F**ing Integrity

Václav Havel and seeking freedom from The Lie

Recently I had one of those tiny integrity challenges that feel annoyingly important. I was cycling with my son, who still has all the control of a comedy drunkard, his front wheel weaving wildly up the pavement. One swerve revealed the loss of the rubber stopper on the end of his handlebars, because it left a long silver gouge in the side of a shiny black four wheel drive. “That looks like Harry Potter’s scar” said my son and cycled merrily on. 

I stopped, sighed, and looked around. Had anyone seen it happen? A dinner lady was smoking outside school gates nearby, conspicuously unconcerned. I took in the large, renovated house by the car, the chequerboard tiled path, the neat window boxes and brass knocker in the shape of a fox’s head. They can afford to repair a scratch, the least lovely part of me whispered. Who drives an SUV in zone 2 anyway. My foot twitched on the pedal, eager to set off. No one saw. 

I *hate* moments like this. Moments where acting with integrity will be costly and the alternative is so attractive. They seem so banal, and mostly I skid over them, not returning the extra change, keeping the duplicate delivery, failing to admit to the breakage. My brain is excellent at motivated forgetfulness, so I couldn’t even recall most of them. Only the faint uncomfortable feeling, the stifled mutter of conscience  lingers. 

Recently though, I am coming to the conclusion that how I act in these small moments matters. Our repeated choices become habits and habits reveal our character and I want my character to be honest, maybe especially because my instinct often isn’t. Honesty used to obviously be something to aim for, but now, with our leaders shamelessly abandoning it, it could become a dying virtue. 

Honesty is one of those things where the common good requires a level of personal sacrifice. If I want to live in a high trust society, I need to be trustworthy. It is no good expecting and requiring other people to have integrity if I haven’t bothered to grow it myself. And I know, deep down, it’s good for me too, because being trustworthy helps my relationships, and good relationships help me thrive. 

However, my brain whispers, I have no relationship with the owner of this car, and I never will have. They will never know it was us. I tot up the possible costs in my head - hundreds, I imagine. The scratch is deep, the car looks like one which can only be serviced in specialist dealers rather than at the cheerful garage under the railway arches like ours is. Hundreds of pounds is not a negligible amount in our family budget. Surely it would be in theirs. 

I realised I had written a whole character brief for the owner of this car, but in actual fact have no idea whose it was. It might be on loan, the fancy house might hide crippling debt or a marriage fragile enough that a stray scratch could become ammunition. My house looks fancy to many. I am, in relative terms, rich. I’d still feel sad if someone scratched my car and cycled off, still feel it told me something bleak about the world. It would become a narrative beat in the story of what we can expect, what other people are really like.

Standing by the shiny car, desperately trying to come up with a reason I shouldn’t have to pay for the repair, I gave in. “Ugh! Fine!” I prayed (most of my prayers are about this eloquent) and scribbled a note on an old receipt. I had to make myself write my real number, clear enough to read, and still added a “feel sorry for me” line about it being my five year olds fault. I stuck it under the windscreen wiper and cycled on. Ideally, virtue leaves you with a glow, but I just felt pissed off. Later that night it rained, and I felt briefly smug that the note would be ruined but I’d still done the right thing. I’d been rewarded.

Then they rang the next day. Dammit. 

Maybe you’ve never been tempted to lie, cheat or steal. I am. And I can often come up with plausible reasons it doesn’t matter. But I do think it matters. I want to spend as much mental effort on these things as I do on a healthy diet, or my skin, or decorating my home. Because one day I might be in a much higher stakes situation. We all might. I want to have a strong ‘tell the truth’ muscle, for it to become such a reflex I don’t have to go through this stupid struggle. Learning to care enough about a stranger with a car seems somehow related to this bigger project of learning to care, full stop. 

Václav Havel was a poet, playwright and later the first president of Czechoslovakia. He wrote an essay in 1967 entitled The Power of the Powerless¹, which went on to be iconic in the struggle to gain independence from Soviet rule. In it he writes of the effects of the totalitarianism communism his country endured on the inner life of its people. The regime demanded outward performance of loyalty, and so citizens were trained to say and do what was expedient, rather than telling the truth or acting according to their conscience.

“The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism…..This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.”

Havel saw that repeated acts of dishonesty to make our own lives easier - what he calls “living within the lie” can be corrosive of our very sense of self.

  “A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralised person. The system depends on this demoralisation”.

I do not want to be a demoralised person, literally de- moralised, without morals. I don’t like the language of morality, its self-righteous, finger-pointy associations, but I do want to be Fully Alive. Havel helped me see that compromising my integrity might, over time, erode my “confidence, enthusiasm and hope” - the things missing in the classical definition of demoralised².

It is laughably grandiose to compare my car-scratch conundrum with those seeking to overthrow communism by refusing to toe the party line. Havel’s context is not mine. But the deeper point applies. Every time I say something I do not believe, make an expedient gesture, fudge an excuse or fail to pay for damage I caused, I am a tiny bit less myself. A tiny bit less alive. Worse, I am complicit in my own demoralisation.

I want moral courage not just because it’s right but because it’s better, yes for the world, but also for me. I want it even though it does not come easily and is bloody hard work. And in this case, maybe the only battle I won that month, it cost £250 pounds. 

What else I’m up to

• Last week I wrote a piece for UnHerd about reaching saturation point with the Sad Girl literary trope and wanting more diverse stories of women.

• A few weeks ago I was guest on The Whole Person Revolution podcast hosted by a dear friend of mine, Anne Snyder. We discussed my outwardly downwardly mobile career, social change and living in a tiny intentional community.

1. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

2. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/demoralized