Posted on 06/20/2002 10:47:24 AM PDT by TLBSHOW
CHELMSFORD, MA—
Hypocrisy is seen as a mortal sin in the public debate of ideas. A debater is constantly looking for a “gotcha” moment in which he can catch his opponent in an apparent contradiction in argumentation. At that point, the debater pounces and proclaims that his opponent is intellectually bankrupt and an embarrassment to society. But is hypocrisy really so bad? The New Testament is filled with references of Jesus chastising the Pharisees and Saducees for being self-righteous hypocrites. Christians are told to look inward before judging others, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and so forth. Hence, Christians put a high premium on not being hypocritical.
One important question—in my mind—is this: Is it better to be consistently wrong or inconsistently right? Sure, the latter is “hypocritical,” but I’ll take it. For example, take Bill Clinton’s economic policy. Clearly, the former president did not believe that the free market was the most efficient way to allocate society’s resources. Instead, he believed that a central government could better provide for individuals’ needs than could individuals. To that end, he supported tax increases, imposed new federal regulations, and lobbied for higher federal spending.
Bill Clinton was also an ardent supporter of free trade—lowering tariffs, eliminating import quotas, supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement, etc. Clinton’s trade position was clearly hypocritical in the sense that it violated his big government philosophy. Would I have preferred that Clinton was consistently pro-free market? Yes. Would I have had more respect for him had he stayed consistently pro-socialist? No. I prefer his hypocrisy to him being 100 percent wrong.
What about moral hypocrisy? “Let he who is without sin” and all that jazz, right? Well, yes, but there are a few caveats. Just because we are all sinners does not mean that we should create a public culture that revels in sin. Indeed, we ought to uphold Puritan morality in public. When we profess what is right in public, there is a higher probability that we will do what is right in private.
But what happens if what an individual does “behind closed doors” is in conflict with what is morally right? One response is that he should be consistent and non-hypocritical. Consistency requires that if a person is engaging in nonmarital sex behind closed doors, then he ought to support nonmarital sex in the public square. But is this the outcome that we would most prefer?
The first-best solution would be that an individual behaves morally behind closed doors and supports traditional values in the public square. But what is the second-best outcome? The “hypocrisy police” would say that the individual ought to be a slut privately and publicly. I say, no. Let’s settle for the person acting badly behind closed doors—where there is no external cost on others—and upholding traditional morality in public. Hypocrisy is a small price to pay for keeping our culture free of pollution.
“What good does that do, Sabia? It sounds like you want people running around with dual identities.”
What’s wrong with that? In a free society, individuals are free to screw up their own lives, but why shouldn’t we ask our fellow citizens to preserve public morality, especially for the next generation of young people? And there is some hope that individuals who behave badly in private might be swayed by public rhetoric to change their ways.
Moral relativists suggest that cultural conservatives like myself ought to stay out of individuals’ private moral affairs. I take these relativists at their word and am in complete support of their wishes…on one condition—that they will support traditional morality in public. This requires that they stop running around in bars, on college campuses, on sitcoms, and on MTV thrusting their immorality in our faces. They cannot be celebrating “alternative lifestyles” and such. This request should not be hard for moral relativists to fulfill if they are being forthright when they suggest that what they do behind closed doors is nobody’s business.
While it is tragic that men like Michael Huffington and Newt Gingrich did not practice private morality while championing traditional family values in public, this was a preferable outcome to, say, what Barney Frank (D-MA) has chosen. Frank celebrates “diversity” by flaunting male prostitution rings operating out of his home. In this way, Frank chooses not to keep his private life behind closed doors, but rather to jettison his bedroom into our living rooms.
In the 18th Century, Thomas Jefferson—a slaveholder—penned a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence that included the following passage about King George III:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
And, of course, Jefferson wrote this famous phrase that was included in the final version:
We hold these truths to be to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Clearly, Jefferson was hypocritical in writing these words since he was also a slaveholder. But would America be a better place if had he been consistent and had never written the Declaration in the first place?
Consistency is wonderful (though it can lead to bizarre outcomes—witness Ayn Randites opposing private charity and libertarians supporting legalized child porn), but it should not be worshiped above all else. Hypocrisy can be a second-best outcome from which we can benefit too.
This one was very interesting.
What Jesus really meant was not that we should refuse to make judgments about what behavior is immoral. He meant that we should expect to have the same standards applied to us that we ourselves apply to others.
This misinterpretation has allowed Christ to be porrtrayed as supportiong the most egregious excesses of moral relativism. Taken literally, it would mean nobody could condemn any behavior, since none of us is sinless.
witness Ayn Randites opposing private charity and libertarians supporting legalized child porn
Can’t witness the non-existent.
Good point. The fact that Christ ended every discourse with a sinner with the admonition to "go and sin no more" seems to have been lost on people.
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