The Untimely Death of Integrity

The Revised & Extended Version (2024)

by Jeff Bloom

SEPTEMBER 7, 2024

Version #1 was published in Medium on March 25, 2018.

With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
From the East beauty has been restored
From the South beauty has been restored
From the West beauty has been restored
From the North beauty has been restored
From the zenith in the sky beauty has been restored
From the nadir of the earth beauty has been restored
From all around me beauty has been restore.
With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
From the East beauty has been restored
From the South beauty has been restored
From the West beauty has been restored
From the North beauty has been restored
From the zenith in the sky beauty has been restored
From the nadir of the earth beauty has been restored
From all around me beauty has been restored. [1]

Traditional Navajo ways of being revolve around the notion of walking in beauty. Beauty in this case is not based on superficial notions of appearance, but rather on deeper ways of being. From such a perspective, you cannot manifest beauty, if you cheat, steal, disparage others, be hateful, and so forth. Walking in beauty for the Navajo is what we might call the ultimate in manifesting integrity.

According to various the online Merriam Webster Dictionary, “integrity” is defined as:
1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY
2 : an unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided: COMPLETENESS
And, some synonyms from the Microsoft Office thesaurus and Thesaurus.com include the following:

The root of “integrity” is “-integ.” We see this in such words as “integral,” “integrated,” and “integer.” All of these words are based on the notion of completeness or wholeness… and maybe even a sense of wholesomeness. We also can see how “integrity” can be extended to include:

• Consistency
• Cohesiveness
• A sense of wholeness and coordination that includes: body, mind, and spirit[2]
• Respect for self, other, and environment
• Ethical
• A sense of an aesthetic of being, an aesthetic of how one manifests
• A sense of reciprocity in relationships
• A sense of balance and equanimity
• The connected-ness of multiple aspects or interdependencies
• A Navajo sense of beauty and “walking in beauty.”

Unfortunately, the quality of integrity seems to be approaching an untimely death. I’m hard-pressed to find a corporation, corporate executives and even lower level administrators, politicians, small business owners, religious leaders, academics, academic administrators, or professionals of any kind that fully manifest this sense of integrity. Maybe the current Pope, the Dalai Lama, and an all too small a number of individuals or group entities demonstrate integrity. In fact, societies seem to honor those with no integrity whatsoever. They elect them as leaders. They raise them to exalted positions of honor and power. And, even laud them as spiritual models, which seems to be one of the most ghastly social delusions.

I’m sure there are many reasons for this decline into the substratum of darkness that lies beneath the surface of humanity. However, among the many contributing contexts, I have been pondering how deeper disconnects have been affecting many contexts. The positivist, reductionist, and mechanistic revolution in thinking that arose from the work of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton had a huge effect on all aspects of societies around the world. This revolution moved societies out of superstitious ways of thinking and provided powerful ways of understanding the universe. The clock as a mechanism became the metaphor for how everything worked. From this beginning arose all of modern science and technology. But, this kind of thinking infiltrated social and cultural thinking and beliefs about the nature of reality. From this point of view, we felt that we, humankind, could control and manipulate the natural world. And, to a large extent, this is just what happened. However, this approach has been backfiring. At the same time, we are beginning to realize that we really can’t control the natural world, and that our technologies are actually destroying the environments upon which we depend. But, there is still incredible resistance to recognizing this cluster of interrelated problems. We even go further by insisting that there are technological fixes for each of our problems. Then, we never take the time to think about the bigger picture. The picture that involves considering all of, or at least as many as we can possibly think of, effects of each technology we wish to utilize and each action we wish to take. The unintended consequences of our actions are hardly ever taken into consideration. Bateson [3] delved into this issue when discussing the issues of “conscious purpose.” Some idea, some action gets into our heads, and we push forward without considering any of the other potential effects our ideas and action are going to have.

One of the characteristics of this Cartesian and Newtonian approach to seeing the living world and all of its organisms as machines has been our reliance upon numbers and quantification, or on cold data. We reduced everything to numbers. If knowledge claims are not supported by numbers and statistical analyses, then the claims are dismissed or not taken seriously. At the same time, such quantification is tightly linked to the notion of objectification. However, living systems really don’t fit within these mechanistic, quantifiable, and objectified perspectives. But, we keep forcing such a framework onto the way we think and relate to living organisms, ecosystems, and social systems. This mechanization and objectification of living systems was and still is a major disconnect with the nature of life, which also seems to be the ultimate death knell for integrity. We no longer have to rely on the heart, rely on our relationships with one another and with the natural world, or even with a larger extent of our own cognitive abilities.

This fundamental disconnect from the “other” (people and the natural world) has eroded the integrity that held us together. Of course, all kinds of other factors have contributed to this erosion of integrity, but this fundamental separation set the pattern for an Ayn Randian [4] objectification and self-centeredness that seems to have permeated contemporary societies, especially among ruling and corporate sectors. Some suggest that Ayn Rand’s work is the major guiding force of the contemporary version of the Republican Party[5] in the United States.

It’s relativity easy to criticize certain individuals and groups, but criticism alone does little to promote any sort of helpful way forward. The real challenge is to address particular issues, conditions, attributes, or whatever in ways that could foster change or development. It is especially tricky to even suggest that other people should change, let alone suggest some sort of direct mandate, which won’t work anyway and is more likely to result in a great deal of push-back. In fact, this whole notion of “making change” relates back to Gregory Bateson’s Conscious Purpose and the unforeseen problems and dangers that almost always follow. Basically, the best we can do, as far as I can tell, is to (and I don’t like the following terms) create, develop, or in some way affect (but I like the next word) contexts that may stimulate personal and social change.

At this point in any discussion of big social issues, many, if not most, people start suggesting that we initiate changes in schools, since that’s where the young people live during much of their waking hours. Such a focus makes great sense, in some ways. Certainly, Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., with all of his faults, saw the potential of public schooling as a way to develop thoughtful and informed citizens.

“The object [of elementary schools] is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country…”[6]

Jefferson’s vision saw that a great deal of potential goes unseen and untapped among the impoverished of the country, and wanted free, quality education, including universities, for all people. He also gave mixed messages about educating the heart, which he saw as taking place in classes in which ethics and morality were taught. In some instances, he said it was a waste of time, but in others, he pushed for such education. However, he more consistently pushed for educating the mind. Personally, I see both — heart and mind — as the same thing, in that emotions, values, aesthetics, ethics, beliefs, etc. are aspects of the cognition of all humans, most mammals, and probably, to some degree, all living things. However, it is this more holistic view of cognition that contributes to the development and continuity of integrity, as well as to the disintegration of integrity.

As for schooling that can develop integrity, we have to take seriously the pitfalls, traps, and dangers of conscious purpose. Almost the entirety of schooling is built on conscious purpose, without any consideration of the longterm, unintended consequences. From lesson plans, to rules of behavior, to classroom management, to curriculums, to curriculum standards, to teacher-proof curriculums, to state and national standards for each subject, to testing and high-stakes testing, and to the corporatization of schooling from pre-kindergarten through university, conscious purpose reigns. As a result of the conscious purposes of schooling across the board, we are contending with a dysfunctional system that has contributed to all sorts of unintended social issues. And, now that education has fully become a political football, the whole system is losing what little integrity it may have had. Just in the time I taught in K-12 schools, over a period of about 10 years from 1974 to 1984, schooling went FROM trying to promote teacher creativity so that we might engage children in exploring, inquiring, learning, and creating TO suppressing such creativity and demanding an adherence to rote learning in order to raise test scores. At this point in my K-12 teaching career, I decided, for my own health and well-being to get out of K-12 schooling, and move, quite naively, into a position where I might be able to have a greater effect on how we teach children. At the university level, I saw a similar trajectory. Just before I retired — and a major reason why I retired rather than continuing to work/play, which is what I always tried to do — the Teaching and Learning Department decided that each member of faculty had to include “lessons” on “how to teach to the test.” I wasn’t going to do it, and I didn’t want to get into yet another battle that would go nowhere. The stress and toxicity of a crumbling system was taking its toll on my health, so I retired. But, I have continued my efforts to create contexts that might stimulate positive change on my own and with others.

So, if we want to create contexts that can stimulate change, how do we create or infuse contexts, including formal and informal learning contexts, with ways to develop integrity or, as I prefer, to support, stimulate, and enhance the development of children’s and adults’ cognition, which includes learning? If we develop such contexts of learning, integrity is a natural consequence and attribute. I have written about some of these ideas elsewhere, either directly or indirectly,[7] and am planning to write more, but to delve too deeply into this set of ideas is way too much for this short piece.

Unfortunately, it is the rare teacher who works to foster the development of integrity, although most make the attempt against a background that undermines the development of integrity. It is the much, much rarer school that manifests this sense of learning and cognition that fosters the development of integrity. To expect to see our public, charter, or private schools change would certainly result in going nowhere, just as every other mandated initiative has failed. The same is true of our whole society. We can’t expect people to change, and in many ways, demanding and expecting such change has serious ethical implications. Schooling and societies at large are complex systems, which like other complex systems, maintain themselves, reset themselves (why mandating change doesn’t work), and are comprised of and intertwined with many other complex systems, such as multiple cultural and ethnic social systems, economic systems, political systems, corporate systems, and many others. Any change has to involve all of the interdependent contexts and systems. With such sets of complex systems, small events may or may not have widespread rippling, but unpredictable, effects. Such a process is often referred to as the butterfly effect.[8] A small event could have a huge effect, but that effect is unpredictable

Infusing contexts with seeds of possibilities may be a reasonable metaphor for what we can do. We can begin the process with ourselves and our families and maybe slowly expanding to include friends and our extended families. As we get a feel for infusing a sense of integrity in the way we think, act, and learn along with our own children, we can develop certain degree of comfort with the territory and the process. Then, we could bring it up in casual conversations with teachers. Some, and I suspect most, teachers will be receptive, if not interested. You may find that some teachers are trying their best to find ways to infuse this sort of learning—teaching into their own classrooms. But, teachers are under considerable pressure to conform to the rigidity of school policies, politics, and all of the rest. But, parents can begin to erode the stranglehold over teachers or even those over principals. Parent support can make a positive difference. Look at what aggressive parental involvement has done in many places across the U.S. Changes have occurred, but are likely to collapse from the lack of support and buy-in from teachers, principals, and many parents. Battles of any sort rarely work to reach a place where everyone is reasonably happy with the consequences. Unfortunately, battles are often the strategies of last resort, where the outcome is not expected to make everyone happy or content.

Just beginning a process of learning and thinking in ways that manifest integrity may have some nice affects in the informal learning opportunities that can occur within families and communities. A family or community garden is an example of how children and adults can learn together how to help the community. There are all sorts of learning rabbit holes, including those by real rabbits, that can be explored: how plants grow and thrive; how to develop a gardening system that is in sync with the local ecosystems and environmental conditions; nutrition; uses of plants beyond the parts eaten; art and music inspired by plants, the garden, and the community, and so on. There are all sort of possibilities, none of which involve much in the way of conscious purpose, beyond growing a garden and feeding people. We don’t have to detail and predetermine what to learn, when to learn it, or how to learn it. The learning can arise from children’s and adults’ questions; from the mistakes we make, which should be celebrated and could even be the material for drawing comic strips or comedic skits; from what the plants do; from what the local animals do with the garden; and so forth. From another angle, Nora Bateson has developed what started out as in-person Warm Data Labs, where people engaged in real, down-to-earth conversations with others in dynamically changing small groups. During Covid, the previously highly resisted push to do Warm Data Labs online, was initiated under the new name, People Need People. Both forms are thriving and spreading to this day. Integrity is supported and valued imperceptibly as people just talk with one another about personally relevant questions and concerns from different contextual perspectives.[9]

With some attention to the meaning of integrity, we can infuse integrity into our dealing with local merchants, locally owned restaurants, and other businesses. Acting with integrity requires a degree of inner strength and courage. It’s much easier to get angry than it is to sit down and communicate directly. But, sitting down to communicate with others needs to be infused with exposing your own vulnerability in ways that manifest your own comfort, courage, and confidence while exposing your vulnerability. Approaching interactions in this way provides a sense of warmth and openness that can foster quality communication. It is a way of sharing our humanity without being condescending, or defensive, or aggressive, or being an asshole. We can engender a sense of equity and balance, of appreciation and respect, and of just be an ordinary human. We may find that empathizing, injecting humor, and not being shaken by another’s aggression or whatever are tremendously helpful attributes to foster. If you’re anything like me, you make lots of mistakes, but we just have to keep trying. Integrity can spread like a beneficial viral infection. Maybe be can stimulate an integrity pandemic.

NOTES

[1] ’’Navajo Prayer” on page 160 in David Maybury-Lewis' (1992) book and video series, Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World.

[2] “Spirit” does not have to be in the religious sense, especially since many contemporary religions have lost their integrity and lost their connection to spirituality.

[3] Gregory Bateson discussed conscious purpose in chapters in an edited volume of his work (1991) and devoted two chapters in Steps to an Ecology of Mind to conscious purpose.

[4] Ayn Rand was a writer and philosopher, although I have a hard time elevating her to that level of integrity, whose major emphasis was to elevate ego-hood with little or no regard for others or for the world in which we live. Two of her most notable books include, Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957).

[5] Burns (2012); Ha (2017); Seabrook (2011)

[6] Quote by Thomas Jefferson on p. xv in Holochak (2014)

[7] My book, Creating a Classroom Community of Young Scientists (2006), is infused with integrity as a learning and teaching attribute, although I don’t think I used the word integrity at all. Other related discussions are included in: Bloom (1990, 1992, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2021-July, 2021-November). My thematic cluster on Passionate Meanderings, “Making Sense of Sense-Making,” also discusses this issue.

[8] The “butterfly effect” is basically the idea that some small event that occurs in a chaotic—complex system can have an effect at some distant location in the same complex system. Fritjof Capra (1996) has a nice description (pages 134-135) of how Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist discovered this process/effect, which is referred to as the “Lorenz Attractor.”

[9] More information on Warm Data, Warm Data Labs, and People Need People can be found in the following sources. Nora Bateson’s articles (2017, 2019) and books (2016, 2023). Nora’s first book, pre-dates the official beginning of Warm Data Labs, but really is all about warm data. The second book is entirely warm data without the label. Other sources include: Warm Data dot Life, Warm Data on the International Bateson Institute website , Warm Data Lab dot Org, and Ken Silvestri’s article (2022).

REFERENCES

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