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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Public life is dominated from time to time by media storms around integrity. The behaviour of elected political leaders has led many to decry the deterioration in standards and the lack of integrity in public life. But what is integrity, and where does our concern with integrity in public life come from?
In this book, Martin Albrow argues that integrity has been an essential component of the rise of the West and a key feature that distinguishes the West from other civilizations. He traces the idea of integrity back to its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where integrity acquired its special meaning: the unique feature of any object with integrity was that it combined its wholeness or completeness with the embodiment of standards that came from outside it. Integrity was unity through values. He then follows the story of integrity through early Christianity and the Renaissance to the present day. Today, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation where the lack of integrity in public life is widely condemned while, at the same time, politicians can remain popular without even pretending to act with integrity: this is the new politics of the integrity vacuum.
The idea of integrity may be a distinctively western one but, like many other aspects of western culture, it has now become a property of worldwide society. Albrow concludes by arguing that integrity could add more value today by being combined with non-western wisdom as we strive to create an order where honesty, trust and reliability in our relationships with others are paramount.
This highly original account of an idea that lies at the heart of western culture will be of interest to anyone concerned about the state and future of our public life.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
1 An Ancient Legacy for the West
Reflections on existence
Integrity in early Christian thought
The expansion of the West
Notes
2 Integrity Becomes Modern
Niccolo Machiavelli and the New Realism
Shakespeare’s play with power and integrity
Francis Bacon and the new science
The fraught ideal
Notes
3 The American Experience
Benjamin Franklin as the talisman
Forming the American character
Herbert Spencer and the Anglo-American synthesis
Theorizing social integration
Notes
4 The Elusiveness of Personal Integrity
‘The darkness filled with organs’
Drop-out integrity
Outrageous integrity
Self as performance
Emerging relationships
Notes
5 Creative Integrity
Society and the creative individual
Overcoming alienation
Freedom in culture
The spirit of integrity
Working for integrity
Notes
6 Being Human
The perennial dilemma
Integrity for modern western philosophers
Alternative wisdom from the East
The Janus-faced concept
The incomplete journey
Notes
7 Media Storms in the New Century
Restoring ‘Honor and Integrity’: Bush vs Clinton
Media integrity storms 2004–8
The British integrity vacuum
Notes
8 The Integrity Crisis of Our Time
Organizing for integrity
Corporate scandals
Governance for integrity
Integrity in peril
Notes
Conclusion: Integrity for the Human Future
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Preface
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Integrity for the Human Future
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Nick, John, Stephen and Tom
Integrity
The Rise of a Distinctive Western Idea and Its Destiny
MARTIN ALBROW
polity
Copyright © Martin Albrow 2025
The right of Martin Albrow to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5987-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024938579
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
My work on the theme of integrity began at the turn of the century, while a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. I was fascinated by the righteous indignation of the American public electing a president to restore ‘honor and integrity to the White House’. The State University of New York at Stony Brook was generous in its welcome soon after, and I am grateful for the resulting friendship of Wolf and Anahi Schafer and the ideas they gladly shared.
While in the United States, I met former British diplomat Graham Leicester, who shared my interest in integrity and invited me to work with his International Futures Foundation, newly founded in Scotland. My warmest thanks to him and all his colleagues at that time, in particular Anthony Hodgson and Andrew Lyon, who each in their own way stimulated my early thinking.
Subsequently, as a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ sadly disbanded Centre for the Study of Global Governance, led by Mary Kaldor and the late David Held, I enjoyed and remain grateful for our discussions on integrity with scholars there, especially Helmut Anheier, Olaf Corry, Marlies Glasius, Hakan Seckinelgin, Sabine Selchow and Geoffrey Pleyers (giving me the chance to congratulate him on recently becoming president of the International Sociological Association).
Later in 2013, I was resident fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Law and Culture at the University of Bonn, where Werner Gephart and Daniel Witte were ever ready to follow, and sometimes save, my lines of thought. I thank them and Marta Bucholc of the University of Warsaw, also a fellow in Bonn, for their friendship and interest in my work. Other scholars with whom I have enjoyed both friendship over the long term and many fruitful exchanges while preparing this book include Anthony Giddens, Stephen Kalberg, Ino Rossi, Sam Whimster and Joy Zhang. Please accept my immense gratitude for the continuing pleasure of talking and thinking with you.
Materially, this book is the recent product of frequent discussions with a few people. My friend Colin Bradford, non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, has been a constant source of advice over the last twenty years. Zhang Xiaoying of the Beijing Foreign Studies University gave me my initial insights and Xiangqun Chang of the Global China Academy provided subsequent feedback on Chinese thinking around integrity issues. My warmest thanks to all three.
Above all, Hugh Canham, author and former managing partner of the city law firm Denton Hall, has at one time or another read, though not necessarily approved, every word of this text. This is the kind of generosity that only old school chums can experience. We have been in it for the long run. I’ll continue to be immensely grateful to him, as we both are to our mutual boyhood friend Barry Amond for the occasional, but much valued, words of support from Australia.
‘Retirement’ has allowed me the freedom that even the most accommodating employer cannot provide, and I have been blessed with the love and continuing encouragement from my wife Sue Owen, who has ungrudgingly supported my travels, figuratively and actually, to the places and topics I find compelling. Occasionally and to its benefit, she has cast her eagle eye over the text. Without her, this book could not have been written.
It is an added pleasure to have this opportunity to thank our tech entrepreneur son, Thomas Albrow-Owen, who has provided essential guidance on things atomic and subatomic.
I will not embarrass John Thompson with the single word that would summarize the completeness and high standards he requires and derives from the synergies of being publisher, professor and scholar at one and the same time. It is enough to thank him warmly for the multiple occasions of feedback and advice he has given to help me bring the ideas in this book to a wider reading public. For his colleagues at Polity Press, too, my warm appreciation for your professional work. My thanks in particular to Gail Ferguson who has made copy-editing a fine art form.
London, April 2024
Preface
It’s an extraordinary story. Integrity! The word that began with the honour of the virgin girl in ancient Rome is now the guarantee for fair elections in the West in 2024. We see it – and we don’t see it – everywhere.
Over two millennia, integrity has been a quality mark for the distinctive contribution of a few western countries to making the world modern. It’s a quirk of history that a single word mirrors so much of the expansion of the West. But then so much of history is a random walk through the past.
The origin of the word was the Latin ‘integritas’.1 It entered everyday language towards the end of the Middle Ages, signalling extremes, like the power of a woman or a resource for the cunning ruler. For integrity can apply to almost anything, or any thing.
Integrity points to distinct things, separate from others, complete in themselves. But it also means having high standards, especially moral, but also material, like being durable. For integrity applies to natural objects as well as human beings, and to the things they make.
The combination of those two meanings, to form what Lewis Carroll called a portmanteau word, is unique to the languages with that Latin origin. Those countries speaking them happen also to be ones that built the empires of the West – Spain, Portugal, France and Britain.
They also happened to be Christian, inheriting the belief in a God who had made all things. When the idea of completeness and standards was subordinated to a belief in the creator God, integrity became a religious requirement. Later, in the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe, when the Catholic Church lost its exclusive hold on believers, the rebel Protestants could seek to emulate God’s creativity.
The United States inherited all those cultures and took integrity into new territory. It became the calling card for its founding fathers and the stern instruction for its young people. Integrity inspires individuals to excel. To this day, it coexists in frequent tension with integration into churches, communities or organizations. Integrity and integration: both words that evoke different aspects of existence.
This is one reason for the longevity of the word – it applies to whatever exists. But the other reason is the linkage with standards. For that expresses the greatest discovery of all, the recognition of what makes us human, namely that our existence involves both material and ideal dimensions or, as it used to be expressed, the material and the spiritual. All cultures recognize both spheres of reality, but only these languages of western imperialism have a single word to cover both.
Now it would be gross to suggest that the word has driven the history of the West. But it has accompanied it, and developed over the centuries, to reflect the changes that it has experienced. Some of its power and hold over the imagination is a relic of its origin. For the Romans, the physical basis of virginity was equally moral, and the sexual connotations of integrity remain sufficient to bring down national and corporate leaders to this day.
But, as this book seeks to show, the scope of integrity has expanded vastly over the centuries. On this very day (literally as I write), there are at least two quite different references to integrity cited in the press. In one case, the European Commission is planning guidelines to counter threats to the integrity of elections that are likely to affect X, TikTok and other online platforms.
The other reference is to the long-running saga of the Rupert Murdoch media empire and victims of phone hacking, who are extending their allegations to implicate journalists and other employees. News Group Newspapers are quoted as saying that this is a ‘scurrilous and cynical attack on the integrity of those named in the case’.2
On the one hand, integrity refers to an institutional and familiar feature of contemporary life, namely elections, on the other, to the moral and professional standards of professional people. We don’t feel any incongruity there, and should we be scientists we would not be surprised to read about the integrity of soundwaves.3
So, what can’t have integrity attributed to it? That’s more difficult because integrity is part of the fabric of everyday life, and absence calls out for attention. But for some things we have no expectation of integrity – the weather, for instance, where we have no control, and which has no obvious boundaries. It is hardly a ‘thing’ or a distinct entity, however much it has an impact on us.
Human beings following their interests to the exclusion of all else have no integrity. In that case, morality is an external restraint on them. Consequently, as we will see in this book, markets inherently have no integrity except that which is imposed on them by legislators and regulators. All of which results, in capitalist systems particularly, in much effort being expended to get round the rules that authorities have imposed.
In the following pages, I trace the course of integrity from the ancient world through to the present when every culture has access to the idea in a globalized world. It is the West’s gift to the rest, even as it has lost its centre and, in my terms, unwound, distributing the results of its efforts far and wide.
Simultaneously, we also need to attend to the alternative worldview that has pervaded non-western cultures and persists to this day. For them, the world is a seamless web of relations, and things are inherently bonded with each other. Our global future depends on the cooperation of both views of human existence, a world of relations and a world of things.
Notes
1.
It used to be at the centre of the motto on the coat of arms at Donald Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago. (He replaced it with ‘
Trump
’.) Jemima Kelly. ‘Dispatch from Mar-a-Lago’,
FT Weekend Magazine
, 26–7 November 2022, p. 18. In a subsequent report, ‘The In Crowd’, also in
FT Weekend Magazine
, 2–3 March 2024, p. 18, Kelly tells how the coat of arms now decorates everything from the gates to the shampoo bottles in the showers.
2.
Financial Times
, Javier Espinosa, ‘EU to Fine Big Tech over Poll Disinformation’, 21 March 2024, p. 8; ibid., Alistair Gray and Daniel Thomas, ‘News Corp Claimants Seek Murdoch in Court’, p. 3.
3.
ASRC News, Photonics Initiative, ‘Scientists Achieve Major Breakthrough in Preserving Integrity of Sound Waves’, 17 July 2020.
https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/topics/photonics-initiative/
Although ‘integrity’ appears in the title, it does not actually get mentioned in the main body of the report.
1An Ancient Legacy for the West
The idea of the West has taken plenty of knocks in recent years. Speculation about a decline of the West is at least over a century old.1 That, in one respect, explains why I have written this book. For me, the West has dispersed or, in the word I use later, unwound. Its influence remains global, even if its core is in pieces. But that is some way ahead in my story.
Rather than this being a history of the West, I am going to follow an idea that is essentially western, and in so many ways an indicator of its basic impetus and motivations. It crops up in every sector of life, usually without comment since it is so familiar. But that is why integrity deserves closer attention because it comes near to what has been at the heart of the West for two millennia and now expresses so much of its present crisis.
This chapter will trace the meaning of integrity back to its origin in the Latin word integritas and take us forward to the beginning of the modern period by which time it had acquired most of the scope it has today. And behind integritas there is integer, with an original meaning of whole and intact, surviving as an English word to this day, meaning a whole number.
Whole numbers make it easy to count things, and the idea of integrity starts off with objects or entities that are separate from each other. But then, and here is its secret power, it adds another aspect, intimacy with standards or values of all kinds, material, moral, intellectual or aesthetic. In that connection with standards, it survives as an entity and seeks to fashion the world around it, call it context, environment or culture. At one time, for some even now, this would have been called its spirit.
This is the secret of integrity. The bonding of values and standards to the idea of wholeness, of the complete entity, creates a concept that is unique in the West. It mirrors and expresses the special drivers behind the West’s expansion. It is a continual impetus towards invention and exploration. It provides the creativity momentum of the West.
For those of us in the West, like me, the peculiarity of integrity is not immediately obvious. It is only when we begin to translate it into other languages that it becomes apparent. Not so with Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, for they all preserve a near replica of the original Latin. Along with the English, and with their shared offspring, the United States, they spearheaded the worldwide expansion of what we call ‘the West’.
With all their national differences, they have the same dualistic idea of integrity. Their integrity is restless and always incomplete. For when completeness is bracketed with standards and fulfilment of values, there is always room for improvement. Perfection is never achieved in the search for integrity, even if advances may always be measured.
When we move outside the Latinate languages to German for instance, Integrität is a rarely used loan word dating from the nineteenth century. The nearest equivalent, Rechtschaffenheit, conveys correctness, observance of standards but not the complete entity. It is often translated, however, as integrity.2
But take a Celtic language like Welsh and there is no equivalent. It has never used integrity as a loan word. The Welsh Academy English–Welsh Dictionary translates integrity as gonestrwydd, cywirdeb or uniondeb. Those terms in the Dictionary of the Welsh Language are rendered as honesty or truthfulness for gonestrwydd, rightness or correctness for cywirdeb and straightness or directness for uniondeb. None of these convey the duality of the English word.3
So it is in the rest of the world. Travelling further afield, the translation of the word ‘integrity’ into Chinese poses the same problems that any non-Latinate language faces. While the meaning of completeness or wholeness can be translated ‘完整’ [wan zheng], the moral aspects appear as ‘正直’ [zheng zhi] (uprightness) and ‘诚实’ [cheng shi] (honesty), and at other times are translated as ‘诚信’ [cheng xin] (good faith), or ‘操守’ [cao shou] (moral principle).4
Reflections on existence
The absence of a word for integrity is only a minor aspect of a profound difference between Chinese culture and the West. Integrity as a concept expresses the separateness of things, even as they embody or reach out to principles. In Chinese thought, things are bonded into the seamless web of reality, tianxia, all under heaven.
In classical China, the sage Lao Zi (born 571 BC) interpreted the ancient wisdom of the Dao De Ching where the idea of Dao is of existence composed of ever contending and combining opposites in an infinite reality. Often translated as ‘the way’, it covers both human behaviour and natural objects. The world-famous yin/yang sign symbolizes the unity and interplay of those opposites.
There was a time in the West when similar ideas were represented by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535–475 BCE). He explored how the many might have arisen out of the one, how the world was a fundamental unity, but composed of opposites, in permanent tension, always in flux. ‘It is not possible to step into the same river twice’ was one of his typical ways of expressing ceaseless movement.
Modern science reflects, too, on the fundamental nature of reality. Fritjof Capra has drawn our attention to the similarities between the worldviews of Heraclitus and Lao Zi. Further, he has argued that modern physics’ discovery of ever deepening complex relationships of subatomic particles is consistent with these ancient senses of the unity of existence.5
However, a fateful intervention occurred to disrupt this fundamental consensus between eastern and ancient thought in Europe. This was the development of atomism in the century after Heraclitus. Linked also with the names of Democritus and Epicurus, reality is no longer a unity. It now consists of distinct units, atoms, each indivisible but separate from each other in space. They are in constant motion and, when they collide, they create new things.
It is difficult to overestimate the long-term significance of this innovative line of thinking for the development of the distinctive civilizational characteristics of the West and its unique features compared with the East. Thus, the great historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, pointed out that atomism played no role in its traditional practices.6
For a twentieth-century writer on the history of philosophy, Bertrand Russell, atomism resembled modern science more than any other ancient theory.7 It refused to look for ultimate causes, to ask why, and simply sought to answer how something happened. It was a mechanistic outlook, suited to the much later development of experimental science, pulling things apart, seeing how they worked.
Atomism was a fateful step, followed by many others that led to increasing separation from the wisdom of the East.8 It shifted attention to a world of things in which human beings were exposed to events they did not control. Things, moving independently of each other in unpredictable ways, made an environment of ever-present threats. Actions to ward off those threats become an equally important imperative.
It is a deep-seated feature of dominant western ways of thinking about the world that has persisted to the present day. How do we as human beings come to terms with a world we have not made and where we are simply one set of entities, among many others, all with their own distinct place in creation? Even the most prominent critics of the Epicureans, the Stoics, aimed mainly to provide an alternative code of behaviour for human beings in a very similar world.
The world of entities becomes especially alarming in times of uncertainty. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the philosophy of Epicurus both provided some reassurance and also inspired one of the greatest literary achievements of all time, the De Rerum Naturae, ‘On the Nature of Things’, written by the Roman aristocrat Lucretius (c. 99–55 BC) in the century before the birth of Jesus Christ.9
In a poem of more than 70,000 words, Lucretius ranged over the need for peace to the atomic constitution of matter, over the mind and spirit to the finality of death, over the existence of deities to their absence from human affairs. He asserted that all entities in the world had their own properties and therefore the freedom to have special effects on others. Those qualities inhering in the entity would make distinctive contributions to the course of future events.
Lucretius explored the human condition. He began from the very foundations of existence, and no aspect of human behaviour was off limits for his imagination. Integrity is the common feature that human beings share with natural entities, the quality of being an identifiable whole object.10
It alludes to the very existential nature of the person and to the place he or she occupies in the whole of creation, and at the same time it points to the distinctive feature of the place of any entity whatsoever. In the case of the individual human being, the place is known as society, embedded in nature and framed by culture.
In one of his most celebrated, if notorious, speculations, Lucretius asserted that the smallest possible constituent of matter, the atom, and the human being shared a common characteristic, namely free will. Though often derided because he declared that both swerved and collided as they moved, it was his basic assumption that the atom and the person were similar in this respect. They each shared the same attributes that governed their behaviour.
It was a contemporary of Lucretius, the celebrated Roman orator Cicero (106–43 BC), who has provided posterity with the fullest use of integrity. Through his engagement in political disputes, Cicero is the classic source for the language of public debate in his time. His uses of integritas covered meanings of undamaged, soundness of mind, incorruptibility, chastity and purity of language.
The Latin root of integritas, namely integer, conveys the underlying sense of unity and continues to be used to this day for the single undivided numerical value. But there is no moral sense involved. The contrary was the case for its derivative. With long-term consequences for public discourse in the West to this day, integritas went beyond wholeness to cover value-laden ideas of moral perfection.11
The association of ideas that brought completeness together with morality in the Latin was female virginity. The sexist assumption in the public morality of the Roman Republic was that a broken hymen meant loss of virtue, the end of chastity.
This linkage of the physical and the moral is the root of the duality of meaning in integrity, retained to this day in all the languages that have a word derived from the Latin integritas. It was to have the long-standing consequences for public discourse that became one of the distinguishing features of western culture.
We may infer from the incendiary power of the word ‘integrity’ in public debate that some of those original sexual connotations are buried not far below the surface. We will find them amply illustrated in Shakespeare, even with geopolitical connotations!
An archetype at work in the Roman imagination lurks behind the western consciousness. Bill Clinton’s misdemeanours with a young woman weighed much more with the American public than the history of the dubious business dealings of the Bush presidents’ forebears.
If today we see integrity as an issue in every sector of life, it is because, like Lucretius, we appreciate the unbroken chain of being that links us to the existence of the universe. Beyond that, at the same time, we feel our contemporary troubles threaten the unique position that we have created for ourselves in the world around us.
We shall find in our exploration of the idea of integrity that the concerns the poet Lucretius addressed in his epic poem, namely the nature of existence and the variety of things in the world, remain to this day as the deep and underlying direction to which all references to integrity take us. Call it pathos, call it hubris, the culture of narcissism or what you will, it is our frequent reference to integrity in every sphere of life, human and natural, that has made it into the watchword for the special crisis of our time.
Integrity in early Christian thought
The hold that integrity was to take on the western imagination was established during the long domination of Roman Catholic Christianity. The only language that enabled the warring princes of medieval Europe to find an accommodation between their competing interests was Latin, and this was essentially the preserve of those educated in religious schools and universities.
What concerns us here is the twist that Latin authors gave to the idea of wholeness by linking it to moral virtue. The early texts of the first three centuries after Cicero tended to equate the word with sexual purity. Christian writers gave particular emphasis to its association with chastity. But virginity, too, was adopted into Christian narrative with the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary, mother of God.
Margaret E. Mohrmann, a professor of both religious studies and medical ethics, has traced how early Christian writers were primarily concerned in their discussions of integritas with what God had in mind by creating girls as virgins.12 The raising of the discussion to a higher level came about by considering integrity as purity rather than simply an unbroken hymen.
It is with the writings of Ambrose of Milan (339–397) that a change can be detected. More emphasis was placed upon the moral achievement of chastity rather than the preservation of physical virginity. In fact, the idea of integrity now applied to the whole person, male and female, possibly a reflection of Ambrose’s reading of Cicero in particular.13
In the thirteenth century, the most influential Catholic theologian of the later Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), revived the original Latin dual emphasis in integritas, wholeness plus morality. In the lives of saints, it meant striving to reach further to achieve a spiritual state of being. Aquinas claimed moral purity belonged to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Through their mortal sin, they lost their original integritas. But believers in the Christian God could recover that state of sinless perfection by taking the Church’s sacrament of penance.14
It was its infinite scope of integrity that Aquinas envisaged in his most all-embracing reference to its wholeness, namely to the universe. He argued it was the duty of a king to secure the continuity in official positions, just as divine providence ensured renewal of corruptible things through generations ‘and so conserves the integrity of the universe’ (ut vel conservetur integritas universi).15
The early citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) come from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and are overwhelmingly from Christian contexts.16 They come under three main definitions:
‘The condition of having no part or element taken away or wanting; undivided or unbroken state; material wholeness, completeness, entirety.’ Its first citation is from Sir Thomas More’s
Workes
(‘The answere to the first parte of the poisoned booke’ 1533): ‘not y sacrifice nor oblacion, whyche to the integritie thereof requyreth both the forms.’
‘The condition of being not being marred or violated; unimpaired or uncorrupted condition; original perfect state; soundness.’ Its citation from 1450 speaks of Christ’s birth ‘savying his moders integritee’.
17
‘In moral sense’ ‘a. Unimpaired moral state; freedom from moral corruption; innocence, sinlessness’. The first reference in 1561 is from the English version of the reformer Calvin’s
Institutes
and speaks of man finding eternal life through integrity ‘b. Soundness of moral principle; the character of uncorrupted virtue, esp. in relation to truth and fair dealing; uprightness, honesty sincerity.’
18
Strikingly, the OED reference make it clear that the original combination of meaning that the Latin integritas carried survived into its reception in English printed texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.19 It left open the possibility of revisiting the complete separation of the two sides of the moral and the material that was always implicit in the original Latin. It was to be a direction that was followed ever more vigorously in the following centuries. For a time, the Christian world held them together, but it was not to last.
Tracing the development of the Christian idea of integrity through to the English King James version of the Bible of 1611, ‘integrity’ appears several times, but no longer is the primary emphasis on chastity. Now it is being used as the translation for terms like innocentia (blamelessness) and simplicitas (guilelessness), which appear in the original Latin version of the Bible, rather than integritas.
For those who held true to Christian principles, integrity became a matter of a way of life, and the Psalms of the New English Bible intoned:
Judge me. O Lord, for I have walked in mine integrity … (Ps. 26:1 repeated in 26:11);
Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he is that is perverse in his lips and is a fool (Pr. 19:1);
The just man walketh in his integrity … (Pr. 20:7).20
Mohrmann sums up Christian integrity as denoting not simply wholeness and completeness but also reliability over time, the predictability and visibility of goodness in a person who was consistently just and honest.21 This elaboration of the core meaning of the Christian idea of integrity through the Middle Ages highlights the contrast with the ambiguities that we shall see mound up to surround it in later periods.22
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Christianity for the development of the western idea of integrity. In its essence, it underpinned the Epicurean view of a world of things. But it was the emphasis on the supreme position of God as their creator that set the West off on a course that was eventually to overwhelm all other civilizations. The very first sentence of the King James Bible runs: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth,’ and the first chapter of the first book, Genesis, is a recitation of the comprehensiveness of his creativity, from ‘great whales and every living creature that moveth’.
That linkage of a world of things with the idea of divine creation was a conceptual legacy for the West long after Christianity ceased to control everyday life. The Christianization of atomism brought the idea of the creator God to bear on the self-image of the human being as well as on the origin of objects. The elements had now been assembled to make the quest for integrity a key factor in western development.
Writing in the 1960s, the French historian Fernand Braudel, widely acknowledged among professional historians of the time as pre-eminent in their trade, was able to write that Christianity was ‘an essential reality in western life’ even for atheists.23 ‘Western Christianity was and remains the main constituent element in European thought – including rationalist thought, which although it attacked Christianity was also derivative from it.’24
The expansion of the West
What we now regularly call ‘the West’ has developed over the last two millennia from an amalgam of the heritage of ancient Europe and the Christian religion. Accompanying its expansion into the Americas and growth into a wider world empire, it adopted the idea of modernity as its special quality.
With modernization as its mission, and with its extension as globalization, the West has crossed the boundaries of every other civilization. In respect of China, for instance, it engages with a civilization with the longest continuous roots stretching back in time, having sustained its distinctive culture through centuries of contact with others. The continuity of a civilization is also associated with the meanings it attaches to its own place in a wider world, and of human beings within it. In its culture are embedded existential assumptions about human life and death, other living beings, the environment, the past and the future.
The aim of this book is to show that integrity has developed in conjunction with these themes as a distinctive feature of the western outlook on life. In its reference to the wholeness of any entity, and the dependence of an entity on the observance of principles, integrity is the counterpart to the fluidity and transient nature of so much of western life. It also reaches into its continuous drive for innovation. We can call it a central meme, an idea reproduced over time and repeatedly in different contexts.
From its beginnings in ancient Rome, integrity has taken hold in the languages that are derived from Latin. They also happen to be the languages of the peoples who voyaged out of Europe into the Americas and around the world. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and English all adapted the word to their respective vernaculars. It accompanied the restlessness and striving of all the colonial nations.
Other ideas too lasted the course from ancient origins through to the expansion of Europe in the sixteenth century, with the voyages to the American continents and around the world. One was, of course, ‘empire’, which cropped up repeatedly in the intervening centuries as an image of transnational order and control.
Integrity emphasized morality. But if you put it together with empire, then, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, it provided a potent combination to fire up the imperialism of later centuries. Integrity became the great counterfactual, the quality forever eluding the seeker after perfection, always escaping the hold of those who imagine they have it in their grasp.
When the times are chaotic, when the individual is in deep trouble, integrity is the repeated appeal for a halt to the damage, the destination that promises safety and stability. When peace and contentment can offer lasting satisfaction, then the restless imaginations of the explorer or the artist, the inventor or the prophet find alternatives to a settled existence and invite others to cross boundaries into new worlds.
Integrity is a watchword and signal of an outlook in the peculiar civilization that the West has thrust on the rest of the world. It is also a condition, never permanent, of both the natural world and the things we make, and sometimes of ourselves, from time to time. In recent times, globalization has been the shorthand term for all such features that make up the distinctive quality of the age we have been living in, the restlessness, the new frontiers, the dangers for so much that is held dear. In that context, seen in the light of its original framing, the reader can appreciate how integrity has come to represent the contrary counterpart, expressing opposition to what otherwise seems to threaten to sweep away all that is familiar and cherished.
With that in mind, we will continue to follow integrity in this book from its origin in the Roman Republic to see if in any way its past holds out hope for repairing the precarious state of our world today.25
Notes
1.
Oswald Spengler (1926 [1920/22]),
The Decline of the West
[
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
].
2.
As in R. J. Hollingdale’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Götzendämmerung
(1889) (
Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist
[1968]), see pp. 25, 77, 96, etc. This does not prevent Charles Taylor in his monumental study
Hegel
(1975) from inferring that the German philosopher was in fact writing about what in English would be called integrity when ‘external reality [which] embodies us and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien’, p. 148. This completeness is only obtained by people seeing themselves as emanations of universal
Geist
(spirit). I think Taylor is fully justified in his inference. In fact, Hegel is giving added emphasis to the meaning of integrity, without finding an equivalent term in German but only via roundabout phrases like ‘consciousness first finds in self-consciousness – the notion of mind – its turning point, where it leaves the part-coloured show of the sensuous immediate, passes from the dark void of the transcendent and remote super-sensuous, and steps into the spiritual daylight of the present’ (G. W. F. Hegel,
The Phenomenology of Mind
[1931 (1807)], trans. J. B. Baillie). ‘Integrity’ is more succinct!
3.
I am greatly indebted to the late Reverend Dr D. H. Matthews, a native Welsh speaker, for informing me on these points.
4.
I am very grateful to Dr Frances Yiying Zhang of the Confucius Institute, Goldsmiths, University of London, for providing the Chinese characters and translations.
5.
Fritjof Capra (1976),
The Tao of Physics
, p. 121.
6.
Joseph Needham (1969),
