"Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power From Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond" by David Runciman (Princeton University Press, 286 pages�).
By Carlin Romano
Philadelphia Inquirer
Barack Obama mocked Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy expertise until he didn’t.
Hillary Clinton savaged Obama’s ability until she praised it.
John McCain vaunted Sarah Palin as the best person in the country (after him) to be president, until he lost, whereupon he declined to back her in 2012.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich? Well, he told lots of children, when he visited their schools, that it’s important to talk nice.
We don’t expect politicians to be honest. A more difficult issue is whether we want them to be. Would terminal sincerity in a politician count as a mental defect, given the truth that consistent honesty in life (“Why, Grandmother, you look like you’re on the verge of death!”) is neither kind nor welcome, let alone efficient?
Journalists and pundits notoriously pounce on any evidence of hypocrisy despite often checkered reputations for honesty themselves. University of Cambridge political theorist David Runciman takes a far more textured, sophisticated approach to the phenomenon in “Political Hypocrisy,” a timely, long overdue study of one of public life’s in-your-face puzzles.
Hypocrisy, Runciman says, is “inevitable” and “ubiquitous” in liberal, democratic societies. It’s also, he argues more surprisingly, “something we have to learn to live with” rather than eliminate. A greater risk, he thinks, is not recognizing that “too great a reliance” on public sincerity — too much sanctimony — is a mistake, because “liberal democratic politics are only sustainable if mixed with a certain amount of dissimulation and pretence.”
What we need, Runciman says, are sharp antennae that distinguish appropriate political hypocrisies from “intolerable” ones. There is, he contends, “no way of breaking out from the hypocrisy of political life, and all attempts to find such an escape are a delusion.”
Runciman proceeds historically, explaining that the “original ‘hypocrits’ were classical stage actors, and the Greek term (hypokrisis) meant the playing of a part.”
The word’s earliest extension from theater came in religion, in regard to “public (and often highly theatrical) professions of religious faith by individuals who did not actually believe what they were saying.”
These days, hypocrisy “in its pejorative sense always entails a deception of some kind,” most often meaning “public statements of principle that do not coincide with an individual’s private practices” or beliefs.
Runciman says there’s “a tradition of thinking about the problem of hypocrisy in politics that runs from Hobbes to Orwell,” and he mines it to reveal the concept’s subtleties and its conundrums.
If hypocrisy is a “coping mechanism” for dealing with vice, might it be a venial sin? No sin at all? Must it involve a conscious intention to deceive, or can it be inadvertent? How does it differ from politeness — a form of dishonesty we applaud — or political “spin,” which we treat as an upfront form of partisanship?
For the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, as for the tradition generally, hypocrisy is always partly a matter of “hiding behind a mask,” which statesmen do in the interest of preserving the public peace. Hobbes thought, Runciman writes, that sovereigns “must be prepared to dissemble, cheat and lie if necessary, in order to do what they think best for their own security, and the security of their state.”
Francis Bacon, notes Runciman, in a related way thought “wisdom lies in getting the balance between honesty and deception right, so that a reputation for honesty is preserved while a capacity for deception is retained.”
In bringing the collective apercus of these and other thinkers to bear on his topic, Runciman explores famous literary renditions of hypocrisy (among them Anthony Trollope’s Phineas novels) and profound historical examples of hypocrisy, such as the Founding Fathers’ acceptance of slavery in a revolution devoted to liberty — a hypocrisy about which all sides in the revolution were “acutely conscious.”
Here Runciman niftily contrasts the preternaturally candid Thomas Paine, who campaigned for “mental truthfulness,” with a “very different kind of political operator” — the “much more subtle, much more shrewd, much more cunning’” Thomas Jefferson. We know how their relative careers worked out. (Robert G. Ingersoll famously lamented how only six mourners attended the 1809 funeral of Paine, by then “maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred.”)
According to the author, guileless folk just aren’t very good at seizing or holding on to power.
