Hypocrisy's vectors

I used to have a saying that I thought was a little clever—that the only sin under moral relativism is hypocrisy. I’ve been saying it so long that I honestly don’t remember if I came up with it or got it from someone else. Google’s no help. I plugged into a GPT-type system, which told me my idea was “insightful” (thanks, bot) and that while it couldn’t find an exact instance of someone else saying it, maybe Richard Rorty (who I didn’t read in college) had described the basic idea at some point, though it couldn’t provide a citation. It occurs to me that maybe Charles Taylor (who I did read in college) did? In any case, I think there’s a useful idea in there. I’m going to expound on that today in relation to some of the increasingly unhinged stories in the news.

To be clear, I don’t think that the idea as I stated it is a good thing. If I were posting it on social media I’d phrase it as: “The only sin left under moral relativism is hypocrisy (derogatory).” I’m not attacking this as a question of whether having any degree of moral relativism at all is a good or a bad thing¹ , or whether it’s useful to have a universal definition of sin for all places and contexts² —though we could certainly use a lot more shame as a society. It’s more basic than that. The problem we face is that when people have abandoned all pretense of preexisting moral codes — whether democratic, social, or religious — the only thing left to judge is how consistently other people act, or how consistently their actions match their rhetoric.

The problem with this way of doing business is made clear by a simple thought experiment: Would you rather live with someone who does what you consider the right thing half the time but is often contradicting themselves and going back on their promises otherwise? Or would you rather live with someone whom you can count on to constantly — and transparently — harm you and others?³  

See also the eternal cartoon by Paul Noth from 2016:

It isn’t that hypocrisy is good or even necessarily benign. It’s just that it’s a fact of life. So instead of wishing hypocrisy didn’t exist, I try to focus on the direction of people’s hypocrisies. When do they shift their moral goalposts, and why?

Take corruption. Donald Trump’s supporters claim to be obsessed with corruption — inside trading in Congress, woke billionaires, human trafficking, whatever post-QAnon insanity is currently in vogue. Pro-Israel reactionaries (there’s obviously a huge overlap there) have similarly been obsessed since well before the October 7th attacks with the allegedly pernicious influence of the Arabian Gulf states, especially Qatar, on U.S. universities, whose money they are convinced is being used to brainwash hapless American college students into supporting anti-Israel dogma (branded unquestioningly as “antisemitism”) and general “terrorism.”

So now, of course, their mental alarms must be clanging over the news that Trump himself is not only openly accepting foreign bribes through his memecoin but is reportedly ready to personally accept a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 — from the Emir of Qatar! — to use as a new Air Force One. (This clearly unconstitutional bribe, which comes on the heels of other Trump family deals with the petrostate, has been reportedly signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who used to lobby on Qatar’s behalf at a salary of $115,000 a month). I mean, the national security implications alone, as helpfully detailed here by Garrett Graff, of a sometimes-adversary presenting its own plane for the use of the president of the United States, must be seriously concerning to people whose core abiding principle is supposedly “America First.”

Lol, no, of course not. I could waste time explaining how the excuses already being floated are bunk (such as the idea that the plane isn’t a gift to Trump, who has already said it will go to his “library” when or if he ever leaves office). If they were clever they might respond by citing the aforementioned inside trading, or very real past Democratic presidential corruption, or simply noting past Qatari gifts to liberal institutions — all to wash out their hypocrisy by impugning others’. And it could work, rhetorically. But fortunately, the problem isn’t that they are hypocrites. It’s that the thing that they are eager to sell themselves out over, the instance they want to excuse even though it goes against all of their supposedly sacred values: in this case an act of naked corruption that makes the country less safe while flattering the personal whims of their authoritarian leader.

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