The Only Liberal Sin 661

alohacyberian

KM, So glad that you posted this! I have long been bothered by the cries of "Hypocrisy, hypocrisy!". Unlike the writer of this essay, however, I see this failing as not being just a liberal failing but of being the particularly prevalent failing of the "boomer generation" because both liberals and conservatives enjoy pointing to "hypocrisy" as being the worst human failing that they see in the opposite side.

I think that the answer to the writer's question, "...what's the moral problem with violating a moral code liberals consider false in the first place..." is this: Failure to live up to ideals or moral principles is taken as proof of the falseness of the ideals or moral principles in the first place. Having denied authority to the speaker, the message is without authority on its own merits. That, I think, is the false conclusion that most people draw from the charge of hypocrisy. I was delighted to read the portion of the essay that referred to Aristotle because I think that "hypocrite" has become just another weapon in the arsenal of verbal buttault that is flung so often with the intent of stopping debates that it has become over used and stretched to cover situations in which it doesn't apply and thus it has been robbed of a lot of its meaning and its intended impact. We have forgotten who and what the original "hypocrites" were: they were a group of Greek philosophers who were said by their critics, to automatically argue the opposite position, whether they believed it or not, to any stance that was taken by another philosopher. They were what we could call "contrarians". If a philosopher stated "The sky is blue", the hypocrites would argue that it was green. If their arguments were sufficient to convince the first philosopher that the sky really was green and he changed his mind to adopt their point of view, the "hypocrites" would reverse course and now argue that the sky was really blue. Thus hypocrites were viewed as being like actors on the state, who pretended to be people that they weren't, because they both spoke words that they did not believe. There was deception involved in both, the actor and the philosophers. The difference was that the actor's audience was aware of the actor's deception and shared in it. The audience of the philosopher was not aware, often of his deception. It is this combination of belief and deception which are the elements of our word "hypocrisy" and it is my contention that the last 40-50 years has seen a rather rapid dropping of the element of "belief" from the definition as the word occurs in popular usage. All that is left is the idea of deception. To my mind "belief" is crucial to the definition and to its usage. That is why I was also glad that the writer included the words "sin" and "moral" in his discussion. This is important to me because to my mind a person who believes and advocates high moral standards and yet fails to live up them is not a hypocrite, even if he doesn't acknowledge those failings in public. He is merely a sinner. Thus I don't see see either Bill Bennett or Rush Limbaugh as hypocrites, just as frail human beings, as sinners. On the other hand, given what little I know, I do see Bill Clinton as a hypocrite as well as a sinner because he argued, without any real belief in what he was saying when he said that "oral love" wasn't really "love". In other words, Bennett and Limbaugh believed, and taught others to believe, in high standards that they felt were genuine moral truths yet failed personally to live up to the standards. Their intent was not deception concerning those truths, but merely the desire to hide their own frailties. Bill Clinton on the other hand must have known full well that his actions were wrong yet he made a false argument which he didn't believe with the intent of deceiving his audience. It is my contention that the example of Clinton fits the full definition of hypocrite while that of Bennett and Limbaugh do not.

If you doubt this idea, and my contention that "boomers" are changing the word, I would like to add the following definition as given by John Bbuttett McCleary in "The Hippie Dictionary" published in 2002. "hypocrite what most hippies call straight people. Someone who is too insecure in the purity of their soul to be able to indulge in simple, decadent enjoyment, withot first ridiculing it and afterward deying it."

Renee L. Dauven