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Suggesting to civil servants that they need help with their moral integrity would rightly provoke outrage. Civil servants exist to uphold moral integrity: it is their DNA, their raison d’etre, their professional role. A civil servant lacking in integrity is an impossibility because it means they can no longer be impartial “guardians of propriety” as Defra permanent secretary Clare Moriarty has phrased it in a talk given at our Institute. This is especially true in the case of in telling the truth. The moral force of political neutrality is that the civil servant can tell the minister ‘how it is’ without needing to feel the pressure of the partisan. And even though the ways in which civil servants do this are classically courteous to the point of deviousness, the language is understood, as CSW has demonstrated in its Terminological Inexactitudes column.
Temptations not to tell the truth come in many guises, some of which we will be exploring in our Truth programme of lectures. Fundamentally we can recognise our common human fallibility: civil servants, along with the rest of us, are not morally perfect. No one is undilutedly good; no one has ever spoken absolute truth; just as (to complete the Platonic triad) no one is perfectly beautiful.
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It is counter cultural to actively look for our moral failings. Nearly every self-help book on the ever-expanding mind, body and spirit shelves of bookshops and websites enjoins celebration of our strengths. Leaders must be perfect and invulnerable; traditional and social media pounce upon the slightest error as a disqualification from public office. But this is my specific proposal: by seeking out our failings, we discover a deeper moral resilience, one that withstands corrosion because it comes from self-awareness. It is a kind of moral Pilates: consciously feeling one’s way to deeper ‘moral muscles’ and exercising them by feeling one’s way to one’s deepest fears, which are almost always to do with failure. At the heart of the Institute’s Fellows’ Programme is a 24-hour residential during which we face fallibility through tragedy and comedy. The guiding principle is “our deepest fears are the dragons guarding our greatest treasures”, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it. The group, which consists of public servants of all kinds including civil servants, spends time with an Ignatian practice of gently, in silence, feeling one’s way to one’s fears, the place of ‘desolation’ as Ignatius puts it, and not trying to deal with them but simply sitting with them. The experience can lead to unexpected joy. It certainly leads to greater strength. ‘Tragedy’ is followed by a standup comedy workshop, where we play with, rather than try to hide, our inner fool, inevitably giving rise to shared hilarity and a newfound ease of selfhood.
Facing up in all honesty to one’s own failings is arguably more important for those who work in virtuous institutions: that is to say, institutions that have been created specifically to do good, than it is for, say, bankers. Because the institution is there to do good, one would understandably assume that people who are attracted to work in it are themselves naturally good. But it is that very assumption that can blind those who work there to their own failings. So attentive to external, structural injustices can we become, that we fail to attend to our internal moral conscience; even overriding it if the goal our institution is seeking is compellingly good and demands such. Goal-based morality is not always aligned with duty-based morality. Recent warnings from the charity sector have highlighted this danger. We are particularly shocked at the failings because of the context; but it is the context that can create the human vulnerability in the first place.
Governing institutions of the UK are thankfully not corrupt; but the maintenance of such uncorruption does not happen without effort. If those working in them do not pay active attention to their own moral health, they and their institutions begin to suffer the corrosive effects of moral laziness. Like our physical health, our moral health needs to be cared for. Perhaps there should be some moral exercise classes alongside the currently trending mindfulness classes.