HA Journal text pages 12-10_Layout 1 12/11/12 1:44 PM Page 24
Naturally, changing circumstances can throw any intended policy off course. Public policies are at the mercy of unexpected events at home and abroad; statements of intention and purpose cannot be ironclad contracts or promises. But when events deflect officials from their stated purposes, these officials must be transparent in explaining why they did not or cannot do what they said they intended to do. On the other hand, citizens must care about being dealt with honestly, and allowing for the play of circumstances, hold officials to their word. When accountability is haphazard or arbitrary, it would then seem that representative democracy could well be replaced by any political system that got desirable results, at least in the immediate. The initial judgment is thus that citizens must want and expect transparency, and find its lack unacceptable, if the political stratum is to feel urgency in providing it to the fullest extent possible. Of course, many of us are not conscientious and attentive as citizens. We make an undesirable situation much worse in many areas of policy in which technical knowledge is not demanded of the citizen and where greater transparency than actually exists is possible. My main interest is in the area of foreign policy, where the failure to insist on transparency intensifies the inveterate disposition of those who make foreign policy not to provide it. And because the results of foreign policy, though always of significance to American citizens, are only episodically or selectively or intermittently visible and palpable, the people remain fairly inattentive. We will return to foreign policy as the most important field for discussion regarding the lack of transparency in democracy. But I would like to turn first in a general way to the deficiencies of democratic citizens. Untruth plays a large role in American politics, so large a role that we could be led to contemplate the possibility that our democracy is intrinsically tenuous. But the plain fact is that untruth plays a large role in American democratic culture, in American life altogether. We the people bear a good deal of the responsibility for that condition. Some main institutions in American life proceed on the assumption that the mental level of the American people is low and that their moral level is perhaps not higher. I have in mind especially politics and advertising. Much of the time, power holders in these institutions can and do assume that people don’t want very much transparency, as long as things go tolerably well. In democratic politics and culture, much of the blame for the ubiquity of untruth must fall on the people. How else could advertising, with its deception, inaccuracy, and exaggeration, prosper? How else could the political stratum get away with its lies, distortions, withholdings, secrets, ingrained partisan bias, and ideological misrepresentations, and even flourish because of them?
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HA
Truthtelling