A recent essay by Jonah Goldberg, in National Review, notes how the popular culture’s understanding of integrity has shifted from heroes in this mold:

Through virtually the entire history of Western civilization, heroes had the right-end-of-the-spectrum version of integrity. They did good out of a desire to do good — and that good was directed by some external ideal. Sure, it wasn’t always, strictly speaking, a Biblical definition of good. You can’t blame Odysseus or Achilles for not following a book that hadn’t been published yet. But however “good” was defined, it existed in some sort of Platonic realm outside of the protagonist’s own id. (Or ego? Or superego? Or super-duper id? I can never keep that stuff straight.) The hero clung to a definition of “good” that was outside himself, and therefore something he had to reach for.

Goldberg argues that we’ve now inverted the idea of integrity to the point on the spectrum that used to be considered its lowest form: internal consistency based on some self-directed principle.  That’s more of a structural integrity; a building may not collapse because its parts fit together well, but we once prioritized the aesthetics and purpose of the building.  There once was an architectural integrity that married sound building principles with aesthetics that matched the surroundings, with a harmony of form and purpose and a moral component to that purpose.

These days, Jonah goes on, everybody from cable-TV’s dark protagonists to cartoons’ moral lodestars teaches the lesson that morality comes from within:

The truth is, it’s hard to find a children’s cartoon or movie that doesn’t tell kids that they need to look inside themselves for moral guidance. Indeed, there’s a riot of Rousseauian claptrap out there that says children are born with rightly ordered consciences. And why not? As Mr. Rogers told us, “You are the most important person in the whole wide world and you hardly even know you.” Hillary Clinton is even worse. In her book It Takes a Village, she claims that some of the best theologians she’s ever met have been five-year-olds …

Like many of the socio-cultural truisms that guide us, these days, this notion has some foundation in old-school Christianity.  But as philosophy, they’re simply downward slopes that help us get a little farther on the fumes left in the moral tank that Jesus filled up a couple millennia ago.

Yes, conscience is divinely inspired and sacrosanct, and we must listen for it inside ourselves.  But there are many other voices in there, from the base animal instinct that is the residue of our formation, to the whispers of outright evil.  Our task is to determine which of them aligns with the direction of good that can be understood through reason, as honed and instructed by our long heritage of experience translated into traditions.

A moral compass is like a regular compass.  On its own, it doesn’t offer much instruction about how to read the thing, let alone what destination we ought to use it to reach.