|
|
|
Two Ways of Lying
|
|||||
 I’d always thought of
hypocrisy as an essentially simple thing until the debate over
ninth-month (or “partial-birth”) abortion. But there is hypocrisy
and hypocrisy.
One kind of hypocrisy we are all familiar with: preaching one
thing while cold-bloodedly practicing another. The notorious example is the
televangelist who gets caught in a motel room with a girl.  Or
the politician who publicly weeps over his sister’s death from lung cancer,
then turns out to have been chummy with rich tobacco farmers even after
witnessing her agony.
Yet this kind of hypocrisy does reinforce the social norm.
The hypocrite has already condemned himself by his own preaching.
He’s defenseless when caught in his inconsistency.
But if some people don’t practice what they preach,
there are others who, you might say, hypocritically preach what they
practice. The stupid hypocrite sets himself up for a fall by feigning respect
for the standard by which he will be judged; the smart hypocrite attacks the
standard itself.
I really don’t think there is much honest disagreement
about abortion. It’s killing. Its target is the inconvenient human being
in the womb. But by pretending that this is a “religious” rather
than a simple biological question, the new breed of hypocrite has managed to
gain acceptance of abortion.
You can understand confusion and uncertainty over the
tiniest embryos, but I always assumed that advocates of abortion would draw
the line at practices that obviously destroy well-formed children, and inflict
agony on them to boot. Draining out the brains, so that the skull can be
crushed, so that the child can be killed without violating the law — well,
you hardly need theological indoctrination to recoil from such cruelty.
Yet there are still people who profess to see nothing wrong
with abortion, even at this stage. And by pretending that what they do or
endorse is consistent with their own consciences, they escape the charge of
barbarity. At least they’re “sincere”!
Are they? Then why don’t they frankly call what they
approve of “killing”? We kill germs and cockroaches and cute
little lambs, and we don’t shrink from saying so, because we regard it
as our right to kill them. So if a “fetus” has no human worth,
what’s wrong with killing it, and saying it’s killing?
No, the new hypocrite knows perfectly well that abortion is
wrong, but finds it expedient to pretend otherwise. And the rest of us
support this hypocrisy by presuming its sincerity.
Consider homosexuality. Everyone knows it’s a serious
disorder; nobody wishes it on anyone he loves; a parent who tried to turn a
child homosexual would be considered monstrous. But the new hypocrisy
requires us to pretend that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality
except “society’s attitude” toward it, which of course
we are supposed to correct.
![[Breaker quote for Two Ways of Lying: How to defend moral squalor]](2006breakers/060824.gif) In
fact the
new hypocrisy is a necessary aspect of the “new morality.”
There is no “new” morality. There is only the systematic
pretense that sexual vice is not vice.
Under the new rules, you can be called a hypocrite for
upholding old standards of virtue that you don’t exemplify perfectly;
but you can’t be called a hypocrite for sinking into utter moral
squalor, as long as you profess to believe there’s nothing wrong with
it. So the defender of traditional morality is kept constantly on the
defensive, since only he can be accused of hypocrisy.
It’s quite a clever system, because it works entirely
to the advantage of one side, while the other side has been slow to figure it
out. But it boils down to something simple and obvious.
If you set high standards, there is the danger that
you’ll create an embarrassing gap between what you believe and what
you do. The actual may fall short of the ideal; in fact it’s almost
certain to do so, and you may look hypocritical when you’re only
human.
But if you profess low standards, there’s no danger
of such a gap. Your behavior is all too likely to meet your standards. If you
openly advocate pedophilia, then the one thing you can’t be accused of
when you’re caught in bed with a little child is hypocrisy.
One thing about the old hypocrisy: It was more innocent.
Joseph Sobran |
|||||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
|||||
|
|
|||||
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |