A rite of accountability

One of my treasured fantasies is an imagined scene at the government center up Capital Hill in one of the buildings, maybe the covered assembly hall just behind the Legislature. It would be at the end of the calendar year, or the first week of January, when the legislative, executive, and judicial officers would convene in a brief ritual of accountability.

But first, a context: In life, structures of accountability abound. Driving lagoon-ward from San Vicente down the hill to lower Dandan are three stoplights. Careening down at 35 miles per hour can easily lead to accelerated speeds from gravitational momentum, and the lights serve as an effective reminder of limits and possibilities.

Whether it be in the political, economic and cultural realms, there are usually two valid perspectives that people adhere to, which are often labeled: “conservative” and “progressive.” The first one reflects the understanding that life is bounded by limits, and society is best served if social constraints are in place so that everyone is clear what and where the boundaries are, and people refrain from doing what is consensed as verboten. 

This view is very rule oriented, and people try to conserve the gains from the past to ensure that wisdom learned are not lost, and mistakes made are not repeated.

The second perspective focuses on possibilities, the adventure of moving beyond proscribed boxes in order to explore the frontiers of progress and discover the cutting edge that makes the unknown known. The human journey is in fact served by a wedgeblade of those who dare use their bodies and social groupings to further push the gains of human culture to realms where no one had gone before, to stand as it were between the no-longer and the not-yet. The dialectic between these two seemingly opposing forces constitutes the Hegelian synthesis, thereby acknowledging the essential function of each in the waltzing journey of the whole.

Thus, in the ritual of accountability, someone like the Bishop Thomas A. Camacho, or another symbolic figure outside the three branches of governance, would stand in front of the gathered assembly of public officials, and ask the question: “Have you been faithful to your covenant to serve, defend and promote the well-being of the Commonwealth this past year?”

The specific oath in the Commonwealth Constitution, Article XVII, Section 1 reads: I do solemnly affirm (or swear) that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Covenant To Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States of America, the applicable provisions of the Constitution, laws and treaties of the United States of America, and that I will faithfully discharge my duties to the best of my ability (so help me God).

Were this rite be led by a religious cleric conversant in the tradition of confessions and absolutions, then s/he may let the same dynamic apply, only in secular terms. Confession would be a lucid acknowledgment of what had transpired and not be the guilt-ridden moralistic condemnation that often accompanies self-righteousness piety.

Obviously, the authentic answer to such a question would be a “Yes and No,” or “No and Yes,” i.e., everyone begins with a decidedly positive or negative (or, proactive or oppositional) stance but that in the due course of serving one’s functions, one either by commission or omission, deviates from original intents, one performs its opposites, or resign to passive indifference that allows inaction itself to become the active choice.

There would be those fanatic absolutists who will insist that they were 100 percent faithful to their covenant, and proudly defend in their minds every thought and action they had taken during the year to be in full conformity to the oath they made in the assumption of their offices, its roles and functions. Self-deception being an unshakable human habit do get some folks stuck in extremes, but the honest and conscientious person would stand present, with not a little bit of humility, to the ambiguity and mystery of human wisdom and behavior. To be sure, each could translate each response to a quantitative scale so that one may imagine that the “Yes” was 70 percent of the time while a petulant “No” was 30 percent of the time, or vice-versa. But one would understand that quantity is not what’s being assessed, rather, the quality of one’s consciousness and understanding is what is being held accountable.

Now, in the old European understanding from which objective assessments evolved, confession without absolution is tyranny, and absolution without confession is libertinism. This is where a Bishop Camacho, or one of symbolic standing, could pronounce the secular metaphors of absolution. The pronouncement would be a recognition that whatever had transpired the year before, it is done, finis infinitus. There is no way that the past can be undone, save in sci-fi imaginations of parallel universes. To be sure, there are objective audits and performance evaluations built in to systems, as well as laws and prohibitions that result in consequences when violated, but the point of the absolution would be the affirmation that wishing things had happened differently is a futile exercise, or worst, blame seeking is irreversibly counter productive. The absolution would be a declaration that where we are in the present, just as we are without apology, is an adequate point of new beginnings, that it is in the nature of the future that it is open to innumerable choices and that one only needs to decide to create that which is new!

Imagine that some dynamic like this is programmed into our neurological and social networks, and that social organizations and individuals can indeed begin at zero, and a tabula rasa, an imaginal clean slate accompanies the launching of a new year. This is not a novel idea. The government of Singapore during Lee Kuan Yew’s time practiced zero budgeting where a department begins every fiscal year at zero regardless of how they functioned during the previous fiscal year.

Brain/mind research is discovering that human behavior follows rites and rituals that it had created, and that normal and abnormal functioning (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorders) is determined by our adherence to those human-made rituals. When there is intentionality in the performance of the ritual, then it is healthy. If the ritual puts consciousness in a reflexive mode so that the ritual determines behavior rather than the other way around, then ritual becomes master rather than servant to the adherents.

On the last Friday of the month in my 6th grade class, we eat lunch together, and we lift up the birthday celebrants during the month. We practice an accountability ritual of a sort. The celebrant is asked what the highlight of the year had been and what expectation s/he has for the coming year. Then s/he is asked: “Have you been faithful to being the one, unique, unrepeatable (the student’s name) in history that you are, of which there has never been one like you before, and there will never be another one like you ever again?” The students are still getting used to the yin-yang of the “Yes and No,” and “No and Yes” answers, but intuitively, they recognize the authenticity, if not accuracy, of the responses.

Litigation and its adversarial nature has become the mode of our accountability structures, and its artifice is deadly. Would that we discover again the naturalness of being held accountable, and the glorious reality that the past brooks no malice, the present invites affirmation and celebration, and the future remains wondrously open and free.