Polgren: We’re Taught to Hate Hypocrisy. We Shouldn’t

Thoughtful and nuanced:

…I have never been especially impressed by the accusation of hypocrisy, in no small part because this is the human condition: We are a collection of aspirations and failings, from which we try to be who we think we should be but constantly fall short. But I understand the appeal of calling out what looks like hypocrisy when we see it, especially now. We live under a penumbra of impotence, even as we face wall-to-wall crises: the heating planet; wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan; the migrant crisis. In place of action and solutions, which seem totally out of reach, we substitute judgment. And what is more satisfying to adjudicate than the charge of hypocrisy?

There is a temptation to police small hypocrisies to buttress our principles — lecture an environmentalist who uses plastic straws, for example. To give hypocrisy a pass, one might argue, is to slide down a slope toward having no principles at all. A better question is: How do you decide which principles you should hold with an iron grip and which you can grasp more loosely, or even ignore, when good might come of doing so? One does not need to sign up for a conspiracy of meaninglessness or embrace a binary choice between principle and expediency.

A manichean devotion to principle brings its own peril. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his best-known essay, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But it is a less famous line from that essay, “Self-Reliance,” that has always stuck with me. It suggests that finding yourself abandoning a principle may well be a necessary precursor to changing your mind based on something new. It is, Emerson wrote, “a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present.”

We do ourselves no favors when we use the same language to describe our human foibles and genuine moral conflictedness to true amorality, the kind of actions that clearly illustrate that one has no principles beyond naked gain. Sure, Mitch McConnell is a hypocrite. But calling him a hypocrite is a bit like calling Al Capone a tax cheat. It is technically correct, but hardly captures the moral atrocity of his actions. In these merciless political times we should focus our minds on the true betrayals that really matter. Perhaps if we embrace our inevitable inconsistencies, we can have a more generous, less purity-focused politics of practical good aimed at actual persuasion and real change.

Source: Polgren: We’re Taught to Hate Hypocrisy. We Shouldn’t