In praise of hypocrisy?

(for Ashok Karra)

Leo Strauss once said that the problem with conservatism is that nothing that a conservative LOVES has ever actually come into being by conservative means.

This, like many, of Strauss’s remarks calls for some interpretation, starting with the all-important question of what kind of "conservatism" is being talked about here.

At first, what Strauss appears to be saying is this:

A conservative defends traditions. But no traditions (in the form of great insights, customs, institutions) have ever come into being by anyone's BEING “conservative", at least if we mean by this, any kind of slavish deference to the ancestral, the old, the traditional.

On the contrary, great institutions, customs, laws -- even the constitutions of great republics have (the historical record shows us) emerged from the crucible of revolutions and wars, from the energy of malcontents, the febrile dreams of visionaries and so on. Even and especially the hoariest of our traditions were once the the wide-eyed children of turmoil, tumult, war, revolution -- the scions of a thousand acts of courage, or defiance, sacrifice or rebellion. It is arguably the very heat in which the metals of civilisation were forged that lends them the robustnss to survive centuries. And, as every school kid knows, tomes now given the status of “classics” might once have been heresies; the orthodox was once the heteordox, and so on.

There are many complicated issues here, but I’d like to briefly discuss two:

First (for those who have read Strauss) there is the general question of the “origin” and the “exception.” Much allegedly left-wing thought (from legal genealogies inspired by Giorgio Agamben to debunking historical narratives like Howard Zinn’s "A People’s History of the United States") has, in recent years, been concerned with showing the impure origins of the present system of government, the "constituitive" or "originary" violence at the heart of all existing legal codes, nation-states, and extant political systems.

A few years ago, when David Cronenberg’s "A History of Violence" came out, I could think of no more fashionable theme in university, and pseudo-intellectual circles generally, than this theme of “originary violence”. At this time, this shibboleth into the houses of hip discussions also served as place-holder for a whole host of musings on what illegal, illegitimate, irrational, and unjust deeds were done (needed to be done?) to set up the orders of legality, legitimacy, rationality and (obviously in a limited sense) “justice” in (and, in a sense, by) which such violence or injustice could be/is deplored? The idea was that (like the original sin, or the primal scene in psychoanalysis) there always existed some trauma at the oriign of justice, a force forbidden by the law at its origin and (therefore) at its heart.

Strauss (in "Thoughts on Machiavelli") associates this thinking about “originary violence” with the revolution in political philosophy that he thinks inaugurates the modern epoch. He defines this revolution in terms of modern political philosophy's "lowering of the goal" of its ancient predecessor. The idea here, is that whereas the 'old' political philosophy asked the question: "what is the best kind of society/what is the most suitable way of life for the human being", the new political philosphy changed this question to 'what is the best kind of society that can be most reliably designed to function in this world?"/"what is the best society that could actually endure, that was least subject to the vagaries of fortune because least reliant on the minimal (and fickle) distribution of human excellence.

In ancient political philosophy, political philosophy involved (as in Plato's Republic) a parallel between the city and the soul, as well as a reflection on the difference between politics and philosophy. Modern political philosophy was to be a philosophy that could serve as the basis for politics. It was thus at once more and less ambitious than its predecessor. Less ambitious in its goal, more ambitious in its demand that the goal be realised.

The reason for this revolution (in simplified form) was that from the perspective of the politcal philospohy that supplanted it -- the old philosophy had a fatal flaw. This was its tendency to produce visions of ideal cities and ideal human beings, rather than principles by which real human beings might be organised or 'managed'.

Starting with visions of how people should be rather than of human beings as they are (I can't help thinking at this point of a scene in Oliver Stone's "Nixon", where the titular character stands before a portrait of JFK) the old philosophy came up with utopias (impossible visions of just societies) rather than practical advice on how one might actually achieve a measure of stability, order, or harmony or justice in this world. According to Strauss, Machiavelli inaugurates modern political philosophy by lowering the goal of that philosophy: looking not to rare, precious, reason, or noble, high-flying philosophy, but to the passion for glory as an anthropological constant that qua constant can be relied upon. By looking at human beings as they are rather than as they should be, Machiavelli, according to Strauss seeks, in his own terms, to discover an aspect of humanity with which one might -actually- build a new society, a whole new order of human affairs rather than simply a dream of other-worldly justice. The price to be paid, for this change of perspective, is, Strauss argues (amongst other things) that in the name of its being realised the new city is also less noble, which in another way, means 'less just'. The lower, practical goal, is set against the nobler, impractical one.

Now: although, Machiavelli is, for Strauss, the disavowed progenitor of what he calls the "un-Machiavellian" "first wave" of modern political philosophy or modern 'natural right' thinking' (broadly speaking: classical liberal political thought up to the time of Locke), the influence of Machiavelli is arguably, felt more today, in "third-wave" (post-Heideggerian's) political philosophy than the more direct descendants of Hobbes and Locke. This later philosophy (which for Strauss denies the very possibility of answering the questions of political philosphy in either its ancient or modern forms) is far more fascinated by the Machiavellian focus on impure origins than Machiavelli himself would ever have considered healthy. And this Machiavellian focus on the exception is “revolutionary” in Strauss’s opinion because it breaks with a classical probity that would once have concieved of the exception as precisely, EXCEPTIONAL. Thus, one way to see the difference between “ancients” and “moderns” (and one that I think is very pertinent for looking at certain fashionable modern themes vs. the classics) – suggested by Strauss – is that for a modern (a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, an Agamben) the exception is SIGNIFICANT such that, where we find illegal violence at the foundation of an order that apparently abhorrs such violence, we find an indelible STAIN on that order's bright, optimistic clothing; a canker at its heart and an original sin that cannot help but be passed down from the founders of said order to the 20th generation -- even and especially when this generation makes 'reformist' attempts to overcome past iniquities.

(Note: Readers of Heidegger will detect a familiar eschatological flavour in this kind of idea).

By contrast, for Strauss, the revelation of exceptional crimes committed to found a legitimate order, neither gives some extra-legal legitimacy to said crimes, nor DELEGITIMATES said order. An “originary violence” (such as the exclusion of African Americans from the constitutional order) WAS indeed a sin, an injustice. And slavery was indeed, as Lincoln saw it, a blight on the republic. But the existence of this blight, by no means constituted proof that the whole project of the founding -- or its declared principles -- was bun. It did not prove that the principles set out in the Declaration of Independence should be read simply a bunch of lies designed to gull poor people into accepting the rule of the upper-classes.

On the contrary: it was precisely the principles of the founding (particularly those of the Declaration of Independence, by both classical and Christian principles) by which the original exclusion/crime/sin could and WAS judged. And it was on the basis of this judgment as well as a long, twilight sturggle that the original stain on the republic was removed. This is not to say that their are not vestiges of past sins (there are). But rather that the stain of slavery whose egregiousness allowed us to see past the mask to the horrible ‘truth’ of the “Declaration” could be illuminated as precisely DEVIATION, an error, a sin in terms of the original Greek word where it is connected to a quite literal going astray.

These thoughts remind me of something I’ve been meaning to say for a long while about hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, is to my mind, the vice to which our age finds most pernicious and least forgivable. It is a source of great indignation.

If I have one maxim to contribute to sociology it is, incidentally, this: indignation is revelatory – if you want to understand a society, or a culture, or even a person: look to what it/she/they consider offensive. In particular, pay attention not to the things that are PROHIBITED or tabooed explicilty, as to what causes offense without reference to any shared norm:

So, what does the irritation with hypocrisy (and moreover what I’d call a plague of ‘hypocrisy spotting’) tell us about our epoch? If there is a constant level of virtue and vice in the universe at any given time (a disputable thesis I know), most epochs tend to have their guns pointing in the exact opposite direction from their most prevalent (and probably most vicious) vices. Thus: a martial, militaristic society worries about its people becoming soft and effeminate when it should really worry about its failures in the realm of compassion, or its philistine disdain for "culture". Aristocratic societies tend to worry about an imminent “revolt of the masses” (Victorians trembling in their drawing rooms at the great unwashed) when the real danger to an aristocracy (and indeed the spur of the revolt it most fears) is often the degenration of aristocracy into an oligarchy. Finally, a democratic society often most fears (as de Tocqueville points out) ELITES -- “tall-poppies” as we say in Australia -- when the real danger to a democracy (c.f. The Federalist as one of many examples) almost never comes from its haughty outliers, but rateher from a demagogue whose road to tyranny is through a constant flattering of the people.

On this line of thinking, I think that our pre-occupation with hypocrisy (which we associate with the much maligned (because apparently infinitely malignable) Victorians – the great whipping boys the twentieth century though) -- reveals another deeper modern vice, in the form of aversion to standards, or what U.S. conservative pundits rather distastefully call (in an unthinking echo of left-leaning sociologists) “values."

What I mean by this, is: If you are a person who judges themselves by some standard or other of virtue (whether these be pagan virtues like wisdom, temperance, justice, courage or Christian ones like faith, hope and charity) you know that the would-be virtuous person FAILS, perhaps FREQUENTLY fails to live up to their ideals. But someone who fails to live up to an idea that she professes or defends, is not, as a consequence of this failure necessarily a hypocrite. On the contrary, her occasional failure can surely be expected as (if not a necessary consequence) than at least a probable outcome of her high standards. Against this, there is something in ‘hypocrisy spotting’ (a certain glee in seeing various people as ‘hypocrites’) that suggests a resentment against the profession of ANY standards whatsoever: we delight in the failures of those who profess noble things, because it gets us OFF THE HOOK where we would have to attempt to be noble. It absolves us from trying.

Note, of course, that I am in no way trying to defend ACTUAL hypocrites nor (god forbid) actual hypocrisy.

Real hypocrisy involves, in my opinion, a particularly ugly kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ – the kind (to use the classical formula) that makes one see the mote in your neighbours eye, without seeing the corresponding skyscraper in one’s own. And so on. Nonetheless, I think that glee in finding instances of ‘hypocrisy’ (here defined as deviations from professed ideals) more often than not reveals something unpleasant about the spotter -- often something (hypocritcally) hidden to herself. In delighting that a professed high standard was not met, happy hypocrisy spotters tends to reveal their hatred for standards in general.

To elaborate on this: Oscar Wilde once said that 'hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue." This can be (correctly) taken as saying that hypocrisy is a properly diabolical return-serve from vice to virtue: a shadow that starts of accompanying the good, but then through obscuring it, negates (and even inverts) it. However, the epigram can also be read as saying that insofar as hypocrisy is a concomitant of virtue (literally something that walks alongside it) one surefire way to stamp out hypocrisy would be to eliminate any and all striving for virtue.

With this achieved, we would find no posturing hypocrites, but also no-one attempting to live up to high standards of justice or nobility. Instead, we would find cynics or narcissists; at any rate, people whose standards were EXACTLY correlated to their actions, at the worst, whose standards were retrofitted to their actions in the form of apologies for them. (What I -do-, now, or as of last Wednesday when I met that girl whose principles I'm imitating IS the good. It always was.)

Apart from the joy of being let off the hook (See, it’s true! All those who press civic virtue REALLY prefer self-interest – I’m as fine as my narcissism requires me to be -- which is very fine indeed!) there is something here of what Max Weber, found so chilling about the Protestant Ethic.

Weber said that unlike Medieval Catholicism, which put the average subject into a pereptual "divine comedy" of trying, failing, and trying again (sin, penance, redemption) the eventually secualrised Calvinism of modernity demanded instead a TOTAL SYSTEM,: a well-oiled machine whose every cog (in the human soul, or in human activitiy) was to be oriented to virtue. For Weber, it is this desire to systematise (to iron out the possibility of making mistakes) that extends into the modern world's tendency to try and find ever better techniques to make better human machines. And it is also perhaps unsurprising that disilliusionment at a technical perfection NOT ACTUALLY ACHIEVED might culminate in the desire, as an alternative way of closing the gap between real and ideal.

One of the features of ancient thought that Strauss persistently points out (particularly in his writings on Xenophon) is the way that ideals are NOT for the ancients ‘refuted’ by instances of their breach. I would have thought that this was common-sense, but it is hardly the prevailing wisdom of the moment.

2) Back to Strauss’s point about ‘conservatives’. I think that this statement (about the inability for conservatives to found anything qua conservatives) must be read against not only with what I've said of Machiavelli and the 'origin', but also with his oft-repeated remark to the effect that Xenophon is an author for people with the wisdom to prefer Jane Austen to Dostoyevsky.

When we do this, I think we can see that the statement about conservatives is not in the first instance an anti-conservative statement saying: because the conservative CONTRADICTS herself (in defending things that didn’t come into being through conservative means) we should instead strive for something like perpetual revolution, continuous (Nietzschean?) combat in the hope that some ideal of greatness might survive the deluge. No, Strauss is not Bernard Shaw at his worst.

Instead, we must remember that for Strauss the origin is an EXCEPTION: one should not expect to institute the origin, nor for the ‘state of exception’ to be ‘normalised’ (to quote aforesaid fashionable rhetoric from Schmitt/Benjamin/Agamben.) Instead, the right attitude, is to say, that an originary exception, particularly insofar as it deviates from what we conceive as justice, should be deplored precisely as such. An instance of injustice thus points to the injustice of the deed (or the doer) and NOT to the conception of justice via which we deplore these things.

At the same time, I do think that Strauss is criticisng a certain kind of “conservatism” (recapitualting, in some respect, his argument against Burke in 'Natural Rigth and History.')

He is arguing against the doctrine that the good is equivalent to the old or the ancestral.

But this does not mean (c.f “Hacks of Academe”) that it is any less stupid to venerate something on the basis of its novelty, even if the nature of the economy means that 'innovation' of any sort must be considered a goose that may one day lay the golden egg of more shiny, new consumable products. And just as nothing is good or just simply BY VIRTUE of being old, nothing is good or just by virtue of being new, or for having BROKEN with tradition.

But, where does this leave us?

I will suspend the broader political question for the moment. (I actually suspect, for instance, that my politics deviate in several important instances from Ashok’s), and confine the point to my remarks here to questions of education and old books.

Thus: We obviously do not read the classics simply because of an irrational elevation of old things to the height of sanctity. But why then do we read them?

The obvious answer is that we believe that said old books, traditions et cetera have some intrinsic worth; that they contain some glimmer of the true, the beautiful or the good that transcends the time of their origin.

Contrary to the opinions of any number of young, stupid acquaintances of mine, reading the classics is not only not principally about veneration of old things, it is not necessarily about old things AT ALL.

I am tempted to mention Gadamer at this point: each age brings its OWN prejudices to the great texts (assuming that it still has any contact with them.). And this encoutner between current prejudices and ancient musings precisely as an encounter precludes the possibility of a monologue of antiquity with itself.

Thus, when we go to Plato we take with us all the baggage of our present city, our current (in Straussian terms) "cave." This means that our eyes are attuned to an intensity of light suited to our particular (modern, liberal, capitalist) shadows.

Consequently, the challenge to our prejudices that we get from someone like Plato, will be as particular to our age, class, or time as the prejudices themselves.

Similarly, nothing guarantees that reading modern, contemporary, funky, “topical” things will prevent us from simply combing through platitudes, whether they are merely the self-satisfied banalities of the age, or the pale imitations of older things no longer recognised because no longer encountered amidst the 'management & marketing" style focus on all things "innovative".

So, I apologise at the length of this rant, and my stringing of various topics together into a perhaps incoherent melange, but I'd like to end with a slogan for my contemporaries. In questions pertaining to the 'canon' and other matters of the new and the old I suggest the slogan (with apologies to Slavoj Zizek):

“Faint-hearted antiquarianism vs. Future-Oriented Innovation: Yes, please!”

-Mal.