A matter of integrity - Living Humanism - Editorial

Humanist, May-June, 2003 by Burton Porter

The golf club in Amherst, Massachusetts, has a picturesque New England quality to it with views stretching to the Holyoke range three miles away, but my son Mark couldn't appreciate its charms that day in July. He had entered the annual tournament for juniors and, as it turned out, he posted the lowest score; that meant the club championship was his. However, when he checked his scorecard he realized that he should have received one more stroke on the first hole, which put him even with another boy. He reported this to the club officials and, in a playoff, he lost the championship by a stroke.

To my son, victories and defeats were a familiar experience. He played both golf and tennis throughout high school and took his losses with grace--it is something called style--although, I could see he was devastated to be defeated in this way. It was an especially hard blow because he wouldn't be able to compete for the junior title again--he was beginning college in the fall--so I tried to be unusually supportive, making all the right fatherly noises: "Better to lose this way than win the other. This was your greatest victory; it shows real character. I'm proud of you for being so honest." I knew that he needed to turn a bitter loss into a moral victory.

Losing a golf tournament is a relatively minor matter in the total scheme of things, but much more was at stake. My son was looking for reassurance about the kind of decision he had made. He wanted me to confirm an article of faith: that losing is redeemed when you do the right thing. It would allay the pain and reaffirm his view of life.

I provided that assurance in abundance--although I couldn't accept the belief myself. My mind was unresolved because the incident stirred up too many memories of unfairness--of times when my principles made me a casualty, a victim, and my faults were disproportionately punished. Part of the baggage I carried with me consisted of injustices, and now my son had lost out because of his decency, and I felt doubly resentful.

If this incident had occurred in a Hollywood film, then integrity would have been rewarded, and he would have carried off the trophy in the playoff. Because the honest people always win, just as the liars, cheaters, and frauds invariably lose--that is, in the movies. This American optimism is continually played out in the media and popular culture. It reinforces the myth that life is a morality play in which good triumphs over evil. We live in a just universe, we are told, where virtue guarantees success and nice guys don't finish last, where as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "At the center of nature lies the moral law, radiating to the circumference." As Americans we are convinced that a retributive system of rewards and punishments governs our society, based entirely on character. Just as God will elevate one person to glory and condemn another to eternal damnation, people are praised or blamed strictly according to merit. We all receive our just desserts, this side of the grave and the other.

I wish that my experience confirmed this worldview; however, I have encountered too many instances where fairness was met with malice and generosity with spite. Some people need to believe that life is fair and refuse to register any experience of injustice, but I can't fashion the world closer to my heart's desire. Too often the undeserving prosper, and they are even admired after death when their portrait is suitably retouched. (Though God can't change the past, historians can.) Worldly success is such a powerful icon that any criticism as to how that success was attained is thought irrelevant and churlish, a function of envy.

So, there is no essential correlation between what one deserves and what one receives. In Robert Frost's verse play A Masque of Reason, God visits Job and says,

  I've had you on my mind a thousand years
   To thank you someday for the way you helped me
   Establish once for all the principle
   There's no connection man can reason out
   Between his just desserts and what he gets.

Those who are deserving, meanwhile, take comfort in the belief that virtue is its own reward. They may not have been effective, they admit, but they are admirable and their hands are clean. But this apologia pro vita sua always leaves a bad taste in their mouth. They resent those who actually got what they wanted out of life and try to tell themselves that successful people are unscrupulous. "Behind every great fortune is a crime," Honore de Balzac wrote, and "amen" cry the poor-but-honest citizens. Even if Balzac's claim is true, it is an icy truth that won't warm the spirit or put food on the table, much less champagne and caviar.

What, then, should I have told my son: that although he behaved honorably, he shouldn't expect to get ahead that way; that if he wants to succeed he should have fewer scruples? Such advice seems both realistic and sad. Accepting this advice may lead to maturity; however, it also signifies a loss of innocence essential to oneself. We all understand why J. D. Salinger wants a catcher in the rye and why e. e. cummings wrote, "Down he forgot as up he grew."