Not Engaging in Our Fathers' Misconduct

In this week's New York Times Sunday Review section, Stephanie Coontz wrote about "social nostalgia," that is, nostalgia about the way society used to be. She cites a study of men with difficult childhoods, done by the psychologist John Snarey, which I assume is discussed in Snarey's 1993 book, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation (Harvard Univ. Press).

Snarey's study shows that some men replicate the problems in their relationships with their children, while others chart a different course. What the new course charters do is neither idealize their fathers, nor focus on their shortcomings. Instead, they place their fathers' failures in context, looking at them with "a sense of sadness for and understanding of the conditions under which their own fathers had functioned." They use their memories to avoid bad behavior rather than as an excuse for engaging in it.

Local government officials are like fathers to young officials and employees who learn the ropes from them. If the government's ethics environment is poor, young officials experience intimidation, secrecy, demands for loyalty, and disdain for those on the outside, better known as the residents of the community. And in most cases, these young officials continue the ethics environment. They might have hated the intimidation, resented the feeling that their loyalty was not returned, and had trouble feeling disdain, but they found they could attain power by intimidating others and demanding their loyalty, or keep clear of the whole thing by going along and keeping quiet, thereby enabling the behavior they resented.

Using old tactics to get and keep power is especially enticing to new groups who are finally getting a chance. The tactics might have been used against them in the past, but they worked, and working is what counts, especially since all that intimidation, demand for loyalty, and requirement of secrecy was intended to keep some pretty lucrative transactions from being discovered.

This is old news, of course. What I want to stress is that the way to deal successfully with past misconduct is the same in government as it is with being a father oneself. Looking at local government leaders not with fear or anger, but with sadness and understanding, with an appreciation of the situational pressures on them, is the best way to go about changing the situational pressures and discussing the past in a way that leads to a new future, rather than the same old thing.

After all, those who take and hold power through intimidation, who abuse both subordinates and the public, are sad people. Just like fathers who abuse their children. They are people who lack self-respect, who can't win by playing fair, and who care more about winning than anything.

One does not have to condemn one's predecessors personally in order to move on to more responsible conduct. The best approach is to recognize that these weak individuals were caught up in a world that rewarded misconduct, that they sadly gave in to pressures and created or continued a poor ethics environment, in which some of them benefited directly and others simply kept their jobs.

Those who manage our communities can "care for the next generation" only by recognizing the faults and limitations of their fathers, and doing what they can to continue their good works and discontinue their poor stewardship.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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