“Integrity”
By Stephen L. Carter
BasicBooks
277 pp.; $24
In his new book “Integrity,” Stephen Carter sounds despairing at times when he considers the level of public discourse in the 1990s–“what appears to be an increasingly bitter and even mean political era.” Carter’s own career, however, suggests that his assessment may be too pessimistic.
Stephen Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has been on the faculty since 1982, first gained a wide audience with his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” (1991). Even more influential was “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion” (1993; an updated paperback edition with a new foreword appeared in 1994). “Contemporary American politics faces few greater dilemmas than deciding how to deal with the resurgence of religious belief,” Carter wrote. From his perspective as a Christian and a political liberal, he proceeded to chastise those (including many of his academic peers) who are openly contemptuous of religion and religious believers, particularly when they also happen to be politically conservative.
“Integrity” is the first of three books that Carter plans to write on what he calls ” ‘pre-political’ virtues–that is, elements of good character that cross the political spectrum and, indeed, without which other political views and values are useless.” (The next book in the series, Carter says, will be on civility.) Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., talked recently with Carter about his new book.
WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS BOOK, AND WHY DID YOU WRITE IT NOW?
We live in a time when people are giving attention, finally, to the spiritual dimensions of public life. Our democratic institutions are at risk precisely because politics has become so relentlessly materialistic, across the political spectrum. As a result, people are feeling increasingly alienated from public life. It strikes me that when you talk about the values that are missing, the virtues we want in our leaders and our institutions, integrity has to rank first. If you lack integrity, nothing else that you say you believe matters, because people have no reason to believe you when you tell them, This is what I stand for.
WHEN WE SAY A MAN OR A WOMAN IS A PERSON OF INTEGRITY, WHAT ARE WE SAYING ABOUT THEM?
People use the word integrity in a lot of different ways. If you look at the philosophical literature, it tends to define it in a very unsatisfactory way. The literature suggests that integrity means living life according to a consistent set of principles. I don’t like that, because what if the principles are bad? Could Hitler have integrity? The philosophical literature says, “Sure he could, as long as he was being consistent.” I think consistency is the wrong criterion. While it’s important that you live a life along a set of principles, it matters where they come from. What seems to me most important is that all of us be willing to take the time and the energy to be deeply discerning and to try to be sure that we’re right. So to me integrity is living your life according to a deeply discerned set of principles.
Integrity ends up having three steps. The first step to a life of integrity is to spend the time, to make the effort to discern what is right and wrong. The second is to struggle to live according to that sense of right and wrong. And the third, the step I think we tend to overlook, is to be willing to be open and emphatic about the rules that we’re living by: to say why we’re doing the things that we’re doing.
Chuck Colson wrote a piece in the “Wall Street Journal” recently where he mentioned that a warden said to him, “Ten years ago I could talk to these kids about right and wrong. Now they don’t know what I’m talking about.”
While I’m not a sixties basher, one of the bad things we did in the sixties was to say that all the problems in American society can be traced to repressive traditions. Some people took that as a license to overturn all values in society. So nowadays you have a culture in which, if you simply talk about right and wrong, many people will say that you’re being oppressive.
William Bennett says the reason that so many Americans don’t like to talk about religion is that religions tend to have rules to which you’re held accountable. That’s true. They do, and that’s good. It seems to me that one of the most important things about living a life of integrity is to be willing to say, “I am governed in my conduct by something other than my own immediate desires.” That’s just fundamental.
The popular injunction, “Don’t impose your morality on me,” is a non sequitur, because all laws impose someone’s morality on somebody else. Law has only two functions. Law says that you must do what you don’t want to do, or that you cannot do what you do want to do. Every law falls into one of those two categories. So when people say, “Don’t impose any morality on me,” they really mean, don’t impose that particular rule. Well that’s a fair proposition. We can then debate that. We can discuss whether this is a good or bad thing for law to do. But we have to be able to have those discussions. We have to be able to say some things are right and some things are wrong.
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTEGRITY AND TOLERANCE?
If you look at the history of Western thought, tolerance developed as a solution to religious warfare. It’s very important to understand that. The idea of tolerance was “We all worship the same God, we can find a way to live together. You can worship God in your way over in your village, I can worship God my way over in my village, and we can rely on what we share and try to live together.” That’s very different from the fashionable notion of tolerance as suspending moral judgment. Whenever you decide to suspend moral judgment, I think you move away from the path of civilization. You don’t just move away from integrity, you move toward a world in which people lack a set of common values.
ON THE SUBJECT OF ABORTION, YOU MAKE THIS COMMENT: “ABORTION IS ONE OF THE FEW MORAL ISSUES IN AMERICAN HISTORY ABOUT WHICH IT IS POSSIBLE TO SAY, WITH NO SENSE OF IRONY, THAT BOTH SIDES ARE RIGHT.”
That’s a little jarring, I realize. When I said, “both sides are right,” what I really meant was, both sides have a point. Saying “right” is a little too strong, and I’m sorry that I wrote it that way.
Both the pro-choice and the pro-life arguments have at their core sensible, humanitarian, and eminently reasonable ideas. They’re very different ideas. But because they’re both reasonable, it strikes me that this can’t possibly be an arena in which the Constitution commands one answer or the other. This is an arena in which culture or politics is going to determine the answer, just as it happens on so many other questions where both sides’ views are reasonable.
It is perfectly reasonable, it seems to me, to say that it is vitally important as a matter of either privacy or equality for women to be able to make this choice without being interfered with. It is also perfectly reasonable to say that this is human life, or so close to human life that we cannot allow its casual destruction. Those are both reasonable and thoughtful positions; they are not morally monstrous. But they are entirely inconsistent. When you have an inconsistency between reasonable views, you resolve it through dialogue and politics. You don’t usually resolve it by saying that one side wins and the other side loses as a matter of constitutional law.
EXCEPT TO SAY THAT POLITICS MAY LEAD TO THE CHANGING OF THE LAW.
That’s true, politics may lead to a changing of the law. My concern about Roe v. Wade is that it changed what was a vibrant and thoughtful moral, cultural, and political debate into a legal debate. We do that all too often, and it’s unfortunate. It allows one side to say, “I don’t have to listen to you because I have a constitutional right.” While that’s sort of technically true, you can’t really have a discussion in that atmosphere.
YOU SAY, “WE HAVE TO STOP ALLOWING SO MUCH OF POLITICS AND PRINCIPLE TO BE DICTATED BY THE NATION’S MORAL DIVISIONS OVER ABORTION . . . IF OUR POLITICS IS TO BECOME A POLITICS OF INTEGRITY, WE MUST NOT ALLOW ONE ISSUE TO GENERATE SO MANY OF THE RULES AND RHETORIC, FROM EITHER LEFT OR RIGHT.” BUT WOULDN’T YOU REJECT THAT LINE OF ARGUMENT IF THE ISSUE WERE SLAVERY? SOME PEOPLE SEE PARALLELS HERE.
I don’t deny those parallels, and I don’t deny that many people see this issue as crucial. At the same time, I’m concerned about the view, especially in the news media, that this is the only issue that matters.
You would also grant that in the sixties there were some who said, “I wish these people would stop talking about race so much. It’s not the only issue that matters.”
Yes, I do grant that. But there’s an important distinction. In the sixties, yes, race was a central issue. But there was an enormous difference between the politics of that time and the politics of today. In the sixties we had a political dialogue that enabled us to talk about big issues. We talked–we argued–about race. We talked about war and peace. We talked about ending poverty. Issues that are central to perennial human concerns were at the top of the national agenda. Today we have vehement arguments over the proper rate at which to tax capital gains.
You see, it’s not that abortion is an unimportant issue. The problem is we’re talking about it in a political era in which we seem unable to conduct productive public discussion of important issues. We talk about abortion, but we don’t talk about it, really. We yell. We scream. We sneer. And the media portray the abortion issue in a way that encourages us to think that everybody yells and screams about it.
But, in fact, the public shouting match isn’t an accurate reflection of what Americans think about abortion. The survey results have been pretty consistent for a long time. There is a set of restrictions on abortion that a majority of Americans favor very strongly; at the same time, a majority of Americans are rather uneasy about banning the practice entirely.
CAN YOU THINK OF TIMES IN YOUR PAST WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN LISTENING IN AN OPEN-MINDED FASHION AND SOMEONE HAS PERSUADED YOU OR AT LEAST FURTHER NUANCED SOMETHING YOU HELD STRONGLY SO THAT NOW YOU SEE IT DIFFERENTLY?
I could name quite a number of examples of that. Maybe I should mention one or two. In “The Culture of Disbelief,” I talk about people who want to ban the teaching of evolution. That is a subject on which I used to be very close-minded. I used to teach a course on law and science. When I taught the cases about trying to ban the teaching of evolution, or demanding equal time for evolution and creation, I presented the issue as a matter of narrow-minded sectarians trying to take over the apparatus of the schools. Then one of my students brought me up short. My student said you have to look at this from the point of view of the parents. All they want is what’s best for their children. They are deeply concerned about their children losing what’s good in their family’s religious tradition because of the way that the alternatives are presented. That really set me to thinking. I don’t believe I could have written “The Culture of Disbelief without that conversation.”
YOU’VE OBSERVED THAT MANY RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE CARICATURED BY THEIR OPPONENTS–AND BY JOURNALISTS.
It’s sad, but it’s true. I don’t want to sweep too broadly, but all too often the vision of religion and religious people that you get in the media is so one-sided, such a caricature. Abortion is an excellent example of this, where you get one story about the opposition to abortion. It’s basically Pat Robertson if you read the papers, or if you watch television especially.
OR A STORY ABOUT SOMEONE WHO’S BLOWN UP AN ABORTION CLINIC.
Yes, all the complexity of the situation is ironed out. Daniel Berrigan, the same Daniel Berrigan who crusaded against the Vietnam War, now crusades against abortion. But I have seen maybe one story about that in the last decade. It doesn’t fit the standard scenario.
OR NAT HENTOFF.
Or Nat Hentoff, an atheist who is against abortion. But my two biggest bugaboos are the caricatures of evangelicals and of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. There was that notorious story in the “Washington Post” which said that religious conservatives are “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” And the next day a retraction was issued that, instead of apologizing, just said there’s no data to support this characterization.
I’ve met moderates and even political liberals who are involved in the Christian Coalition. At a speaking engagement, I met two young women who call themselves political liberals and were involved on the fringe of the Christian Coalition. I asked them why, and they said something very interesting. They were evangelicals and political liberals, and they had tried to get involved in a variety of liberal organizations but had always found that their religion made them objects of suspicion. In the end, they were forced to choose between a place that appreciated their politics and not their faith, and a place that appreciated their faith and not their politics. They chose to go to the place that appreciated their faith and not their politics.
YOU SPEAK OF THE ANTIRELIGIOUS BIAS OF LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS. IS THAT CHANGING?
I don’t mean to say that all liberal intellectuals are antireligion, but there is, in much liberal intellectual thought, a tendency to treat religion as an object of suspicion. This goes at least back to John Dewey, who quite clearly in his writing on public education means to stamp out what he viewed as immigrant superstitions, by which he meant religions different from a kind of mainline American Protestantism. Judaism and Catholicism were somehow distortions in the mind, and when parents tried to raise their children in this kind of religious faith, you had to coax the children out of that because otherwise they couldn’t be good, upstanding citizens.
I think that such attitudes are a very serious problem. These are the intellectual currents that dominate our universities, and so our best and brightest kids are often learning from people who view religion with condescension, at best, if not outright hostility. I only wish that we would find a way in our thinking, writing, and talking to treat antireligious bias the same way we treat bias about race or sex. It’s just as much of a problem.
I also wish that academics would spend more time with religious people before concluding that there is this kind of close-mindedness that occurs simply because you are a person of deep religious faith who consults his or her religious convictions in deciding moral and political questions.
YOU WRITE, “THE GREATEST ERROR OF ALL IN CONSIDERING HOW TO BUILD AN INTEGRAL POLITICS IS TO JUDGE THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICS BY THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICIANS.” HAVE WE BEEN FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE INTEGRITY OF OUR POLITICIANS?
The integrity of our leaders is not unimportant; in fact, it’s crucial. But we are the voters. It’s the integrity of the voters that’s going to matter most. Are we willing to vote for what we say we are going to vote for? When we choose political leaders, do we demand of them the things we say we are going to demand of them, or do we allow them to break their promises, to do as they please, and then vote for them again?
CAN INTEGRITY BE LEGISLATED?
Yes and no. When you use something else as a proxy for integrity, sometimes you can legislate it. For example, if you want to legislate honesty in the securities markets, if you want to have some disclosure rules, you can do it; you’re being a technician, in effect. But when you’re trying to get directly to people’s behavior, it gets a lot harder.
In the book I give a couple of examples. A lot of people want to legislate rules for advertising in election campaigns. You just can’t do it. We can complain about advertising, but the notion of having rules strikes me as a bad idea. It leads to crazy cases like the one the Supreme Court decided 15 years ago that involved a politician in Kentucky. When he ran for office, he said, “If I’m elected, I’m not going to take my salary. I’m going to redirect my salary to the treasury.” He won, and he was brought up on charges in the state on the ground that this was like a bribe to the voters. That’s the craziness you get when you try to enforce rules about what you can and can’t promise in election campaigns. So while we should have very strong societal norms about what we do and don’t want politicians to do, we as voters should be willing to enforce those norms. The proposal to have a government agency regulating truth and falsity in advertising in election campaigns strikes me as a terrible idea.
You can’t legislate integrity in government. You can either elect good leaders or not elect good leaders. We can’t regulate integrity the same way that we regulate clean air. But what we forget is that politics is regulatory in its own way. It’s very clear that the Framers had a view that if people were corrupt in office, you would give the voters a chance to vote them out.
SO IN A SENSE, INTEGRITY IS LEGISLATED BY THE PEOPLE.
In politics that’s exactly right. In politics the level of integrity you get is the level of integrity people want to demand with their votes. You make tradeoffs. You say, well, this politician seems honest about X, dishonest about Y, but I like his view on Z. If the balance comes out, I prefer his view on Z, then he stays in office. If the balance comes out, his integrity is too low even though I like his views on these other issues, then he’s voted out of office. Those are political judgments, not legal judgments. Politics has to resolve it, not special prosecutors.
IN THE LAST CHAPTER OF INTEGRITY YOU WRESTLE WITH THE REALITY OF EVIL IN THE WORLD. YOU WRITE, “EVIL IS NOT SIMPLY THE RESULT OF A DECISION TO DO A BAD THING; IT IS THE RESULT OF REFUSING TO MAKE A DECISION TO DO A GOOD THING.”
When Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, that’s what she was really getting at when she talked about the “banality of evil.” What she was trying to say was that you don’t need moral monsters to create morally monstrous results. You need people who simply don’t think about what they are doing, or look the other way once or twice. In premedieval theology–in Augustine, for instance–that was the very definition of sin: it was the refusal to do God’s will, turning your face away from God. It seems to me that that is exactly right. Whether you want to talk about evil as not doing God’s will, or in strictly secular terms, evil is not doing the good; the point is, when you know what’s right, you’ve got to do it.
Integrity is not integrity unless it forces you at times to stand up against what everybody else is saying. If you always end up, just by coincidence, doing the popular thing, that’s a pretty clear sign that you lack integrity. Integrity requires you to risk something. You have to have something at stake, something you can lose. You can’t live a life of integrity unless you sometimes are willing to stand up and say, “I know all of my friends believe this,” or, “My society believes this. But I believe something entirely different, and here it is. Take your best shot.” It’s so much easier to sit back. It’s exhausting to stand up when people criticize you and when you are viewed as odd. But that’s precisely when integrity is tested.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 14
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