Chairs, it seems, are now ethically suspect. Listen carefully to the logic:
At most business meetings, even the simplest ones, hospitality requires the host to offer something -- coffee, soft drinks, perhaps cookies -- to the guests. More elaborate receptions provide fancier drinks and more substantial food. Chairs invite people to sit in them. But sitting down to eat looks dangerously like having a meal. And serving meals to members of Congress or their aides violates the new rules. To be safe, my friend yanks the chairs.
Shouldn't he, then, ban hors d'oeuvres entirely? No, they're still okay, as long as they don't require a knife and fork -- a convention known as the toothpick rule. So, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week, serving raw oysters to a legislator is acceptable, but serving oyster pasta is not. Why? Because you can eat raw oysters with toothpicks, but pasta needs silverware.
And that's just the tip of the regulatory iceberg. According to the Journal, the measures that passed both houses early in January make it illegal for members of Congress to fly their own private planes. The rules say they can't board any "non-governmental airplane that is not licensed ... to operate for compensation or hire." A member can, however, accept a fancy lobster dinner from a firm that doesn't employ registered lobbyists, though they can't take even a hot dog from one that does.
A January 19 memorandum to House members from the House ethics committee explains rather sheepishly that "the Committee intends to provide more detailed guidance as soon as practicable on issues that may arise under the new rules." Translation: We'll soon be sending around more rules to support these rules.
How did a nation of thoughtful, well-meaning citizens get to this pass? Admittedly, Congress needs ethics help. Gallup's most recent survey of "confidence of institutions," published last summer, finds that fewer than one in five Americans have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress -- well below the confidence accorded to the media, the presidency, and organized labor. But how did we get from there to toothpick ethics? How did we imagine that such rules would elevate the character and integrity of Congress? Are we seeing our lawmakers slip into self-parody? Are the ethics committees being deliberately extreme, hoping to show the absurdity of having any ethics legislation at all? Or is this a good intention gone inanely ham-fisted?
I think it's the latter, and I think it reflects an underlying confusion in our culture about the relationship between values and rules. Simply put, when a culture perceives itself to be in ethical decline and seeks to reform, it has two options: It can strive to return to its fundamental principles and values, or it can lather itself over with rules and regulations.
The good news is that Congress wants to improve. The bad news is that it's choosing the second option.
That's not surprising. Option #1 is genuinely tough. In a diverse community, it takes patience and persistence to help people recognize that, despite our differences, there's a core of shared values that includes such universals as honesty, respect, and compassion. But since this recognition flies in the face of a half-century of moral relativism -- insisting that everyone has different values and that ethics is situational and individualistic -- the first option is still difficult.
Which makes the Option #2 look easy. Want a new ethical climate? You simply announce and enforce new restrictions. You don't need to explore commonalities. You don't have to depend on others' values, trust them to do the right thing, or give them any tools for moral reasoning. You simply have to compel unthinking obedience.
Put Option #1 into practice -- in, say, the schools -- and you get a resurgence of character education, often with measurable benefits. The result is a budding climate of integrity. Exercise Option #2 -- in, say, the corporate world -- and you get something like Sarbanes-Oxley, the accounting and governance legislation that continues to generate headaches for honest managers and loopholes for dishonest ones. The result is a regime of compliance.
Toothpick ethics enforces the notion that compliance is synonymous with ethics -- that rules produce morality. And since rules are the logical outcome of any legislative process -- after all, legislatures are created to pass laws -- it's not surprising that a lawmaker's knee-jerk response to an ethical lapse is a new regulation.
Needed, instead, is a new culture of integrity -- a recommitment by Congress to core values and a renewed effort to win back the public's confidence. That won't be popular with lawmakers, since it probably will require a body of ethical overseers outside of Congress intent on developing principles rather than writing rules. Rules will help, but they'll never generate integrity. That only happens when you spend more time on character and trust than on chairs and toothpicks.