It is strange how something learned 46 years ago suddenly becomes relevant. I was a senior political science honors student at University of California at Berkeley in 1960. Norman Jacobson -- an iconoclastic conservative, conducted my seminar on American political theory. He gave a remarkable lecture on the nature of corruption.
First, he argued that corruption has different levels and may not always be bad.
Take the allegedly incorruptible Nazi regime, the morally incorruptible Mormons, the religiously sanitized true believers. The obsessive regard for honor, personal integrity and moral purity can however lead to regimes that have been described by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This contrarian view of corruption broke up my knee jerk reaction to the evils of breaking the iron laws of purity. For instance, in 1972 I had neglectfully and unknowingly overstayed my visa in Japan.
I arrived at Haneda with my family. The Customs official stopped me. As soon as I understood the problem, I gave him my last ?2,000 (US$17.16) and walked through with my wife and my two young children.
As a budding political scientist, I began to divide corruption into its many manifestations and abuses such as: bribery, graft, extortion, patronage and misappropriation of public funds for private enrichment. I, and as I have learned since, developed a theoretical and practical approach to corruption.
For the sake of argument, there are three main types of corruption:
1) The need to use or receive money to save oneself from a threatening situation. This type of corruption can be perfectly valid. It can be identified with paying off blackmail.
2) The use of slush funds for personal gain. This is often provided by sloppy rules of accounting. It often does not amount to a tremendous amount of money and can be justified through ingenious accounting tricks.
Examples are padding an expense account -- I have been a consultant to businessmen and researchers who almost always pad their trips.
This has included paying for such cheap and odd items as toothpaste, knock off watches, meals, liquor and even female entertainment.
Jacobson would surely argue that such slush funds are actually a right of work, a reward for working harder, a necessity without which few would ever commit themselves to a task.
3) When corruption creates an undemocratic systemic change, or when it disrupts the legal and economic order, then it clearly is no longer benign or partially acceptable.
The reports of US and Iraqi corruption in Baghdad, the economic corruption in China and the reconstruction corruption in New Orleans have affected the system of public service itself.
They have weakened and hindered the legal system, undermined and thwarted democratic institutions and harmed and caused the psychological balance of the population.
However, one should not only attack the corrupters. The people who react to the corruption can be just as responsible for the destruction of the social, political, and cultural system as the people they wish to punish.
Today, there is a specter of fundamentalism that is destroying people's lives and societies.
This fundamentalism produces multiple demons. Religious fundamentalism provides an excuse to torture, kidnap, or murder anyone who offends the doctrine even in the most innocent ways.
In medieval Catholicism, lying was considered an offense against God. In the Christian world, one swears on the Bible when testifying in court. One of the major reforms of Hugo Grotious, the founder of International law in the 16th century, was that he argued that lying was okay under certain situations.
There is also a moral fundamentalism, which equally reduces any act of corruption to an issue of honor or of purity.
This fundamentalism is a game of declaring what is pure in the most absolute terms, and then lightest offender in the most extreme way possible.
Like the blasphemy of lying, there are no boundaries or separate categories to delineate the forms and nature of the offense -- even to exonerate the offender in certain cases.
And the charge is ahistorical. It does not matter when one did it, whether or not there was a law against it. Moral turpitude is an absolute crime no matter when it occurred or where or under what conditions.
While in the case of creating different categories for the definition and punishment of a murder from first degree, to second degree, to manslaughter, to self-defense, in the case of moral fundamentalism there are no factors, which can limit the extreme charge and punishment.
These ideas were never thought of in one instance. Rather, they have been a magnetic response to many historical and legal notes of energy.
However, they quickly formed a pattern when I read about the fundamentalism of former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Shih Ming-teh (施明德), the arousal of the delusions of the masses around him who seized upon magical energies to promote their cause -- the circles and influences of special energies -- and the whiplash by other politicians who want to engage in a massive cleaning house of all corrupt politicians.
When I read the comments of Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), Minister of Justice Morely Shih (施茂林) and the Taipei Times editorial of Dec. 3, I thought that someone else may have been inspired by the sagacity of Norman Jacobson.
Their observation that one cannot go back into the past and punish people for administrative laws that were not clear is a direct attack on the idea that corruption is a fundamental moral problem. Just think if they were in Iraq and had stated that Mohammed may not have written the Koran. What would the response be?
The alleged corruption of the family of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and of Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is a minor affair that should be handled by legal and democratic means -- not by the arousal of the masses or the appeal to narcissistic purity.
The appropriate response is to study the issue in a thorough and analytical way. It would be appropriate to set up a committee on comitology -- the comparative study of laws, judicial decisions, and administrative procedures in other jurisdictions -- at home and abroad, to create a system of fairness and order in the handling of corruption.
For those who have donned or are donning their red outfits to attack Chen's moral behavior, they should be asked to distinguish between individual and systemic corruption.
Based on the Corruption Perceptions Index, the countries that are more democratic have the lowest score.
Last year, out of 159 countries Hong Kong ranked 15, Israel 28, Taiwan 32, China 78, Senegal 78 and Sri Lanka 78. If one wants to be a reformer, then China is the place to go.
To successfully reform Taiwan, one must engage in institutional, legal, and administrative reforms and not just try to intimidate, chase down, or engage in hyper-charged accusations of moral turpitude that raise the level of the deed to an act of blasphemy.
Richard Kagan is a professor of history at Hamline University.
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