Integrity. What does it mean? What is it besides a word tossed around to describe something admirable, desirable, complete, untainted, natural, and even primordial? 'Integrity' is used to depict the quality of a person's character, and it is often used in this context as a synonym for "moral." In public discourse, integrity is sometimes a code word for virtue, honesty and trustworthiness in a person.
Integrity is a loaded word.
The integrity of an ecosystem, a wilderness area, a forest, a river, a mountain meadow or an alpine lake is invoked by advocates for the environment as an essential quality, not just a desirable one.
To claim that a person or an area of wilderness maintains its integrity is to say that all the components of its natural systems are intact, complete, uncorrupted. Jack Turner most succinctly made the point when he wrote in his recently published book "Travels in the Greater Yellowstone" (a fine read and an important book): "An intact ecosystem, like a body, requires a functioning unity of many parts, not just some; saving some of the parts doesn't count as "saving." When I ask the Emergency Room doctor to save my wife, I don't want him to return with her chin and liver."
The key phrase is "a functioning unity of many parts."
There is professional integrity in fields as diverse as science, athletics, business, the arts, intellectual endeavors and mechanical systems. Or not. For instance, science guided by ideology, politics or economic interests has been corrupted and forfeits any claim to scientific integrity. Integrity is a word not to be taken—or used, or understood—lightly. At the least, it implies a functioning unity of many parts, none of them corrupted.
Integrity has to do with the character of people, places and things. Shakespeare rendered one narrow, famous view of personal character in "Hamlet" when Polonius gives this advice to his son, Laertes: "This above all: To thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man."
It can be argued that if that self is ignorant, ill-informed, superficial, foolish, lacking in judgment or respect for the integrity, well-being, rights, opinions and true-self of others, then being true to thine own self is fundamentally self-indulgent folly, destructive to any concept of unity. Fanatics often lay a fraudulent claim to integrity through unflinching faith in their commitments, ideas and courses of action, thereby giving any useful and human concept of integrity a bad name. Suicide bombers, warriors whose faith supercedes the Geneva conventions and the politicos who support them both are examples of such bogus virtue and perverse morality (and mentality), though, if you can believe them, they are being true to their own selves. But by no stretch of definition do they have integrity.
A good and not at all facetious case can be made that integrity and participation in national, and, maybe, even high-level state politics in America are incompatible, though for both obvious and unobvious reasons most participants in the political game might dispute that argument. When it comes from special interest groups, most notably big business, the money that funds the campaigns that elect our politicians is not given to those campaigns without the strings that strangle integrity. Political campaign donors are not practicing philanthropy; they are making a business investment. Failing to recognize this reality of our system of government is disingenuous, denial, deceptive, stupid or, at the very least, a failure in the very integrity of understanding. Our current system of electing government officials gives influence and power to the highest bidder and is inimical to maintaining environmental, personal, political or social integrity in the country. Thus, the state of the nation.
A telling if lightly emphasized acknowledgement of the strings that strangle has been peeping through the news accounts earlier this month of presidential campaign fund-raising efforts. The headlines are about the record amount of money raised. The campaign press releases have emphasized the large numbers of people (i.e. average citizens) who have contributed small amounts to the campaigns. The underlying message is that the promoted candidate truly will represent the citizenry which is supporting him/her in large numbers and small contributions and will not compromise his/her integrity for the sake of the small numbers with large, sometimes obscenely large, contributions.
If that were true a chin and a liver could be called "a functioning unity of many parts."
The relationship between national politics, high-level state politics, and the interests that finance them both are as clearly connected to the integrity of the environment of America as they are to society as a whole and the personal integrity of its individual citizens. Environmental, political, social and personal integrity are conducive to well-being. Some would say they are essential. The proper term for the confusion, malaise and inevitable conflict that results from a system that is a threat to the very integrity and well-being of its people is alienation.
Alienation, too, is a loaded word.
