Circled Wagons: Loyalty and Municipal Ethics

I was inspired to take a different point of view of municipal ethics while reading Charles Taylor's review of Jonathan Lear's new book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Please bear with me as I describe the book before I say why it is relevant to municipal ethics.

The book looks at cultures that have been devastated by having their way of life destroyed. The result is that people's actions no longer have meaning, even such basic actions as raising children and putting food on the table.

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Lear focuses on what happened to the Crow Indian tribe. It was a nomadic tribe, according to Lear, based on two things: hunting buffalo and war with tribes that wanted to hunt on the land where it was hunting. The principal virtue was courage. The tribe's history, religion, marriages, child-rearing, everything depended on these two intertwined activities.

When the Crows were forced to live on a reservation, they could no longer hunt buffalo, and because their boundaries were secure, there was no reason for war. And there was no need to be courageous, at least not in the same sense of the word. As the tribe's chief said in the late 1920s, 'When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.' He meant this literally, Lear argues, because although things happened, they no longer had meaning from the Crow perspective.

In municipal ethics, it is also important to see things from the point of view of the culture, the ethical environment. Without understanding that, it is impossible to deal with it, impossible to make it more ethical.

Think of Chicago. Its government culture has long been very simple. Its principal activity is patronage and its principal virtue is loyalty. Chicago is hardly alone in this. Thirty years ago, a federal court handed down what is known as the Shakman Decree, prohibiting political considerations in hiring and promotions for about 37,000 non-policy-making city jobs. This did nothing to change its principal virtue. In fact, it strengthened it. Patronage too continued just as before, only it went underground.

Again, last year, city officials were sentenced to prison, this time for the fraudulent ways in which they hid the patronage system. Did anything change? Mayor Daley said he knew nothing about what was happening ' effectively that he knew nothing about the government's culture, which had been his home since birth ' and Chicago's voters rewarded him with a landslide victory, embracing their government's culture.

We feel sorry for the Crows losing their culture, but would we feel sorry for Chicago if it lost the ability to give patronage and if internal loyalty were to have no meaning anymore?

As I say in my blog entry on moral courage, courage is not actually a virtue, but something that is instrumental, that enables one to be virtuous. This is also true of loyalty. Loyalty allows one to be fair, compassionate, honest and open with people. It is an important element in holding together families and businesses and other sorts of groups. But it is not a virtue. In fact, it is an obstacle to being virtuous to people outside the group. To be loyal to one's family outside of one's family often requires one to be unfair, dishonest and deceptive, and without compassion for others, just as to be courageous in defense of one's tribal boundaries requires one to kill people from other tribes.

We feel sorry for the Crows because they are not a threat to us. We can sympathize with their loss. We do not feel sorry for Chicago because we see their devotion to loyalty as a threat to democratic values.

What I would like to emphasize here is the need to look at the world from the point of view of those for whom loyalty ' not a virtue at all ' is the principal virtue, so that fairness, honesty, and compassion are all practiced in an insular way, for the preservation of power. This insular way is perverse, for example, in Chicago it includes giving jobs and patronage power to members of minorities simply because they are members of minorities. This might be fair, but it does not respect individuals' dignity. Respecting an outsider's dignity is not a virtue in this culture. Honesty is also not a virtue in this culture, and even less so since the Shakman Decree. Cleverness, getting away with doing what the preservation of the culture requires, is a virtue instead.

But cleverness is a virtue of the oppressed. Clever heroes who outsmart stronger and more numerous enemies are the heroes of the few and the poor. Chicago is neither oppressed nor few nor poor. By trying to force Chicago into giving up its culture, the courts actually made its culture worse. It gave Chicago a reason to believe that it actually needs to circle its wagons. But circling wagons in the face of opposition is, in any event, a common feature of governments based on loyalty.

So what can be done to change cultures based on the false virtue of loyalty? Would any amount of moral courage make a difference? Possibly, if there were leaders strong and respected enough to change the culture (usually the leaders come from the business community and the local patricians, as is happening now in Philadelphia). But this is a rarity. Would ethics education matter? New laws, independent enforcement? Shame? None of them seems to make a difference in Chicago.

My town has just reached a possible turning point. Its deeply unethical government environment is based on loyalty, and there are signs of opening up and breaking down. Three town officials were arrested this week for embezzlement and acts committed in covering it up and hiding it from authorities. But the loyalty is at least as strong as always, possibly stronger. The false threats that held the ruling group together now seem more real. The wagons are circling more tightly.

How can my town, and many towns and cities throughout the country, replace loyalty with true virtues, true ethical conduct? The first step is to understand their cultures. But then what? What has worked or not worked, in your experience, and why?