July 25, 2004
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

CharactersBy CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

According to recent news reports, Martha Stewart's lawyers questioned the ''integrity'' of the jury verdict against her, Mike Myers demanded assurances of the ''integrity'' of ''Shrek 2'' before agreeing to work on it, officials overseeing the renovation of the Yale Bowl promise to protect the building's ''historical integrity'' and voting rights groups worry about ''ballot integrity'' for the 2004 elections. Integrity is undergoing what C.S. Lewis, in his ''Studies in Words,'' called ''the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative . . . and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good and bad.'' He took note of sadistic (to mean ''cruel''), rotten, villain, awful and significant. Now integrity, too, has lost its integrity.
Yet even after much of the meaning has leached out of integrity-the-word, in political matters Americans claim to care very much about integrity-the-thing. George W. Bush played to this audience in 2000, promising to ''restore honor and integrity to the office'' of president. And this June, when a Pew Research Center poll asked Bush supporters what they liked best about the president, integrity was at the top of the list, bundled with honesty. (Of course, had the Constitution permitted a third candidacy for Bill Clinton -- who, it is implied, deprived the Oval Office of integrity -- he would have won easily.) John Kerry seems to consider integrity a plus; in Senator John Edwards he picked a running mate whom even the Republican Senate majority leader Bill Frist praised on the day of selection as ''a man of great character, great integrity.''

But what do Americans think we're demanding when we demand integrity? Etymologically, as its common root with ''integer'' makes clear, it suggests wholeness. In its moral sense, it implies something unblemished, untarnished, not corrupt. A politician who has integrity is what the English call ''sound.'' You know where you stand with him.

Clinton was indeed the integrity-challenged politician par excellence: tearing up over an anecdote at one moment, strong-arming corporate donors the next. His foes complained that he ''compartmentalized'' his life, taking on a different personality and set of values according to the situation. Yet those who advocated ending Clinton's presidency on the grounds that he lacked integrity would sometimes make the opposite argument: that Clinton had an integrity -- albeit a bad integrity -- that he was practicing in secret. Call this theif-a-president-lies-to-his-wife-about-sex-he-must-be-lying-to-Congress-about-the-budget argument.

Integrity takes on a particular charge among contemporary Americans, who distrust pomp and exalt ''acting natural.'' It used to be that we were ruled by ''the president'' -- understood as a role, not a person. How we felt about him was determined less by his private habits or his smirk than by how well he did in that role. But we no longer want someone playing a role; we want to be ruled by a real guy. A nice guy, preferably. A guy with integrity.

The opposite of integrity is not dishonesty but hypocrisy. In an age when the ''real'' person is more important than the political persona, finding out what our leaders really, sincerely, think is necessarily an obsession, and politics becomes a dangerous exercise in hypocrisy-hunting. It was a need to test the integrity of the French Revolution's supporters, according to Hannah Arendt, that spurred the Reign of Terror. What made Robespierre assume that hypocrisy was the worst of all vices, she wrote in ''On Revolution,'' ''is that integrity can . . . exist under the cover of all other vices except this one.''

Arendt was writing in the early 60's. Her worries over the demand for integrity and the costs of political paranoia owed much to the recent memory of McCarthyism, but they are not out of place in our time. There is a vogue among government watchdogs lately for the strange word ''transparency'' -- which is not at all the same thing as honesty or accountability. The word implies that the public has no claims on what government does, as long as it is done openly -- or brazenly. Conversely, any government act decided upon in secret is liable to accusations of corruption, from Ira Magaziner's health care task force to Dick Cheney's energy task force.

Political correctness has also been a quest for integrity. It is, in fact, the same faith professed by those who thought Bill Clinton's sexual corruption implied political corruption. It is a faith that the part always reliably represents the whole, that the person who says ''Oriental'' instead of ''Asian'' or ''girl'' instead of ''woman'' probably has a bomb factory up and running in his swastika-hung garage. Persecution is the only way to deal with such people, and it is natural that today a wave of political books with the word ''lies'' in the title (lies being self-evidently bad, as in ''The Lies of George W. Bush'') should coincide with a wave of books with the word ''hate'' in them (hate being good, the banner of a club one should want to join, as in ''The I Hate Republicans Reader'').

This is where Americans have wound up with our zeal for political integrity. Where the word is not dangerous, it denotes only honesty of a certain kind -- a certain nonexistent kind. Michael Moore, for instance, is endorsing a form of integrity in ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' when he shows George W. Bush, cornered on the golf course, saying a few solemn words about terrorism before adding, ''Now watch this drive.'' Is the message that golfers should not pronounce on matters of state? Or that those fighting terrorism should not golf? ''Integrity'' combines the reasonable expectation that one be as straightforward as possible in all dealings with the unreasonable expectation that all dealings demand the same kind of straightforwardness. It winds up being the kind of honesty ideologues have, much as ''discretion'' is the kind of chastity promiscuous people have.


Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.