VIEWPOINT
Politicians and morality
GEORGE GALE
The inquest on Mary Jo Kopechne provides a useful occasion to consider the relation, if any, between politics and morality, a relation which might more fruitfully be described as that between the acts of politicians and the moral criticism of those acts. At first, it can hardly fail to be noticed that there is very little moral criticism indeed of the acts of politicians as such. For instance, most of the criticism that is directed against this man or that, this side or that, this cause or that, on say Vietnam or Biafra, is essentially of an ideological or idealist nature.
With characteristically elegant pessimism Michael Oakeshott discussed what he called the morality of ideals over twenty years ago in his powerful essay `The Tower of Babel', which concluded: `The history of European morals, then, is in part the history of the maintenance and ex- tension of a morality whose form has, from the beginning, been dominated by the pursuit of moral ideals. In so far as this is an un- happy form of morality, prone to obsession- ism and at war with itself, it is a misfortune to be deplored; insofar as it cannot readily be avoided, it is a misfortune to be made the best of . . . the predicament of Western morals, as I read it, is first that our moral life has come to be dominated by the pursuit of ideals, a dominance ruinous to a settled habit of behaviour; and secondly, that we have come to think of this dominance as a benefit for which we should be grateful or an achievement of which we should be proud. And the only purpose to be served by this investigation of our predicament is to dis- close the corrupt conscience, the self-decep- tion which reconciles us to our misfortune.'
My only dispute is with Oakeshott's very characteristic aside in which he describes the dominance of our pursuit of ideals as 'ruin- ous to a settled habit of behaviour'. To my mind the dominance of this pursuit justifies, maintains, and causes such settled habits of behaviour as barbaric warfare, tyrannous police states, religious and racial conflicts of hideous and bloody intensity. I prefer to describe as, at best, amoral such criticism of the acts of politicians as flows from 'the morality of ideals', itself the product to my mind of 'the corrupt consciousness'.
Oakeshott regrets the weakness of what he calls `the morality of habit of behaviour,' which the morality of ideals has never suc- ceeded in becoming. And certainly if we seek examples of moral criticism which flow from a morality of habits of behaviour rather than from a morality of ideals we shall find few such examples; and when we do, they Will have about them the familiar stale smell of hypocrisy. Such examples that come to mind include the public disgracings of such men as Parnell, DiIke, Wilde and Profumo: Of others such as J. H. Thomas, Bottomley, Belcher; and, during the past few months, in the United States, of Senator Kennedy.
In the British instances, the disgraces have come about because of sexual or finan- cial improbity, sometimes aggravated by lack of candour. It may indeed be that the habit of behaviour, the morality of which in these cases has been enjoined, is no more than not to get caught out. Certainly, in all these and similar cases there must have been very many men in public life who have said of themselves: `there but for the grace of God go 1'. However, they do exhibit one feature in common: and that is the general assumption made by those who offer their moral criticism that the public in general expects more from its public men than it does from the ordinary run of mortals. 1 am not convinced that as a matter of fact the majority do have such expectations; but it is desirable. I think, that public men and their critics should act as if such expectations were generally held. At the lowest, it is necessary pour encourager les autres.
It is, therefore, I think, in a way unfor- tunate that much of the criticism of Edward Kennedy over the Mary Jo Kopechne affair hinged on the alleged, 'panicky' nature of his response to the tragedy. I am not all that convinced, on reflection, that he panicked at all, any more than he panicked when he cheated at Harvard; and even if he did panic when he realised that Mary Jo was missing or drowned, this does not mean he would necessarily panic if confronted, say, by a Cuban missile crisis. Different kinds of situa- tions frighten different kinds of men. It is natural, also, but equally unfortunate, that most of the moral rather than political criticism of the Senator has revolved around the minor but interesting question of sex and drink.
Is there a remaining kind of moral criti- cism which we could hope to flow from a morality of habit of behaviour? Can any fruitful moral criticism be made at all over the Mary Jo Kopechne affair? The moral criticism that flows from customary habit of behaviour is characterised by almost instinc- tive or reflexive feelings of repugnance, of aversion, of anger, of shock and the like. 'I am unpleasantly surprised that a man such as he should behave as he did' is the form such moral criticism might take.
The aspect of the Mary Jo Kopechne affair that I found most offensive was the summoning by Kennedy of some of the great administrators and advisers and speechwriters of his brother's presidential team, the arrival by his side of many of them, and the subsequent contradictory ac- counts that between them they had Kennedy make. This behaviour would have been laud- able if a crisis of state had occurred. It would have been normal if some would-be successor to Caesar had wished to discuss with his generals how the imperial purple might be seized.
But for the surviving Kennedy to seek and receive advice how best to behave in a situation where to behave ordinarily and decently must have been obvious to every- one—and then, apparently, for some of them to advise him not to behave in the obvious way at all: all this I find offensive. To return, briefly, to Oakeshott's essay :
'A man who fails to practise what he preaches does not greatly disturb us . . . but when a man preaches "open social justice" (or indeed any other ideal whatso- ever) and at the same time is obviously without a habit of ordinary decent be- haviour (a habit that belongs to our morality but has fortunately never been idealised), the tension I speak of makes its appear- ance. The fact that we are still able to recognise it is evidence that we are not wholly at the mercy of a morality of abstract ideals.'
Can, any longer, moral criticisms of the acts of politicians be made upon these lines? Is not the customary habit of politi- cians possessing or seeking great power be- come such that ordinary decent behaviour is no longer generally expected of them? If so, the morality of ideals is triumphant. and as Oakeshott observes in an only slightly different context in his beautiful essay 'The Voice of Poetry in the Verse of Mankind'. when this happens barbarism may be ob- served to have supervened.
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