Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?

“Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.”

Integrity is a troubled word these days. People seem to think that there is not much of it around anymore. And without it, trust becomes difficult, which leads to all kinds of social problems and a general cynicism that undermines faith in basic political processes. The idea of integrity goes back a ways. It played a key role in determining an array of the modern world’s forms-of-life where the individual was a crucial, foundational concept and when integrity established the basis for relations between individuals. A literal definition of integrity is intact wholeness (out of integral), the opposite of duplicity’s dishonest doubleness. From this troubled moment in late or postmodernity where we now find ourselves, the basic underlying ideas that would make such an opposition meaningful, ideas like fact, truth, evidence, seem to be disintegrating, if not already gone. Who, then, can one trust?

The invocation of integrity in the mouths of perennially duplicitous officials and politicians has contributed significantly to a general, at best mistrust, at worst downright disbelief, about the continuing relevance of the word in our daily lives. The revelation of outright government duplicity—the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate—has only intensified general mistrust and a deep feeling of the loss of any (perhaps illusory) sense of integrity, other than in reference to marketing communications and brand integrity. As a concept applicable to current USAmerican public life, integrity has become meaningless, a view widely shared, as was evident in the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis. We live in the midst of the disarray, if not breakdown, of modernity’s array of meanings and its components, components that also include democracy and equality, and that extend to the institutions based on them.

I found myself thinking about this in relation to my response to a television show called Yellowstone. I did not begin to watch it until its fourth season when I heard it was the most-watched show on television. Not knowing anything about it (other than it starred Kevin Costner), I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Almost immediately, I was swept up in a roller coaster of feelings that started with excitement at the action. I was stunned by the embrace of deep moral ambiguity. I grew fascinated with the characters and my reaction to them (especially Beth and Rip, and Jimmy). I admired the treatment of animals and the humans’ relation to them. I was impressed by the representation of Indigenous people and their struggles, and I increasingly recognized an intellectual dimension to the narrative that spoke to a long USAmerican conversation about the origin and meaning of the idea of America. Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.