On Political Chastity and Fidelity

Purity and Incumbency

By John Taylor; 2009 May 19, Azamat 03, 166 BE

Incumbency is the tendency of the electorate to choose somebody and never change their minds. Election after election brings the same result until the poor individual chosen either burns out or dies. This is an ongoing issue in Baha'i administration. Although as electors we are supposed to be investigating new people all the time, in practice it is very rare -- at least in my experience -- for there to be much turnover. This is distressing when you are on the institution and see with your own eyes how certain LSA members' service is less than stellar, yet they get re-elected again and again. Usually the problem is not so much contention and querulous attitudes as with the notorious politicians in Ottawa right now. Usually poor service is for the prosaic reason that an Assembly member simply does not turn up for meetings. It is distressing from an inside perspective to see how little the electorate is aware of attendance records of those they vote for.

Not that this knowledge always helps. In an extreme case, I know of one LSA that elected as its chair a member who had not turned up for a meeting for at least three years before!

In general terms we do recognize incumbency as a problem, though. It is always a heated issue whether to publish attendance records of LSA members in the newsletter or the annual report. Although it is technically permitted to do so, there is in practice great reluctance. I have only seen it actually done a couple of times in all my years of service. When the record was made public, the deadwood was swept away very quickly. Almost too quickly.

It is always difficult to assess performance in a leader. Attendance is one indicator, but that says nothing about how well an elected public servant does when they do turn up. The "who will guard the guardians?" quandary applies to anybody in a position of authority.

I sometimes think that there should be some way to collect a combined visual display of several statistical indicators that would look beautiful when the job is done well and ugly when done poorly. This would supplement the electoral process and allow experts to have a say along with the people. This escutcheon, as Comenius suggested, could be displayed for all to see in a prominent place. Maintaining official badges, escutcheons or coats of arms visible to all would make sure that professional failure or incompetence is not hidden and secret, it would be automatically public knowledge. Moral taint would be fair and measurable. Wrongdoing and negligence would literally become a blot on a permanent public record, impossible to hide, deface or minimize. As long as we do this fairly and accurately, and it is monitored by expert opinion, an escutcheon would assure that public officials give due attention to the basic aspects of their job, such as attendance, punctuality and reliability.

In a recent issue of Macleans Magazine, political columnist Paul Wells points out something I had not realized, that incumbency is not always a bad thing. In fact, when an elected official takes the job seriously it is a very good thing to have the chance to see things from the perspective of decades rather than only a couple of years. It takes skill, wisdom and years of experience to perform any difficult job, and we should not expect politics to be an exception. Unfortunately, the bad reputation of politicians is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. I will cite his entire first paragraph since Wells frames the problem I think quite eloquently,

"Apart from sex, the only realm of human achievement where ignorance and inexperience are widely seen as virtues is politics. Sarah Palin is only the most notorious recent example of the phenomenon; the `vote for me, I have no experience' gambit succeeds with remarkable frequency, which speaks volumes about public attitudes toward the political process and politicians. Politics is seen as a profession in the same sense that prostitution is, practised only by people of highly suspect moral character." (Why every day is amateur hour in the House, http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/05/14/why-every-day-is-amateur-hour-in-the-house/)

The problem in Ottawa, he points out, is that we have had several minority governments in a row, with many incumbents booted out of office after only one term of office. The result is that most members of parliament are inexperienced, compared to England and the U.S. Worse, in most cases members are not qualified for the job in the first place.

"Only two-thirds of Canadian MPs have a university degree, while 72 per cent of British members have attended university and fully 93 per cent of members of the U.S. House of Representatives have a degree. David Mitchell, the head of the Public Policy Forum, finds this all pretty alarming. The amateur character of the Commons has led, he says, to an unprecedented level of partisan acrimony and a high degree of distrust between elected representatives and the federal public service."

Canada has a traditionally high turnover rate in its parliament, and the level of civility has been declining severely over the past decade. Wells calls its televised feedback session a "daily disgrace" and a "monkified feces-toss,"

"To call question period a zoo would be an insult to the relative civility and good temperament of wild animals; one suspects that the occasional parleys between Bloods and Crips in South Central Los Angeles are less partisan and hostile affairs."

The present situation involves "an entrenched and experienced government facing off against a transient and largely clueless House of Commons." Our tendency to elect what Wells calls "uncivil, hyper-partisan ignoramuses" is making it increasingly obvious that we need to improve the structure of democracy with basic institutional changes.

The most obvious reform is to how we stage elections.

In a blog posting by the same columnist called, "Christy switched, and so should you," he points to a radio confession on YouTube by a former elected official in British Columbia. Wells comments, "Apparently I'm not the only late convert to BC-STV (a rejected electoral reform commission that suggested an alternative to the present "first past the post" system). Here is Christy Clark, Gordon Campbell's former deputy premier." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhccpzI4lbQ

In the video she admits that she had looked at electoral reform with a jaundiced eye when she was in office, since the old way was what got her into office. But now that she is working as a radio talkback host in close contact with the people, she sees that electoral change would be the most effective way to assuage spreading anger against politicians. Continuing with his comparison of politics to sex, Wells concludes his column,

"In both Parliament and the bedroom, there is something deeply attractive about someone who has yet to be morally tainted by what goes on once the doors are shut. But in both chambers, if it is civility, consideration and effectiveness you are after, it helps to have someone who knows what they are doing."

As a husband of almost twenty years, I am constantly reminded of how permanent marriage is. The fact that God does not want us to flit from lover to lover lays upon us a sort of built-in divine conservatism. In effect, in the world of sex God puts in a holy vote for incumbency. You only lose virginity once but you can show fidelity through all the worlds of God. And both chastity and fidelity require one thing: purity of motive.

Similarly, in the world of work Baha'is are encouraged to have a long term career or profession. The latter is more difficult to start, requiring long training and education, but flitting from job to job sacrifices our long-term view of past and future in the name of expediency. Here too purity takes a worker from innocence to experience.

Baha'i writer Paul Lample in his "Creating a New Mind" devotes an entire chapter to the importance of purity. In it he points out that,

"Among the highest aspirations of all people is freedom. It is their dream, their expressed ideal, the object of their constant struggle. Yet few in modern society recognize that purity is the door to freedom, since it is purity that releases a soul from earthly bondage and oppression." (31)

Only by purifying the soul can it take on the apparent burdens, the balls and chains, the huge commitments of marriage, children and career without stress, moral taint or loss of freedom. In fact, if we know how to constantly clean the body and purify the soul we can, with the help of a loving community, avoid moral taint completely. We increase our own freedom by learning how to make a whim into a long-term project over several decades. As Lample puts it,

"purity is neither an unattainable ideal, nor easily achieved. Purification is an ongoing process won by degrees -- a struggle that lasts throughout a lifetime. Each time some frontier is conquered, a challenging new horizon appears." (33)

John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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