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Bill Bennett, Front Porch Republic, hypocrisy, James Matthew Wilson, Jeremy Lott, Mark Sanford, race, William Vallicella
Recent news of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s affair provides an appropriate occasion to discuss a topic that’s been on my mind lately: hypocrisy. When social conservatives like Sanford or Bill Bennett get caught in vice, the charge immediately hurled at them is hypocrisy; this is said to make their crimes far worse than those of, say, Eliot Spitzer, who wasn’t that kind of moralizer in the first place. But I want to make the case here that hypocrisy is really not so bad.
A defence of hypocrisy is not original to me. There are plenty of right-wingers who’ve defended hypocrisy in these sorts of situations: William Vallicella blogged about it a while ago, Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book about it, and most recently James Matthew Wilson‘s defence of hypocrisy at Front Porch Republic was where I heard about Sanford’s adultery in the first place. But these men do not share the ideals of those who usually attack hypocrisy, and I think the point might be more persuasive coming from a left-leaner like me. I oppose Sanford’s and Bennett’s sexual politics, and I think their behaviours were unjustifiable; but I want to claim that these two criticisms are and should be mostly separate.
Put it this way. Suppose a man preaches anti-racism, tells all his friends they must avoid racism, donates to anti-racist causes; but himself refuses to hire black people or associate with them professionally. Now imagine a man who acted the same way toward black people but advocated doing so — a man who said that black people are unreliable and should not be hired or associated with. The first man is a hypocrite, the second man is absolutely not; the second man is sincere, and true to himself. But is the second man then better than the first? I don’t think so. In both cases the serious wrongdoing is the racism, not the hypocrisy. I might say, actually, that the hypocrite who preaches anti-racism is at least a bit better than the consistent man who doesn’t; the first is doing some good. Moreover, one can point out the inconsistency between his behaviour and his ideals, in a way that helps his behaviour change for the better. It’s much harder to change the man whose bad ideals match his bad behaviour.
The comment on hypocrisy brings to mind the oft cited La Rochefoucauld maxim about hypocrisy being the honor that vice pays to virtue. The reason for bringing it up is that it points to hypocrisy as a middle term between the opposites: vice and virtue. At the same time it valorizes the latter and makes the former “the lesser term” of that dualism. It recognizes virtue as honorable and therefore to be defended and adhered to, at least rhetorically.
Matters can be made even more complicated of course if we were to introduce the ‘liberal’ distinction between public and private, the one which is often invoked when denouncing vice in matters public, while demanding that it be treated as ‘sacred’ when it comes to the “bedrooms” of citizens or even elites.
The vice-virtue dualism may take us back to your earlier note about intimacy and integrity. Those two were also presented as terms of a duality. The idea of associating the first with Asian philosophy and the latter with Western does not necessarily reduce one of them to the lesser term but could be and perhaps has been, in some East vs. West polemics. In your note you do make the point about the presence of both in both traditions. But you seem to see some value in the distinction as it is applied to the two traditions.
What if we were to look at the two issues together and put them in the context of Western philosophy’s penchant for “dwelling” in dualisms and for remaining stuck in them in fact, both in thought and in practice? Asian philosophies, on the other hand, seem to have traditionally made room for the possibility of going beyond, for overcoming such dualisms. They seem to me to search for, at least, and advocate some sort of a ‘middle path’ as a better way, if and when they choose not to make transcendental projections. Hypocrisy in that sense could be seen as a middle path, in practice, between vice and virtue but one which has, by association, and perhaps even in your estimation, already reduced vice to the position of the lesser term.
Thanks for your comment! I’m not sure that Asian philosophies are necessarily any more oriented away from dualism than Western philosophies are. A middle is still a middle between two extremes; the Buddha’s ethical or spiritual middle way was the path between sensualism and severe Jain asceticism, and Nāgārjuna’s epistemological middle way was between affirmation and negation. So too, the East Asian yin and yang is a clear dualism, with the idea being an attempt to set up a harmony between the two. None of this marks a clear difference from Western thought, where Aristotle saw virtue as itself a mean between two vices. The rhetoric of a valued middle is usually only made possible by setting up two extremes between which the middle sits. Even the intimacy-integrity dualism acknowledges plenty of gray between the two (they’re ideal types, as I mentioned) and suggests a potential hope of a meeting point in the middle.
I share your sense that the criticism over Sanford’s hypocrisy is misplaced: his real sin was the adultery, not the fact that he preached marriage virtues. Yet to leave the hypocrisy issue at that is too simple, I think, because there is something egregious when a hypocrite takes action based on hypocritical beliefs. As exhibit A, I give you Newt Gingrich: even as he was cheating on his wife, he was trying to impeach President Clinton for doing the same. The fact that Newt was cheating on his wife is blameworthy, but in this case, it really IS the hypocrisy that troubles me, because it leads to wrongful actions. I fault Gingrich for cheating on his wife, but as a political sin, the far greater one was the fact that he was devouring the American political agenda by skewering Clinton for a personal sin that he simultaneously forgave himself for committing.
Thanks for the comment, and welcome! I’ll admit that I phrase things a bit strongly here; hypocrisy is a vice, it’s just not usually as serious as the other misdeeds committed along with it. I’m intrigued by something you say in this comment: that hypocrisy troubles you “because it leads to wrongful actions.” Isn’t it the reverse? Aren’t the actions, taken together, what makes for hypocrisy – isn’t hypocrisy the end result?
This is a super-old post, but some discussions I had with other people today brought my mind back to the topic.
I, personally, don’t buy the defense of hypocrisy. If someone campaigns against bad deed A, yet also secretly practices A, I don’t view this as better than someone who unabashedly practices A. Instead, I view it as someone who practices A *and is also a liar*.
“Liar” is an over-strong word for emphasis: they’re more likely to be self-deluded than malevolent. Regardless, especially given the disjoin between conscious narrative and behavior (as discussed elsewhere), if someone practices A, then in some sense they do not place sufficient proscriptive value on the moral arguments against A. To then reproach others for pursuing A entails an unfair double standard. “Do you really think that A is so wrong, when you do A yourself? I suspect instead you just want to cast opprobium on this person, because I don’t trust your claim that hatred of A motivates your reproaching actions.”
A friend of mine (who posted as “mop” above) was making a similar point to me in person. He was pushing on the point about Gingrich above, describing him in terms very much like you use here. We came to the conclusion that there are two different types of hypocrisy. One is when a person’s attack on others for doing A is primarily a way of attacking those others (like Gingrich attacking Clinton). Then the hypocrisy really is dishonest and calculating, in a way considerably worse than I’ve allowed for above.
But in the second case (Bennett’s seems to be like this), the person sincerely believes that A is wrong, but is simply weak. Hatred of A may very well motivate the public reproach – one hates it even more because one has such a hard time getting away from it, hates the fact that one does it. In that second case I think the person is definitely better than simply endorsing A, assuming we believe A is a bad thing in the first place. At least they’re aiming at self-improvement, which is a step to getting there. Even if we don’t believe there’s anything wrong with A, the problem is just with criticizing it, not with the hypocrisy as such.
But, even Hypocrisy v2.0 has some serious problems.
First and more simply, the reproacher is being harsh, by trying to hold their target to a standard that the reproacher knows is difficult.
Second and more importantly, the reproacher’s hypocrisy is probably secret, at least at time of reproach. Because of this, the reproacher’s words and actions amount to a claim that, “You should be punished/shamed for this, but I should get away with it.” Hence arises the unjustness of their position. Even if their hypocritical position arises from weakness rather than malice, it is a self-serving weakness that implicitly yet intrinsically creates an unfair double standard.
While rare in public life, there could be Hypocrisy v3.0, where the reproacher’s hypocrisy is not secret. I suppose someone saying “I do this too, but it’s wrong, and we should both stop”, would indeed be doing something mildly commendable. But I think this is rarely what people have in mind when talking about hypocrites.
I think in many cases there’s also a Hypocrisy 2.5: the reproacher believes the actions in question are worthy of punishment and shame in his or her own case, as well as others’. But the act remains secret, partially because the reproacher feels shame about it – that too is part of the weakness. When it comes out in the open, that gives the reproacher reason to change, in a way he or she might not otherwise have had.
Ted Haggard, from my old ‘hood Colorado Springs, may actually have been something like this. While I obviously don’t share Haggard’s condemnations of homosexuality in any way, he seems to have honestly believed them – and more importantly, believed that they applied to him – even while violating them. When it all surfaced, he said: “The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life.” This isn’t something I can imagine Gingrich saying. He left his positions of leadership and responsibility, accepting consequences of his actions. Afterwards, Haggard described himself as a “heterosexual with issues.”
Haggard seems to be a pretty clear example of a hypocrite, and one who has a great number of ethical problems – but the hypocrisy itself does not seem to be one of the greater ones, as far as I can tell. If he had lived the same kind of way with respect to an action that I actually believe to be wrong (say, pedophilia), I would have believed that he was right to issue the denunciations even though his actions would have contradicted them.