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Why Betrayal?

Indeed, why betrayal?
Why choose such a moth-eaten topic? Why not stick with noble topics such as equality and liberty, instead of pursuing the seedy topic of betrayal?
I start with an indirect answer to the question “Why betrayal?” Then I suggest some direct answers to that very same question.
Robespierre suggested weaving the revolutionary triangle libertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ© on the French flag.1 His suggestion was not accepted. But the slogan became well inscribed on the revolutionary consciousness, and in a way set the agenda for all modern political thought. Almost all the effort in political thought has been devoted to two sides of the triangle, liberty and equality, and especially to the relationship between them. Indeed, one can view justice as finding the right balance between liberty and equality. The neglected side of the revolutionary triangle is fraternity. Fraternity, understood as a brotherly attitude toward people we don’t know, strikes us as an elusive metaphor. Even worse, it strikes us as an invitation to dance to the tune of moral kitsch composed by propagandists; in short, it is a disinvitation to serious thinking. For some, fraternity reeks not only of sentimentality but also of a precarious premodern leftover from a medieval guild’s banquet. Fraternity seems to vitiate the liberal sensibility for privacy by granting license to interfere in people’s private affairs under the sticky slogan of fraternal concern. Carlyle scorned forced “brotherhood” by quoting a pun on the revolutionary slogan that went “Fraternity or death: Be my brother, or I will kill you.”2 Some modern liberals view fraternity as pernicious communitarianism, a threat to our core sense of individuality. Liberal society should be inspired by liberty and equality and leave fraternity to families and cloistered undergraduates.
I believe that fraternity is important as a motivating force to bring about liberty and equality. Only a society with a strong sense of fraternity has the potential to bring about justice. There is nothing obvious in what I have just stated. I state it here dogmatically since my book is not directly about fraternity but about betrayal. The idea is not to tackle the idea of fraternity head-on but to deal with fraternity through its pathology, which is betrayal. The basic claim in the book is that betrayal is betrayal of a thick human relationship. A thick human relationship comes very close to what fraternity means. So betrayal is the flip side of fraternity.
The business of medical doctors is health, but they deal with diseases: the way health goes wrong. Doctors hardly give an account of what health consists of. They spend all their time and effort accounting for what undermines health. The same holds true for mental health. Sigmund Freud, for example, hardly said a word about what normal human beings are like, apart from what Erik Erikson quotes him as saying, which is that to be normal is to be able to love and to work.3 Freud spent all his time dealing with pathologies that undermine normalcy. In the same spirit, I propose to deal with fraternity by dealing with what undermines it. Betrayal undermines thick relations. The paradigmatic cases of thick relations are relations of family and friends. Fraternity is meant to stand for thick human relations, modeled on family and friendship. At center stage of my concerns are personal betrayal, in the form of betraying family and friendship; political betrayal, in the form of treason; betrayal of religious community, in the form of apostasy; and betraying one’s class. And so my answer to the question “Why betrayal?” is that it is a good indirect way to deal with fraternity.

A Basic Plot

A friend who spent years in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) once told me that the price of a movie ticket, during his time there, was one rupiah. In buying a ticket one had to choose between queuing for love movies and queuing for war movies. The producers of the movies couldn’t be bothered with editing their movies or giving them specific titles. Instead, viewers were provided with a timeless overarching choice of topics: love or war. The idea is clear: for an admission price of one rupiah, basic human plots can be reduced to just two. The rest are mere variations on these two Ur-themes. I would have squashed these basic plots even further, for a love plot is usually about love betrayed, and war plots are marred by treason, desertion, defection, collaboration, and spying. In short, the only plot worth one rupiah is betrayal. One should of course take that description with a grand grain of salt, for there is more to human life than betrayal, but the point of the Ceylon story is that betrayal is such a basic and ubiquitous element of the human repertoire that there is no need to answer the question “Why betrayal?”
To be sure, you can dine out extensively by telling people that you are working on betrayal. People feel that the issue of betrayal touches their lives: some directly, others vicariously. Vicarious experience (das Leben der Anderen, “the lives of others”) is no less a human experience than direct experience. Many people lead a vicarious life, either because they are terrified of daring and dangerous experiences or because they lack the opportunity. As a result, they become passive consumers of betrayal stories. By the same token, you may say that it is precisely the people who cannot live their own true life who become betrayers. Instead of leading one full life, they lead a double life.
One may retort that the broad underlying suspicion that comes with the question “Why betrayal?” is not whether betrayal is a subject worthy of general attention but whether it is a suitable subject for philosophy. To this last gambit there is a stock pious answer: nothing human is alien to philosophy. But the pious answer is not good enough. For it may very well be the case that artistic accounts are a better way of conveying what betrayal is. Reading or watching Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal, or any scrap of paper written by John le CarrĂ© on that subject, may be a better way to gain insight into modern betrayal than reading a laborious philosophical tractate on the subject. Betrayal, like laughter, belongs to the basic fabric of human existence, and yet, like laughter, it may produce crushingly tedious philosophical stuff.
The last suspicion about whether the choice of betrayal is a proper philosophical topic has little to do with betrayal as such. It is a general suspicion about any choice of subject. That a subject is important doesn’t mean that one has important things to say about it: one can write uninterestingly about an interesting subject, humorlessly about humor, and boringly about the exciting topic of betrayal. All of this is trite and true and should end with the clichĂ© that the proof is in the pudding.
But the question “Why betrayal?” cannot be stonewalled by a clichĂ©, for there is a genuine worry expressed by this question. The worry is that the concept of betrayal has lost its grip in liberal modern societies. True, the generic term “betrayal” still resonates with lots of people, but when it comes to its central species—political betrayal in the form of treason, marital betrayal in the form of adultery, and religious betrayal in the form of apostasy—the topic of betrayal rings archaic. Losing the grip on treason, adultery, and apostasy is not so much a matter of losing the sense of these terms as it is of losing their sensibility. What I shall try to do in this chapter is to inquire in what sense, if any, treason, adultery, and apostasy have lost their grip on the modern liberal imagination.

Treason

Our reactive attitude today to treason is greatly altered from the time of William Shakespeare. The horror expressed in “Treason! Treason!” (Hamlet) is not our horror. We seem to be removed from the paranoiac world of Henry’s “Good tidings, my Lord Hastings; for the which / I do arrest thee, traitor, of high treason: / And you, lord archbishop, and you, Lord Mowbray, / Of capital treason I attach you both” (Henry IV, Part 2). We do not shiver when dipping into Dante’s frozen ninth circle (in the Inferno, the circle that is the lowest of the low, the seat of the betrayers). We may be puzzled as to why Brutus of all people ranks so high on Dante’s list of traitors, which secures him a front-row seat in Dante’s underworld, but these are the least of our worries. The worry is that the underpinning of “betrayal” and its semantic field seems so utterly entrenched in a feudal morality that it is not part of modern liberal sensibilities anymore.
You may protest and say that this worry about losing our grip cannot be true as stated. After all, treason is with us, enshrined, for example, in the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Constitution is an ongoing concern and not dead folios.
The handling of treason in the U.S. Constitution is, I believe, a poor counterexample to the claim that treason has lost its grip. The concept of treason in the United States Constitution is a response to the treason of feudal morality, with the aim of removing its sting.
I shall address the attitude of the U.S. Constitution to treason in more detail in Chapter 5.

Adultery

A parallel story to the loosening grip of treason on the Western world can be told about marital betrayal in the form of adultery. Adultery used to be a crime, which on occasion was punished by death or disfigurement. It stopped being a criminal offense in most liberal countries and was relegated to family law.
The decline in the hold of adultery, as a form of betrayal, in liberal countries has to do with an important shift in the attitude toward sexual morality. Liberal morality does not recognize sexual morality as an independent moral domain. It recognizes the importance of sex in human life as well as its vulnerability to exploitation and domination. It recognizes sexuality as a sensitive domain in applying general moral principles. But it does not recognize sexuality as an autonomous moral domain with principles of its own, any more than it recognizes eating as a separate moral domain. Indeed, in the liberal view there is no more room for sexual morality than there is room for a morality of eating. The counterpicture—shared by the major religions of the world—starts with the centrality of sexual morality. Sexual morality is at the core of religious morality. The rest of morality is taken as an extension of sexual morality. Adultery is a central category of the sex-centered picture of morality. The shift in attitude toward adultery, in secular liberal countries, expresses a deep shift from sex-centered morality to general morality. In liberal countries adultery lost its hold and was shunted to the private domain.

Apostasy

My third example of betrayal is religious betrayal in the form of apostasy.
The law in liberal states suggests the weakening of religious betrayal. Apostasy, “the right to replace one’s current religion or belief,” is a particularly curious case, for it is declared to be a basic human right, and is regarded as such by liberal states.4 By contrast, apostasy may carry a death penalty in some illiberal states.5
We seem to be torn between two conflicting poles. On the one hand, betrayal seems an obvious concern for philosophy by being a basic human plot. On the other hand, major manifestations of betrayal—treason, adultery, and apostasy—from the perspective of a liberal way of life seem somewhat outdated concerns, and hence outdated philosophical concerns.

The Interest in Trust

While the concept of betrayal seems to have loosened its grip on liberal societies, an apparently inversely correlated notion, trust, finds its way to liberal societies’ center stage. How can we explain the topicality of trust and the outdatedness of betrayal when betrayal seems to be the antonym of trust? Put differently, why is there an intense interest in trust, while there is wary disregard of betrayal?
The dialectics of trust and betrayal is more complicated than just presenting one as a close antonym of the other. It is important for my study to highlight the difference between the old-fashioned concern with betrayal and the current concern with trust in a market economy. It is a difference that, once understood, makes the need for answering the question “Why betrayal?” all the more pressing.
There are two notions of trust. There is thin trust and there is thick trust.
Here is a case of thin trust: Two strangers are sitting on the beach. Both are afraid to leave their belongings unattended. Suddenly one asks, “Would you keep an eye on my belongings while I take a dip?” “By all means,” the other says. The first person returns wet and happy from her swim, finding her belongings in place. The other asks, “Will you keep an eye on my stuff? I feel like going in too.” “Sure,” she says. And off he goes. Both are showing thin trust: trust between strangers.
Here is a case of thick trust: It so happens that you and your companion have and hold each other in sickness and in health. Moreover, you vow to cherish each other from this day forward for better and for worse. In short, those familiar words do capture your thick trust in each other.
These two examples are in a way more than we bargained for. They are not just cases of trust, thick or thin, but cases of mutual trust. You and the stranger on the beach trust each other with your belongings; you and your companion trust each other to nurture and care for each other through thick and thin. But then the stranger may thinly trust you, without you trusting her, and you may thickly trust your companion, without your partner trusting you.
So what are the characteristics of typical cases of thin trust?
One cooperates with another in the belief that in doing so one promotes one’s interests in comparison to being left on one’s own. In cooperating you become vulnerable by becoming dependent on your presumed partner to do her bit in the cooperation. You expose yourself to exploitation. Being exposed to exploitation means that your partner is able to use your dependence and harm your interests relative to the situation in which you are left on your own. Exploitation strengthens by degrees: the degree to which your interests are ignored or actively harmed. The stranger on the beach may take your belongings and run away or, more benignly, ma...