These wise sayings contain important truths for us to consider in our current cultural context. First: “Integrity is what you are; prestige and reputation are what other people think of you.” Second: “Integrity creates character.”
Reputations are external, exist in other people’s minds, and are transmitted through words and slogans. Reputations are easily manipulated, created, or crushed, depending upon the way the winds blow. Feathers tossed to and fro. Integrity and character are internal and are the source of what you really are. Integrity and character can best be developed and maintained.
Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Integrity inspires high standards to accomplish positive results. Growth in integrity is a marker for moral maturity and should be the goal of each person. Development and maintenance of integrity and good character are the goals of all positive education and learning from infancy to the grave.
Maintaining a good reputation is also a worthy goal for an individual and an institution. As Shakespeare wrote in Othello, “Who steals my purse steals trash … but he who filches from me my good name robs me of that which does not enrich him but makes me poor indeed.” Maintaining a good reputation becomes harder at a time when accusations — even when false or absent investigation or evidence — can effectively wreck a reputation or an enterprise. Urgent revelations of wrongdoing speed across the air waves, blown by social media and the desire for 24/7 coverage of anything that will catch attention for a moment. “Innocent until proven guilty” is ignored or deemed to be dull. The stench of scandal gains attention, whereas the careful work of investigation and good judgments are slow, complex and tedious.
Developing a bad reputation and even an evil character is possible and easy, leading to a questionable prestige. The opposite of integrity is to be immoral or amoral. The only person who tends toward total evil is the one who is amoral, which involves having no moral compass at all. Peer pressure and lack of positive social norms grease the slide downward into danger and even destruction.
No one or any human institution maintains unblemished integrity or unmitigated immorality. Most of us struggle in the gray spaces between, making the best decisions we can according to our abilities and contexts, and trying to be the best we can be according to our lights. Even when we try to do good or evil, our actions have unintended consequences. Therefore, judge not lest you be judged.
Some leaders of government, business, and community march into this moral struggle propagating falsehoods and wrongheaded guidance to gain our support for their egos, positions, and ideologies, whatever those might be. Our propensity for errors of attributing misdirected expertise complicates the matter. Public relations gurus resurrect or manufacture “celebrities” and “influencers” from among sports or entertainment professionals as instant experts. They might never have uttered an intelligent word in public — only obscenities or rap phrases shouted to spaced-out crowds in dark dungeons. They appear suddenly as from a mist to “reveal” “hot secrets” or “earth-shaking” endorsements, or they “fire back” attacks on politicians and other public figures. All this corrodes our public discourse.
Something better than expressions of disgust or despair resulting in apathy is required to redeem our public discourse and culture. We can get to work at self-development of one’s personal integrity and inner self. We can support leaders and fellow citizens who give evidence of having the integrity to which we aspire. We can avoid words and actions that are contrary to integrity and good character, not for ego satisfaction or to improve one’s reputation but to enjoy a more meaningful and creative life. We can also support the educational and other institutions in Montgomery County that guide our youths and all of us in promoting mature moral judgments and actions. Thereby, we can improve the quality of live for ourselves and all our neighbors and spread hope.
Raymond Brady Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
