What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal… confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.
— Hannah Arendt: On Revolution
Now that another round of elections will be upon us and the stench of corruption is in the air, is it too cynical to say that we brace ourselves for another bunch of political hypocrites and liars? After all, under the new rules of political fabrication, a lie is just a lie and since everyone one is at it, all that matters is what you get away with. And it isn’t just the boldest liar who is the best because he is detached from his true feelings and knows almost instinctively how far he can go to get what is wanted; there are also-rans in the game who can do equally well with a little grit and luck. David Runciman, who teaches political theory at Cambridge has come with a sequel to his earlier book, The Politics of Good Intentions with Political Hypocrisy: The Masks of Power (Princeton University Press, $19.95) which, though based on western political thinkers and recent case studies has lessons for us too because double standards are at work in contemporary politics everywhere.
Some basics. It is cynical to pretend that politics either now or in the distant past was ever completely sincere. The problem of sincerity and truth in politics and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy is, in a sense, non-sequitor because so long as human beings are involved with their ‘crooked timbers’ a degree of hypocrisy is necessary to get things done. Besides, hypocrisy comes in many forms from the common type of not practicing what you preach to the classical sense of the term, which involves not believing what you say.
The original hypocrites were those who simply mouthed pieties: it meant going through motions for the sake of form or etiquette. Even here there were different ways of dissembling what was going on behind the public mask. The pious hypocrites who pretended to be true believers were liars because their claim for themselves was not true. But they concealed the truth about themselves by sticking to the truth in public: so that what they said in public was the bare minimum that allowed them to get by.
But they always held something back, something they would only share with their closest friends. People today understand that given the complexity of politics not everything can be said up-front and therefore holding back is legitimate. What they detest much more than they hate are liars and adulterers — politicians who make deals with half-truths because they serve their immediate purposes.
But the real problem is that hypocrisy, though inherently unattractive, is more or less inevitable in most political settings, especially in liberal democratic societies. Which means it is difficult to criticise hypocrisy without falling into the trap of exemplifying the very thing one is criticising. So, it is nothing new and to support himself Runciman explores a range of political thinkers from Hobbes to George Orwell for their views on the limits of truthfulness in politics, especially “in the moralistic pluralistic world of modern politics.”
There are two ways that hypocrisy works as a tool to achieve the ends of political power: either by stretching the truth to serve the political cause or by being economical with the truth. Usually, it is the latter tactic of holding back crucial bits of information that would tilt the balance the other way. Here again, there are no hard and fast rules especially when “fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
“The greatest exemplar of what can be achieved by a politician who doesn’t hold anything back, even when he is playing around with the truth is… Bill Clinton who was the sincerest liar in modern political history, and what he, and his opponents, and the American public discovered was that sincerity could easily trump the lies. Clinton’s popularity rose as his mendacity was exposed. He got away with lies, including the blatant falsehood that he never had sexual relations with “that woman” because it became clear that the absurd stories he was telling (oral sex is not sex when you are only receiving and not giving) were not just for public consumption: they were ones he was willing to try out on anyone, even himself.”
Two lessons from the Clinton episode (and other public scandals) are clear. First, sincerity or the public perception of it, matters much more than double-dealing/double-crossing. Second, in the world of political triangulation (where two or more parties are involved) nothing is out of bounds, most of all changing your spots and people who are willing to change their spots are more sincere than those who don’t.
Where does this exercise in hypocrisy leave us? First, our politicians should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, though the tests that are applied to them should not always be the same in all cases. But is this enough when our double standards are glossed over to provide for corruption and personal profit?
