Better Off Forgetting?

EDITED BY CHERYL AVERY AND MONA HOLMLUND Better Off Forgetting? Essays on Archives, Public Policy, and Collective Memory UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London ©University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4167-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1080-4 (paper) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Better off forgetting?: essays on archives, public policy, and collective memory/edited by Cheryl Avery and Mona Holmlund. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4167-9 (bound). — ISBN 978-1-4426-1080-4 (pbk). 1. Archives — Canada. 2. Archives — Access control. 3. Digital preservation. 4. Public records — Management. I. Avery, Cheryl II. Holmlund, Mona CD3621.B47 2010 025.1714 C2010-902793-0 The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the University of Saskatchewan Publications Fund. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Canada Council Conseil des Arts ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL for the Arts du Canada iht CONSEIL DES ARTS DE L'ONTARIO University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. 8 Archives, Democratic Accountability, and Truth TERRY EASTWOOD In the Broadway production of Beyond the Fringe, a reporter interviews a pedantic police inspector about the Great Train Robbery. After quib- bling that it was not really a train robbery because there was 'no loss of train, it's merely what I like to call the contents of the train that were pilfered,' the inspector, when asked who he thought did the deed, replies that the police believe that 'the tell-tale loss of property, the snatching away of money substance ... all point to thieves.' The reporter then says, 'You feel that thieves are responsible.' The inspector replies: 'Good heavens, no! I feel that thieves are totally irresponsible, ghastly people who go around snatching your money.' Michael Harmon, in Responsibility as Paradox: A Critique of Rational Discourse on Government, uses this theatrical episode to illustrate that 'each of responsibility's dual, indeed opposing, meanings is logically necessary for comprehending the other. That is, the belief that people's actions cause events to occur ... is a precondition for their answerability to others for those actions!' The propensity in contemporary society to ask people in all walks of life to render an account of their actions, to judge those actions, and to reward the actor or, as is more often the case, to demand some measure of redress, recompense, or punishment for failure suggests that as a society we are becoming increasingly pre- occupied with responsibility and with unravelling its meaning in specific instances. The core idea of accountability is responsibility. At the simplest, the term accountability means the obligation to render an account or answer for discharge of duties or conduct. Jane Parkinson ably summa- rizes this essential meaning. 'For the purpose of conceptual clarity,' she says, 'we must distinguish accountability from the system to guarantee 144 Terry Eastwood Archives, Democratic Accountability, and Truth 145 it, but also from the effort to compel observance, or act on it by whoever their actions.' The third, obligation, is 'the notion that moral action is is holding someone to it. The latter is difficult to characterize abstractly, determined by its correspondence to principles and standards deriving since it depends entirely on the tactics of those with power. That there from sources external to the agent.'s In his analysis of responsibility are persons with the power to hold other persons accountable is all that as paradox, Harmon borrows theologian H. Richard Niebuhr's depic- can be implied by the concept of accountability.' As Parkinson also tion of the responsible self as one who is responsible for one's actions observes, 'accountability ... is a condition attached to the person who is and who is accountable to other members of a moral community. In to give account, not the person calling for it.'2 In Gerald Caiden's sum- Niebuhr's terms, responsible individuals are both makers and answer- mary of its nuances, 'to be accountable is to answer for one's respon- ers.' Harmon's paradoxes are easy to state in a fairly simplified form. sibilities, to report, to explain, to give reasons, to respond, to assume Although he discusses them in the context of public administration, obligations, to render a reckoning and to submit to an outside or exter- they surely apply to some degree in any bureaucratic setting. nal judgment.'3 But events in which accountability is at issue are rarely The first, the paradox of obligation, is this. If public servants are free simple. The complexities of organizational arrangements and societal to choose a course of action but must act only as others authoritatively interactions are such that it is often difficult to decide who is responsi- choose for them, practically speaking they are not free. If they do choose ble for what and to whom, and, if the facts of the matter are known, what freely, their actions may violate authoritative obligations, in which case is often even more difficult, to judge actions and, if necessary, deal with their exercise of free choice is irresponsible.' The paradox of agency is a their consequences. Establishing the facts becomes very much estab- little more complicated. For there to be responsibility, there must be lishing the truth in any given case where accountability is at issue. This blameworthiness for morally faulty decisions, but most rational argu- is hardly surprising: whoever judges actions or deals with their conse- ments put blame and guilt on individuals and are suspicious of col- quences will necessarily seek to understand the truth of the matter. As lective responsibility, which if regularly asserted would undermine the philosopher Bernard Williams observes, modern culture exhibits institutional stability and social control. Blaming someone tends to two attitudes towards truth. On the one hand, we are all suspicious of imply the blamer's innocence. But blaming invites the blamed one, in a being deceived, for no one wants to be fooled. On the other, we have paraphrase of Harmon, to deny guilt, justify the action, dispute the grown sceptical that objective truth exists at all, for no one wants to be facts of the matter, claim an inability to control the events in question, naive, to be seen to accept explanations or justifications for actions or or protest that he or she was just following orders. As Harmon says, all events as the truth of the matter.4 such claims of innocence are 'endlessly arguable.'8 The paradox, in a With these difficulties registered, what part do archives and archi- simplified version, is that individual acceptance of responsibility vists play in the pageant of accountability, in the public comprehension undermines institutional answerability, and claims of innocence as the of the often paradoxical tangles in which actors' responsibilities mani- answer given for actions can be achieved only by the individual's de- fest themselves in events? To ask this question implies another ques- nial of moral agency or responsibility. We sense this contradiction when tion: For what and to whom are archives and archivists accountable? we feel, as we often do, that something is horribly wrong when de- Before dwelling on these questions, it is necessary to explore account- mands for accountability are made, for the paradoxical quality of obli- ability's core concept, responsibility. gation and agency in a bureaucratic setting makes it difficult to assign blame or innocence in incidents when some institutionalized failure The Paradoxes of Responsibility seems to have occurred. Bureaucratic environments invite us to separ- ate moral agency from authoritative obligation, but neither can we act Harmon argues that there are three contemporary meanings of respon- effectively without being responsible agents, nor can we, as individ- sibility. The first, the idea of agency, is 'the idea that freedom of the will uals, answer completely for institutional behaviour. makes people, in Jean Paul Sartre's phrase, the "incontestable authors" Harmon's third paradox, the paradox of accountability, is this: 'If of their actions.' The second, the idea of accountability, is 'the idea that public servants are accountable solely for the effective achievement of people are answerable to a higher, usually institutional, authority for purposes mandated by political authority, then as mere instruments 146 Terry Eastwood Archives, Democratic Accountability, and Truth 147 of that authority they bear no personal responsibility as moral agents urgent imperatives, renders the official responsible for it liable to the for the products of their actions. If, on the other hand, public servants charge of irresponsible conduct.'" In an equally famous response to actively participate in determining public purposes, their accountabil- Friederich's article, Herbert Finer argued that

Load more