A matter of integrity. (Living Humanism).

The golf club in Amherst, Massachusetts, has a picturesque New England quality to it with views stretching to the Holyoke range three miles away, but my son Mark couldn't appreciate its charms that day in July. He had entered the annual tournament for juniors and, as it turned out, he posted the lowest score; that meant the club championship was his. However, when he checked his scorecard he realized that he should have received one more stroke on the first hole, which put him even with another boy. He reported this to the club officials and, in a playoff, he lost the championship by a stroke.

To my son, victories and defeats were a familiar experience. He played both golf and tennis throughout high school and took his losses with grace--it is something called style--although, I could see he was devastated to be defeated in this way. It was an especially hard blow because he wouldn't be able to compete for the junior title again--he was beginning college in the fall--so I tried to be unusually supportive, making all the right fatherly noises: "Better to lose this way than win the other. This was your greatest victory; it shows real character. I'm proud of you for being so honest." I knew that he needed to turn a bitter loss into a moral victory.

Losing a golf tournament is a relatively minor matter in the total scheme of things, but much more was at stake. My son was looking for reassurance about the kind of decision he had made. He wanted me to confirm an article of faith: that losing is redeemed when you do the right thing. It would allay the pain and reaffirm his view of life.

I provided that assurance in abundance--although I couldn't accept the belief myself. My mind was unresolved because the incident stirred up too many memories of unfairness--of times when my principles made me a casualty, a victim, and my faults were disproportionately punished. Part of the baggage I carried with me consisted of injustices, and now my son had lost out because of his decency, and I felt doubly resentful.

If this incident had occurred in a Hollywood film, then integrity would have been rewarded, and he would have carried off the trophy in the playoff. Because the honest people always win, just as the liars, cheaters, and frauds invariably lose--that is, in the movies. This American optimism is continually played out in the media and popular culture. It reinforces the myth that life is a morality play in which good triumphs over evil. We live in a just universe, we are told, where virtue guarantees success and nice guys don't finish last, where as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "At the center of nature lies the moral law, radiating to the circumference." As Americans we are convinced that a retributive system of rewards and punishments governs our society, based entirely on character. Just as God will elevate one person to glory and condemn another to eternal damnation, people are praised or blamed strictly according to merit. We all receive our just desserts, this side of the grave and the other.

I wish that my experience confirmed this worldview; however, I have encountered too many instances where fairness was met with malice and generosity with spite. Some people need to believe that life is fair and refuse to register any experience of injustice, but I can't fashion the world closer to my heart's desire. Too often the undeserving prosper, and they are even admired after death when their portrait is suitably retouched. (Though God can't change the past, historians can.) Worldly success is such a powerful icon that any criticism as to how that success was attained is thought irrelevant and churlish, a function of envy.

So, there is no essential correlation between what one deserves and what one receives. In Robert Frost's verse play A Masque of Reason, God visits Job and says,

  I've had you on my mind a thousand years
   To thank you someday for the way you helped me
   Establish once for all the principle
   There's no connection man can reason out
   Between his just desserts and what he gets.

Those who are deserving, meanwhile, take comfort in the belief that virtue is its own reward. They may not have been effective, they admit, but they are admirable and their hands are clean. But this apologia pro vita sua always leaves a bad taste in their mouth. They resent those who actually got what they wanted out of life and try to tell themselves that successful people are unscrupulous. "Behind every great fortune is a crime," Honore de Balzac wrote, and "amen" cry the poor-but-honest citizens. Even if Balzac's claim is true, it is an icy truth that won't warm the spirit or put food on the table, much less champagne and caviar.

What, then, should I have told my son: that although he behaved honorably, he shouldn't expect to get ahead that way; that if he wants to succeed he should have fewer scruples? Such advice seems both realistic and sad. Accepting this advice may lead to maturity; however, it also signifies a loss of innocence essential to oneself. We all understand why J. D. Salinger wants a catcher in the rye and why e. e. cummings wrote, "Down he forgot as up he grew."

When I was two years older than my son is now and a sophomore in college, I dropped my pre-law major. I did so because of my conviction that practicing law and maintaining one's integrity are largely incompatible. That may not be true, but it convinced me at the time to choose another career, one that was more high minded. The direction I chose promised little money, and I took that as proof of its purity. At the time, I could make that decision for myself, although later I wondered if I had the right to condemn my family to a modest existence.

Meanwhile many of those around me prospered, not through committing crimes (Balzac exaggerates) but neither because of their virtue. Some succeeded because they were talented and in the right field to capitalize on it; others were fortunate in their birth and consequently had family connections, opportunities, and contacts; and many were smart (read pragmatic, flexible, shrewd, and manipulative). None of my contemporaries became Wealthy because of their honesty, and few achieved fame by rising above principles; it seems a truism that the great people in society are seldom good.

Should I, therefore, perpetuate the myth to my son that virtue is always rewarded, just as I once told him about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy in order to make the world seem benign? (Santa finds out who's naughty and nice, and rewards good little children.) I would like him to continue believing that if he does his part others will do theirs, but he is bound to see through this fiction. Sometimes the cream rises to the top but so does the scum, and he has only to read the newspaper headlines to realize this. The CEOs who made millions through insider trading and creative accounting are just the tip of the iceberg, while the employees who trusted them lost their retirement savings.

I find it hard to lie to my son about honesty and its relation to rewards, even for his own good. But I might be too cynical about human relations. And since all cynics are former idealists, I could be overstating the case out of disappointment. Lily Tomlin once remarked, "No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up with it," but such an attitude can lead to resignation. I don't want my son to become a skeptic before his time.

If a similar incident arises, I will probably say the same thing I did the first time, repeating the platitudes of the culture. When being a good person becomes an obstacle to making a good living, he may feel betrayed by his father and conclude that morals are the worst of swindles. Or he may come to forgive me for collaborating with society and understand my motive for deceiving him. His honesty will keep him from fooling himself; however, he might feel justified in lying to his own son by saying, "It is always best to tell the truth."

This particular story happens to have a happy ending. During that summer, the Francis Ouimet Society was considering my son for a college scholarship. The review committee learned of the incident at the club and, apparently, this clinched the award for him. The scholarship is offered to those "who demonstrate exceptional qualities in the area of academics, service to golf, and personal characteristics." Seemingly, my son's truthfulness was thought to be in keeping with the highest traditions of the game, and the term game was interpreted in the broadest sense.

Although honesty was ultimately rewarded in this case, we can't expect justice to prevail in the world. But that may not be the point, and virtues could have a different justification altogether. In discussing this issue with my son--after the wound had stopped stinging--he said that maybe we should do what is right because it is the right thing to do. That isn't bad thinking. Success as a person isn't the same as winning, and in the last analysis honesty may be a matter of respect--respect for oneself and for crucial values. In any case, I don't worry about my son as much any more.

Burton Porter is an academic, living in Amherst, Massachusetts, and holds a Ph.D. from St. Andrews University in Scotland, including graduate study at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He has held faculty positions in the United States and England and has written eight books to date. His most recent works are The Voice of Reason and Philosophy Through Fiction and Film.