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zxd wrote:
How could integrity become 诚信? “操守”is much closer, I think, although still not right. 诚信means trust worthy.
朱老师：谢谢您的赐教。下面是我的一篇文稿的摘录，见笑。：）
Lost in Translation
Shangnengfan
"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
--Robert Frost
An Overloaded Word
Integrity is an overloaded word that has different meanings in different contexts. It is an oft-cited term of virtue and character by moralists and politicians alike, as in the case of “personal integrity.” However, it can be applied to almost anything. For instance, in the engineering field alone, civil engineers often talk about “structural integrity”, electrical engineers “signal integrity” and “electrical grid integrity”, chemical engineers “experimental integrity”, aerospace engineers “aircraft landing system integrity”, computer geeks “data integrity” and “inter-domain integrity”, and mechanical engineers “material integrity” etc. Classical composers value a work’s “compositional integrity”, be it a one-movement symphonic tone poem or a four-movement full-scale symphony. Artists strive to maintain a painting’s overall “integrity”, and claim that even a light touch could compromise the work’s integrity for being too excessive! The US Supreme Court often uses the phrase “Constitution’s structural integrity” in deciding the thorny cases. Many a country would not hesitate at shedding their citizens’ blood in order to defend their “territorial integrity.” Ecologists are concerned with “ecological integrity” and “ecosystem integrity”, dieticians “nutrition integrity”, and yes, we scientists “academic integrity”. The list seems endless, the utility of the word all-encompassing, and yet the word’s meaning often hopelessly vague and puzzling.
This frustration was succinctly expressed by Stephen Carter, a Yale Law School professor, in his 1996 book called “Integrity”: “Integrity is like the weather: everybody talks about it but nobody knows what to do about it.” Struggling to offer his take on the word, Carter later resigned to say: “ So perhaps we should say that integrity is like good weather, because everybody is in favor of it.” This is far from reaching even a working definition of the word.
Toward a Definition
Various modern English dictionaries, from more conservative but authoritative Oxford English Dictionary to less terse and more approachable The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, define “integrity” in several slight variations on the constant theme that includes:
1. Firm adherence to a strict moral or ethical code: incorruptibility.
2. An unimpaired condition: soundness.
3. The quality or state of being whole or undivided: completeness.
Let us examine these items one by one:
1. There may not be a universal code of moral or ethical value, but incorruptibility is an absolute term.
As an example, let me start my discourse with a tragedy happened recently in China. A young man in Ruzhou, Henan Province, stormed into a high school’s dormitory and brutally slashed five boys to death. And later his mother turned him in to the local police. I read the news both in the People’s Daily and in the Lawrence Journal-World. Both stressed the point that the mother had turned in her son, but gave it a totally opposite moral spin. Whereas the Chinese media lauded it a virtue (大义灭亲) exhibited by the poor mother, the American newspaper portrayed it an unthinkable moral taboo.
In contrast, this reminds me of a moving story I read some years ago in the Times magazine’s “American Scene” column. A single mother at the New York City’s Harlem had a son who was serving his life in prison for a violent crime. For over 30 years, the poor mother got up before dawn every Saturday morning to take a bus to her son’s prison in Pennsylvania, arrived there in the afternoon and spent a couple of hours visiting her son, and then caught the last bus back to Harlem in the midnight. She had to save all the money she had to pay for the trips, and she had diabetes and had to give herself shots on the bus. Before she died suddenly in a hospital, she had only missed twice in making her weekly trip to the Pennsylvania prison: once due to a severe snowstorm that canceled all the buses; the other due to her admission into the hospital before her death.
Both women were great loving mothers. The only difference lies in the fundamentally different value systems. On one hand, the Chinese mother “sacrificed” her own son for the common good of the society, a moral act that has been promoted in China for thousands of years. On the other hand, the American mother loved her son unconditionally for who he was, not what he was, a deep-seated moral value in the Christian culture.
Even within the same culture and thus the identical value system, the moral or ethical code can sometimes be ambiguous as well. For instance, the infamous O. J. Simpson trial provided a classic case for contention. While the majority of the people who watched the courtroom drama played out on their living room TV screens felt that Simpson was guilty, his defense team did an excellent job with admirable professional integrity and handed the prosecutors a stunning defeat. Here one might argue that Simpson’s defense lawyers may have acted with professional integrity but may in fact have also acted immorally in letting a brutal murder go free. However, to turn the argument around, hypothetically suppose that Simpson admitted his crime to his lawyers, and his lawyers felt so morally bound that they would tell the jury his admission, then what would happen?
In the court of law, that admission would be inadmissible at the end, and those lawyers could be reprimanded! Even their legal adversaries, the prosecutors, would condemn them for their outrageous violation of the attorney-client privilege. Otherwise, the very fabric of the current legal system would be threatened, and consequently the Constitution’s structural integrity would be compromised. It seems to be a paradox, doesn’t it? Not necessarily so! The legal system in this country was designed to punish criminals and, equally important, protect the innocent. A vigorous defense mechanism requires a rigorous prosecution, and the “arm races” between the two ensures an overall fair trial and hence limits, but not necessarily eliminates, potential abuses.
Similarly, let us look at another hypothetical case. A would-be murder goes to his church to confess to his priest that he is going to kill a person for whatever reason, and asks for God’s forgiveness. The priest may try every possible means at his disposal to persuade the man not to commit the crime, but in no circumstances would the priest turn him in to prevent the tragic event from happening. The priest is acting with his professional integrity by maintaining the trust people have placed on churches as a religious institution, a spiritual safe heaven so to speak. To protect the confessor’s identity is in fact a strict moral or ethical code that churches have to adhere to, regardless of what consequences that may cause.
In both cases, the integrity of the legal system and the churches was uncorrupted despite the moral “dilemmas” (as viewed by the general public) they had to face.
2. In the physical world, an unimpaired condition is unstable, but the soundness of the object resists any attempt at impairing it. The same must be true of the living world.
In his 1995 book called “Piloting Through Chaos”, international attorney Julian Gressler wrote: “Integrity is the capacity of every living thing to maintain its hold in the face of entropy, disorder, and uncertainty, its link to the living world, its ability to carry on its life, however humble.”
A classic example immediately comes to my mind is about late Dr. Hu Shih, my idol since youth. He was only in his late 20’s when he became a full professor at the Peking University and a leading intellectual figure in the May Fourth Movement in 1919. He later became the wartime Chinese Ambassador to the United States, and in late 1940s, president of the Peking University. He was awarded a total of 35 honorary doctoral degrees by the renowned universities around the world. After the Chinese nationalist’s defeat, he lived in exile in the States during 1950s before returning to Taiwan to become president of Academia Sinica. In early 1950s, he was briefly the head of the Gest Oriental Library at Princeton University, a position that would be considered an insult by some for Dr. Hu’s stature. Yet, he carried out his duty there with enthusiasm and passion and maintained quiet dignity and extraordinary aplomb. This “unimpaired condition” in Dr. Hu’s personal characters was deeply rooted in his own firm belief in humanity’s being “…not necessarily devoid of beauty, of poetry, of moral responsibility, and of the fullest opportunity for the exercise of creative intelligence of man,” even in face of “the apparent cruelty in the struggle for existence” (“My Living Philosophy”, 1933). Dr. Hu’s entire life exemplified those aspects that can be best described by the following Chinese sayings: 威武不能屈, 贫贱不能移, 富贵不能淫; and to these, Dr. Hu added his very own: 时髦不为动.
The soundness of a person’s character is also well illustrated in this incident that literally happened in my doorsteps. In 2002, a Kansas City high school biology teacher caught 28 of her students plagiarizing from an Internet article, and she flunked them all! Under the pressure from the students’ parents, the school district authorities overruled the teacher and ordered her to change those students’ grade. She refused and instead resigned from her post.
3. Integrity as completeness goes back to the word’s etymological root; its sense of wholeness, entireness, and intactness has such a wide applications that they essentially contribute to the word’s overloaded content.
In real world, or at least in the moral realm, however, can this completeness ever be achieved? Or, to frame the question differently, one might wonder whether integrity is merely a lofty ideal that only can be approached but never reached, as the value of “pi” in geometry. The examples of this sort are plentiful, from the biblical story in which “ He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone” to a familiar saying that “The golden idol has feet of clay.”
In his recent book “Letters to a Young Lawyer” (2001), Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor and an internationally acclaimed legal scholar, wrote:
Lawyers tend to be hero worshippers. Perhaps because we often work on an ethically ambiguous terrain, we need to create large-than-life role models to look up to. We airbrush the warts of our heroes and turn them into saints who could do no wrong. Eventually, we learn the truth and we become disappointed, if not disillusioned.
Dershowitz went on to tell some disturbing revelations from his own experiences with several famous US Supreme Court justices, who were generally regarded as the persons of “integrity” but were found, by the author, to be flawed--some even deeply flawed. He later came to a somewhat cynical but true, and perfectly Dershowitzsque, conclusion:
So, please no heroes and no worship. Look up to people who have admirable traits, but understand that all have human foibles, some more than others. Expect to be disappointed, especially if you ever get to know personally those you look up to. Learn to live with the disappointments and still emulate those characters of your role models that warrant emulation. Burt even singular characteristics will rarely be without flaws.
No wonder, in the midst of nationwide worships of late Chairman Mao of China during the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, was never impressed by the dirty old man! It’s not that “Familiarity breeds contempt”, but it’s that proximity detects defect.
Despite Dershowitz’s rather grim view of “person of integrity”, it is not difficult to find some names that are almost universally acknowledged to represent such a “person of integrity”. Among them, the Pope has been criticized for his view s of women’s role in the Church; Martin Luther King, Jr., has been accused of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation. Just as a building with structural integrity does not have to be flawless, so one can be a person of integrity without being perfect (完人) or being a saint (圣人).
Perhaps mindful of the fact that people can be imperfect but remain to have integrity, many now often speak of “person of complete integrity”! The word “integrity”, like the word “unique”, used to be considered an absolute term—you either have it or have not, and you cannot have it partially. This tendency to dilute the word’s absoluteness apparently reflects the society’s struggle with or, rather, retreat from a stricter moral code. Therefore, it is essential, now more than ever, for us to grasp the real meaning of the word “integrity”. As Albert Camus aptly stated, “Integrity has no need of rules.” Whereas honesty demands you to be true to others, integrity requires you to be true to yourself. Nothing could be more inspirational than the Greek sculptor Phidias’s two-word answer to his student’s question why the master had to belabor himself with the details of Athena’s back head for nobody will see it—“I will.”
Back to Square One
By now, any lingering sympathy toward the translation of the word “integrity” into 诚信 should have evaporated. 诚信means honesty and trustworthiness, and thus only constitutes a tiny fraction of the meaning of integrity. Therefore, so much has been lost in this particular translation!
Historically, integrity has been embedded in the Chinese moral value system as in that of any other culture. All the things discussed above would find their parallels in Chinese vocabulary without any difficulty. And yet I have failed to find a Chinese word that would even come close in meaning to the English word “integrity”. The integrity would include, but certainly is not limited to, the following Chinese concepts: 忠实, 率真, 正直, 诚信, 坚固, 完整无损, 言行一致, 表里一致, 前后一致, 良好操守, 风骨, 气节, 高尚纯洁, 道德文章, 有所为有所不为, 等等. Any of these Chinese concepts alone cannot convey the very integrity of that all encompassing English word—that has been my biggest problem!
灏氳兘楗�