More On 'Corruption'

Following yesterday's post about corruption in Russia, or more specifically a link to a video about those who speak out against it, our usually apolitical blog is gonna attempt to set out some thoughts about this corruption, for what they're worth.

Corruption seems to be one of those words, like democracy, which gets bandied around quite a lot without clearly defining what is meant by it (in the case of the original meaning of democracy, most of the populace in Plato's Athens, which in any case he was criticizing of course, were in fact excluded from any say in affairs of state). In order to call something 'corrupt' it is necessary to have an idea of an 'uncorrupt' version, just as you can't have an up without a down.

In the case of a computer file, for example, this is presumably relatively easy as we, or at least programmers, know what a clean file should be. But do we have a clear picture of what a corruption-free country would be? Presumably it would mean everything would be done by the book, so to speak, and that there was in fact a book to adhere to. No irregularities, no jumping the queue, bribes etc. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't envisagae that such a state exists anywhere in the world. Where everything is done fairly and on merit, and noone has any major gripes about the way things work. Indeed, political thinkers have diverged hugely on what form the perfect theoretical state should take.

In the UK for example there have been numerous scandals involving large financial donations to political parties in return for influence, expenses claims, control of the media etc.

One big area that I feel is a bit of a red herring is that of the never ending sex scandals. Without condoning them, these largely seem to fuel public demands for salaciousness and don't, necessarily, impact on the running of affairs of state. Naturally there are some exceptions to this, such as the Profumo affair which potentially threatened national security, but this was almost half a century ago now. It reminds me of the story told about Lincoln when, in the early stages of the civil war, things weren't going very well for the Union as they lost battle after battle. Some aides, generals whatever came to him snitching about General Hooker's alleged, shock horror, addiction to the bottle. Lincoln simply asked what brand of whiskey Hooker drank and when informed ordered bottles of the same to be sent to all of his generals since Hooker was the only one that was winning any battles. A little bit facetious but, whether it's apocryphal or not it illustrates a point.- someone's personal life need not have any bearing on their professional function and that goes for politicians too (provided they don't have the gall to start lecturing us about morality, I'm remembering John Major's fiasco of an administration here). We seem to expect our politicians to be next to sinless, even as the bulk of those decrying them are not likely to be any worse, or any better, forgetting that all of the prophets had their iffy moments, so it seems a little bit unrealistic to hold mere politicians up to a much higher standard than we apply to ourselves.

But I digress. If we have no example of a perfectly uncorrupt state in reality, maybe we can show that to some extent some countries vary hugely in their adherence or otherwise to some sort of theoretical model people have in their minds, although even then these things are hard to quantify.

What we're left with really is people's perceived view of a government's corruption, and naturally Russia scores very low here even in its own people's eyes. I think the answer is that we have to give credence to people's common sense here - if it walks, talks and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck, without going into detail of what species of duck it is, how ducks evolved etc.  I'm sure there is a good deal of unfairness and downright oppression of the majority of the people to the benfit of the elite, and that this is what people really mean by corruption; having lived in Lithuania and Latvia I've come into contact with minor examples of this and no doubt Estonia is  hardly free from the phenomenon either. In other words outcry at this 'corruption' seems to rise in proportion to the ordinary folk's inability to get a piece of the action, and the yawning gap that arises from this impotence, rather than criticism of the general ethos of the state. But maybe I have a too pessimistic view of people here.

It's in part a question of semantics; returning to my opening theme, 'corruption' seems to be a catch-all theme for a variety of activities, or even spoken about in the same way that we'd speak about influenza. But the willingness of a few, courageous people (sooner them than me!) to use whatever avenues they can, including youtube, to highlight this, surely must be a step in the right direction in clarifying further what these problems are and the realities of the suffering of the many millions who have to live with this every day.