Would You Betray Your Friends or Your Country?

Some Thoughts on E.M. Forster's Dilemma

“Personal relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as products of a time of fair weather which is now past, and we are urged to get rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country… Still, there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild though it sounds. Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do – down with the state says I, which means that the State would down me.”

– E.M. Forster, “What I Believe,” printed in Two Cheers for Democracy.

I was a teenager when I first heard these thrilling lines, and I imagined the noble sacrifices I would make for the cause of friendship. But that’s the thing: I had to imagine them. As I read more history and travelled a bit, I realised that many people don’t have to imagine: those impossible choices are real. A man whose biggest difficulty was getting stuck between a rock and a Cambridge college, Forster trivialised a sour conflict. In her book Ordinary Vices, the political philosopher Judith Shklar canes him for his callow remark. Her conclusion? “Even without its heroics, this is not an intelligent statement.”

Forster should have asked himself what sort of “state” he wanted “down.” Countries with decent legal systems, such as Great Britain or Australia, don’t force spouses to testify against each other in criminal cases. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union encouraged children to dob on their parents. Even good legal systems can be corrupted and start coercing and bullying its citizens instead of protecting them: in New South Wales during the coronavirus lockdowns, it was a crime to visit your family if the state decided they lived too far away. The police encouraged people to report anyone disobeying the government’s mandates. (A frighteningly large amount of people did so.) If you consider the contingency and fragility of a good legal system, you can’t make a claim as facile as Forster’s.

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Moreover, what sort of friend does Forster mean, and what is he, the friend, doing? Is he endangering innocent people by ignoring his duties? Is he beating his children? Is he accepting money from foreign countries to spy on his fellow citizens? Is he inciting a violent mob? Or is he like some of Forster’s fellow Cambridge graduates, who betrayed their friends and their country by passing large amounts of British intelligence to the Soviet Union? (While I studied at Cambridge, Forster’s old college, King’s, still displayed the Soviet Flag in its bar. Its students voted to remove the flag in 2018.)

Would Forster really have defended his friend from the law in all these instances? Would the welfare of his fellow Englishmen have counted for nothing compared to the safety and freedom of his friend?

If Forster were defending the importance of personal bonds against impersonal governments and bureaucracies, then fair enough. But he called for more: a “creed of personal relationships” requiring “guts.” His braggadocio prevented him from thinking about the political difficulties which cause the grandest and most ambiguous conflicts of loyalty and betrayal. He wrote that “Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome,” as if that solves the problem. Judas Iscariot also occupies that part of Dante’s hell, but the tough question of how to act when your religious obligations conflict with your personal and political loyalties eluded Forster. As an atheist, maybe he never considered it. But he also didn’t consider the questions brought up by Socrates in Plato’s Crito.

Portrait of Forster by Dora Carrington, c. 1924–1925 (Wikimedia Commons)

In my second year of university, a great classicist-cum-lawyer introduced me to Crito, the first major discussion about the conflict between public and private obligations. According to Plato, Socrates’ friends arranged his escape from prison, but he chose to stay and drink the hemlock, arguing that if he defied the judgement against him, he would be breaking his agreements and commitments (ὁμολογίας τε καὶ συνθήκας) to his friends, his country, and the laws of Athens. Acknowledging that he owes his birth, nurture, and education to those laws, Socrates confronts Crito (Crito, 50b): “do you think the state can exist and not be overturned when its legal judgements have no force but are nullified and destroyed by private people?” (ἢ δοκεῖ σοι οἷόν τε ἔτι ἐκείνην τὴν πόλιν εἶναι καὶ μὴ ἀνατετράφθαι, ἐν ᾗ ἂν αἱ γενόμεναι δίκαι μηδὲν ἰσχύωσιν ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ ἰδιωτῶν ἄκυροί τε γίγνωνται καὶ διαφθείρωνται;)

Forster ignored these questions about clashing loyalties – and for someone celebrating “a creed of personal relationships,” he doesn’t seem to have thought about them very much, either.

“Would Forster really have defended his friend from the law in all these instances?”

A good friend knows that you find some things valuable and understands why you value those things. A close friend probably shares those values. An intimate friend might create and sustain those values in you, making you the sort of person you are. If friendship essentially involves caring for the other’s good for his sake, then how would Forster apply his “creed”? Would he have allowed his friend to develop vicious habits just because the state objected to them? What sort of friend would do that? A good friend prevents you from going astray, and our idea of the “right path” is largely determined by our country.

Forster was the type of intellectual who dedicates his skill and effort to retaining the luxury of liberal values while disparaging the country that makes them possible. A country isn’t superfluous: it shapes and nurtures you. The twentieth-century artists who left their homelands should have given Forster thought. Thomas Mann was always German. Stravinsky was always Russian. James Joyce left Ireland, but Ireland never left him. It didn’t occur to Forster that his “creed” of individual conscience owed a lot to the English Protestant culture that developed him.

“Forster was the type of intellectual who dedicates his skill and effort to retaining the luxury of liberal values while disparaging the country that makes them possible.”

Insufficiently sensitive to religion and country, Forster’s “creed” is also insufficiently sensitive to literature. We have a word to describe situations when there are no guidelines or certainties to help with an impossible choice: tragedy. Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, A Man for All Seasons – tragedies like these show us the tensions and ambiguities natural to all human relationships. We don’t praise those who assert inflexible rules for unbearable conditions; we praise those who face them nobly. Historians and tragedians don’t tend to judge a specific act of treachery but the character of the man who committed it.

Forster mentioned Dante’s Brutus but forgot about Shakespeare’s. Throughout Julius Caesar, Brutus faces an agonising choice between his friend and his country. He chooses his country: “Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?”

During the Battle of Philippi, losing the fight against the armies ostensibly avenging Caesar’s death, Brutus runs on his own sword, and says with remorse: “Caesar, now be still: / I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.”

Yet at the play’s end, Antony, Brutus’ enemy in that battle and Caesar’s former yes-man, praises the conspirator:

This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”

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