Is loyalty always a virtue? Wilson acknowledges that loyalty cannot be the supreme moral good, for it is possible to be loyal to the wrong cause, the wrong authority, or the wrong association. As he remarks, "A Nazi is not regarded as a moral person because he is loyal to Nazism."
Thus, Wilson proposes that loyalty as a positive virtue should be defined as "the natural sociability of people." Accordingly, "A loyal person is someone who is attached to other people for the long term based on a deep sense of what is due to them."
In some, Wilson argues that a sense of loyalty is a civilizational essential and that the context of the family--with marriage at the center--is essential to the inculcation of loyalty in the young. Sociopaths are produced when this essential commitment to loyalty is missing. The risk of producing sociopaths escalates significantly when a large number of children and adolescents lack the loyalty-building context of the family with married parents.
"The fundamental social institution that encourages loyalty is the family," Wilson argues. "An infant is raised by one or two parents and acquires an attachment, usually a strong one, to these people." Beyond this, the child develops attachments of loyalty to siblings, extended family, and peers as brought into the individual's life through the structure of the family and its life.
Looking to Western Europe and its ongoing experiment with radicalized social revolution, Wilson suggests that the more radical heirs of the Enlightenment are trying to reap the benefits of marriage while simultaneously undermining the institution. He correctly points to the fact that a growing number of activists and ideologues in the United States are urging this country to follow the same example.
This process is being aided and abetted by the United States Supreme Court. As Wilson recounts: "In the late nineteenth century it spoke of marriage as a 'sacred obligation' and a 'holy estate' that was the source of civilization itself. By 1972 it had abandoned any such reference and said instead that marriage is 'an association of two individuals, each with a separate emotional and intellectual makeup.' Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a sacred obligation, and now it is a private contract."
The embrace of cohabitation as an alternative to marriage has accelerated the decline of marital commitment. "Men and women who cohabit have only a weak incentive to pool their resources and to put up with the inevitable emotional bumps that come from sharing an apartment and a bed," Wilson explains. Couples choose to cohabitate rather than to marry precisely because they do not want to be bound by the public commitment that marriage represents. Furthermore, the stigma and shame associated with unmarried cohabitation--and with having children out of wedlock--has largely evaporated.
