Abraham Maslow says that we desire to belong to a group and when we have done that, we desire to distinguish ourselves from the group. Perfectly natural. Jim Davies, my mentor at the University of Oregon, used to paraphrase those stages by saying that we want to be a part; then we want to be apart.
I have nothing good at all to say about lack of integrity, but I know now that it comes in more than one flavor. Integrity is hard to describe, but it isn’t hard to recognize. In math, we say that this number is an integer and that one is a fraction. Those are your choices so far as “numerical integrity” is concerned: whole or broken into pieces.
Davies provided me with another way of looking at the meaning of this word. He passed on a story about a political theorist we both knew—by that I mean that Davies knew him and I knew who he was—who was not highly thought of as a person. “He’s a horse’s ass,” went the punch line of the story, “and I mean that isotropically.” I didn’t have to look it up because one of the reasons Davies liked to tell the story is that he got to say what the word meant. My dictionary says, “having…properties that are the same regardless of the direction of measurement.”[1] This gives the sense of “consistency” to integrity.
I think the idea of integrity my father had in mind is that you are a) who you really are and b) the same person in one setting that you are in another. I think that’s the heart of it, but since the word is always used positively, let’s toss in the Boy Scout virtues as a coating: you know, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc. I learned that that was what integrity meant. Then I went into politics.
In my first job, I ran a campaign and I was never ever asked what I thought about the issues of the campaign. I was asked what the candidate thought and it helped if I said it as if I thought that too. Then I was a legislative assistant. No one cares about the views of the legislative assistant.[2] So I would say, “We don’t think that bill is fair to the environmental concerns that are being raised,” meaning that the legislator didn’t want to vote for it for any one of a number of reasons. It was important, of course, that I give the same reason he did. Then I was a lobbyist, and in that capacity wrote testimony for legislative hearings and delivered the testimony myself once my office got comfortable with the idea of my doing it. Now the “we” was: “Madam Chair, our position is that this bill removes from the committee a crucial power to decide what the State of Oregon will fund and what it will not.”
Those were hard days for me. I didn’t have any trouble doing the work, but I had trouble feeling good about doing it. That was when I discovered what I have, since then, been calling “public integrity. No veteran legislator thinks that when you testify, you are giving your own views and if he did suspect that, he would be critical of it. What the legislators want is for you to give the best pitch of your agency’s position you can give. They know what your agency’s interest is. They know what you really have to say. They want to know how listening to you can a) make it a better bill and/or b) help the committee or the caucus with the work they are trying to do. It is silliness to tell a legislature he will be better off doing what you are proposing when you and he both know he will be worse off. Why would you want him to think you are that stupid? It might be worthwhile telling him why everyone else will be better off if he supports the bill. He may not be able to take your advice, but he will know that you have looked at the effect on him before you gave your testimony.
I came to that logic—a publically oriented logic—slowly. Well before I formulated these ideas, I saw that the best public actors—legislators, committee staff, governor’s aides, and lobbyists—were people everyone admired. They were people who contributed to the process. They always represented the interests they were there to represent and they always told the truth. Well, they always told “a truth;” there many truths in politics and any one of them will be respected. Untruths are not respected.
These policy superstars were people who saw the whole process and contributed to it. They allied themselves to everyone they could make mutual agreements with and they construed “mutual agreements” broadly, so that they included the next legislative session, not just this one. These people helped combatants see other approaches to the common problems and other ways of dealing with each other. They had, in spades, what I am calling “public integrity.”
After I got clear on the two kinds of integrity, I began to look a little more warily at the kind I grew up thinking was “the only kind.” I began to see some dark corners I had not seen before. For one thing, the moral stance I learned when I was growing up was relentlessly self-referential. I needed for my motives to be pure and to be seen as pure, even if I didn’t know entirely what they were. And if they weren’t acknowledged to be pure, I needed to defend their purity because I saw my “integrity” to be wrapped up not so much in achieving good outcomes as in intending good outcomes. After a while, that didn’t seem like such a good tradeoff to me.
And if you are “a man of principle,” what do you do when the principle has to be modified in order to fairly treat other interests? Do you say, “I know that would be the best thing overall, but I can’t support it because of my principles? I’ve heard that said. If you are “an honest man,” does that mean you are limited to saying what you think to be true, no matter what the question is? I’ve heard that said too. If you have a “strong work ethic,” is it an ethic that will allow you to work invisibly so that someone more important to the whole process can take the credit for it? Or will you be out in the halls justifying the role you had in the achievement for fear you will be seen to have done less than you should have? I’ve seen a lot of that.
The condemnations in the previous paragraph were not just a list of bad behaviors. It was a list of the mistakes people are driven into by their understanding of all integrity as private integrity. These people aren’t glory seekers, but they do want to make sure that they don’t find their own thoughts or intentions or actions taken or actions foregone to have fallen short of their own standards. It’s the personal shortfalls, not the public achievements, that most draw their attention.
Dark corners, I said. They aren’t bad. They are the products of people like me who learned that “doing the right thing” comes in only one flavor. And when you find other flavors, you call them bad because they are different from “what it ought to taste like.” But if you can learn that there a lot of flavors that are good—there are still flavors that are bad—then you have learned a powerful and useful and…I might as well say it….humbling, lesson.
[1] The word I left out was “physical.” Everyone knew that “horse’s ass” was a social, not a physical, judgment.
[2] Actually, some do. The seasoned lobbyists who know that the legislator does or does not have room for a brief chat (just before the vote) is often determined on the spot by the lobbyist’s relationship with the assistant. Those guys care.
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