Integrity
Integrity, noun. 1. Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.
- Soundness.
- Completeness; unity.
- From Latin integer whole.
When I think of the word integrity I think of my mother’s description of her Anatomy Professor’s opening lecture about skin. The medical term for skin is integument. The professor explained the term indicated the skin’s most important function: being a barrier against infection, loss of fluids and other hazards. Ever since my mother told me about that lecture, I have believed that integrity is best defined in terms of defending wholeness. Having integrity is having a concept of what you value, what you are willing to defend. What I am talking about may be also defined as defending important boundaries.
Integrity is about defending your wholeness. It is setting a boundary about the things you care about. Often for me it has meant stating what I will allow and what I will not allow. Defending my integrity has meant saying “No!” to mistreatment, “No!” to accepting a distorted version of reality, “No!” to another person’s self serving compromises. It also means saying “Yes!” to the things you value most.
One of those things, often mentioned as a synonym for integrity is truth. Having integrity means being truthful and honest, even when it doesn’t serve your interests. I recall one incident which occurred when I was volunteering to pray outside the local abortion clinic in our town. As our group was praying, a lady ran into a car owned by one of the workers of the clinic, and then promptly left the scene of the accident. But not before one of the protestors snapped a photo of her license plate. The protestors then informed the clinic worker of what had happened and helped her with the paperwork when the police came. The abortion worker was flat out astonished that the protestors went out of their way to help her, being on opposite sides of a very controversial issue.
Another definition of integrity is “being in the same skin with.” This aligns with the definition of completeness and wholeness. Engineers speak of structural integrity, for example, of a building. I believe both meanings come together. Moral truth has a structure to it as surely as a bridge or a building does, and a physical breach of integrity and a moral breach of integrity have the same disastrous results: the structure collapses. This is why I believe that morality is not private and truth is universal and not relative. If we don’t want the important edifices of our society to collapse, we have to ensure their soundness. To return to the issue of abortion as an example, we see a lot of the difficult situations people are in when the support systems in their lives have failed. The result is death.