What is integrity anyways?
We talk about integrity in journalism. No good just throwing words around. What is that quality?
Well, first of all, in my view, integrity is adherence to the truth. Ranged against adherence to the truth are a fear for one’s life, fear of a loss of livelihood, pressure from others, etc.
Like so much else in this Age of Devolution, integrity as reverence for the truth seems to have suffered. We lack a good moral compass.
Integrity is also being good for your word. Our word is more valuable than anything else I can think of in the interpersonal arena. If the truthfulness of our word or the failure to honor our promises becomes an issue, we’ve lost a great advantage.
As a person who adjudicated claims, I know that the whole hearing room atmosphere would shift when the first lie was told and made known. Contradiction, inconsistency, impossibility – it mattered not. Any swerving from the truth needed to be explained satisfactorily.
If not, then the proceedings shifted and became about credibility. They ceased to be about wholly accepting a story. Up till that point, it sounded credible. Now it had become suspect.
We’re less formal in everyday life but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge the other’s credibility. Just without the tools and laws.
Telling the truth and keeping one’s word are things we learned in kindergarten: Take turns; put things back; keep your word; tell the truth. (2)
I consider this the hallmark of a “decent” person: What they learned in kindergarten they still practice.
A population that agrees to act decently – which implies fairness and compassion – is a population that will want a journalism of integrity. There’ll be fertile ground and a healthy demand for such a press when we return to a basic standard of morality, a basic standard of decency.
So to answer what is integrity: Integrity, in my view, is adhering to a code of conduct that has a person’s behavior towards others be moral and decent.
All the things we learned as a young child, that’s what we need to return to. Did not Jesus say, you must become as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven? My experience reveals our natural state is one of original innocence. (1) Being in that state, it seems to me, would mean “to become as a child.”
Footnotes
(1) See “Original Innocence,” September 21, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/09/21/original-innocence-2/ and “There is No Original Sin; Only Original Innocence,” May 22, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/05/22/there-is-no-original-sin-only-original-innocence/
(2) All I ever needed to know, I learned in
Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum
(https://eflfocus.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/all-i-ever-learned-in-kindergarten.pdf)
Click to access all-i-ever-learned-in-kindergarten.pdf
Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten.
Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand box at nursery school.
These are the things I learned. Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some
and think some and draw some and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday.
Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out in the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup?
The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why. We are like that.
And then remember that book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK! Everything you need to know is there somewhere: The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation, ecology, and politics and sane living.
Think of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap.
Or we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put things back where we found them and clean up our own messes.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.