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Two
cheers for hypocrisy
By
Spengler
"Hypocrites!" jeer the blue-state
metrosexuals at church-going folk who re-elected
US President George W Bush in November. Writing in
the Boston Globe of October 31, for example,
William V D'Antonio complained, "President Bush
and Vice President [Dick] Cheney make reference to
'Massachusetts liberals' as if they were referring
to people with some kind of disease." In fact,
avers D'Antonio, the citizens of Senator John
Kerry's home state lead purer lives than Red
Staters:
The state with the lowest divorce
rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest
count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000
population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1 ...
Born-again Christians have among the highest
divorce rates. The Associated Press, using data
supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the
highest divorce rates are to be found in the
Bible Belt. That is true in part
because the population of the Bible Belt is
younger and more likely to marry; if no one but
lesbians lived in Massachusetts, the divorce rate
would be zero. Nonetheless it is true that
Massachusetts liberals display less hypocrisy than
Bible Belt Christians, who preach better than they
practice. Liberals admit no constraints to
pleasure-seeking. They are not hypocritical, but
merely disgusting.
On the other hand, the
neo-conservatives offer a spirited defense of
hypocrisy. Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, the wife
of movement founder Irving Kristol, is a
specialist in the Victorian era, a byword for
hypocrisy. Up to 5% of young women in the
Victorian era worked as prostitutes. In a July
1995 interview with Religion and Liberty,
Himmelfarb observed, "I believe firmly in the old
adage, 'hypocrisy is the homage that virtue pays
to vice'. Violations of the moral code were
regarded as such; they were cause for shame and
guilt. The Victorians did not do what we do today
- that is, 'define deviancy down' - normalize
immorality so that it no longer seems immoral.
Immorality was seen as such, as immoral and wrong,
and was condemned as such."
Before taking
exception, I should emphasize that Professor
Himmelfarb has a point; apart from the saintly,
only the unashamedly wicked are guiltless of
hypocrisy. The rest of us pay homage to standards
that we do not uphold in practice. For the sake of
filial piety we honor parents who well might be
unpleasant people, and uphold civic virtues that
our leaders honored more in the breach than the
observance. The fact that we acknowledge virtue
even when we pursue vice makes civil society
possible.
For the sake of domestic harmony
we tell lies daily. We do not tell our wife that
she looks fat, or our child that he is a dullard,
or our aged mother that she is a nasty old
harridan. The first recorded lie of this genre was
told by God in Genesis 18:12-14. The matriarch
Sarah laughed at the angels' prophecy that the
elderly Abraham would father a son; God
interrupted, and told Abraham that Sarah thought
that she (rather than he) was too old. Thus
hypocrisy has divine sanction.
It is true
that sexual repression makes one miserable, but so
does sexual license, the more so if one is female.
Sex is not the problem, contrary to Sigmund Freud.
The problem is life. When Faust tells
Mephistopheles that he wants to experience life
with all its joys and sorrows, the devil answers
pityingly, "Believe me - I've been chewing on this
hard cookie for thousands of years, and from
cradle to grave, no one has ever been able to
digest this sourdough." Life by definition is a
failure. First you will grow old (if you are
lucky) and then die. Family, religion, culture and
nation offer consolations in the face of death,
within limits.
Secular modernism marches
under the banner of truth and freedom. Unmasking
the hypocrisy of family and civil life was the
single-minded purpose of modern literature from no
later than the 1879 premiere of the Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Nora abandons her husband and children at the end
of the play out of pique at her husband's
condescension. She had forged a co-signature on a
loan to pay for the rest cure that saved his life
and no longer can bear to be his puppet. Despite
her husband's vow to change, the pursuit of truth
and honesty demand the instant and total sacrifice
of Nora's children as well as her marriage. She
has no means to earn a living, and well may end up
in a brothel, but she has freed herself from
illusion.
Ibsen's plays follow a
predictable template in which dirty little secrets
guarded by hypocrisy come to the surface.
Hereditary syphilis in Ghosts, a forged
co-signature to a loan in A Doll's House,
an old love affair in Hedda Gabler, and
other such devices expose the hypocritical
underpinnings of family life and lead to madness,
divorce, or suicide.
King among the
moderns was Freud, of course, who purported to
find in sexual repression the secret of neurosis.
Eschewing Freud's pessimism ("the purpose of
psychoanalysis is to go from hysterical misery to
ordinary unhappiness"), his successors proposed
that by eliminating the family in favor of an
incubator and a team of mental-health
professionals, neurosis could be eliminated, like
smallpox. That is the import of Hillary Clinton's
book title, It Takes a Village (to raise a
child), presuming of course that the village is
populated by social workers.
The other
moderns were just as single-minded. Ibsen's
younger Swedish contemporary August Strindberg
turned patriarchy into a nightmare in The
Father. Gustave Flaubert chronicled the
adulterous passion boiling within bourgeois
marriage in Madame Bovary. George Bernard
Shaw (Mrs Warren's Profession) and Emile
Zola (Nana) presented prostitution as a
rational choice for working-class women. This
genre of literature never drew broad patronage
from the public, which knows perfectly well that
most marriages involve a great deal of looking the
other way, and would rather read stories in which
the protagonists live happily rather than
miserably ever after. That is why romance novels
sell more copies than so-called serious fiction.
In this lies a lesson.
The healthy
instinct of the public, which prefers the fantasy
ideal of happiness to modernist truth telling,
illustrates why hypocrisy only deserves two
cheers. We cannot tolerate the continuous
disappointments of family and civic life, without
the hope of something better. Bible Belt
Christians are not merely hypocrites but also
sinners. They do not only go against the rules,
but also against their conscience. Religion does
not presume human perfection, but a longing for
perfection. That longing is what makes it possible
to chew Mephisto's sourdough. It is not surprising
that throughout the industrial world, all but the
religious have given up on family life.
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