The Virtues of Hypocrisy

edited 030919

Indifference and hypocrisy between them keep orthodoxy alive ...
-- Israel Zangwill (1906)[1]

When you're smilin', when you're smilin'
The whole world smiles with you.
Yes, when you're laughin', when you're laughin'
The sun comes shinin' through.
But when you're cryin', you bring on the rain
So stop your sighin', be happy again.
Keep on smilin', 'cause when you're smilin',
The whole world smiles with you.[2]

Hypocrisy is consciously and deliberately saying something which you believe to be false or doing something you believe or feel is not right while maintaining a public demeanor of righteous indifference or neutral sanguinity.

If what you say is a statement, e.g. "I have returned your book to the library," when in fact you haven't, then it would be commonly called a lie. But if your statement is intended to have some sort of moral force or focusses on an act which you would reluctantly, at best, perform yourself, then it would also be considered hypocrisy, e.g. "Stop your sighing', be happy again."

Hypocrisy is generally considered undesirable, especially, in theorizing (moralizing?) if possibly mitigating circumstances are not considered. However, there are many situations which arise where disregarding concerns for hypocrisy is reasonable. Human history abounds with examples.

Two common social situations follow: the first is when a person of less power is dealing with someone threatening. For example, when importuned by persons (whether true believers or hypocrites) who are authorized, capable and willing to cause you hurt or harm.[3] Such situations can be a matter of life, death or imprisonment.

Situation I examples. Austrian Lutherans, for example, when offered the options by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1623-1637) of emigration, death, or conversion to Roman Catholicism, pretended to convert.

The Russian Communist Party membership purge under Stalin 1929-1930 resulted in the execution of over 3,000 people and tens of thousands who lost their positions and privileges for either former membership or sympathy with those who resisted Bolshevik dominance. The "Great Purge" of 1937-39 resulted in the deaths of from 600 thousand to over one million Communist Party and government officials, and wealthy landlords. We can imagine that the victims would have felt no pricks of conscience at vehemently, though hypocritically declaring their loyalty to the Party.

German resistance to Nazism was generally unable to mobilize political opposition that would lead to a coup against Hitler. However, 77,000 German citizen resisters, presumably non-Jewish, were killed by Special Courts, or People's Courts. "Tens of thousands" more were said to be sent to concentration camps.

During the years 1947 - 1954 many Americans were pressured by US government officials and police as to whether they were communists or communist sympathizers. Rumors abounded and jail was not an unlikely outcome for many. In order to be eligible for employment as a substitute teacher in 1965, I, myself, at age 22 had to sign a document attesting to the fact that I was not, nor ever had been, a member of or sympathizer with the Communist Party of America.

I signed easily since, having had little political experience at my age, my declarations were true. If they had been false, I would have signed anyway, since I badly needed a job and I considered such documents to be irredeemably stupid and counter-productive. It seemed to me that anyone who was actually a Communist would sign it, anyway; rather than draw back and say "Sorry, I can't sign this oath for reasons of conscience." Back then in 1965, such a declaration, divulged as a lie, might just get you, not a job, but a prison sentence.

Situation II, where hypocrisy is a matter of course, occurs with a tactful inquiry, "How are you?" where the conversants lack sufficient intimacy to reveal the truth. Tact is hardly even imaginable as being other than a virtue except, say, when a normally tactful, if rather informal, question is severely out of place. For example, upon being presented to the Queen of England to receive the CBE, one extends one's hand and asks, "How's it goin', Toots?" Whatever fault we might find with this, it is not likely to be that of hypocrisy.[4]

The Values of Hypocrisy. If you are in a position of relative power or authority over some persons then your own hypocrisy (often reconceptualized as "leadership discretion") may facilitate any of the situations mentioned above: examples:

To reinforce the legitimacy of organizational or social status. [4A]

To maintain the hierarchy deriving from an ethos.[5]

To intimidate persons of inferior status to forestall defiance or resistance.[6]

As a procedural step in the initiation of military or academic recruit training.[7]

To maintain a of veneer of respectability or sanguinity.

These are no small incentives for hypocrisy. Such hypocrisy, if at all held to be morally objectionable, is likely to be considered a "Lesser Evil" than the likely consequences of "Transparency".

James G. March (1976) suggests that we would be better off with less rationality. And that we would be well served by a concept of "sensible foolishness". Freed from the constraints of pre-existent purposes, the necessity of consistency and the primacy of rationality (formal or algorithmic approaches, e.g. policies, mathematical theories) often appear less salient. [8]

We could use the act of intelligent choice as a planned occasion for discovering new goals, unpredicted and attractive value consequences. We become intelligently foolish by treating goals as hypotheses, intuition as real, hypocrisy as a transition, memory as an enemy and experience as theory.

For a continuation on these issues, See March, J. G. & Olsen, J. P. (1976) Ambiguity and Choice. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget. Accessible at
Rationales for Intervention: From Test to Treatment to Policy: generalizing the Rationale.

REFERENCES

[1] Zangwill, I (1896) Children of the Ghetto. A study of a peculiar people. New York: Macmillan and Co. page 510

[2] Written by Joe Goodwin, Larry Shay, Mark Fisher (1928). See, also B Ehrenreich (2009)Smile or Die ISBN:9781847081735

[3] See Hurt, Harm & Safety

[4] See Good Lies, Wise Evasions

[4A] See Merchandizing Science (...or Religion? ...or Politics?)

[5] See Constricting Social Ideals: breaking the values-action link to ensure "stability."

[6] See Good Lies, Wise Evasions

[7] See Teaching Values: basic lessons in hypocrisy?

[8] See Choosing The Lesser Evil: a Moral Failure?

Public “Science” Controversy: distrust is not the only issue.

edited 2/23/21

“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster.” -- Carl Sagan

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. -- Albert Einstein

I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong. -- Bertrand Russell

Need Understanding Promote Acceptance? For as brilliant a scientist (and advocate of Critical Thinking) as Carl Sagan was, he makes a common, and erroneous logical leap: he appears to imply that to understand something is necessarily either to condone or advocate it.

This is wrong. Understanding something (or someone) is not to concede it some kind of validity or authority. But should understanding a practice (or person) bring us to conceding, at least, a live-and-let-live attitude toward it?

Consider the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Or the regimes of Hitler or Stalin. We pretty much know why they did what they did. We have a good idea what their supporting religious and cultural beliefs and practices were, and how they were carried out. Should we thus adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward them? Certainly our understanding of what they were about need not move anyone to see their examples repeated.

”Science” Perceived as a Special Interest. We live in a Market Culture. Caveat Emptor, folks! It’s not hard to understand why many people -- not necessarily only uninformed or ignorant people -- are suspicious of pronouncements about, say, global warming, safe vaccinations, or gender differences correlating with intellectual inferiority in science. They consider the sources, motivation and social contexts of the claims or claimants. All’s fair in love, war, and marketing. (See Bestowing Trust.)

Anyone with a memory reaching back more than twenty-five years -- or some acquaintance with history -- can remember when “science” was invoked to justify slavery, frequent wide-spectrum use of antibiotics and promiscuous electric-shock therapy, as well as systematic X-ray exposure to treat teen-age acne. And, don’t forget, tobacco companies could always find a scientist to insist that there was no link between smoking and cancer. (See The 7 biggest problems facing science, according to 270 scientists.)

But “Science” corrected itself, did it not? Yes, so to speak. But generally, only in areas that did not upset entrenched cultural hierarchies. It took World War II to convince most Americans that women could learn to weld and to construct machines. That non-Whites, even Japanese, Native and African Americans could loyally defend a country where they had been treated with so very much less respect than citizens of European derivation. That not all, if some, human behavior was controlled by environmental reinforcement.

U.S. University presidents, even, were abashed to find out that common “grunts,” returning working-class GI’s, could actually use the GI Bill to acquire a profession. WWII Veterans on the GI Bill neither destroyed private higher education -- as predicted by James Conant -- nor did their presence turn universities into "vast hobo jungles" -- as Robert Maynard Hutchins warned they would.

The Elephant in the Room? Two Antagonistic Conceptions of Knowledge.

“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” -- Karl Popper

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” -- Karl Popper

There is a deeper issue underlying the widespread skepticism about Science than suspicions about marketeering. It is that there are, roughly speaking, two competing concepts of knowledge embedded in our society. Many people, generally those with scientific training, or interest in scientific activity consider -- or at least give lip-service to the idea that -- scientific knowledge is an accumulation of hypotheses that are

a. tentative and correctible, (therefore, always possibly evanescent);
b. most persistently survivors of critical testing; and
c. cross-disciplinarily or experimentally mutually reinforcing.
d. Predictions are, at best, estimated with better than random probability.

This is the notion Einstein and Russell are alluding to in their quotes in the epigraph. I will refer this notion, albeit imprecise, as the notion of “Experimentalist Knowledge”. Any "Faith" one has in Experimentalist Knowledge is conditional upon its producing outcomes that someone values (in some "market"?), or at least, that one can hopefully predict (and, maybe, control -- barring certain kinds of complexity) through testing and adjustments in theory and procedure.

Within a professional context, Experimentalist Knowledge is not only given often precise expression, but carefully practiced, because any resultant publication must pass peer revue. Questioning can be quite intense and rigorous (and, to less prepared souls, annoying.} In the marketplace, as we will see below, something else happens.

A Competing Tradition. Eternalist Knowledge is a more ancient concept but still quite active today. It is given lip-service, at least, not only by adherents of certain religions, but also by many mathematicians, theoretical physicists, philosophers, mystics and "humanist" educators.

Eternal Truths are:

a. unchanging and eternal;
b. beyond being challengeable by “so-called tests”; and
c. often indifferent to other claimants to truth.
d. Predictions are considered to be either certainties, e.g. (logically?) derived from more basic Eternal Truths, or speculations of lesser concern.

Within a professional context which typically includes non-professionally prepared participants -- e.g. a laity --, there is at most a perfunctory "peer review" with a bias toward maintaining the authority of the professional over the layperson. Questioning, unless ritualized, is not encouraged.

So if adherents of Experimentalist Knowledge warn about global warming, those of Eternalist Knowledge might reply in dismissal, “Our Faith in X (or Y or Z) is our assurance that we will be exempt from such travail.”

Whether or not they are very devout adherents of eternal truths, many people’s ideas of science are as sophisticated as weather-forecasting TV permits. Snow, if predicted, often amounts to little. And yet, despite mathematical models and predictions, we get surprises. In the communities where Eternalist Knowledge dominates, lip-service is often reinforced by practices and rituals. But it, too, like Experimentalist Knowledge, can be transformed by the ethos of various markets.


An Important Caution. The reader ought not assume that what follows from the distinction Experimental or Eternalist is that either of the two traditions is being offered as "superior" to the other. In a disagreement it will all depend on what claims are made and which tradition is invoked. Nowadays a minor flesh wound is not treated with a prayer service. Nor is a geometric axiom invoked in a cry of mourning.

People who recognize certain items, e.g. holy scripture, foundational moral axioms, domains of discourse or procedure as "worthy" of pursuit are likely committed to justification by certain forms of Eternalist Knowledge. So also may be scientists who engage in debates about "Laws of Nature", or whether the Universe consists basically of "wave or particle"; or, whether individual rights ought to override "needs" for social stability. Or whether a mother's or her foetus' life should take precedence. Or, even, what criteria should be used, if any, to implement discriminatory treatment of populations, e.g. who gets a rare vaccine, or pardon for criminal behavior.

(The wisdom of recognizing the Experimentalist-Eternalist distiction seems to indicate that the much-vaunted pursuit of Artistic or Philosophical Authenticity, the degree to which a person’s actions are congruent with his or her beliefs, must take second-place to a modicum of hypocrisy, if only for survival purposes.)

Debating About “Science” in the Market: a slogan-fest.

The arc of the moral universe really is bending toward progress. -- Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc, (Henry Holt, 2015) précis of article appearing in Scientific American, Jan. 20, 2015

Professional interaction and market interactions are quite different, even among adherents of the same type, i.e. those of Experimentalist Knowledge, Empiricists, or those of Eternalist Knowledge, Eternalists. The epigraph of this section is certainly strange. For appearing in a generally Empiricist publication it looks suspiciously like an Eternalist statement.

Let's put some questions to Shermer. What is this "arc of the moral universe" in empirical terms? How does one determine the direction in which it bends? If one considers that 200,000,000+ people, mostly non-combatants, were killed in wars in the 20th century and that the slaughters continue into this 21st, where might this moral universe be situated?

Or is this article's appearance in Scientific American merely meant to get Eternalist adherents to buy a subscription?

Consider the punditry published in even scientific journals about Global Warming, or Vaccination, or Spanking, or anything purported to be of Public Concern. There the rhetoric begins to heat up: individuals are treated as though having melted together into uniform sampling groups or opinion-blocks, e.g. Scientists, Religionists, Believers, Atheists, Conservatives, Liberals. Reifications and hubris abound. False consensus likely rules the day.

Does knowledge of either kind even matter here? Or is this game best described as Fools Fooling Fools? C.P. Snow in 1959 anticipated a scholarly schism into two basic cultures, the Scientific and the Literary. Has his prediction been visited not only upon Academia; but, with a vengeance, upon our national culture as a whole?

To examine these issues further, see Knowledge: The Residues of Practical Caution.

Cordially
--- EGR

Cause & Effect: essential belief, misapprehension, moral hazard?

updated 071322

The brain is a construction of the brain. -- Nietzsche

There Must Be a Better Way! (The proctological principle?) I was waiting in a doctor’s office to arrange an examination, when a nurse answered a phone call. The irate voice on the other end of the line resounded throughout the small room: “I’m getting a colonoscopic exam tomorrow and I’m told I have to flush my system out by drinking a gallon of some insipid water concoction over the next twenty-four hours.” “That’s correct,” replied the nurse. “That’s absolutely ridiculous!” retorted the caller. “In this day and age there must be a better way to do it!” “No, sir. There is not,” responded the nurse.

A stream of expletives gushed from the telephone receiver. I thought to suggest to the nurse that she advise the patient to use a plumber’s snake instead of the prescribed water solution. But I kept my silence.

Practically Necessary Beliefs. Our way of life depends on a certain system of beliefs handed down through the centuries, although substantially modified in the process. Our notions of self-control, insanity, responsibility, criminality, and justice rest ultimately on the belief that some events relate to one another as cause and effect.

Daily we debate about who has done what; or, who can do what -- pretending all along that these “practical” questions have little to do with what “ivory-tower types” would call “philosophy.” In the debate we presume our investigations rest on a firm foundation: not merely the “belief,” but the “reality” of cause and effect. The operative train of thought here seems to ride on the Proctological Principle: if we (think we) need it, it must, in this day and age, be “a reality.”

Are Cause and Effect Illusions? Bertrand Russell recounts in his memoirs how, as a young man, he woke up in his bed one morning and came to a frightening understanding as to what David Hume meant by his theory of causation. All we ever observe, Hume had written, are correlations; regular sequences of event. Cause is our interpretation, our belief, more commonly, an assumption that normally observed regularities of precedence and propinquity will continue into the future.

Russell feared to step out of his bed onto the floor. It might, if Hume were right, suddenly open up beneath him, since there was nothing more than assumption to guarantee the persistence of its support. Thus, he would fall into an abyss of … nothingness (?).

(Russell’s reasoning here is somewhat inconsistent: If he could not trust that the floor, though sound and normal, would continue to support him, how could he come to any conclusion about what might happen next? Maybe he might float over the abyss!)

Being ultimately a pragmatist, as we all tend to be, Russell got past this fear and out of his bed and on with his life. Possibly he came to the realization that his bed, too, -- or the foundation of his house, or England in its entirety -- could just as likely open up to swallow him as he imagined the floor might.

Ultimately, perhaps, Russell, being a philosopher, might have come to concede (he did so, later) that there is more involved in identifying cause-and-effect relations than what our perceptions give us. Even today we warn our students, friends, associates, and acquaintances, perhaps, -- often futilely -- that mere “correlation” neither indicates nor denies “cause.” Little matter; if they are gamblers, day-traders, newspaper columnists, or political incumbents, they tend to ignore us.

Cause = Perceptions + Assumptions. Russell’s, and our, ability to act in this world rests heavily on structures of trust in generally unproven (and purely empirically unprovable) regularities of persistence. We construct edifices of trust with bricks of hope and desire cemented together with no more than the mortar of our assumptions. (See Varieties of Explanation & Cause.)

Immanuel Kant, some decades after Hume, presented a counter to Hume’s apparent empirical skepticism by denying that the human mind could go beyond experience, even such experience as augmented with scientific apparatus, to settle questions such as the “nature” of causation or objectivity. Our knowledge, Kant says, such as it is, is limited to phenomena.

Phenomena are constructed within the framework of human categories of understanding, which constitute the structure of the human mind, although interacting in someway with entities -- or entity -- of the extra-phenomenal world. Number, unity or plenty, says Kant, is a category of human understanding; not necessarily to be expected to parallel extra-phenomenal “reality.” (Check out the notion of quantum entanglement to appreciate how Kant's distinctions still retain relevance; although, he seems not to have considered how developing technologies and theories might interact to substantially expand human experience.)

It is amazing how many people in so many walks of life just hate this kind of theory: the theory that in culling out the true from the false, the wishful or delusional from the real, we ultimately invoke items of belief that themselves can only be judged, ad infinitum, by invoking other items of belief. (See Getting Down to Facts: can we avoid making assumptions?)

Is there a Bedrock of Knowledge? So what if claims of knowledge are always risky, resting on a potentially infinite chain of assumptions? Why the panic? Or more likely, the dismissive disdain? (Much more polite, if more condescending.)

I suppose it’s frightening. What? No absolute bedrock of The Known upon which to build our temples of Value, Prestige, Justice and Faith? Must everything be at risk? Can we, no matter how high our IQ or repute, how vast our wealth or influence, never be free from the risk of mistake?

Excepting formal linguistically constructed systems, i.e. knowledge by definition or stipulation, never, it would seem.

But does it really matter whether we occasionally stumble through life, rather than exhibiting perfection in all our decisions? Apparently to some people it does. Many who would reject the idea that knowledge may be essentially tentative are not inclined to even bother to present counter-argument or -evidence. Their basic concern, one might suspect, is more to preserve their incumbency in privileged positions; or, their right to importune others less empowered, i.e. to be in a condition of permanent moral hazard.

For references and to examine these issues further, See Buffering: Enhancing Moral Hazard in Decision-Making?

See also Varieties of Explanation. & Cause

Cordially
--- EGR

**Consider the similarities also in

Isaiah 45:7 (KJV) "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."

And, also, the conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles (1335-1337 and 1345-1358 Original German edition, my translation -- EGR) wherein Faust's question as to who Mephisto is is answered "I am a part of that power that always pursues Evil yet always yields Good."

Faust counters, "How can you be a part of something when you present yourself to me as a whole?", Mephisto replies,"... Although (you) a human, from that a tiny world of fools, may consider yourself a whole, I am a part of a part that once was Everything, the Darkness that gave birth to Light."