The political philosophy of sleaze

...More than one wag has opined that we should have expected nothing less from Republican administrations --they might have also added from Democratic machine-based administra- tions...

...Yet it provides the necessary though elemental basis for what can follow: the arduous process of radical transformation or trans- figuration in which we gradually uncover and surrender what- ever prevents our being lived by God...

...In the end, these officials regularly accepted the private groups' preferred solutions on policy whether or not consonant with the law...

...The very idea of public service means that we believe individuals can be trusted morally to restrain their desire for gain and positively act to seek a public good or fulfill a public charge in a disinterested or accountable manner...

...In her own way Rita Lavelle symbolized all the personal and moral failures of the administration with her incompetence, infidelity to law and oath, conflation of private interest with public good, and utter insensitivity to procedure or public terms of discourse...

...In another idiom, this subordination of personal self to public duty means that officials act from a sense of civic virtue...

...Rituals reassure citizens that officials remain accountable and that governors do not cloak private interests with the common 'good...

...Throughout the administration, officials have bitterly resisted both disclosure requirements and blind trusts...

...Indeed for many people the initial process is relatively easy: becoming aware of the vari- ous energy-centers of the physical body, beginning to see or to feel other people's energy-fields or spiritual bodies, learning how to channel healing energies to others, getting into contact with discarnate spirits who can help us or whom we can help, discovering the blurred boundaries between self and others in the spiritual realm plus the blurred agencies ("I yet not I...

...We speak of "entering the service" or the "service academies," and have in mind the special combination of power, duty, character, and commitment which soldiers take on when they serve their country...

...Yet even here, Casey refused to sacrifice the privilege of maximizing his personal gain even if it could conflict with his public obligations...

...For Christians, this transfiguration happens through contemplative identification with Christ: "All of us, gazing on the Lord's glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed from glory to glory into his very image by the Lord who is the Spirit...

...Life as a public servant should not be without honor, praise, or comfort...

...WHEN THERE IS NO SENSE OF THE PUBLIC REALM The political philosophy of sleaze I I I I III J. PATRICK DOBEL W lHAT PUNDITS and Democrats have labeled the "sleaze factor" will probably harrow the Reagan administra- tion for the rest of its tenure...

...Even when agencies are reluctantly called upon to perform their tasks, they perform them haltingly with less competence, personnel, and "esprit de corps.'" Finally, officials like James Watt at the Department of the Interior or Rita Lavelle at the EPA simply saw no autonomous common good and possessed no capacity to think about prob- lems in a morally disinterested way...

...For St...

...His articles have appeared in Commonweal, Dissent, The American Political Science Review and The South Atlantic Quarterly...

...For God," who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness' has shone in our hearts, that we in turn might make known the glory of God shining on the face of Christ...

...If Christians are to learn how to surrender the whole self to GOd, to be lived by God, they must have an awareness of self as spirit or spiritual body in complex interdependence with self as physical body, emotions, and mind...

...But nations accomplished something of great value when they enshrined the moral ideal that those who possess public power should exercise it in a disinterested manner according to public rules rather than for personal or tribal gain...

...The right wing of the adminis- tration possesses no abiding sense of public service and the Commonweal: 396 responsibilities it entails...

...An ad- ministration which seriously rejects public responsibility and public action in any area but defense will not be able to generate a serious ethos of public service...

...The public domain is bound by our ideals, aspirations, and symbols of government...

...Public service depends upon two different ideas...

...Individuals do not enter public service primarily for private gain...

...The ideal of public service obviously asumes compe- tency to perform an assigned responsibility, but it goes much further...

...The disastrous attempts to replace public wel- fare with volunteerism merely represent the most evident case of their evisceration of the properly public...

...The Reagan administration regularly betrays this tradi- * tion, given its ideological and personal predilection to collapse the public into the private...

...While willing temporarily to sacrifice higher incomes, they otherwise wish to maintain all the financial benefits and freedoms of private citizenship while exercising privileged power in the public realm...

...Then it regularly turns to individu- als from the public-service tradition to save itself, as it did when William D. Ruckelshaus was brought in to rebuild the EPA...

...Both moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats possess a long tradition which sees public service as an honorable vocation for a noble cause...

...First, officials do not see any difference between the interests and methods of the private sector and the responsibilities to the public...

...Even when faced with overwhelming public consensus upon certain obligations, administration repre-sentatives struggle to deflate the goals and make them private responsibilities...

...Whether in civil rights or regulation, in any area where the officials personally disagree with the law, the law remains unenforced, or enforced only under constant pressure...

...it is arrived at through rituals of procedure, public accountability, and elec- tion...

...At other times, they must obey laws or abide policies with which they morally disagree...

...Public servants must make conscious efforts t6 seek disinterested solutions to common problems...

...Yet if we draw on some of the largely-lost resources within our Christian tradi- tion and if we have the humility to sit at the feet of teachers from non-Christian traditions who do provide wise counsel, we can readily come to know in our own experience a great deal concerning spiritual reality...

...They experienced no qualms about consulting, outside of the publicly sanctioned channels of consultation, with the very groups they must regulate, or having these private groups buy dinners, pay for travel, or provide exorbitant honorariums...

...Such simple answers do not suffice...

...None of this by itself leads to God, and all of this, like any human endeavor, can be perverted into a mere ego trip...

...Meese's unblushing refusal to see bow his private dealings might tarnish his functioning as the chief law enforcement officer of the land demonstrates an identical blindness...

...In such a process we Christians can draw on resources of spiritual wisdom from both our own heritage and non-Christian traditions...

...Today, however, most Christians avoid spiritual pride in the same way that a pauper avoids material pride, by having little in which to be proud about...

...But these words of St...

...Edwin Meese's financial dealings as well as his rhetorical insults of the poor reflect an inability to understand the sym- bolic and ritual requirements of public service --a lack of understanding that influences the administration's far-flung insensitivity to appropriate public behavior...

...It purges trained cadres of public servants through coordinated budget cuts, personnel "reforms," and legal inertia, and compounds these actions by bringing in a remarkable array of ill-informed, hostile, and incompetent low-level appointees...

...We should realize, of course, that spiritual awareness, especially at the lowest or purely psychic level, is no more intrinsically religious than awareness of physical body or emo- tions or mind...

...Gorsuch, James Watt, and Rita Lavelle on ad- ministrative agencies, it regularly debilitates agencies with bad management...

...Personal favors for and by public officials seldom qualify as simply "personal" given the realities of political life...

...director of the CIA, head of the EPA, and various cabinet officers, not to mention many low-level appointees...

...This, in turn, stems from an even deeper ideological and moral confusion at the administration's core, a confusion which collapses the distinction between the public and private realms...

...It requires something this administration profoundly lacks --a personal commit- ment to the autonomy of public life and fidelity to its rituals and laws...

...First, it presumes an autonomous public realm with its own ideals, methods, and substance...

...The ideological and personal confusion of the private and public realms among members of the current administration accounts for most of the sleaze problems...

...In a similar manner, Edwin Meese does not seem to see that calculations of interest always bend to the existence of public power in a person...

...For many people, the" sleaze factor" simply confirms what they always suspected about the greed which lies at the heart of any Repub- lican administration...

...On the other hand, 13 July 1984:397 their efforts to reinvigorate public life usually inappropriately inject private morality into public life as typified by attempts to reintroduce public religion or regulate sexual mores...

...When these basic values conflict with public service, then internal opposi- tion, resignation, and public dissent are all honorable and reasonable options...

...It also supplements accountability by leading individuals to inter- nalize their fidelity to the goals, methods, and law of a coun- try...

...Second, public service presumes the ideal of "service...

...The vocation to serve the public involves special powers and privileges not given to private citizens and requires that the public servants establish psychological and moral distance between their private and public worlds...

...The military at their best exemplify this ideal...

...This seemingly endless array of peccadillos, sweetheart deals, and improprieties touches officials as diverse as the counsel to the president, I I J. PATRICK DOBEL is assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Dear, born...

...The Casey case is especially significant because he exercises con- trol in the one area where the right wing acknowledges a strong public interest and a concern with maintaining "esprit de corps" and service traditions...

...James Watt finally self-destructed by employing insensitive and ethnically divisive rhetoric which showed an utter lack of understanding of the need for appropriate public demeanor from officials in a deeply pluralistic society...

...The first failing shows up most clearly in the lack of fidelity to the law throughout the administration...

...I do not suggest that public and private morality are completely disconnected, but we must realize that they are distinct and entail different responsibilities...

...Paul's caution against a sinful stance towards spiritual phenomena has become, in practice, an effective caution against the phenomena them- selves...

...How can we begin to have such an awareness...

...They wish the best of both worlds and see no need to give up private prerogative for the sake of public propriety...

...it is articulated in the laws of the land...

...Second, individuals have no sense of the personal requirements of public office and morality, and confuse their private and public identities...

...As such, public actions must always earn their legitimacy in people's eyes and reinforce the legitimacy of the public order...

...But a transfiguring surrender of the whole self can only occur if we are aware of our whole self, which includes our self as spiritual body...

...To violate these rituals and responsibilities of office besmirches the symbols sustaining the community and, as in the Watergate crisis, can devastate people's trust in the politi- cal system...

...They must separate their pri- vate opinions and interests from their public obligation to obey the law and transcend their personal prejudices and desires...

...Public symbols and i'hetoric create and sustain bonds of common aspiration and justification across parties and between citizens and governors...

...When the administration is not foisting barely experienced personnel into the position of Chief Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board or un- leashing Ms...

...CIA Director William Casey's refusal to surrender control over his investments in firms associated with his agency, or Presidential Counselor Edwin Meese's trouble with the multi- ple coincidences of individuals, who financially helped him, getting government jobs, demonstrates the other half of the problem...

...They conflated the public good with the interests of the private constituencies involved in their areas of responsibility...

...For others, it simply represents the prob- lems of individuals adjusting their business or entrepreneurial ethics to public office...

...This insensitivity to the symbolic and ritual requirements of private men in public life explains the perplexed and even aggrieved reactions many officials express when called to account for their confusion over public and private lives...

...Ironically, this THERE, I$ +".% CARE TO HEAR MY (,',,~5 ~/*', "-./ ON administration speaks stridently of virtue out of the "moral majority" side of its mouth, but it only means private virtue...

...Such individuals as these acknowledge no serious responsibility to reconstruct their private lives and decisions to accord with the duties of public life...

...This separates private or group gain from public service and helps to minimize the corruption of power...

...The administration has yet to learn that public service requires more than personal decency...

...Its policies continually try to shrink public responsibilities...

...The lack of fidelity to law is accompanied by a remarkable disregard for competence in making political appointments...

...it has little serious conception of the need for civic virtue in its public officials...

...Ultimately, they are linked by our commitment to the same basic values which underlie a humane life and a just government...

...And spiritual self- awareness has a special importance in all this because a mini- mal element of it seems to be necessary if we are to experience what surrender means in any of our aspects, not only the spiritual but also the physical, emotional, and mental...

...Sometimes, public servants must actually sacrifice private interest to the obligations of the public realm...

...And we should also realize that there are many levels of spiritual awareness, from the psychic, which is merely sensational and fascinating, to the sublimely loving, which is transforming...

...Public action seeks to define and realize shared public aspirations through discus- sion, election, and politics, and gives these aspirations reality through law and policy...

...Emanuel Savas's exit from the Department of Housing and Urban Development after ordering his staff to help rewrite his book Privatizing the Public Sector nicely illustrates the problem...

...Anne Gorsuch Burford halted virtually all serious enforcement at the Environmental Protec- tion Agency for two years...

...This conception of the public does not simply reduce to aggregated private concerns...

...Spiritual self-awareness is an essential part of the process by which eventually a person surrenders the whole self to the divine Source, so that he or she becomes a transparent channel for the divine Spirit, a luminous human being outshone by the divine Light...

...Official actors embody the ideals of the soci- ety...

...Concerning this, contempo- rary Christianity provides little counsel...

...Commonweal: 398...

...What distinguishes our path is the privilege of identifying with the risen Jesus Christ in his completed tranfiguration and thereby in his healing and liberat- ing identification with the sick and the poor and the oppressed --other dimensions of Christian life which I have neglected in this necessarily one-sided essay...

...Officials casually use public money for exorbitant private transportation or ex- pensive office redecoratious, and use their staffs for private activities...

...This is a tragic error...

...Public life and civic virtue presuppose a public realm with its own symbolic and ritualistic integrity...

...rather, they reflect something far more disturbing...

...A T ITS RIGHT-WING CORE, the administration rejects any serious idea of a public realm or common good beyond national defense...

...Thinkers from Aristotle to Machiavelli recognize, as do the consistent decisions of the Supreme Court, how exceptional propriety on the part of public servants gives substance to disinterested policy and maintains the legitimacy of the political system...

...In reality, few of the incidents on the sleaze list represent either overt venality or personal corruption...

...Paul can be read as little more than a pious inspirational pep talk unless, at the very least, we are aware of ourselves as spirit in a spiritual realm...