The Contextual Character of Moral Integrity

237 Pages·2018·2.814 MB·English

by  Dita Šamánková, Marek Preiss, Tereza Příhodová

Transcultural Psychological Applications
Dita Šamánková, Marek Preiss
and Tereza Příhodová
The Contextual Character of Moral Integrity
Dita Šamánková · Marek Preiss
Tereza Příhodová
The Contextual
Character of Moral
Integrity
Transcultural Psychological
Applications
Dita Šamánková Tereza Příhodová
The National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health
Klecany, Czech Republic Klecany, Czech Republic
Marek Preiss
The National Institute of Mental Health
Klecany, Czech Republic
ISBN 978-3-319-89535-2 ISBN 978-3-319-89536-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89536-9
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This study is a result of the research funded by the Czech Science
Foundation; grant No. 16-06264S (“Integrity, moral disengagement and
other relevant constructs”).
Preface
When my old friend Marek, a professor of psychology in Prague,
invited me to participate in his and his Ph.D. student Tereza’s research
projects concerning moral integrity, my first question was: “Why? Why
do you deal with that at all?” Moral integrity testing has got virtually
no tradition in my homeland, Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia):
unlike the Anglophone world, especially the United States, we, ‘Eastern
Europeans’, have not become obsessed with what appears to be a
favourite Anglo-Saxon pastime, that is, ‘ticking the boxes’ in every pos-
sible area of life …
What do we do ‘in the East’ instead?
Well. First of all, the inverted commas gently insinuate that you can-
not offend us more but calling us ‘Eastern’—Prague is just in the heart
of Europe, isn’t it? Hence, ‘Central European’ may be a better term to
render our distinctive national features like utter scepticism, opportun-
ism, atheism, disrespect to any establishment or authority, and humour
that could dry out all the lush moors of the British Isles. Therefore, do
not call us ‘Eastern’, kindly please.
And secondly: We, Czechs, instead of ‘ticking the boxes’ rather rely
on our sharp social instincts when we hire someone for work or assess
vii
viii Preface
someone’s ability to comply with all our unspoken rules that, during the
long history of foreign subjection, have helped us survive as a nation.
Unspoken and fluid, that is. As any tenets too stern would have hardly
enabled us to coexist with alien systems and enforced ideologies with-
out losing sense of who we are: or so many historians say, pondering
our difficult central position between the German and Russian powers
through the centuries.
From whichever point you look at it, we are ‘the man in the
middle’—absorbing both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ influences, while put-
ting them under the constant scrutiny of our acid wit, and twisting all
‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ ideals and maxims to use them against their cre-
ators. Difficult as it is to describe where we truly belong on the map
of the Euro-Atlantic civilisation, one thing is undeniable: we won’t buy
anything as it is.
Give us Ten Commandments of any sort, and we shall ask questions:
“What do you actually mean by stealing? Hasn’t my neighbour sto-
len my opportunity to run my own bakery by opening his, in which
I’m now coerced to toll, since two bakers in our hillbillies could never
thrive, which everybody knows, as well as that the weasel’s uncle sits in
the town hall issuing licences to all his extended family, which has been
preventing anyone else’s honest efforts for decades? How could I estab-
lish my own business and become rich in this situation, can anybody
tell me? How could I afford to provide decent schooling for my kids
hadn’t I not helped myself with a pound of butter (or two) every now
(and then), and especially at Christmas time when so many of you need
cheap vanilla rolls from my kitchen oven? Licences? Taxes? To feed the
town hall scoundrels? Do you really want to judge me? Or would you
rather like a Viennese wedding cake for your eldest for a fraction of that
geezer’s price?”
And we would not stop at that. We would also ask “why”—to whom
the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” actually serves; the projection
of whose subconscious desires it might be—and so on. Therefore, I, too,
asked:
“Why? Why, Marek and Tereza, why have you been interested in
people’s morals, why have you developed your own tests to try thy
neighbour, what’s your own motivation behind that?”
Preface ix
Marek (like me) was born in the late 1960s, the time of the Prague
Spring blooming with hopes that the Czechs (and Slovaks) could
transform the communist regime into their very own “socialism with
human face” (as our fathers used to call it). Then he spent virtually all
his young, formative years in the straightjacket of the Moscow dictated
Normalisation of the Czechoslovak society, when the first command-
ment for most citizens who wanted to save their skin was Pretence. To
my question “why”, he told me the following:
“Some twenty years after we’d got rid of the Soviets (i.e., after the anti-
communist Velvet Revolution of 1989) and renewed our hope that we, as
a nation, could rearrange things in a completely new, fair manner, I felt
disgusted by how we’ve squandered our political freedom; how our sinister
ways, developed to bypass evil demands of the oppressors, have branched out
and yielded a mesh growing from the very bottom to the highest echelons of
our society; how immorality and corruption have become a norm we seem
unable to uproot. I got a sense of responsibility, seeing such behaviour even
in young people who shouldn’t have been affected by the communist past:
that was the reason for my first moral integrity studies amongst university
students. I wanted to unveil the morality of our people, and commenced my
work on the original Czech moral integrity tests.”
Tereza arrived to this world very shortly before the regime change.
When my and Marek’s contemporaries voted a playwright Václav Havel
for president of the free, democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989, she was in
the Kindergarten. She never experienced in her life what it’s like to have
to lie and develop a shadowy existence so as not to get in prison, lose a
job, or put your dear ones in jeopardy. Her Mum and Dad taught her
honesty, healthy competitiveness, fair play, and other good old demo-
cratic values. Moreover, she got a chance to experience them first-hand
in a bastion of the modern world democracy: aged seventeen, she left
for the United States, and embarked on the Star Valley High School in
Wyoming. This is one of her first impressions:
“When I was about to sit my first test in chemistry, the lector handed us
the papers with questions, and then left the class. I was waiting for them
to come back but soon I gathered that the test had already started, since
everybody was working hard on their questions. I mean, no one pulled out
a crib sheet, no one opened the textbook, no one consulted their mates…
x Preface
you know, things all our students normally do. I thought the guys must have
been extremely well prepared—but guess what?? Most of them got really
bad grades! They didn’t know the lesson well and still they didn’t seize their
chance to cheat. Only later I learned that this was entirely normal.”
In other words, Tereza confirmed Marek’s concerns that the indi-
rect, opportunist behavioural patterns of the socialist era had been
passed onto the new generation of Czechs, despite they had never been
taught to say different things at school and different things at home, or
required to write essays on the leading role of the Communist Party to
raise their chances to be admitted to the university. Still, a chemistry
test without cheating would have been unimaginable for most of them.
Tereza claimed she preferred the American style of direct fight to our
sneaky ways. It probably did suit her well: not only did she manage
to get her US high school diploma; four years later, she graduated as
BS from the Idaho State University, and then earned her MA in clini-
cal psychology and counselling in La Salle. Was all her experience the
same? Are the Americans morally better people?
“Well, not always”, she says, “But if they do commit something wrong,
they would make a big fuss about that. At the very least, they know it’s
wrong, you see.”
Upon her return to the Czech Republic, Tereza chose Marek’s moral
integrity research as her Ph.D. theme: in view of her US experience, she
wanted to contribute to moral elevation of her countrymen. Genuinely,
yes. She’s that kind of a person who, in her own words, likes to do “a
little bit more than she has to”—she wants to be good. I believe her. As
well as Marek, who feels that our society lacks ideals, spirituality, and
desire for transcendence; that we are too selfish and cynical; that noth-
ing is holy for us.
I agree. Ten years ago, I fled before it all to Britain.
Since I was not seventeen when I emigrated, but thirty-seven, and
because I did not fight for grades, but for living, my experience is
slightly different from the one Tereza made (any differences between the
Americans and the Brits aside). Short of her innocent naivety, I noticed
quite a few scoundrels in the English town halls and managerial chairs
of the rural NHS trusts where I worked as a consultant psychiatrist,
making friends who allowed me to peep under the lid …
Preface xi
Let me skip all the spicy details here. I will share just one important
thing I learned during my eight-year venture ‘to the West’: No amount
of guidelines and policies telling people what to do will ever erase their
selfishness and cynicism; no system of commissions and regulatory
bodies will make them comply with what is not in their true interest.
Perhaps, rather the opposite is true. Too many rules (and too many
roundabouts) often cause havoc in the traffic of human emotions and
motivations, making it easier to hide the individuals’ true direction of
thought behind a fancy signpost at the 50th exit.
According to my personal experience, I do not think people (or
morals) ‘in the West’ are any better than ‘in the East’. I am not even
convinced that fifty years of totalitarian regimes in my homeland caused
indisputable moral devastation. I argue about that with Marek and
Tereza, insisting that moral integrity depends on how we define it.
So, we decided to write a book in which we would look at moral-
ity from many different points of view and in many different contexts.
Marek and Tereza are the ones who do the serious research. They work
rigorously, construct sophisticated tests, put their results through odi-
ous statistical torture, and interpret them with caution. I am the joker
in our team—the one who asks uncomfortable questions and turns all
their results upside down.
We all sincerely hope you will enjoy our ‘Eastern’ way of asking what
moral integrity really is—or whether it does exist at all.
Klecany, Czech Republic Dita Šamánková
Klecany, Czech Republic Marek Preiss
Klecany, Czech Republic Tereza Příhodová