The Meaning of Integrity in Politics

Continued… John McCain and Barack Obama both appear to be men of integrity, having “1. soundness of and adherence to moral principle and character; uprightness; honesty,” according to the most common usage.

But that definition of integrity has been reduced over years, having been bandied around in political and business arenas, losing most of the original connotations of integration – “1. the act or an instance of combining into an integral whole. 2. behavior, as of an individual, that is in harmony with the environment. 3. the organization of the constituent elements of the personality into a coordinated, harmonious whole.”

The word whole would seem simple enough (“1. comprising the full quantity… 2. containing all the elements properly belonging; complete…”), but the common meaning is too static and suited more for inert objects than living beings.

Personalities and societies are never “complete”; life may be defined as a continuous quest for completeness. There may be occasional moments that seem complete — as if nothing could possibly be added to that moment (like a wedding, or the birth of a child, or a cathartic political convention) — but those moments always lead to new experiences and circumstances that are incomplete.

Our days are always incomplete until we sleep, at which point our hope is almost always to wake up and face another day, another week, another year, another set of opportunities and challenges. There’s always a horizon, beyond which we can’t see but hope to arrive at eventually.

So we can’t talk about a “whole personality” in the same sense we talk about a “whole set of dishes.” Even then, we rarely conceive our “whole set of tools,” “whole set of furniture,” “whole collection of music and books,” or “whole fortune” as truly complete. Things are always growing and changing.

A dynamic whole — e.g. a whole person, or a whole group of people — refers to a living system that adapts as its components change, as it encounters new challenges and opportunities. The components of a dynamic system (nor the system itself) cannot properly be conceived as mere parts or concrete things; they are active functions that affect qualities of the whole, not just quantities. The effects throughout the system of changes we make are difficult to anticipate, as its dynamic qualities interact in unexpected and unaccountable ways.

The challenges faced by the leaders of our society are complex in this way: economics, financial markets, geopolitics, technological progress, urban development, tribal warfare, and of course our ecological environment… these are all complex systems: changes that occur anywhere in these systems generate effects throughout, which generate new effects, etc…

Making matters even more complex, all of those complex systems are composed of smaller systems, they all interact with each other, and they all combine into even greater systems.

Al Gore gave a fairly simplified example of this in his speech Thursday: the economy, climate change, and the geopolitics of oil are essentially related to the same problem of fossil fuel dependence. That’s one aspect of a complex problem: the notion that one lever can work on three different systems: Solve the problem of dependence on foreign fossil fuels and you kill three birds with one stone.

But there’s also another, inverse aspect of that. In order to solve dependence on foreign oil we need multiple systems to work in concert. It isn’t just a matter of pulling one lever; ending reliance on foreign oil means integrating technological development and cultural motivation (which in turn require the cooperation of economic and political factors, which in turn require the cooperation of an endless variety of factors).

So these are the two aspects of addressing complex problems: on one hand converging many factors into a unitary focus, on the other hand organizing from within that focus, looking out to manage systems of diverse functions and operations. In other words, one eye looks in and the other eye looks out.

I don’t know of a better example of this than what Barack Obama is doing now. His platform isn’t just a bunch of policies cobbled together for expedience; Obama’s platform grows (and is still growing) out of a conciliatory approach and ideological background that has developed through decades of conversation, reflection, and learning, which was intended to maximize openness and adaptability.

As his “casual advisor” Cass Sunstein wrote the other day on Obama’s pragmatic empiricism, Obama-the-visionary “attempts to accommodate, rather than to repudiate, the defining beliefs of most Americans,” while on the other hand, “we should expect to see, from Obama, a rigorously evidence-based government.” Obama has built (and continues to build) his policies with one eye on each of the two aspects of complexity: one eye is trained in on a guiding focal point and the other looks out on real, complex circumstances as they emerge.

Obama’s apparent vagueness about policy isn’t merely a matter of not having ideas, or not wanting to risk committing to them publicly, it’s a matter of the ideas being too complex early on to reduce them to anything specific. The notion that you can effectively plan policy execution so far in advance is stupid. Obama the empirical pragmatist knows that policies are to some degree experiments that must adapt as realities emerge and evolve.

So instead of coming out early with artificially concrete and coherent policies, Obama has concentrated on defining and highlighting an open ideology and strong personality — the convergent levers needed to work on the big, complex challenges effectively.

In order to address the complex issues in the world, we need a program that is itself complex (in the sense of being a living, complex adaptive system, not merely in the sense of being complicated), that uses conflict and complementarity to generate new solutions and opportunities, while still being unified and coherent.

Ironically, Obama’s supersized “celebrity” status is what makes this program open to the greatest number and variety of contributors and participants. His persona symbolizes the movement in a way that (unlike movements held together by ideas alone) literally lives and breathes and grows with the many individuals who identify with it, giving people the opportunity to participate in their own special way.

Having established a sense of the whole, Obama can incorporate even greater conflict and variety without diminishing the overall quality and coherence — the integrity — of his program. He can give Hillary and Bill Clinton the stage at the Democratic convention without worrying about dissonance or degradation to his image and campaign message. This is what integrity means: the brighter shines any point in the Democratic party, the brighter they all become, like flames burning more brilliantly together.

John McCain presents an altogether different picture. His campaign seems to be degenerating into a sequence of disconnected shots and reactions. As Matthew Yglesias wrote today, McCain’s choices are “killing his brand.”

Just after the Democratic convention demonstrated Obama’s campaign integrity beyond any doubt, McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate demonstrated that his campaign (and perhaps Republican politics in general) is in a process of disintegration.

Apart from Yglesias’s (and many other liberal bloggers‘) constant ridiculing of Palin’s background and experience — and the implications on assessments of McCain’s ability and judgement — more conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan and even David Frum have expressed deep concerns about what this says about John McCain’s campaign and even perhaps the man himself.

There now appears to be a kind of reversal happening. Obama is ironically becoming the safer pick out of the two candidates. Frum remarked that McCain’s selection of Palin is “a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I’d be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it’s John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.”

My own take is the one major benefit of Palin’s selection — neutralizing the publicity for Obama after his performance at the convention — isn’t even very important to the outcome in November.

The big point that’s missed by McCain and most Republicans is that Obama approaches every event and decision not merely as a matter of winning the media cycle, but as an opportunity to learn and develop, to build the skills, knowledge, and support that will make future challenges more manageable.

I suspect in a way Obama doesn’t even mind giving up that attention. According to the profile of Obama by Jodi Kantor, even after his greatest performances, his main concern is how he can get better for the next one. He’s like a champion athlete who knows “the next game starts as soon as the last one finishes,” and it’s the championship that matters, not just how many points you accumulate along the way.

While McCain and his communications team engage in guerrilla PR battles, Obama developing the resources needed to carry him through the fall and into the presidency — and to actually do something as president.

This week we saw what the two potential administrations might look like. McCain showed that, despite being a man of great honour, he is not a man of integrity in the truest sense. We can expect from him another 4 years of reactionary and evasive maneuvering, concerned more with passing appearances than genuinely sustainable value, substance, and purpose.

Meanwhile Obama is demonstrating himself to the embodiment of integrity, par excellence, in its widest, deepest, richest, and most meaningful sense.

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