Corruption

This is how power works

There is an old proverb about the tendency of power to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely.

Our tendency is to think of corruption in this context in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde kind of way. A kind, altruistic person dedicated to public service and the art of healing or helping who, injected with power, becomes an evil, menacing, monstrous figure of violence and cruelty. That kind of corruption is hardly ever effective for very long and it certainly doesn’t sway masses of people to join “team Hyde.”

The dangerous kind of corruption that power causes is in those whose greatest goal appears to be getting the trains to run on time.

Or reorganize a corporation for greater efficiency.

Or make everyone in the family get along with each other.

Or to make the country they lead great again.

I’ve just finished listening to a Serial podcast about “The Kids of Rutherford County.” It’s a story from a county in Tennessee where the juvenile court judge, Donna Scott Davenport, was the county's singular juvenile court judge. She ran things her way, sometimes in disregard of state law, seeing herself as the “mother” of the county.

Sometimes this meant jailing a 7-year-old child.

Often this meant holding children in custody that state law said should be free and confining children and teens to solitary confinement she called, “lockdown” in a clear violation of human rights and federal law. The show description reads, “For over a decade, one Tennessee county arrested and illegally jailed hundreds, maybe thousands, of children.”

And while that may sound like Mr. Hyde level corruption and cruelty, most people involved thanked Judge Davenport for all of her hard work and she was lauded for doing so much for the children of her Tennessee county. The corrupting work of power – the truly dangerous expression of it – is often applauded by a large number of people who often are not aware of the consequences or harm done by the practices of those with all the power.

And sometimes, they do know, but they are willing to reframe every abuse they see, and to provide an alternative narrative for every violation of human decency. Or we apply another proverb, “You can’t bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.” And we come to believe that there will inevitably be an accumulation of bodies under the bus if you want to get somewhere and make things better for everyone else.

The original proverb of power and corruption is found in a longer letter, the context of which involves the Church and leaders in the Church.

Surprised?

Here’s more of the paragraph for context…

“…I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” – John Acton

What makes this corruption so deceptive is that usually comes from people wanting to do the “right” thing. People who think they know what we all need. People who are concerned for the “greater good” and are determined to get it for all of us. These are people on whom power is conferred who, by and large, have the very best of intentions.

But on the way to their intentions, the reality of other people and the particularities of individuals often come into conflict with both the means and the end people are aiming at.

Tolkien, in the Fellowship of the Ring, acknowledges the reality of Power’s tendency to corrupt us as well as our willingness to cede power to those we think have our best interest at heart. In Lorien, Frodo offers the Ring of Power, the one Ring to rule them all, to Galadriel. He offers her the power to “save” them all from the evil, Sauron. Galadriel replies,

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.

“I pass the test”, she said. “I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”

The agency of the hobbits, the smallest and least powerful, is a theme throughout the trilogy. In the movie version of Return of the King, after Frodo, Sam and Gollum have destroyed the Ring of Power, Aragon, Isildur’s heir and newly crowned High King, walks over to the hobbits Frodo, Samwise, Merry and Pippin, who all have played pivotal roles in the group’s quest to defeat Sauron. The four hobbits bow to Aragorn and the new High King says, “My friends, you bow to no one.” before bowing himself to the four as the assembly of “powerful” people present for his coronation joins him in honoring the little hobbits.

Throughout the trilogy, the character of Aragorn is tested and proven and he continually sets aside privilege and preference for the sake of those without power. His ancestor failed the test of power by trying to sneak off with the Ring of Power for himself (and the greater good, no doubt). Aragorn passes the test, like Galadriel, by acknowledging Frodo’s agency by not demanding the Ring or pursuing Frodo when he runs away with Sam.

In the Serial podcast there are clips from a weekly radio program that Judge Davenport would appear on to talk about the county juvenile legal system, the juvenile detention center and to dispense parenting advice. She sounds like everyone’s well-meaning aunt who, on the way home from family gatherings, you always say to your spouse, “Never let her around our children.” She sounds sweet and maybe a little old-fashioned, dispensing what she calls “common sense” but sounds, to discerning ears, like fascism with a handmade lace doily on top.

But the people who called in to the show never called her a fascist, they praised her and thanked her for what she was doing for their children.

This is how power works. Not only does it corrupt the wielder of that power, but it will corrupt all of us who feel we, in some way, benefit from that power. Our lives are safer, our economy is better, our church is benefiting, and the no nonsense talk about sorting our children out (everyone else’s really because I’ve got mine covered) feels like the kind of community I want to be a part of.

The Church, I have found, is a place of great contradiction.

We regularly ignore the things Jesus said about wealth and power and their corruptive influences while we focus on the traditional vice lists that the apostle Paul quotes that were typical vices for Christian and non-Christian culture in his day. The simple truth is that it’s often easy to say when someone has violated an item from the vice list – they’re clearly drunk, they’re worshipping that idol, they’re stealing from their neighbor. But it’s much harder to describe, quantify and address the abuse of power by people with power or the hoarding of wealth by people with great wealth.

In our part of the world, honestly, we’ve negotiated with mammon and we’ve reached an agreement.

And we’ve done the same with power.

Recently, David Fitch released a book called, Reckoning with Power. While I recommend the book, what I found even more fascinating were the comments on social media to posts ABOUT the book based solely on the title and tagline and brief descriptions that appeared with a picture of the cover. If another proverb turns out to be wise, "If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that holla is the one ya’ hit" then a lot of us in the Church are very sensitive about conversations around the use of power.

There was a lot of hollering going on.

Similarly, Matt Tebbe will often post on social media about Mammon, greed and wealth and how Mammon works as a system. His comments are often filled with pushback and hollering from people who seem to feel we’ve definitely managed to get a handle on greed and hoarding wealth despite living in our consumer driven, materialistic culture.

Author Kurt Vonnegut, writing an obituary of his friend and fellow writer, Joseph Heller, wrote…

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

The inability to know what “enough” looks like, or to even acknowledge that there is such a thing as “enough” when it comes to the accumulation of wealth (aka power) is also how Mammon works.

Fitch writes,

The church can be on the wrong side of power. And because people trust God, people derivatively trust church and are therefore open to power abusing them in God’s name all the more by those in power who wish to use them for their own purposes. Power seems so much more dangerous in a church, and so Christians must not shirk from discerning it. Every church must be equipped to discern power. (Reckoning with Power)

In the Serial podcast, one of the attorneys involved talks about landing in juvenile court before Judge Davenport on his first day, armed with examples of how the practices of the Court are in violation of State and Federal law and that his young client should be released, being met with ambivalence from the Judge and other lawyers present. He could not understand why none of the other lawyers present were enraged as he was. He said the general vibe was a shrug of their souls that said, “What can you do?”

Which brings us back to – probably – my favorite truism about power – people in power tend to use their power to stay in power. But let me expand it this time to say, “and manage to enlist the aid of others in maintaining their status quo of power.” This is how power corrupts us too.

We must follow Fitch’s advice and collectively practice the discernment of power and acknowledge the truth of Acton’s observation that we need to presume people with power are already using their power coercively and corruptly because this is the nature of power.

Here are some questions that might help us discern if and how power is being used…

How is/are the person/people with power benefiting from a practice or a decision that is being made? What are they having to give up?

How do the people with no power benefit from a decision or practice that is being made? How are they being harmed?

How are the people with no power regularly empowered by those with power? How are they given opportunities to meaningfully engage in ways that effects outcomes in measurable ways?

What is an example of a meaningful change that has been made by the person/people with power based on the feedback from the people without power? How has the original practice/plan been changed in response to feedback from the powerless?

How is power shared all the way down to the “grass roots” of our system?

To whom can people turn to when they feel they are victims of injustice? Who can they appeal to who are not beholding to the system of power who are nevertheless empowered to advocate for them within the system?

What power do I have in this situation/relationship? How am I exercising my power? Who is benefiting from my use of power? How am I benefiting from my use of power? How could I share power in this situation? In what way(s) am I trying to control outcomes?

Power and wealth. They are both corruptive. They sing a siren’s song to get us to crash on their rocky shores. This is true in government, in the justice system, in the neighborhood HOA, in the Book Club and at Church. In the movement that was started by the one who emptied himself (Php 2:7) it’s difficult to understand how we are attracted to people so full of themselves.