctions. Our purpose here is to allow the second context to borrow some of the lustre of the first. Opposition to the second meaning of the word becomes indefensible, after all, are you really opposed to love? To loyalty? The response that certain kinds of things are simply inappropriate objects of what we once called “love” or “loyalty”, that those advocating the “love of humanity” are committing what computer scientists call a “category error”, is pretty flaccid in the face of that kind of rhetorical cudgel. And so our language grows sloppier. Pretty soon, we’ll be talking about “a sense of loyalty to the People”. Oh dear.

All of which is a longwinded way of suggesting that the concept Conor is talking about is something called “civic duty” or “civic obligation”. It’s improper to frame this as a question of conflicting loyalties. The tools we have for resolving those kinds of conflicts don’t do the work we need here. 

Now, Conor rightly raises the question of whether there’s any loyalty at work here at all, noting that the idea of owing loyalty to one’s employer merely because he is one’s employer is hopelessly archaic. What makes me less sympathetic to this view, however, is the well-known fact that if there’s one thing that Bush was notable for in his hiring policies, it was subverting just this trend. Some called it nepotism, and nepotism may in fact be the right word, but let’s not forget that nepotism carries with it the expectation of ongoing loyalty, of a relationship that is not purely “business”. If Latimer didn’t like that arrangement, he shouldn’t have taken the job.

And so now we come to the time for evaluation: could it be that Latimer is both a craven and treacherous worm AND a civic hero who nobly informed the American public of stuff that it Needed to Know? Of course! The correct answer to E.D. Kain’s question is “Both”. The reality that sometimes duties conflict, sometimes all of our available options result in sin, sometimes there is no right thing to do, is entirely compatible with a suitably tragic worldview — a worldview which recognizes that there is something inconceivably broken and flawed at the root of the world.

But, as E.D. and others have pointed out, it’s very unlikely that Latimer’s tell-all will result in much civic gain at all, and equally unlikely that Civic Duty was anywhere near the front of his mind. So in reality he’s just a craven and treacherous worm, and nothing more.