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Category: Hypocrisy
On the Death of a Neighbor
My neighbor Ted across the street, 85 years old, died the other day. Last I spoke with him, two weeks ago, he seemed as hale and hearty as ever. Ted and I enjoyed 26 trouble-free years of neighborly, if superficial, acquaintanceship. In this world of surfaces, relationships kept conventional and superficial are often best. Not one harsh word passed between us. Nothing was ever said in seriousness or in jest to sully the serenity that made the living easy. I will remember him fondly, with nary a negative thought.
There is a lot to be said for mere acquaintanceship and for cleaving to the conventional. Go deep with people and you may see things you would like to forget. In a world of seemings, surfaces are safe. You say conventional usages are phony? They mainly are, but what did you expect in a world fleeting and phenomenal? Grow up, Holden!
Don't look for depth where it cannot be found. But look for depth. Where? First within, and then in a kindred spirit or two.
Hypocrisy? Double-Standardization?
Accusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.
The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters.
A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.
The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue. In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)
Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada. But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health. When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense. Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.
Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly. Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.
We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences.
What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization. We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.
I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.
I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all. Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:
Win at all costs and by any means!
So True, Hillary!
A Double Standard or an Alinskyite Tactic?
One mistake I have corrected in my own political thinking — thanks in part to Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' — is the tendency to confuse the double standard with a hard-Left Alinskyite tactic the name of which, if it has one, I don't know.
Suppose you and I are politically opposed but agree on certain values or standards. We are, for example, both strongly committed to free speech and open inquiry. But your behavior suggests a tacit commitment to "Free speech for me but not for thee." This is an example of a double standard. The moniker is infelicitous in that there are not two standards but one; what makes the standard 'double' is that it is inconsistently applied. While sincerely professing a commitment to free speech you tend to take it more seriously in your own case and less seriously in the cases of those with opposing views. You really do accept the value of free speech; it is just that you have a hard time in the heat of conflict applying it fairly and consistently to all parties.
But there is something far worse than the double standard.
The most vicious and mendacious type of leftist will feign an interest in our conservative standards and then use them against us. In many cases they don't even feign the interest.
Sex is a source of examples. By and large, leftists do not value chastity, sexual purity, traditional marriage (as opposed to same-sex 'marriage'), marital fidelity. Talk of lust as a deadly sin is a joke to them. They have a pronounced libertine wobble and are entirely too 'sophisticated' for the above. They celebrate 'alternative sexual lifestyles.' Bestiality is not a grave sin but something to joke about (Al Franken).
Since they do not share our standards when it comes to sexual behavior, it is a mistake to accuse them of a double standard when they pillory Trump while giving Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton a pass. The truth is, they see politics as war and will do anything to win including using our standards against us while mocking those very standards.
The same with free speech. The Alinskyite hard Left doesn't give a damn about free speech except insofar as they can use it it to destroy free speech. These tactics are at least as old as V. I. Lenin, and people need to be aware of them.
Our political opponents on the Left are not fellow citizens but domestic enemies and the sooner we admit this fact the better.
‘Liberal’ Immigration Hyper-Hypocrisy
You may remember Trump Labor Secretary nominee Anthony Puzder who came under fire for having employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper. But why should 'liberals' care given that they do not distinguish legal from illegal immigrants while standing for open borders and sanctuary jurisdictions in defiance of the rule of law? Suddenly, these destructive leftists care about immigration law? 'Liberals' should praise Puzder for giving the poor woman a job. After all, as they say, no human being is illegal!
What the Left is doing here is employing a Saul Alinsky tactic. The fourth of his Rules for Radicals reads:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Leftists judge us by rules for which they have nothing but contempt.
The ordinary hypocrite will not practice what he preaches, but at least he preaches, thereby paying lip service to ideals of conduct that he puts forth as binding on all. The Alinksyite leftist is a hyper-hypocrite who preaches ideals of conduct, not to all, but to his enemies, ideals that he has no intention of honoring.
Of course, I am not saying that Puzder did not do wrong in hiring the illegal immigrant. He did, assuming he knew she was illegal.
Do Our Ideals Make Hypocrites of Us?
Perhaps only unrealizable ideals do. But such 'ideals' are not ideals in the first place. Only that which is realizable by us counts as an ideal for us. Or so say I. This is a quick and dirty formulation of my Generalized Ought-Implies-Can principle.
Take celibacy. Can any healthy man in the full flood of his manhood adhere to it? St. Augustine in his Confessions somewhere remarks (I paraphrase from memory) that no man can get a grip on his concupiscence without divine assistance.
So I note an ambiguity. 'Realizable by us' is ambiguous as between 'realizable by us without outside help' and 'realizable by us with or without outside help.'
Moral Phenomena in the Vicinity of Hypocrisy
When is one a hypocrite? Let's consider some cases.
C1. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of moral behavior, and in the main he practices what he preaches. But on occasion he succumbs to temptation, repents, and resolves to do better next time. Is such a person a hypocrite? Clearly not. If he were, then we would all be hypocrites, and the term 'hypocrite,' failing of contrast, would become useless. A hypocrite cannot be defined as one who fails to practice what he preaches since we all, at some time or other, fail to practice what we preach. An adequate definition must allow for moral failure.
C2. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of behavior, but, for whatever reason, he makes no attempt to live in accordance with his advocacy. Here we have a clear case of a hypocrite.
C3. Let the high standard be sexual purity in thought, word, and deed. Consider now the case of a person, call him Lenny, who does not accept this standard. He has no objection to impure thoughts or pornography or to the sort of locker-room braggadocio in which men like Donald Trump boast of their sexual escapades. But Lenny knows that his neighbor, a Trump supporter, does advocate the high standard that he, Lenny, does not acknowledge.
In an attempt to persuade his neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump, Lenny says to the neighbor, "Look, man, you are appalled by Trump's sexual morality, or lack thereof; how then can you support him?" This is an example of a non-fallacious ad hominem argument. The argument is 'to the man,' in this case the neighbor. It starts with a premise that the neighbor accepts but Lenny does not; the argumentative aim is to expose an inconsistency among the neighbor's beliefs.
Is Lenny a hypocrite? No. He does not accept the neighbor's stringent sexual morality. He thinks it is 'puritanical.' He may even think that it sets the bar so high that no one can attain it, the end result being that people who try to live by the standard are driven to hypocrisy. But Lenny himself is not a hypocrite. For it is not the case that he makes no attempt to live by a moral standard that he sincerely advocates. He does not accept the standard.
C4. Now we come to the most interesting case, that of 'Saul.' Lenny made it clear that he does not accept as objectively morally binding the demand to be pure in thought, word, and deed. Like Lenny, Saul does not accept the moral standard in question. Unlike Lenny, Saul feigns a commitment to it in his interactions with conservatives. Suppose Saul tries to convince Lenny's neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump. Saul uses the same argument that Lenny used. "Look, man, you are appalled by Trump's sexual morality, or lack thereof; how then can you support him?"
Is Saul a hypocrite or not? Not by one definition that suggests itself and that I endorse. On this definition there are two conditions one must satisfy to be a hypocrite: (i) one sincerely advocates a moral standard he believes to be morally obligatory; (ii) one makes little or no attempt to live by the standard. In other words, a hypocrite is a person who makes no attempt to practice what he sincerely preaches and believes to be morally obligatory. Saul does not satisfy condition (i); so, on this definition, Saul is not a hypocrite.
What then is the difference between Saul and Lenny? I have just argued that neither are hypocrites. The difference is that Saul mendaciously feigns a commitment to the moral standard in question. Saul is your typical hard leftist. Such leftists use our morality against us when they themselves have nothing but contempt for it.
It is a mistake to call them hypocrites. They are worse than hypocrites.
I'll leave it to the reader to apply this to the case of Sarah Jeong. See Get Whitey for details.
The Higher Hypocrisy
A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible. A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them.
For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue
David Horowitz (2013):
Here is another statement from [Saul Alinsky's] Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party.
In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.
Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph. (emphasis added)
A good recent example of how, for the Left, the issue is never the issue is the furor over the separation of the children of illegal immigrants from their parents. Why are 'liberals' apoplectically concerned about the separation of the children of criminals from their parents? Because the issue is not the issue. That is, the issue is merely a means to the end of more power. They have no objection to the use of State power in separating children from criminal parents when the ones affected are citizens.
This meme bears the title 'Hypocrisy.' But it is worse than hypocrisy. And it is not correctly called a double standard. Leftists, liberals, progressives — whatever you want to call them — don't share our values and standards. They use them against us in the approved Alinskyite manner.
Virtue and its Exhortation
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:
Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.
This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.
Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.
To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.' It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself. The very fact of preaching shows one to be a hypocrite. Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy. When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.
And therein lies the contradiction. They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical. But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.
We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.' But if you have read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.
“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:
Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."
The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas.
In a second footnote we read:
Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"
Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.
What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more. Does it mean that no man preaches a pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack. But on this reading the saying comes out false.
Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.
A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy. But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.
Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.
It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.
Moral Phenomena in the Vicinity of Hypocrisy
When is one a hypocrite? Let's consider some cases.
C1. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of moral behavior, and in the main he practices what he preaches. But on occasion he succumbs to temptation, repents, and resolves to do better next time. Is such a person a hypocrite? Clearly not. If he were, then we would all be hypocrites, and the term 'hypocrite,' failing of contrast, would become useless. A hypocrite cannot be defined as one who fails to practice what he preaches since we all, at some time or other, fail to practice what we preach. An adequate definition must allow for moral failure.
C2. A man sincerely advocates a high standard of behavior, but, for whatever reason, he makes no attempt to live in accordance with his advocacy. Here we have a clear case of a hypocrite.
C3. Let the high standard be sexual purity in thought, word, and deed. Consider now the case of a person, call him Lenny, who does not accept this standard. He has no objection to impure thoughts or pornography or to the sort of locker-room braggadocio in which men like Donald Trump boast of their sexual escapades. But Lenny knows that his neighbor, a Trump supporter, does advocate the high standard that he, Lenny, does not acknowledge.
In an attempt to persuade his neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump, Lenny says to the neighbor, "Look, man, you are appalled by Trump's sexual morality, or lack thereof; how then can you vote for him?" This is an example of a non-fallacious ad hominem argument. The argument is 'to the man,' in this case the neighbor. It starts with a premise that the neighbor accepts but Lenny does not; the argumentative aim is to expose an inconsistency among the neighbor's beliefs.
Is Lenny a hypocrite? No. He does not accept the neighbor's stringent sexual morality. He thinks it is 'puritanical.' He may even think that it sets the bar so high that no one can attain it, the end result being that people who try to live by the standard are driven to hypocrisy. But Lenny himself is not a hypocrite. For it is not the case that he makes no attempt to live by a moral standard that he sincerely advocates. He does not accept the standard.
C4. Now we come to the most interesting case, that of 'Saul.' Lenny made it clear that he does not accept as objectively morally binding the demand to be pure in thought, word, and deed. Like Lenny, Saul does not accept the moral standard in question. Unlike Lenny, Saul feigns a commitment to it in his interactions with conservatives. Suppose Saul tries to convince Lenny's neighbor to withdraw his support from Trump. Saul uses the same argument that Lenny used.
Is Saul a hypocrite or not? Not by one definition that suggests itself. On this definition there are two conditions one must satisfy to be a hypocrite: (i) one sincerely advocates a moral standard he believes to be morally obligatory; (ii) one makes little or no attempt to live by the standard. In other words, a hypocrite is a person who makes no attempt to practice what he sincerely preaches and believes to be morally obligatory. Saul does not satisfy condition (i); so, on this definition, Saul is not a hypocrite.
Or is he?
It depends on whether (i) is a necessary condition of being a hypocrite. Suppose we say that a hypocrite is one who makes little or no attempt at practicing what he preaches, whether what he preaches is sincerely or insincerely advocated as morally obligatory. Then Saul would count as a hypocrite along with all the other Alinskyite leftists who condemn Trump for his sexual excesses.
Whether or not we call these leftist scum hypocrites, they use our morality against us when they themselves have nothing but contempt for it.
Flannery O’Connor on Pious Language
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), p. 227 in a letter to Maryat Lee dated 28 June 1957:
I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides.
To the unbeliever, pious language is just so much cant and hypocrisy and offensive for these reasons. At funerals for worldly persons one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. This may prove sickening to the unbeliever. Here is someone who spent his whole life on the make. And now you portray him as eager to meet his Maker? Or a nominal Catholic who never prayed the rosary in his life is set in an open casket with a rosary interlaced between his fingers. Disgusting!
The conventional lukewarm believer, for whom there is a tendency to conflate formulas and usages with the underlying realities, will not be offended. He does not take religion all that seriously in any case. It is a matter of habit and acculturation and respectability together with a vague sense that it might be a good idea to attend services as a sort of insurance lest any of the stuff about heaven and hell turn out to be true.
And then there is the person of genuine faith, for whom faith is not a convenience or a crutch or cheap consolation or an insurance policy or a mere matter of habit or acculturation or respectability. Such a person aims to penetrate through the formulas and usages to the transcendent realities and is offended by conventional piety for the right reason.
Related: Afterlife Again
A Note on a Common Misunderstanding of Hypocrisy
I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.
Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.
A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.
After Jeb Bush admitted to smoking marijuana during his prep school days, Rand Paul called him a hypocrite on the ground that he now opposes what he once did.
This accusation shows a failure on Paul's part to grasp the concept of hypocrisy.