Integrity, soul, and life in a world of no-win scenarios

In my time and place on Earth, people still struggle with immoral and unethical reasoning at both the individual and structural levels of our civilization. We see it in the banal administration of our public institutions, the business ontology of corporations, and the bias of large, wealthy commercial interests. And the result is unnecessary and avoidable suffering.

None of this, however, is really new. Only this flavor is new, and perhaps the depth of significance in terms of the consequences of such things. What is true now of our politicians was true of Cicero’s time. What is true now of the general public was true of the Athenian public in 560 BCE. Funny how, regardless of historical era, the intellectual and emotional immaturity of some leads to the unnecessary suffering of many. All the while, exploitation rather than cooperation tends to be the modus operandi that devours nations and societies, with hubris sprinkled throughout.

Contrary to late-20th-century optimism here in America, human technological progress, including statecraft, has not led to moral progress. Nor does it, I imagine. The passage of time itself does not improve society and civilization. The human condition has not evolved. The human experience, though dotted with joy and goodness, is generally cruel and harsh. The struggles I have faced in my life are no better or worse than the struggles others have faced, past, present, and future. What is unique are the specific circumstances I find myself in, my own nature, my own knowledge and experience, and how I respond to the existential crises and moral dilemmas I may face.

Which brings me to this term:

“Integrity, n. The entire, unimpaired state of any thing, particularly of the mind; moral soundness of purity; incorruptness; uprightness; honesty. Integrity comprehends the whole moral character, but has a special reference to uprightness in mutual dealings, transfers of property, and agencies for others.” — Webster’s (1891).

As I read the definition more slowly, I can see two conceptual layers, laid down at different times. The older one is wholeness: the entire, unimpaired state of a thing, especially the mind. The word shares a root with integer, something that can't be divided without ceasing to be itself. The newer layer is about uprightness in dealings with others: property, contracts, acting on someone's behalf. Somewhere between the two, the emphasis shifted from the quality of the person to the quality of the agreement — the business contract — with the person across the table. It stopped describing what a soul is and started describing what a merchant can be trusted to deliver. In other words, it developed a business ontology as an add-on to the moral one. Or perhaps the transactional aspect was always there, and the definition simply made it salient. I cannot tell which from the reading alone.

The lexicographer may have been aware of this, but I doubt they noticed or paid particular attention to its philosophical implications. Words, like fossils, rarely explain themselves in profoundly revelatory ways. But it’s all here in this dictionary entry. A word that once described the unbroken inner life had, by the golden age of American mercantilism and industrialization, come to mean the reliability of the outer one.

What the definition still keeps, maybe in spite of itself, is the order and its inherent logic. How we treat people depends on what we're like inside. Quality of character determines the quality of human relationships and interactions once you remove commercial exploitation and transactions. A cracked vessel pours crooked no matter how steady the hand. A cracked soul sounds corrupt to the ear, no matter how suave the conversation.

By soul I mean the whole of who someone is, as opposed to what they have or do: the self that persists when the body, the résumé, and the material possessions all change. Integrity is that inner state showing up as observable conduct. When the inside is sound, dealings tend to be upright. When it's fractured by compromise, by deliberate choice, by coercion, by a thousand small surrenders, the dealings inherit the fracture. Not right away, but eventually. Inevitably. And that fracture leaves a mark not just on the body, but also on the soul.

I think integrity matters greatly because it may be the one thing that both connects us and protects us from one another. Every contract honored and every promise kept assumes the person on the other side is whole enough to keep faith. That same assumption is nearly all that stands between us and the darker sides of our nature, which are hardly new. The Romans knew them, and so did the Athenians. Every generation has had about the same mix of maturity and immaturity, and the quality of life in any era or region depends on this. I can't think of anything sturdier. Religion gets recruited to justify exploiters as often as to restrain them. Technology amplifies whatever part of us is running it. Time improves nothing just by passing. And what gets recorded in history is more about who does the recording than what actually happened. When combined with a social memory span of less than a generation, a vicious circle begins to emerge, and we are doomed to repeat the worst of our ancestors’ struggles.

Some people say integrity is a luxury, that sometimes you have to accept a smaller evil now to prevent a larger one later. However many times I've thought about this, and I don't trust it. How does the degree of harm between two horrific options automatically make the seemingly less horrific one somehow good? How does one make the better moral choice when the very definition of a moral dilemma is that there is no good choice? Moral dilemmas are, by nature, no-win scenarios. And no-win scenarios are solvable, but there’s always a price to be paid. The loss is built into the term no-win. So the question isn’t “if I pay” but “how do I pay” and “how much.” In other words, what is the cost to my soul? And integrity plays a critical role in that determination, not as a cold calculation, but as a means for deciding what is the better choice for me rather than what is the better choice in the eyes of others, real or imagined.

Moral dilemmas are real. They are dilemmas because they exact a toll. And the cost is paid in an immaterial currency. Invisible to the naked eye, yet indelible to the conscience and whole being. Giving up something of the inner life for the outer one costs something even if nobody else notices or cares. Maybe especially then. And only the person facing it can judge that cost. Not the imagined masses, who don't exist and will never speak, and not the instigators and whatever system stands behind them. If I'm ever in a situation where harm is coming, whatever choice I make, it’ll be a decision my conscience can live with, however fragile that peace.

This matters to me now, especially, because I feel surrounded by leaders and institutions that lack accountability, consistency, and any real concern for other people. Care is now performative and only meaningful in the context of providing services to people where both service and people are commodifiable. You can't count on them in the old commercial sense, let alone the much older sense of wholeness. They preach the second layer of the definition while hollowing out the first. Even “integrity” has become a brand, a transfer of property and an agency for others, minus the uprightness or transparency. You often see the term in the taglines and marketing materials for certain commercial industries, but how is usery, for example, also integrity? Or, is the consistency of admitted wrongdoing itself a form of integrity? Questions for another day, perhaps.

I'm not sure whether things are morally worse now than in Cicero's Rome or Solon's Athens, but I'm very certain they're not better.

We're fragile creatures in a deeply flawed world that may never see real moral progress, or a balance between our inner and outer lives. I suspect the forces that pull us away from ourselves, which our integrity helps resist, will always be there. And what I'm finding more and more as I get older is that resisting is what matters most.

#Excultio

Notes:

By D. Bowman  Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.