Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, as it is said. Mostly I think it's just the excuse that the lazy blogger gives to avoid confronting the actual issue in a straightforward manner, and we really need to get over it. It is so overused, in fact, that I think we've lost our sense of what it is, why hypocrisy should or should not be the object of scorn, and why it seems that everyone is accused of it at some point. So what exactly do we mean by it?
Usually, a hypocrite is taken to be a person who "does not practice what he preaches", as in a smoker cautioning against tobacco use, or the churchman who is unfaithful to his wife, or the green-talking celebrity with a carbon footprint the size of New Jersey. The feature which most often draws the charge of hypocrite is that of publicly stating a belief, then failing to act in accordance with those beliefs. Another trait often labeled as "hypocrisy" is stating multiple beliefs or principles which appear to contradict one another. I argue that neither one of these should be sufficient to elicit the tag "hypocrite", and certainly not the scorn that follows.
Ahh, the "family values" politician caught up in a prostitution ring. God's gift to whoever opposes whatever it is that politician presumably stood for. The sad thing about our psychology is that he's much worse off now for having stood against his secret vice, than if he openly embraced it. At least Larry Flint is not a hypocrite! we say. And so we have it that people with low or no standards escape the withering scorn shoveled at those who visibly fail their high standards of conduct.
But this is where distinctions are in order. There are two dimensions to hypocrisy: belief, and action. We pretty much all agree that a hypocrite's actions fall short of their publicly expressed beliefs. But where we get it wrong, is when we naturally assume that the person is being dishonest in their beliefs when their actions do not .
Calling someone a hypocrite is what we do when we resent a person for suggesting to us a moral standard that we would rather not shoulder. The quickest way to exempt ourselves from this burden is to point out, somehow, that he himself cannot/will not bear the standard. It is a very primitive and emotional response, when we should be making every effort to respond intellectually. It is the tu quoque and ad hominem rolled into one, and it is extremely lazy. We need to give this up. We should call liars what they are, and leave honest but basically human, error-prone people alone.
A good clue that calling someone a hypocrite is utterly pointless is the fact that virtually everyone on all sides of any argument, at some point, calls the other side a hypocrite. Google "liberal hypocrisy" and there are approximately 11,000 hits as of this writing. A random sampling of these hits shows they concern Al Shaprton on the Don Imus affair, Alec Baldwin's celebrity carbon-consuming lifestyle, "tax-loving" democrats who don't pay their taxes, "voucher-hating" democrats who send their kids to private schools, gun-control advocates who have private body guards with conceal-and-carry permits, the ACLU, the DNC for numerous political trivialities, Eliot Spitzer, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, your dog, etc. etc. the list does not end. It does not end because calling someone a hypocrite is the universal, all-purpose sledgehammer.
And what about "conservative hypocrisy" ? There are fewer hits (feel free to speculate on why, I think it is unimportant), but they "substance", such as it is, is pretty much the same. Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, the Catholic Church (which liberals a progressives apparently consider conservative on account of its position on abortion, and despite its opinions to the left of the GOP on the death penalty, labor issues, minimum wage, immigration, war, the environment, etc.), conservative talk show hosts, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, every preacher who ever lived, Rudy Giuliani, textualist justices who are not, as progressives see it, always all that textual, universal-health-care-hating millionaires who have all the private health care they'll ever need, etc. etc. Again, we've really gotten no where.
In most of these cases, I think what we have is a misunderstanding of, or deliberate distortion of another's views. We have people who publicly claim a high moral standard of behavior, and privately (that is, until someone like Matt Drudge finds out) fail spectacularly to live up to those standards, though their standards are good and sincere. And we have institutions who do not think with one mind at all times, and will appear to outsiders to contradict themselves at times. None of this deserves to be called hypocrisy.
The only hypocrites are those who dishonestly advocate one thing out of self-interest, while privately not believing a damn word they said and living accordingly. This is the vice we should highlight, not cafeteria hypocrisy, otherwise we risk throwing out the good with the bad, or making ourselves look petty and foolish. And by the way, "they'll never stop being petty or foolish" is not a good excuse. That's not what moral high ground is about.