Loyalty Ackshually

The Midwits vs the Virtues

Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash

Loyalty is one of the chivalric virtues. The true knight is a ride-or-die kind of man, loyal to the core. This is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said—as if the knight could be anything but loyal.

But upon claiming this, you can count on some midwit dropping into the discourse to tell us that loyalty is “ackshually quite problematic.” He’s so brimming with faux-profoundity that he never met a virtue or ideal he couldn’t make problematic.

To support his claim the midwit might cite the scene from the third season of Game of Thrones in which Jaime Lannister, a villain hiding a heart of gold, explains how he became the most hated man in Westeros. When serving in the king’s guard years ago as a young man, Jaime faced a choice: loyalty to his father or to his king. A man is supposed to stay true to both of them. But what if they are at war with each other? What does loyalty demand then? Huh? Huh? The midwit becomes gleeful in the face of such problems.

Jaime chose his father and killed the king, earning himself a reputation as an infamous traitor. What people don’t know is that the king was at that moment about detonate explosives throughout his city and kill thousands. A bad name—“the Kingslayer”—became Jaime’s reward for saving so many lives. Jaime then fulfills the destiny written for him by becoming the villain everyone accuses him of being. To make matters even more problematic, the man who guaranteed Jaime’s bad name was one Ned Stark, famous for his honor. Which just shows honor is suspect too.

Let’s give credit where it’s due: this confessional and the very brief redemption arc that followed make for compelling viewing, at least at first. But frustratingly little comes of Jaime’s redemption and the viewer should start to wonder if he’s been duped. What are the showrunners ultimately suggesting with this subplot? That the old virtues are supposedly too simplistic for modern people? That as a result of a moral dilemma a man can’t help but give himself over teenage emo-villainy?

Another Approach

In The Two Towers, Tolkien portrays a man facing difficulties of loyalty and performing far better and manlier: Éomer son of Éomund.

Authority has collapsed in Éomer’s country. After Grima Wormtongue incapacitates Théoden and effectively rules Rohan through the sickened king, Éomer finds himself taking orders from an illegitimate puppetmaster who means to destroy his country. What is Éomer to do? Follow the supposedly lawful orders of a usurper? Or disobey his (incapacitated) uncle and king?

In any difficult situation there is nothing a man can do except his best. Éomer defies Wormtongue’s new policy of letting the orcs of Isengard run free across the plains of Rohan: he and his riders go rogue and slaughter a band of them with brutal efficiency. The Marshal of the Mark is not willing to hide behind the phony orders he’s been given, and he is more than willing to die if that’s what this course of action brings, without crying over the unfairness of it all.

Éomer not only saves Rohan with his extermination of these orcs—he saves all of Middle Earth. That particular band is carrying two hobbits with them who would have spilled information to Saruman about Frodo’s mission. Éomer’s attack gives Merry and Pip the chance they need to escape. All this he does with a true heart, in service of his king. When Théoden recovers from his spell, Éomer bows before him in utter loyalty, having done the best he could for his king under very difficult circumstances.

I don’t mean to argue that Éomer’s trouble runs neatly parallel to Jaime’s. But it seems clear enough that these characters suggest very different visions of the worthiness of loyalty.

We should always ask ourselves what kind of designs an artist or a writer has for his audience. With Jaime’s overcooked melodramatics, the showrunners suggest-without-explicitly-suggesting that we be highly sophisticated victims of circumstance. There’s something like a self-fulfilling prophecy involved in this vision. When we tell ourselves that the world is just a giant spinning rock of endless moral dilemma, we give ourselves permission to abandon those virtues whose sole purpose is to call forth the best within us. Then we become all the more insubstantial in moments of crisis, mediocre quasi-villains in our own lives. Then, to complete the cycle, we justify our theories about how the virtues we abandoned don’t cut it in “the real world.”

Éomer, meanwhile, adhering to older notions of the virtues, shows us the possibility of vigorous action. He stays loyal. He shows bravery. He exercises prudence. And he reconciles himself to the consequences of bold conduct. Sometimes you win and sometimes you die trying—but either way you do it as nobly as you can. Things might not have turned out so well for the Marshal, it should be noted, if Gandalf had not arrived in Rohan in the nick of time. Or perhaps Gandalf’s arrival should be seen as Providence’s reward to Éomer for his excellent conduct—because Providence does move to help the good man who stays good.

Yes, loyalties can sometimes come into conflict and a man’s faithfulness can be tested in tricky ways. Only a cartoonish, one-size-fits-all virtue ethics would suggest otherwise. At the same time, only a self-impressed midwit would find this a good reason to chuck ancient virtues which have served men so well for thousands of years.