Howard Mitchell | Inspiring integrity – a collective call to action

The International Centre for Academic Integrity alludes to five fundamental values necessary to sustain integrity in any circumstance: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility.

As French philosopher Voltaire said, “Every man is guilty of the good he did not do “…. and an often repeated rule of thumb says, “If it’s not right, don’t do it, and if it’s not true, don’t say it.”

All of that sounds very straightforward. One definition of integrity is “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles”. Honesty is easy to understand – just don’t lie and just stay with the facts.

But whose ‘facts’ are these? They vary from person to person. Some facts cannot be held in your hand or seen physically, and the challenge is, how will they be proved, possibly by faith? The cynic says faith is a belief in something that does not exist!

As a lawyer, I am trained to collect facts and organise truth in accordance with my client’s interests. Is that all that is necessary for me to beat my chest and say righteously that “I am a lawyer and an honest man”?

Lawyers need more than the ability to organise facts so as to demonstrate a particular truth and then say that we are honest. We have to demonstrate by example that we are people of integrity. This trait has to be across the board within all professions.

Then there are moral principles, which are not something you can get from an online shopping platform – well, they do sell everything, don’t they?.

However, morals, principles, values, and attitudes are concepts of a culture, which, in turn, is the social behaviours and customs of a particular society. For example, when we speak of these strong moral principles we must be aware that we get those by socialisation. This is critical as bad examples or leadership can destroy what has been learned from experience. In the absence of a culture of moral principles, positive values and considerate attitudes, a human being is just a more intellectually advanced type of animal, and “honesty” will be interpreted selfishly and only for individual advancement.

Jamaica’s cultural history isn’t, unfortunately, full of examples of strong moral principles, beginning with the dominant Western culture adopted largely from the British, which was born in land capture by Cromwell, piracy, and robbery led by Henry Morgan with royal encouragement and then 300 years of the brutal slavery of our main ancestors. Those who were born after slavery and during the insidious mind-bending propaganda of colonialism have simply been socialised by that experience and example. We joined whatever clique or class that effectively modernised the values and attitudes and “strong moral principles” of our cultural captors and leaders.

It is small wonder then that people gravitate towards the safe harbour of tribalism with its particular set of rules and political moral principles that allow us to interpret facts in ways that suit partisan political beliefs. It makes life difficult for those of us who were influenced by religious upbringing or socialisation of a different sort to interpret these “political facts” and arrive at a position of honesty.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Anancy is a sort of crossover anti-hero, admired for cunning and ability to lie and cheat his way to success, or that the gunman is a model for our youth and that producing children without taking responsibility for them is a valid aspiration.

Unfortunately, these traits are our truths, our facts.

We also need to recognise that honesty is a neutral concept. It is simply stating the facts as you see them without bias or influence or interpretation. Integrity, on the other hand, places honesty in a framework of morality and values.

In the Jamaican context, our historical culture of values and attitudes is so coloured with violence, bias, deceit driven by the need to survive and a pretence motivated by the need to be accepted within a society that is so unequal and divided by tribal politics.

Which brings us to leadership, wherein the idea of a leader inspiring followers in a context where the socialisation of those followers is not aligned to the leader’s values and attitudes is unreal and impractical. Our social realities are so confusing, and we are so vulnerable in the face of all of the challenges that we have, an uncertain economy, an outdated and ill-fitting constitution, an increasingly hostile global political division of East versus West, and a hostile climactic environment.

There is an urgent need to reset, recalibrate, and upgrade.

Additionally, as if all of the above were not enough, Jamaica is globally the third most exposed country to natural hazards – hurricanes, floods, drought, landslides, and earthquakes – and yet we have created, locally, an almost ungovernable system of class division, grades of colour acceptability, educational and economic stratification, and of partisan tribal division.

In the face of all these vulnerabilities and our refusal to face the reality of these challenges, which leader could ever inspire integrity? They would be so busy dodging the various agenda conspiracies of our divided classes and tribes that they are almost compelled to deceive and dissimulate!

If we must honestly entertain the notion of inspiring integrity by leadership and by collective example, we need to understand and accept that our country is in a crisis of dysfunctional behaviour. A state of selfish and brutal individualism, identification with anti-heroes, and deviate activities. These, ultimately, will make us fail as a society if we continue on this path.

It is critical to work as a well-oiled machinery. We need to arrive at a consensus as to who we really are and who we want to be, define what values are important to us as they change over time, and we need to adopt attitudes that make us more efficient. It is also important to recognise that discipline and governance are more efficient and beneficial than lawlessness and chaos. We need to use the educational curriculum as a tool to re-engineer the society and social behaviours.

Laws and the police are not enough, filling courts and jails with lawbreakers and executing young men judicially or extrajudicially will only make it worse. All of us – Church, State, private sector and civil society and other stakeholders must embark on a deliberate, structured programme of promoting and teaching and living values and attitudes that reject the brutality of our past and the selfish tribal divisions of our present. This is a collective responsibility, and no one should shy away from it.

The ground has to be fertile before the seed is planted and, and interestingly, earth becomes more fertile after the passing of a hurricane. What better time to come to an agreement as to who we are as a people, what values we want to live and practice as a people, and what we want our society to look like after we have passed from this life.

There is no time like now, and if we miss this opportunity, we are going to be rebuilding physically on a false and dysfunctional base, which cannot sustain prosperity or economic success. As we are developing our critical infrastructure, what are we doing about the hearts and minds of our people?

Re-engineering human society should be undertaken in the same manner as we have re-engineered our economy and are now benefiting from that resilient restructuring. That is non-negotiable.

Howard Mitchell is an attorney-at-law. This commentary is an abridged version of his speech at the annual conference of the Association of Certified Anti-Fraud Examiners on November 20. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com