The Nature of Hypocrisy, Part II

This essay is part two of two. Part one is here.

 

by Christopher DeGroot (October 2018)

Nocturne, Bruce Herman, 1982

 

 

 

The surest way to resist hypocrisy, this most insidious of vices, is by being honest with ourselves. But it follows from the frailty of our nature—exacerbated, in some instances, by events that befall us which are beyond our control and which produce corrupt habits of thought—that this is one of the hardest of virtues. Extra vigilance is needed here because our natural egoism, and concomitant desire to shirk the ugly truth about ourselves, makes consistent self-honesty a task we frequently want to evade. As I put it earlier this year in an essay for The Imaginative Conservative,

 

reason deftly furnishes ad hoc justifications for what people want. The moral character of a thing may be only partially acknowledged, if at all, and it takes only moments for the mind to interpret behavior in a false but agreeable light. Nor will the memory necessarily impel one to confront the ignored truth.

 

William Hazlitt had a trenchant understanding of hypocrisy, as of many other things, and his essay “On Good Nature” (1816) is worth quoting at length:

 

 

On the contrary, we sometimes meet with persons who regularly heat themselves in an argument, and get out of humour on every occasion, and make themselves obnoxious to a whole company about nothing. This is not because they are ill-tempered, but because they are in earnest. Good-nature is a hypocrite: it tries to pass off its love of its own ease and indifference to everything else for a particular softness and mildness of disposition. All people get in a passion, and lose their temper, if you offer to strike them, or cheat them of their money, that is, if you interfere with that which they are really interested in. Tread on the heel of one of these good-natured persons, who do not care if the whole world is in flames, and see how he will bear it. If the truth were known the most disagreeable people are the most amiable. They are the only persons who feel an interest in what does not concern them. They have as much regard for others as they have for themselves. They have as many vexations and causes of complaint as there are in the world. They are general righters of wrongs, and redressers of grievances.

 

op-ed on February 27 of this year. While bemoaning the “oppression” of all non-heterosexual persons, the transgender Boylan claims that Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, “suggests that transgender people are crazy, and that what we deserve at every turn is scorn, contempt and belittlement.” To the disinterested reader, Anderson’s book clearly deals with the philosophical contradictions of transgenderism, and what the man actually believes is that transgender persons are delusional in the medical sense of the word. Nowhere does Anderson say that “transgender people are crazy” in some demeaning sense, nor that what they “deserve at every turn is scorn, contempt and belittlement.” Boylan’s misrepresentation is however revealing, and an apt example of Hazlitt’s hypocritical notion of good nature. For her, Anderson’s arguments and intentions are of no account. She takes the subject personally, so it is perceived only in that light, and so it is often with homosexuals and transgender persons (though of course not only them). Anxious about their own selves, they immediately become defensive and distort other people’s views. The “cisgender” or “homophobe” is “targeting” them; let him be punished accordingly. (Indeed, the will to punish is ever the most reliable thing in the moral domain.)

 

James Damore argued that some of the gender disparity at Google was not necessarily an injustice, but a result of men and women having different interests and aptitudes, he was—predictably—attacked by feminists, including those at the corporation itself. It made no difference that Damore’s belief had the support of a vast empirical literature. Google’s yes-mam CEO saw fit to fire him, and the engineer became an object of scorn in the Hawthorne novel that is America. Like most of the biggest corporations, and like nearly all colleges and universities, Google hires employees because they are women. This is obviously unfair. Gender tells us absolutely nothing about a person’s competence, nor should better qualified men be denied a job simply because they do not have a vagina. But of course, this is of no concern to feminists in general, comfortable hypocrites that they are. Without a selfish interest, their “good nature” is not called forth. Excepting a very few feminists, the specific aims and ends of men, however true and just, do not matter to them.

 

One could go on in this vein. Suffice it to say, Hazlitt is right. What is considered a good nature, in many cases, is nothing but a base and lowly and endlessly self-interested character. Incurious about and indifferent to whatever does not affect him personally, he will say, if asked, that he supports gay marriage, because his superficial impressions, so mindful of what the crowd thinks, tell him that that is the “good” thing to do. A generation before, he would have said homosexuality is wrong, and perhaps quoted some “expert” to that end, as he might do now to support the very doubtful view that one is “born that way.” Neither does he understand that one can believe homosexuality is wrong, or rather, a perversion in the strict sense of the word, without intending malice toward homosexuals themselves. He understands everything in a personal sense because for him there is no other sense.

 

For the worst of this type, morality itself is nothing but an acting job, a petty game of imitating the majority, and even if he has the intelligence to notice that they are wrong, his cowardly nature will not allow him to give voice to that disagreement, let alone act on it. He is a bureaucratic soul, a fitting member of committees. Easily ruffled, he does not wish to let things go, but is inclined to have “a dialogue” about them. When it comes to weighing in on any “issue,” he is inclined to ask himself that most vital question: What would other people think? Nor does he, being so averse to independent judgment, wish to go against any group, even as groups themselves are determined by regard for public perception. Thus his say or vote is determined by what he thinks others think, and what he thinks they expect of him. In all this, the strongest motive is fear: “Dare I to be—myself? No! I cannot.”

 

In complement to Hazlitt’s ironic notion of good nature, in which there is so much hypocrisy, there is this truth: that disagreeable persons, the types “who regularly heat themselves in an argument,” are often better from a moral point of view than their more likeable fellows. Hazlitt himself was a quarrelsome man, but like many such (Dr. Johnson, Carlyle, Empson, Wittgenstein), he cared much more about the true and the good than most people do, and no doubt has himself in mind in the second paragraph that I have quoted above. The interests of this sort of “bad nature” are not reducible to their own well-being. On the contrary, they are the rarest of individuals—they will sacrifice themselves for principle’s sake. For that they may well be despised, and truly they are lucky if they do not meet with a worse fate. Since they cannot but appear as enemies to many, theirs is typically an unhappy lot. In some cases, they are the most moral of persons, being not only good, albeit rather trying, but also the least hypocritical. Still, to live thus is not good news for them. Indeed, a prophet regards his own fate as something terrible. He has the most important truth to convey, but the experience itself is a sentence to ostracism at best, and to persecution at worst.

 

Alas, more and more, false good nature appears to be the post-Christian morality of these States. Fundamentally manipulative, it ensures that egoistic ends can be pursued so long as the puny souls pretend to value equality, diversity, inclusion, and the like cant. It is, in fact, a recipe for sociopathy, of which there should be a lot more, were it not for lack of nerve. During a job interview a man declares his “can-do attitude,” and in like manner a student fills his university statement of purpose with warm and fuzzy sentiments concerning “the rights of undocumented immigrants,” or of “marginalized peoples,” or of God-knows-what. More than “success” is at stake, because any non-conformist may easily become an occasion for mankind’s will to punish, which in many instances functions, I believe, to discharge frustrations and aggressions that have nothing to do with the particular object, although certainly this process happens unconsciously.

 

When traditions weaken, as in our “progressive” time, there is a lack of exacting moral authority to make and keep men and women accountable. So it happens that, where in the past a hypocrite would have been made to answer for his conduct, today he may receive an easy pardon. This, of course, is in keeping with the general attitude towards misconduct. Thus the poor criminal, because he is poor, is assumed not to have known better, like a dog that could do no other than bite. Likewise, the hustler who swindled his elderly neighbor, pretending to want to assist her with a household chore in order to steal her expensive jewelry, is not actually guilty. No, he who made another a victim is himself a victim, of poverty, that is.

 

Such sentiments become ever more common since, absent traditional forms of thought, evaluation, and judgment, the way is clear for the leveling democratic spirit to take over. Sheer affect reigns, marked by blind pity on the one hand and cheap resentment on the other.

 

Look and see yourself here,

You proud, vain, ignorant century…

All puffed up, calling it progress,

While educated men, whose bad luck

Was to be born in this time,

Flatter your foolishness in public,

Even as, in private among themselves,

They make laughingstocks of you.

But I won’t take such shame to the grave:

No, I shall tell the entire world

The scorn for you that burns my heart.

                                                          —Leopardi

 

Then, since both disinterestedness—crucially, an affair of a person’s character and his intelligence—and the ability to make sense of the enormous complexity of things are uncommon, while bias and downright perversity are not at all, the increase in unaccountability and the acceptance of lies, excuses, and evasions are constantly reinforced by intimates, who in their corrupting sympathy readily incline to people’s distorted perspectives and perceptions. Indeed, generally speaking, much of what is called love and friendship entails the mutual support of sustaining illusions and delusions which are hardly commendable in a moral sense. Morality amounts to huddling together in blankets of rationalization, noxious and yet thought to be otherwise: “Well, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.” “No, definitely not. Besides, you deserve better!”

 

Having said all this, let me be clear that we should not make too much of hypocrisy. Nietzsche’s insight, that the lie is essential to life, is confirmed by ample research, and many of the parts we play are not only harmless but beneficial. For we should experience endless discomfort and disruption in our relations if we didn’t incessantly say things like “nice to meet you,” “let’s do this again,” and “thank you for calling.” In “Concealment and Exposure” (2002),Thomas Nagel imagines what life would be like without all our nifty pseudo-moral games.

 

 

 

 

C: Groan . . .

 

 

While such candor is wonderful comedy, it would be highly unpleasant to endure. In Nagel’s words, “The trouble with the alternatives is that they lead to a dead end, because they demand engagement on terrain where common ground is unavailable without great effort, and only conflict will result.” So we need certain conventions of insincerity and to overlook much that we know about others. But ah, there’s a problem here. Conditioned by therapy culture, now running over forty years strong, we twenty-first century good team members find it quite difficult not to express our feelings. Despite the special values of politeness and reticence, our attitude is captured by the line in the old song: “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” Poor fellows! for neither do we have the hardiness for conflict, which arises the more we assert ourselves, “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”

 

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New English Review. His writing has appeared in The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative, Jacobite Magazine, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Unz Review, Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, and elsewhere. Follow him at @CEGrotius.

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